Sitch Ring

Since this is almost the third post in this vein, I'm tempting to add a tag on my blog for "news about sitch-like devices". If you haven't heard about the Sitch, it was a device I invented for the purpose of Deviants, a play I wrote and acted in this past spring. The central idea is that it connects one's mind to all other minds (think like a mental internet) and allows for free flow of information, and the ensuing consequences.

Well here's a video where someone has created a Sitch-like device using wikipedia and Second Life:

A Short History of Progress

Summer of 2004:

I'm bussing downtown at Chez Piggy, leaving me pretty unstimulated intellectually, leading some critics to call this "a rather boring summer."

While trying to cure my boredom, I discover Second Life while surfing on mmorpg.com.

Considering I'm part of a real-life Improv Show, I try starting a team in Second Life. I manage to get about 25 avatars to show up at a meeting of The Thinkers (written about here). The interest was there, but I realized the interface was too awkward to make decent theatre.

School Year 2004-2005:

Nothing relevant. Worked really hard at school.

Summer 2005:

Worked in the ILC on lighting controls that adjusted to ambient daylight. It was pretty lonely, programming on a micro-processor all day.

Went to a virtual book signing in Second Life for a book by blogger Cory Doctorow.

School Year 2005-2006:

I was part of a collaborative playwriting project, and hired to organize/summarive/concentrate all the creative input. I came upon the idea of using this blog as a way for everyone to see and comment on my summaries. Almost by accident, we starting writing the play here, most of which was retained when it was actually performed (pdf).

Summer 2006:

I work for a professor in the Mathematics Department by performing MATLAB simulations of electrons in metal lattices, to help better understand high-temperature superconductivity. (no website anymore) This was a little less lonely, because I had another student I was working with.

School Year 2006-2007:

I was hired as a Teaching Assistant for APSC 171 and APSC 172, which I found incredibly rewarding. I ran one 50-student tutorial per week.

Summer 2007:

I threw the chance of getting another cushy four-month job to the wind, and travelled Southeast Asia for six weeks, making for a great start to the summer. When I returned to Kingston, I was a little depressed when waking up in the morning didn't mean I would learn a bit of a new language that day, and that I was jobless.

Yesterday:

I was hired by Professor Leo Jonker to work on a project for the rest of the summer, developing an online supplementary calculus course for students who have not had sufficient calculus in high school.

While looking into the job before he hired me, he went to the Emerging Technology Centre at Queen's University, who suggested that one of the ways he could teach calculus was to use Second Life (wikipedia link this time). That's full circle.

While I probably won't be using Second Life, I do have some crazy ideas coming, and this is bound to be the Best Job Yet.

All Quiet on the Home Front

I know I've been pretty quiet since I got back from the amazing trip. I've been job searching, which is, for me at least, one of the most stressful activities in the world. Anyway, I may be two inches away from securing something but I can't be really happy until that happens.

Well, I noticed this story recently, combining many things I'm a fan of: Second Life, Richard Dawkins and questions of "reality".

Also, happy birthday to mom.

Psssstthhh!

I know I'm supposed to be in Southeast Asia right now, but The Escapist has a great four-part article by Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Thief, Wing Commander, etc.) on Storytelling in games.

link.

Gone to Southeast Asia

From May 1st - June 10th, I'm gone backpacking across Southeast Asia with my friend Taylor. I won't be updating this old place as much, but I will be putting words and pictures (and videos?) on our travel blog, http://ducksonaplane.blogspot.com/

Hot Fuzz versus Adaptation

I just watched Hot Fuzz again last night in a theatre for the second time in a week. What a great movie on so many different levels.

[SPOILERS]

Halfway through the movie the first time, I suddenly dawned on me the similarities between this movie and Adaptation, another film I'm very much in love with.

Both films play with romanticism (not just with love, but with things that are awesome) and its relation to reality. Both of them are extremely post-modern, although in different ways. The thing that Really Got It For Me in Hot Fuzz was when Nicholas Angel (the main character and conservative supercop) returned back to the village of Sandford after being exiled and supposedly murdered by Danny, his partner. This strikes exactly the same to me as the "hollywood ending" that appears and becomes the ending of Adaptation, provided by Donald Kaufman, the fictional/real screenwriter brother of Charlie Kaufman, who actually exists. The exact moment of the changeover appears to be when Nicholas Angel stops in a coffee shop on his way back to London, and see Keanu Reeve's face on the cover of Point Break staring back at him.

This "split" or changeover makes a few changes in both movies: from plausible to non-plausible, from unromantic to romantic, from tension to release of tension; essentially from regular to awesome. The split appears not just in the actual plot of the movie, but throughout other elements as well. In Adaptation, there is a split personality of Charlie/Donald Kaufman. This is manifested differently in Hot Fuzz - Nicholas Angel is extremely serious, having a lot of experience in the London police force. Also, he only drinks cranberry juice. Danny, however, believes him to be some kind of superhero, asking him, for example, what the best place is in a man's head to shoot if you want it to blow up. Danny believes him to be a very different person from who actually he is, although he becomes that person at the end of the movie. Finally, both films deal with a split between surface reality and actual reality, namely, conspiracies. Conspiracies are convenient plot devices, generally, because they allow a writer to makes sudden changes to a world we, as an audience, had thought that we had already understood the rules for. Anyway, the conspiracy in Adaptation was that the Ghost Orchid was some sort of drug that the indians were teaching Susan Orlean and John LaRoche to extract. Meanwhile, the conspiracy in Hot Fuzz was that the members of the NWA were killing off people in "accidents" whenever they risked Sanford's reputation as a prize-winning quaint small town.

I have to secretly wonder whether Hot Fuzz's writers and lead actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost ever watched Adaptation, and felt the split between reality and fantasy the same way I did. Having just watched their television show Spaced, which is abundant with "fantasy" experiences, I see its a big part of what they do. I'm happy that these two films acknowledge reality one an equal level as they acknowledge fantasy, which plays a huge part in our daily lives.

What I learned in Montreal

On Wednesday, I took a bus up to a meeting of IGDA Montreal, to one of their casual meetings about the games industry. It was all really interesting, and too hard to sum up here, but here's what I learned:

- Montreal is becoming more and more the Hollywood of Games.
- I have childish writing.
- read realitypanic.com - Jason Della Rocca's blog for info on an ongoing dispute with the lawyer Jack Thompson.
- You can smoke indoors in Montreal if it's wrapped in 100% tobacco paper.
- If you want to be taken seriously, have a business card.
- "Nobody wants just another shiny gun."
"I DO want another shiny gun."
- Chris 'Wombat' Crowell from A2M is one cool creative director badass.
- Everything that ever happens will be as a result of cool people that you meet in college.
- Big studios are getting progressively larger, while really small studios are becoming more abundant.
- The game industry is moving towards a freelance/union model.
- being the only non-French speaker at a table is an awkward position.
- get a French girlfriend in Montreal to force yourself to learn French.

A wicked rhyme I thought up

Then I hit the pavement, wondering how the rave went.

Bacon's Lover Blog Post #325: on the road

Fuck I love bacon. Sometimes I get really intense cravings, and I want to be able to just snap my fingers and have bacon rain from the sky (see Perry Bible Fellowship).

I want to eat bacon on with everything. With mustard, with eggs, with cats even.


Are the new viewers gone yet?

I'm on a take-home exam writing binge. Its 2:30 am and I'm in the Oval-shaped computer lab in the ILC all by myself, with three computers logged in under my name. One to write this, another to do MATLAB/Maple work and the third is playing TV shows to keep me alert (I think?).

This image was under the heading "Food Porn":

This helps me get through the day