There's a lot of advantages to having a massive chalkboard in my house. One is the quenching of my large writable space fetishism. Another is being able to work on my thesis and a set design at the same time.
Image processing algorithm design for my thesis on the left, set design scribbles for the opera on the right.
It's been a while since I've updated this blog. I'm sort of beginning to wonder what the purpose of it. The last few posts have been all over the map. Am I using this to disseminate things I find cool? Am I using this for commentary or musings? I'd like to use if for all of the above, but it may be time to consider a serious design change.
Every once in a while, I make a consciously drastic change in my daily life. This may be anything from forcing myself to sing in the shower in the morning, or moving my furniture around to a very different configurations. I find this forces me actively adapt to new situations, so I never actually settle into unproductive habits. I'm beginning to think I need to re-think this blog in the same manner. Another problem is that most of my casual updating about my life (with pictures!) now happens over the almighty facebook.
These last two months have been busy. Oh man oh man oh man. I'm so anxious to finish up this undergrad degree it hurts. I've also been on a school hunt. After an especially good find while I was in Vancouver, I've decided to broaden my horizons and look around a little. I'll likely apply to many places, but several factors may influence my final choice. I've also been doing Improv, producing a show and finishing up my degree. This has left me pretty lacking in new interpersonal relationships, although I have to say that the people I'm living with are amazing (sorry, there's no actual link there).
I've managed to play Halo 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal during the wee hours of the night after I've been mentally capable of doing schoolwork. My reading has been lacking lately, although I've managed to organize the giant list of rss feeds I read into Google Reader. I currently read 62, some of which are more news-oriented, some are less serious, and some are rants or laments on the nature of game design. I've taken to watching video of the latest Johnathan Blow speeches while doing laundry or relatively boring homework, too.
Somewhere in here I have a list of art projects to finish. Some involve flash, some involve the internet, some involve text. As usual, thanks for reading and I promise to bring some more coherence to this space in the near future.
I just read this article:
Neurotic software has winning personality
Austrian researchers made several different AI classes (agressive, defensive, normal and neurotic) and pitted them against a real-time strategy game's built-in AI engine. Turns out the neurotic AI was the most successful of them all
In other news,
Lately I've been watching a lot of Johnathan Blow's speeches, where he often mentions "unethical gameplay" (article). He defines unethical gameplay, in one specific case, as designing a game with "rewards" built in. So, the user keeps playing a game for these moments of reward (cutscenes could be one example) while the underlying gameplay is crappy or uninteresting. He says that the play that results from the game should be interesting in of itself, not because of the "rewards" that the game doles out.
Both of these items are interesting to me. While the majority jury is out on whether violent games cause violence (I don't think so) I am of the belief that the cognitive structure of a game has a significant effect, in the short term at least, on how you behave. After playing a few hours of the Thief series, I find I always stick to the shadows in real-life for a while afterwards. After playing a "twitch"-style casual game for 15 minutes, I have a little trouble concentrating and feel hyper afterwards. But these are always short-term effects. The violence in videogames is different because it is representational. I'm not going to get deep into this right now, but you aren't actually ACTING violent, you are DOING violent things. If you're doing them with a friend, such as completing Halo 3 on Legendary (me and my housemate yesterday) then the primary behavior that is being encouraged is cooperation.
So, if game designers want to design ethically, they should think of the type of personality that a game encourages. Cool.
I finally got this pay slip in the mail, after it was passed around for several weeks in Queen's internal mail system. I thought I'd capture it here; it represents my educational experience with shocking accuracy. The "experience" is coming to a close, and there's really only 7 months left for me at Queen's.
This September has been really busy, so I've been relatively silent here. The first Improv Show in several months was last night at Wellington St. Theatre, and it was great to get back on stage again.
Keep watching, fans.
In 12 hours I'm going to be getting on a flight to Vancouver. This is my final hurrah of the summer, the final tiny bit of adventure I get in before school starts up again.
In Vancouver the agenda is pretty thick with Game Design and Digital Media schools to check out. I've got five on my list in the space of three days.
I had already booked my return flight, with the intention of coming back on Sept 6th. However, my Vancouver friend gave me an offer I couldn't refuse: in exchange for a free place to stay, he and I will tag-team drive his car back, and see how close we can cut it to 40 hours. Here's a picture of our route:
Apparently the quickest way is through the States. We aren't stopping, and are going to try to drive in alternating 6-hour shifts. Oh man oh man oh man. I've heard alot of doubt as to whether we can do it in 40 hours, although I had somebody quote 36 hours to me yesterday as the amount of time it should take.
I'll keep all y'all posted.
Back in Grade 11, a few friends and I innocently made a music video cover of Nelly's Ride Wit Me. We really weren't seeking artistic integrity at the time, just seeing what we could do with some video editing and shooting. Also, one of the guys I was working with was incredibly rich (as as example, we once asked his neighbor if we could use his Mercedes in the shoot, to which he replied "Which one?") so we could actually have some nice cars, etc. Well, we made the video and a year or so ago I posted it on youtube. The rest, they say, is history.
For whatever undecipherable reason, using the youtube search algorithm with the search string "Ride Wit Me" brings our video in at 6th. Because of this strange gift, at the time of this writing, the video itself has attracted over 30,000 views and 64 comments.
I think some of these comments are good examples of the backwaters of internet culture. Here's a few choice examples:
ceeceegurl8735 (1 week ago)
lol. da part with da dog wuz funny. great video
beckerfanboy27 (1 month ago)
WIGGER OMG
t1cTacJ0e (2 months ago)
without disrespecting you lads, the only thing that makes this video watchable was the song, however god acting and shit. stay brutal \m/
Mortadaissexy (3 months ago)
Wigger 100 %
aznbabieloser (3 months ago)
yo you guys suck plz stop posting shit
aracid (3 months ago)
The video wasn't interesting. That's all I can say. I can see most of your commenters are very immature and ignorant with their words, but not interesting is what they basically mean.
crazywhiteb0y11 (4 months ago)
these bitches are gay they dont got no girls
wtf vid dont got bitches
Djurovic90 (4 months ago)
bullshit of video!!!stupid american pussis!
armendtje (5 months ago)
where them girls at? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA nerds
snl4life15 (5 months ago)
you need to learn the difference between fact and racism "brotha". they were corny and they were white, if they were f@#kin orange i would have said stupid orange boyz,so keelo stop trying to assume some one is a racist against some corny white boyz if you dont know them. u calm down
killo11 (5 months ago)
the term "white boyz" is no different than the "n"-word.
they're both racial comments and are not acceptable in modern society.
gameking50P (5 months ago)
what the fuck is this, its just a bunch of white guys flashing how rich the r compared to black ppl
MrMarijuanaMan (10 months ago)
...fake chains...fake clothes... no ladys just weiners...the only thing you did right was say "im a failure"...
I just started applying for OSAP for the fourth year in a row. The last few years, its just been a series of clicks through all the documentation and then on to the "give me money phase" (some paraphrasing here) but it looks like this year, for each portion of the legalese, there is a short multiple-choice quiz on what the legalese actually says. Initially, I find this incredibly annoying, but its nice that I'm actually being forced to read the fine print on what I'm signing up for.
If only they'd do this with EULAs....
