dwrensha, wlog

New music for you!

Yesterday, using some of my new toys (an iPad and Logic Express!), I made a theme song for a holiday greeting card. Enjoy here.

This weekend was another Ludum Dare! Therefore I present a game:

You can play it here, or look at my official entry, where other Ludum Darers should be posting comments in the coming week.

Everything here is my work—logic, music, graphics. I wrote the game in Actionscript using the Flixel library, which made all of the physics and scrolling stuff pretty easy.

The levels may be a little bit too big and empty, but I promise there are rewards at the end of all the hallways!

I was chilling with Tom and William for much of the weekend. You can see their entries here and here.

Was on a plane/train/bus for a large portion of the past 72 hours, during which time I read Ian McEwan’s The Innocent. It’s a fairly effective antidote to Pynchon: crisp, coherent, plot-driven, and structurally conventional. A young and nerdy Englishman gets his first job away from home doing intelligence work in cold war Berlin. He proceeds to lose his innocence in various ways. Good stuff happens, bad stuff happens, tension builds, and, you know, eventually everything gets resolved. 

McEwan’s language and psychological insights are just lovely, as in the scene when our hero, Leonard, struggles to talk to a German woman: ”She smoothed away a wisp of hair from her eyes. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her.”

My favorite part is a flashback sequence in which Leonard dazedly stumbles to work while a murder scene from the previous night replays in his head. It reminds me of those heist movies where the planning and the execution of an elaborate crime unfold in parallel. The nonlinearity lets us witness both the action and its explanation without ruining the suspense.

I give the book an 8/10. 

—Listen Tyrone, you don’t know how dangerous that stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh?

—Ho, ho! Don’t I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You’re such an old fuddyduddy! A-and who says it’s a dream, huh?

The above is not from The Matrix or Inception. It’s from a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon called Gravity’s Rainbow. I have been reading it since June, and it certainly does well at depicting the boundary between dreams and reality. The narrative often leaps between the conscious and subconscious so abruptly that you don’t notice the leap until two paragraphs later. One minute, a group of scientists are quite reasonably discussing research funding. The next, laboratory rodents are breaking into song and dance on the subject of “Pavlovia.” Usually, your only tipoff is, as the narrator himself puts it, a “radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality.” And yes, in Pynchon’s cartoon universe, it is plausible that rats could sing.

This is a really weird book. It delivers a huge load of historical fact and wonderful technical detail. We learn much about how V-2 rockets were made and about the miserable life of the engineers (not to mention the laborers!) who worked on them. And hand-in-hand with the data come comically absurd scenes like a midair custard pie fight between a hot-air balloon and a fighter plane.

Some things in the book seem to exist only for the sake of bad puns. Other things are just plain bizarre, such as Pynchon’s fixation on astrology and his catalog of deviant sexual behaviors. And many, many things in the book are obscure. They are probably not worth the effort of digging through 1940’s pop culture to decipher.

Although none of the book’s characters are really lovable, some are memorable. For instance, here we get a glimpse of the cold careerism and blatant sexism of a wartime British scientist:

By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter.

There are plenty of other interesting characters, pretty much all of them cynical and paranoid. 

If Infinite Jest (a much better book) is composed primarily of sad, funny stories, then Gravity’s Rainbow is composed primarily of absurd, disgusting images. It’s gloomy, exhausting, and in the end probably not worth the slog. It’s like 800 pages. I’m quitting 30 from the end.

Saw The Social Network today. I don’t care whether you think the “Mark Zuckerberg” character is an asshole—his hacking wizardry just pushes all of my envy buttons. 

Last weekend was super awesome. With a group of friends, I made an entry for the Ludum Dare game jam.

At ten on Friday night, the theme was announced to be “Enemies as Weapons,” which I thought was pretty boring. Jokingly, I suggested that we do Plants vs. Zombies: Hidden Depths: Anemones as Weapons. Somehow this idea eventually morphed into the game we actually made, which is called Bouncecrab 2: Anemones as Friends. You are a snail who can crawl on walls and ceilings. To win, you must find and set free all of the anemones.

Rob A. and I were in charge of music. Some high points from our twenty minute soundtrack include the latin “Boss Bossa” which features a sizzling piano solo by Jason, the eight bit throwback “Eight Bends It” which works surprisingly well for being improvised by three people on the keyboard w/ pitchbend, and the ominous 5/4 “March of the Starfish.”

My other main contribution was hacking together a physics engine at the last minute after it became clear that our original one had serious problems. I gave the snail a continuously-varying normal vector and three sets of pixel sensors to detect collisions and to adjust the snail’s position and orientation. The engine enables simple and intuitive wall-climbing dynamics. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the freefall physics working quite right in time for the submission, but those too have since been fixed.

Other members of our team made contributions too numerous to list here, but I will mention that the artwork is very good, mostly due to work of Tom and Chris.

I must also mention that the game is really fun. I can’t stop playing it.

World of Goo is a wonderful game, but one thing about it has been bothering me. In the “gpu” level, why don’t the goo balls orbit in stable ellipses, like planets around a sun? Instead they trace out a kind of spirograph pattern.

Today I wrote a simulator which suggests an answer. An inverse-square gravity field might be physically accurate, but it brings about orbits that are difficult to manage—-both for the player and the simulator. The player must deal with goo balls that tend to swing around the sun in a blink and then take minutes to return, if they return at all. The simulator must deal with much stronger forces near the sun that require it to do more work to be accurate. Nobody wins. The game, it appears, sidesteps these issues by defining a gravitational field that varies only in direction, not magnitude. So World of Goo ditches real-world physics when cartoon-world physics make for better gameplay. That’s probably the right choice.

Today I saw the new Christopher Nolan movie, Inception. Watching it is like watching as an expert plays through an intricate video game; it’s dazzling to see complex tasks performed in a universe governed by strange rules, but it’s also somewhat tiresome when the rules are unclear. Like, why does everyone need to enter freefall at the same time across all dreams? And, wait, is it ok to die in this level or not? The movie suffers not because such questions don’t have clear answers, but because two hours is really not enough time for the answers to be internalized by any audience. It’s no accident that in Portal, a teleportation-themed video game whose universe has far simpler mechanics than Inception’s, the first couple hours of play are devoted to a step-by-step tutorial. Nolan tries to cram lessons into his action sequences, but fails simply because way too much happens way too quickly. Maybe the movie was just meant to be seen multiple times, but I certainly won’t be returning. Inception is primarily an action movie, and I prefer not to resubmit myself to scene after scene of gunfighting and car chases, even if the movie has some redeeming aspects. It does have some rather good pyschological funhouse scenes, but none that approach the hilarity of those in Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and none that are truly scary, either.

It can be good to start with a shipwreck. Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.

from Hitch-22

It’s divided into chunks, there are sort of obvious closures or last lines—-that make it pretty clear that you’re supposed to go have a cigar or something, come back later.

from although of course you end up becoming yourself

I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb…. what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach us again that we’re smart.

from although of course you end up becoming yourself

—-yeah, I know this is gonna sound drippy and PC. I’m just, I’m really into the work now. I mean it’s really—-and I feel good about this. Because, you know, we wanna be doing this for forty more years, you know? And so I’ve gotta find some way to enjoy this that doesn’t involve getting eaten by it, so that I’m gonna be able to go do something else. Because bein’ thirty-four, sitting alone in a room with a piece of paper is what’s real to me. This (points at table, tape, me) is nice, but this is not real. Y’know what I mean?

from although of course you end up becoming yourself