flush to disk

[flwyd]

Yeah, it's a long delay, but I've had few spare blocks of time to do an entry. So it's time to give some processor time to the consumer thread in my brain. In roughly chronological order.

Father's Day

Yes, that's where I left off. I began Father's Day by creating a self-referential banjo-related father's day card in the shape of a banjo. (This follows on the self-referential birthday card (which was a more masterful work) which was in turn inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas articles on self-reference. It's a theme I may muse about at some future time.) We then got a patented Stone Family Start on our way to The Center of the Universe, an awesome mountain location outside of Gold Hill. We walked around, took pictures of flowers, and stared into the vastness of the valley. After an enjoyable dinner, I reflected that, even though holidays like Father's Day are dumb -- you should be nice to your dad most of the time -- it helpfully provides a catalyst to go out and do stuff that don't get done in the routines of daily life.

Over the Edge

I haven't GMed anything more than a silly one-off game before, and so I decided to run an Over the Edge game over the summer to try out some theoretic role playing techniques. It didn't run as well as I'd hoped, but I have some inclinations as to why.

• In cut-to style several players are separated and action moves from one to another who each act one-on-one with the Game Moderator. This works well for plot and ham reasons, but can be taxing on the players who spend a lot of time watching someone else play for an extended period of time. With a group of good role players, this can be a very fun way to tell a story. However, it's often more fun to keep the group together most of the time. Cut-to is quite useful for short stints, however, and invaluable if your players decide to split up.
• When you let your players do whatever they want, they tend to wander around waiting for a plot to happen. Lots of details get covered, and they sometimes spend 45 minutes failing to do anything of import. Self-direction also varies on player makeup, and, I'm told, is an acquired skill. Complete freedom is pretty central to the setup, though, which is that a reality TV show is filming the characters do whatever they want on Al Amarja. The plot (which hasn't been hit yet) is just there to provide direction.
• I am able to improv most of a session based on a very small amount of notes and knowledge of the area. It's not as good as having a well-crafted plan. However, if I waited for well-crafted plans, it would take me a k-long time of procrastination to get a game going. On the flip side, I had predicted that the plot hook would show up in the second session. After five or six sessions, it still hasn't. That's partly my responsibility and partly the players'.
• When you tell players they can play anything they want, personal identity is a major theme. The characters involved in the game so far are:
  • a secret agent
  • a shapeshifter
  • an identity stealer
  • a schizophrenic
  • the child of a mob boss; identity changed for protection purposes
  • and (proposed, but not in the game) a multiple-personality case who shares head space with Sailor Moon

These observations will definitely help me in my next OTE escapade. Possibly during school, possibly next summer.

Jorge Luis Borges

This guy rules. In his introduction to the collection The Garden of the Forking Paths, he mentions the absurdity of writing several hundred pages of novel on a premise which can be expressed in a few sentences. Borges then proceeds to tell several stories about books which don't exist, several of which would make very cool films.

A.I.

This is perhaps the best movie I've seen all summer. (It vies for that spot with Memento, Dark Days, and Snatch.) For the most part, it is suitably Kubrikian, save the part after the first ending. Every shot is carefully constructed. The pace is not hurried. Small details are perfectly placed (like the fact that mecha don't blink). The acting is stellar -- Haley Joel Osment managed to do even better than he did in The Sixth Sense (which, even ignoring the ending, is an awesome movie about a boy and a psychologist). The first ending is awesome. The second ending is also very good, and quite poignant, although not as Kubrikianly cool (more movies need to end in ambiguous sadness).

Interestingly enough, lots of people misunderstand the movie's main thrust. They get caught up in the real/fake boy paradigm and whether mecha have real emotions. This is a very interesting philosophical question which requires exploration of views of our own emotional makeup and mind/body assumptions. It is not, however, the question asked by the movie. Whether David's emotions are the same sort of things as human emotions is not important to this movie's investigation. The movie isn't about the internals of robots. (The tagline says "His love is real. But he is not.") It's about how humans interact with nonhumans which display human traits.

David is a much better boy than Martin is. He's less destructive, less costly, and more loving of his parents -- traits which are all things parents like. And yet, when there's a choice between Martin and David, Martin is chosen, no matter the harm to David. The parallel to draw here is not between David and your iMac, but between David and your cat or David and a slave. Monica has a hard time giving up David (in a move more reminiscent of Hansel and Grettel than Pinocchio) just as an owner would have a tough time giving up a dog, but it's done entirely because of a perceived threat to Martin. If you had two real children, would you send one out in the woods because he might harm the other? Furthermore, the flesh fair shows that some humans hate mecha because they are mecha, regardless of their worth. Blacks were denied rights because they were black, not because they lacked worth. Ditto women. Ditto mecha. Pinocchio was made a real boy because he proved his worth. Contrarily, David proved his worth, but wasn't accepted. He therefore sought the blue fairy to become a real boy to gain acceptance, not so that he would "really know what love felt like." He (presumably) already knew that. If you had a child and grew to love her over ten years and then learned that she wasn't your biological child, but a hospital mistake, would you love her any less? If you had something which was functionally equivalent to a dog, but was not a dog, would you love it more if it was a real dog? This movie raises questions about human/machine interaction. Their answers are, I think, more important than whether machines "actually think." We are machines that think. Our view of machines just doesn't include ourselves.

Additionally, the second part of the movie is not a reenactment of Pinocchio gets lured away from home by shady characters promising excitement. David is left in the woods because Monica doesn't have the stomach to let him be deactivated. And while the Teddy/David interaction is similar to Jiminy Cricket/Pinocchio relationship, David's quest (ant its result) to find the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy is more similar to The Wizard of Oz than Pinocchio, who knew nothing of the Blue Fairy.

Other movies

Everyone should watch Dark Days. It's amazing. It shatters what you thought you knew about homeless people. It shatters your expectations of untrained film making. It would be an excellent setting for roleplaying or fiction. Moulin Rouge is a very fun movie, provided you can cope with anachronism on crack. Snatch is lots of fun and sort of like Pulp Fiction in chronological order. Brazil makes more sense when you watch (a) the whole thing and (b) the European version. Memento (awesome Flash site) is an excellently told story, evocative of a more convoluted structure dreamed up by Borges. The line to get in to both of the Boulder Theater's showings was about three people thick and a city block long. Seconds is an interestingly philosophical movie.

Rituals

The Fourth of July brought an interesting chance to explore the symbolism of the I Ching in a Wiccan context. We also had chinese food, watched fireworks from real close (we saw a piece of flaming debris land in the bed of someone's pickup), and encountered people I knew who chose the same spot to watch fireworks. Lots of fun. My other ritual this month focused on ways of playing with energy, and was conducted from the always-cool Teddy's Head. It was well liked, and everyone dug hanging out at my cabin.

Cars

I finally got my driver's license. Aged 21 3/4. Now I just have to perfect things like turning, stopping completely, going the right speed, and changing lanes on the freeway.

Music

I totally grooved out at The Fox watching Average White Band and opening act Buckminster Funken Jazz. It's all about funk. I also attended most of KGNU's Charles Sawtelle Memorial Mountain Jam in Gold Hill, featuring my dad as emcee, Open Road, and western duo Liz Masterson and Shaun Blackburn. It's sad how few kids today don't know Western as a music other than that Garth Brooks CD they don't like. And bluegrass joins classical in the small set of genres where looking sharp counts for a lot. Of course, playing sharp counts even more. As Tim O'Brien's shirt says, "Old Music Rules." A week after AWB, I saw Transglobal Underground at The Fox. It was a fun show, and about 90% of the attendees were dancing, compared to about 3% at AWB. And yet I found AWB more danceable, surprisingly. IMHO, TGU sounded better with Natacha Atlas as vocalist, but their assault of drums (trap plus big bongos plus a bunch of smaller African ones), keyboard, stock sounds, sitar/electric bass, and three vocalists works. The concert hardly seemed like an hour and a half, even including three encore songs. But then, I showed up at 9 like the ticket said. Then a DJ spun for about 45 minutes until 10. Then there was about a 30 minute wait for TGU. Good thing I didn't leave Stop Making Sense early to get there. (I attended that one almost by mistake, thinking it was the Boulder Theater's previous week's movie. Thus, I didn't know that it was essentially a movie of a Talking Heads concert. Cinematically, it did a concert well, and the music was k-groovy. Talking Heads are now on my "to download when I have bandwidth again" list.) And to bring to five the number of concerts I'll see in a three week period, I'm going to see Tool with King Crimson at Red Rocks. A cadre of my brother's friends are coming along. Hopefully we'll have enough people competent enough to drive down 470 in a mad rush.

And because that's not enough music, I'm working my way through a spindle of 50 blank CDs recording various world music around my house. We may well have enough celtic music to play continuously for three days.

The Web

Since I work at an ISP, and am thus perpetually online at work, I've made an effort to keep more abreast of news, comics, and other periodic web offerings. And as a way to keep track of things, muck around with style sheets, and save my fingers a few keystrokes, I've put together a nifty start page with quick links to stuff I visit frequently. One thing that's a real kick is Red Meat Construction Set, a bunch of folks who create comics in the style of Red Meat. Some of them are pretty hilarious. I think I'll build a portfolio and apply. A good outlet for puns, at the least.

Resident Advisor

I just finished scanning a book of M.C. Escher's art. I'm going to use them as door tags. Fellow RAs and other members of the Department of Housing will receive the regular divisions of a plane pictures with the caption "A Perfect Fit?" Yay inside advertising jokes. I haven't gotten around to my other summer R.A. projects like coming up with material for the first month's featured {artist,musician,author,leader,engineer,scientist} but I may be able to knock those out before I go to Dragonfest. Hopefully I'll be able to send my residents a pre-welcome letter at the beginning of this week.

Wedding

Yesterday, I went to the wedding of Dawn and Erik. Dawn was a member of the short-lived Highland Grove Naropa-based Celtic ritual planning group. I hadn't seen her or other members of the group in about three years, so that was fun. It was a really cool ceremony, the "altar" was surrounded by flowers in front of an aspen grove in Lefthand Canyon. The emcee began by saying "In Colorado, all you need to get married is a signature of the Justice of the Peace. I am not a Justice of the Peace." They wrote and read their own vows to each other. Dawn has triplets who are about 8 by now, and they were involved in the ceremony -- both said vows to the kids too. Then they drank mead. And everyone had a little container of bubbles which we all blew as the two walked towards the food tent. People shared stories and poems, they played the newlywed game, we ate food catered by K.T.'s BBQ, and had a generally wonderful time. This makes three the number of my friends who have gotten married in the past year along with four babies, two more pregnancies, and an engagement. And on the minus side of the ledger, only one suicide, one natural death (whose time had really come) and one broken engagement.