After four unsuccessful attempts over the past two years at starting up a character in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the most detailed and ambient single-player computer RPG in recent years (since Morrowind, Oblivion’s predecessor), I thought fortune was smiling on me: I thought I had escaped the grasp of this game and its immersive, engaging, and (above all) time-consuming reputation. In both Morrowind and Daggerfall, the latter being Oblivion’s great-grandfather, a couple hundred hours were spent within the game-realm of Tamriel, the world of The Elder Scrolls.
A couple hundred hours?! Yeesh! These days, I don’t have time for games that span tens of hours, let alone the hundred that could easily be adventured out of Oblivion. I mean, I play guitar. I code. I take a lot of photos. I plot out crappy vector drawings. I catch up on the past four months of Scientific American. I bake bread and make yogurt. I keep the city kids off the streets. I sleep a couple hours. I walk a few miles. I have stuff to do.
Oh, but not after this weekend — the weekend that Oblivion finally caught me. Drat!
I suspect that the previous character of formula of the bristled, Nordic warrior-barbarian was the only thing that kept this latest squeeze at bay. The barbarian was my default choice for the previous games and my character for the first several attempts at Oblivion because, hey, the way of a warrior was an easy choice.
Warrior-types kill a lot of creatures and people, loot the bodies, and make a lot of cash selling the booty of the dead. Warriors can dash into vampire covens and dank grottos and all kinds of havens of the unsavory, confident of success due to an arsenal of bulging thews, vitality that could outlast Methusalah twice over, and a double-bladed axe that could slice through a sequoia trunk like it was made of salmon mousse. Life for warriors is straight-forward, bloody, and profitable.
And warriors have it boring too, I decided. There have been many warrior characters among the multiple play-throughs of Daggerfall (where the class and character distinctions were hardly noticeable), Morrowind, and early Oblivion games, and I’m guessing that the constant single-character narrative had run too thin. Smashy-smashy is good fun and all, but even the most sociopathic barbarian comes home after a long day of vigorous, wanton slaughter and serves himself a raspberry popover.
This weekend, having completed Far Cry and needing another PC game, I decided to give Oblivion one last go, but not as a brutish man-killer from the North. Far from it: this time, I’m playing a female High-Elf thief. How’s that for a career change?
Previous run-throughs of the opening (and typical) sewers dungeon have always ended up the same way: a long trail of dead bodies, and my character gaining enough experience and sellable loot to raise a couple levels and afford himself a full set of lovely fur armor.
As a thief, the sewers progressed very differently: instead of a trail of dead bodies, I was chased out of the ducts and muck-filled cisterns by a trail of very much alive bodies. My character, a master at sweet-talk and sneakery but coming up a little short on the blade and bow side of things, could hardly take up the offensive to a sick rat, let alone square off against goblin mage or the rare crusading skooma-struck madman. Instead of the previous barbarian tactic of hack-slash-repeat, my character dashed won first place in the Imperial Sewers 500 (reward: her bloody life).
(On one occasion, after I was out of the sewers, a female warrior killed my character with a single blow. This immediate death occurred after I’d plunged approximately a dozen arrows into the offender’s body. The bandits in the hills of Oblivion-country are mighty, mighty tough.)
But playing as a thief has turned out to be a completely different experience compared to the kill-and-loot strategy of the warrior’s life, not surprisingly. The free-form, choose-your-own-adventure design of these games has been ignored by me until this current play-though, and now that I’ve exchange axes for arrows, slaughter for speech-craft, and lock-picking instead of looting, my own little plot has been almost entirely different.
For one, my character spends a lot of time running backwards, firing arrows and fireballs at pursuing warriors. After the magic stores run dry and the opponent is bristling with every arrow I once owned, my character, fleeing for her pointy-eared life, dashes off into the scenic hills.
These frequent trips into the wooded areas of Cyrodill are partially fueled by an intrinsic appreciation for the beautiful trees, flowers, and the occasional Nirnroot of the countryside; the other, dominant part of my frenzied wanderlust is fueled by a desire to avoid being cut in half length-wise by a psychotic, blood-thirsty Imperial cave-dweller who’s hungry to add the head of a hot young Elf to his skull collection. Sometimes during these flora-heavy chase sequences I feel like Thoreau, at peace and introspective, but instead of speculating about ants I’m sitting on top of a motorbike, hauling ass and screaming my way through Walden.
Over the weekend, I decided to spend a Saturday doing nothing. Nothing! Woo hoooooo—
Of course, when I say “nothing” I don’t mean those hours were spent on the floor motionless, in the midst of brain-death, pulmonary and cardiac arrest, and it definitely means that I didn’t go out and buy carpet. Saturday was the colliquial day off (and by “day off” I don’t mean…well, forget it).
Instead of singing the choir eternal for a few hours, that one Saturday afternoon was spent playing video games. (Death versus video games? The classic Cake or Death routine by the great Izzard-man comes to mind.) As much as I blather on about the state of digital gaming on this blog and with friends, my actual time spent per week in front of a monitor enjoying a game is less than or equal to five hours.
Fortunately, I think the five-hour mark of time spent gaming qualifies me to keep my self-ordained “Underground” status on Xbox Live. If I had chosen the “Pro” status and missed the weekly quota, whatever it is, I’d probably have underage thugs hired by Microsoft leaving obscene and derogatory insults in my Live messagebox. Anyone who has played Halo 2 or Halo 3 and uses the public voicechat knows what kind of insults Live’s pre-pubescent community frequently wields, and for those that haven’t ventured into that Live mire, your ears and general hope for sustaining good taste and humanity at large is magnitudes more rosy.
Far Cry
Half of Saturday’s game time behind the mouse was spent with Far Cry, which is perhaps the most story-bald and intensely-paced game I’ve ever played. As the pacing and actual gameplay goes, roughly 90% of Far Cry is spent sneaking through lush jungle and archipelago brush and bouncing across pristine lagoons and coral reefs in small inflatable boats. Another 8% goes towards wanton death, murder and killing, and that last two percent is banked against watching completely inept, unnecessary story and plot developments.
I like Far Cry’s action. The gameplay is almost continuously maddeningly intense: a common scenario is spent carefully at the keys, creeping through ferns and under the canopy of palm trees, knowing that the last save point is 45 minutes back and that a couple of bullets from the last two alive mercenaries, who are just a few meters ahead, would be a quick death. Such sequences can take up to a half-hour, which is usually a small part of any individual level. That’s good fun.
What’s not good fun is Far Cry’s complete lack of an engaging narrative. The developer’s complete distain for even attempting to finish penning the first sentence of a half-decent story worth the player’s time is evident right from the opening CG intro, a production that’s equal parts MTV music video, art-school senior project, personification of Attention-Deficit Disorder, and cocaine dream.
Subsequent in-game or intermediary cutscenes forgo even the art-school and cocaine ingredients and are just plain bonkers (for better, or for worse). For instance, I’m probably 30 hours into this game, on the fourth-to-last level, and my femme-fatale cohort just told me that the enemy camp in front of us needs to be cleaned of all bipedal life because it’s there. That’s it, more or less (read: less). I’m hours from the end of the game, and the story is still all, Go kill those guys. Happy to oblige.
The good news was that my gung-ho friend suggested that we use a nuclear weapon to blow up the enemy camp. Evidently the mercenaries we are about to wantonly murder have the nuke around as a table centerpiece, conversation starter, or maybe a Plan S if the previous plan involving the pike-wielding, spiked helmet-wearing, methamphetamine-metabolizing silverbacks don’t take care of any opposition.
“Don’t worry,” says my charismatic companion-in-arms, after I told her she was bark-raving nuts for wanting to detonate a nuke in our vicinity. (She is, evidently, afflicted by an especially virulent strain of malaria.) “The yield isn’t big enough to take out more than the camp.” Oh. Right. Perfect strategy, then.
And that, in a rifleshell, is why I like Far Cry. It speaks in the language of gun reports, and sometimes, at the end of a long day, a bit of the ultra-violence isn’t a bad thing.
I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it, other than thinking it is somehow important. I guess more than a few players will want my head on a platter. But then, art isn’t about pleasing your audience, it’s about looking for the truth, no matter where the quest takes you.
That’s what creator Jonas Kyratzes has to say (in part) about his game, The Museum of Broken Memories, an independent point-and-click adventure game about…well, it’s about war, and people broken up about war, and a lot of other small things. Completing the game from start to finish — no collectibles, no additional endings, nothing — took me about 45 minutes.
Not that I’m not hoping you’ll enjoy this - quite the opposite. As I said, it is a unique game; it goes to some pretty crazy places. The only thing I ask of you is that you keep an open mind, and follow me inside…
Overall I enjoyed The Museum of Broken Memories, but my specific feelings are polarized. The narrative is too loose for my taste: Kyratzes obviously has something to say about the consequences of war, but the player within The Museum is privy only to the bad consequences. (Unrelated to my opinion the game, Kyraztes and I have very different worldviews, to put it mildly.) That in itself is not a detriment, but the actual telling is so loose that its like the game is trying to relate a story using a series of vague gestures instead of words — the player can see a general idea, and maybe a disjointed harmony among the different rooms in the museum, but an overall idea is largely lost within the fog.
Kyratzes has noted in the game’s documentation and elsewhere that this abstract, tenuous design was intentional in the name of art, but I personally would have liked to see a stronger statement, one even stronger than the individual statements given by the rooms of the Museum. This is a case where the parts are worth more than the whole.
Simultaneously, the design of The Museum of Broken Memories is brilliant and well-toned. The experience of traveling within The Museum felt very much like reading a story, and nothing like playing an adventure game, or any kind of game. Room to room, the plot, as stretched as it was, was laid out carefully and steadily like the pages in a book, except that in this book was being simultaneously written and read by me.
While I said previously that The Museum of Broken Memories thrusts the player into a post-war atmosphere, the actual individual stories being told are so much deeper and detailed, much closer to the people who lived the war. This design of having a simple-plot, but deep, compelling and intricate characters or actors is my favorite form of narrative, one I fell in love with largely thanks to the frequent employ of such a design by Kurosawa in many of his films. Museum is a bottom-up kind of story: something connects all of these characters together, but the thing is not the interesting part. The really good stuff is the characters themselves — who they are, what they do, how they are affected, how they react.
The bare interface and straight-forward gameplay progression contributes much to the intimacy of The Museum of Broken Memories — the game has no heads-up display, keeps no inventory, and does not force the player to keep track of dozens of numerical codes and passwords. (If you like collecting codes and items, try The Infinite Ocean, another good adventure game by Kyratzes with another discomforting plot and environment.) The Museum is strictly point-and-click, and does not necessitate pixel-hunting rooms for items or buttons or switches. Transitioning rooms and dialogue is obvious and easy, and consequently the pacing is brisk and unrelenting.
But there’s one scenario in the Museum where the “obvious and easy” navigation is intentionally thrown out the window, and the player character is literally stumbling around in complete darkness. When the lights go out in, say, Super Mario Bros. (or Fatal Frame 2, where a ghost really did take away the player character’s sight), it’s extremely annoying, but the usage and presentation in The Museum of Broken Memories is both appropriate and entirely effective.
That’s what I like about the design of The Museum of Broken Memories: its intent and rule-set is clear, even if its plot isn’t (intentionally, again), and the game works wonderfully within its self-picked constraints. Many things could’ve lessened the impact of The Museum of Broken Memories: having to keep track of codes and passwords, for one, or keeping an inventory, or, Thor forbid, an action sequence. There’s even a bit of spoken dialogue that’s slightly comical, but again Kryatzes, firmly holding onto the reigns, exhibits discretion about what works in his game. And it does work, very well.
I need more of these 45-minute games. Beating a couple of these short-story games every week would beat out 30 hours of Far Cry any time. Maybe it’s time for me to start tapping into the indie text-adventure circuit for future entertainment.
Or, heck, maybe I should try making one of those 45-minute games, and finally see if I can put all of my griping into a worthy product. Some day, some day.
My footage of the Sonata Arctica concert from back in February has finally been edited, color-corrected, scored using other people’s music, and post-produced beyond recognition. The final product turned out well — so well, in fact, that I decided to keep it for myself and upload this ugly, poorly-produced version to YouTube instead. Too bad, suckers!
99% of the time spent on this video was spent in post-production, jammin’ away through Vegas Movie Studio. The title came together fairly quickly, but the denouement sequence — the last third of the movie, after the audience-jam ends and the fade-to-white — went through many, many revisions. The final bit is a big dramatic blob, but I’m pleased with those big blobby results. Mmmm, blobby.
The production of this movie firmly establishes a pattern: the last four dorky little films I’ve made were quick on the actual recording of the event, lasting long enough to capture just a few minutes of footage, but the post-production spans hours and hours. Out of my meager YouTube catalog, Son San Fran joins Catchphrika, Reverend Horton Heat’s Birthday Wishes, Solid Squirrel and, to a lesser measure, A2 Xp 2k7 in the quick-filmed, heavy-post-produced group of creations.
On the other hand, the time spent to make all of the other productions in the catalog combined could’ve fit into the full schedule of any one of the aforementioned post-prod time-hogs. I’m enjoying the full process of editing stubby films more and more, but if pushing out a squiddy little thing like Son San Fran takes as long as two months, I fear that my available resources have possibly hit a ceiling. I just don’t have the time to make this stuff as much as I would like. Ack, argh, arugula.
But I have no problem kicking the premise of an unavailable time investment out into the open road and stating that I’m definitely interested in making a movie that makes use of, y’know, multiple cuts, scenes, and — get this! — acting and a plot (gasp!).
But don’t worry, gentle and cultured Internet readers: all people of good taste are likely saved from the disgusting throes of such a creation — I spend so much time post-producing these darn things that I would never finish toying with any amount of film that lasted more than five minutes. Maybe I need a collaborator to crack the whip and, erm, do all of the hard work.
Much fun was had, anyway, both at the concert and creating the final movie. Enjoy!
Addenduodeneumden: The original version of this post and video was actually up on Monday, two days ago. To any readers who watched that version of Son San Fran, congratulations! You win absolutely nothing.
In fact, that version of the video was the super-secret YouTube Overlay version, the one where some of the titles at the bottom of the movie were covered up by the little YouTube button that appears in the lower-right corner for shared films — that is, the crappy version. (Again, for anyone that watched Monday’s version: being an early adopter is always a bit rough, innit?)
I discovered the overlap problem a couple minutes after I thought everything was uploaded and finalized, and, boy, talk about a buzzkill. Nothing stops the poppin’ champagne bottles during the after-party like discovering the final production was botched by a third-party.
Anyway, the version now available is “corrected,” and by that I mean the conflicting titles were moved over to the left side of the frame, resolving the overlap problem. Yeah, that’s right: I ripped my artistic license in thirds, subscribed to The Man’s weekly recipe newsletter, tossed out my croissant crumb-covered beret, and edited away the original vision, acquiescing completely to the constraints of YouTube sharing.
Twice I’ve received pick-up slips from the USPS, and twice the packages came from Russia. No joke. I have a serious problem.
I should clarify that I expected the packages, since I ordered them in the first place. Also, I should mention that I lied just now and am not actually in any kind of trouble. Nope, not a smidge of trouble unless Ann Arbor is under siege and the Reds are implicated as the provocateurs, in which case a government agency might rap at my door to inquire why Vladimirsky insists on sending me satchels from the Motherland every couple months.
If the Big Government Agency does knock and ask to see the package contents, I might be in trouble: the liner notes of the imported goods distinctly say “For sale only in RUSSIA!” If my illicit importation is discovered, hopefully the bottle of 120-Minute IPA I have sitting in my fridge will appease them. If the beer itself doesn’t work, maybe the bottle itself will be more coercive.
The other day’s Red Arrival brought me The Poodles’ latest album, a disc of some fine hard-rock tunes that despite the name doesn’t feature a squad frilly men wearing tutus and playing guitars. Instead, the frilly men are wearing various types of vests, which is by my estimation one of the high marks of Swedish manhood. Swedes sometimes don three, even four vests of different fabrics, threads and leathers when out for a night on the town, or at least I’ve heard that, or else I’ve just made it up. I’ll ask Paul, my merry Swedish friend, if he’d be willing to wear multiple vests to a jazz show and will report back here with the answer in due time.
This Poodles album arrives on the tail end of a very musical couple of months. Beginning around the start of February up to the present, I’m averaging about 2.5 new albums a week. On one hand, the plethora new tunes is an absolute boon, for the obvious reasons: rock and roll will never die, Britney will hit it big again one day, etc. On the other gloved hand, attempting to fully digest and appreciate, or digest and reject, roughly two albums a week is nearly impossible. But, whatever. Music, aye? I’ll take it.
One of my favorites is called The Human Equation and comes courtesy famed Dutch mastermind Arjen Anthony Lucassen and his Ayreon project.
Ayreon, the concept, relates the forlorn tale of Ayreon, the 6th Century minstrel, who is able to receive broadcasts from the late 21nd Century via some crackpot scientists and a little thing they call the Time Telepathy Experiment. In what must be some kind of torture, these far-future jokers are sending back notices to poor Ayreon that their time is in the midst of some existential crisis — world’s about to collapse, explode, be eaten by the Sun, that sort of thing. The actual cause of Earth’s impending doom is not clear, but the Time Telepathists make it obvious that, Oh yes, later in this 21nd Century is going to be very rough.
(The actual apocalypse purportedly occurs in 2084, so neither Lucassen nor I will be around to see the skies falling. Too bad — I wanted to be in line to take a crack at Time Telepathy to harass a few bards, or maybe a pharaoh or two. Imagine what kind of stories the inside walls of pyramids would tell if King Tut had received a few broadcasts from the collapsing 21st. Then again, some folks might already say those stories are already on the walls. Migods!)
Lucassen develops the whole concept through a series of vaguely-connected albums, all under the Ayreon name, but for what I’ve been able to garner this far it’s all pretty foggy, ham-handed stuff. The album Into the Electric Castle is well-known in the metal world for its musicianship and quality production in the prog-rock vein, but the summary of the concept looks like a bad post-modern cocktail of quack psychiatry, 7th-grade science-fiction, and hallucinogenic drugs: several parts of the plot are trying to coalesce into a definable thread, but in the end the whole thing just looks a mess.
Being unable to clarify and trim off the philosophical garbage from a concept is an epidemic in the progressive- and power-metal genre. That’s not to say that no compelling or well-composed concepts exist in the metal world, but I’ve listened to quite a few in my day, having frequently sought out story-based productions for some strange, masochistic reason. Maybe my continued patronization of the quill-wielding hoardes of metalheads is a result of discovering Blind Guardian as one of my first true power metal bands, a band who has written rich and highly-programmatic instrumentals (for power metal, at least) and whose concepts are frequently really good.
As for Ayreon, I’ve bought two albums from Lucassen’s intergalactic space-time mumbo-jumbo hodgey-podgey butter-bread opera, and he’s batting .500 so far.
The more recently-released and recently-purchased album is 01011001 (yes, that’s the real album name; yes, it does represent something in the concept; no, the thing in the concept is not represented in base-2 for a good reason).
Within the past couple of weeks I’ve spun both discs of 01011001 a couple times. After the 100 or so minutes of narrative and high-effect guitar and Hammond organ, and after frequent repartee between the 11 different vocalists, including Lucassen himself, I can’t figure what in the Universal Migrator’s underpants is going on. Maybe my lack of understanding is because I’ve picked up on the whole Ayreon deal at the tail end of the concept and skipping all the basic, integral bits, but sheesh, if my ability to derive the overall story from a fairly complex concept is this bad, then it’s a wonder I can pay attention at my job during the day. (And about that job, I had the big annual performance review last week, and the bosses think I’m doing a bang-up job. Dig me.)
The short review for 01011001: a big confused pile. Good music, bad storytelling. Those who enjoy brevity can stop here.
Maybe 01011001 needs to be played a half-dozen more times or so before I really get into the meat of the subject. From what I can tell so far, the principal character — or characters, really — is a sentient race that lives on Planet Y — and Y can be represented in ASCII character code by the number 89 — and the base-10 number 89 can be represented in base-2 by the number 1011001 — har, har, har — that has incredible mechanical and biological technology. The race is immortal, but somewhere along the highway of life they took a sharp turn to get off at a rest stop in the mountains, and the luggage with their emotions packed away slipped off the top of the turbo-charged VW van and tumbled down into a big dark ravine, lost forever. That’s how I see it in my head, at least.
So the concept begins with a bunch of super-geeks who can’t feel emotion, which is odd considering that they do more than their planet’s share of moaning and groaning throughout the production. The general lamentations of this sorry group is further exacerbated by the fact that Planet Y is dying, because all the space tuna have gone back to their home planet or something, which is always a bummer. (At least they won’t have to worry about the heavy-metal poisoning from the frequent and delicious tuna melts — now the fellows just need to watch out for the other kind of bad heavy metal, the kind that comes out of a speaker. Zing.)
Fortunately, the Emo Collective is a clever bunch, and they seed a comet with their own biological makeup and fire it off into the cosmos, sending their progeny out to landfall on a totally different world to be cultivated. (This is, more or less, an actual hypothesis of biological creation, although the supporting evidence has thus far been thin.) Note that the wise guys themselves aren’t actually riding the comet: the intergalatic-travelling body will just smash into some accommodating planet and generate a new breed of emo-geeks, and the Collective will oversee the general upbringing.
That’s basically disc one’s plot in a nutshell, although I skipped a few tracks such as the one where Simone Simons, the golden-voiced lead singer of Epica, plays the embarrassing Anonymous Internet Hottie and tries to dig on some random fellow via an awkward and, ultimately, completely banal e-mail exchange (and that’s no joke). Disc two opens up with the comet — happily, and fortunately! — smashing into a nice, lush, breed-friendly planet. The Collective sees life on the planet prior to the comet’s landfall; when the comet hits the larger organisms will be wiped out, but the cosmic smarty-pants decide that a bunch of lizards don’t matter much when this brand-new, totally awesome species takes root and evolves.
By the way, those lizards that are killed off when the comet hits? It was the dinosaurs, as in our dinosaurs, or at least the dinosaur remains we keep digging out of prehistoric strata. The song where the comet wipes out those poor feathered pea-brains is called The Fifth Extinction.
The final song on 01011001 is The Sixth Extinction and takes place in — wait for it — the year 2084, which just means after the whole morbid trip that the Collective screwed up yet again! In a way I feel badly for those poor sods, what with all that work resulting in complete failure for the sixth time.
A bunch of strange and magical and surprisingly boring events occur between that Fifth and Sixth Extinctions, all working up from prehistory through the current day, and man, I’ve been really trying hard to care about it all, even just a little bit. One of the tunes is named “E=mc2” and has some chanting about “breaking the equation,” so maybe I’ll tune back into that one and see if it drops any hints towards that Pulitzer Prize in physics I’ve been meaning to land for a few months now.
Of course, I could just read the Wikipedia article for the album and take in the whole darn story at once, but then I probably wouldn’t listen to the album after that, since all of the unintentional mystery would be gone.
Fortunately, 01011001’s shortcomings are more than made up by The Human Equation.
But I’ll ramble about that one some other time, because the auditorium surely has cleared out by now. Seems like a pretty good idea to me — I’ve done plenty of moaning and whining for one day.
(San Francisco pictures are here. I spent enough time on ‘em, so I’m gonna plug ‘em. And now, back to regular, er, blogging content.
Anyone who’s spent any amount of attention to the news lately — or if, like me, you don’t read the news at all but spend a lot of time reading science blogs and science-oriented sites — is probably aware of the recent big controversy about autism and vaccines.
If not, here’s the basic dish: an outspoken lobby of parents, naturalists, evangelists and outright kooks has hypothesized that vaccines are at least partially responsible for causing autistic spectrum disorders, or ASDs. Actually, hypothesize is probably too tame a word — wholly charged and convicted is more appropriate, as the lobby is completely convinced one way or another that vaccines are, without a doubt, the root cause of ASDs.
(This guesswork regarding the autism-vaccine is not necessarily the problem — good scienctific methodology requires beginning with a hypothesis, so you have to start somewhere. The problem is when support for the hypothesis is continued and prolonged after trials and experimentation has proven, through the best-available methods and evidence, that the hypothesis is wrong. Later on in this post I’ll direct the reader towards posts that dissect the hypothesis and present the evidence, but I wanted to just wanted to make the point that supposing a cause and effect is in itself not necessarily bad. The problem is that this case has gone way beyond the disproven point.)
The anti-vaccine movement is composed in part by parents. Last year, a large group of families with autistic children filed roughly 5,000 suits en masse to the government’s Vaccine Court. Hearings of individual cases began back in June 2007 and continue grinding away slowly today. A ruling in favor of the plantiff — an admittance that an administered vaccine caused harmful reactions in the treated patient — results in monetary compensation. While individual cases are important for medicine and proven compensation, the stakes for cases within the Autism Omnibus are much more important: rulings could not only set a precedence for other similar cases, but could affect how vaccines are administered to children.
And vaccines are — duh — important. Cases of polio and measles, two diseases that have established, effective vaccines available, have rebounded in African and Japanese populations, respectively, after families refused vaccines for various reasons. Continued vaccinations could lead to the complete containment and eradication of these afflictions, just like the reduction and removal of smallpox via vaccines in the 1970s.
The recent outcry in the media and anti-vaccine groups was about one of those Autism Omnibus hearings: a special master overseeing the case decided that 9-year-old Hannah Poling, who was diagnosed with autism early in her life, was indeed affected harmfully by an administered vaccine. The anti-vaccine lobby and many media outlets, seeing red meat (but landing a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc instead), is now put this case on a pedestal as definite evidence that vaccines are indeed responsible for causing ASDs.
In actuality, the studies and evidence for the vaccine-autism connection — that is, the studies have revealed that the connection is false. And this is where I’m going to let the scientists take over.
The science blogging community has been combatting what they’ve deemed the “Mercury Militia” (the mercury moniker comes from the anti-vaccines lobby that thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury-containing additive to vaccines that has since been removed nearly all vaccines, was the particular component causing the autism) for many months, far before the Autism Omnibus hearing began in June 2007. Most of the bloggers commenting on this issue (at least, the bloggers I’ve been reading) are MDs or PhDs, or both, and all of them are critical thinkers, which is the very least you could ask for when dealing with such a sensitive issue.
I’m no scientishian, but I, um, read blogs — a lot of blogs, actually. Not only can I read (and write!) words larger than a few syllables, but I can make one smart-looking unlinked list in HTML. So, putting all of my intellectual abilites to the utmost test, here’s a list of a few blog posts from favorite science and medicine blogs about the autism-vaccine firestorm that’s cooking hot these days.
Orac, at his indispensable and irreplaceable blog Respectful Insolence, has been traumatizing the anti-vaccine crowd with his logic-, evidence-, and derision-bat for months and months. He’s been very much on top of the debate, and recently created an aggregate link-post for his own blog. Orac orients the audience towards a lot of good posts with his single post, so begin digging with this one.
Skeptico links to the same Orac aggregate-post that I did above, but he (she?) offers some additional commentary in his typically cogent, well-articulated and frank manner.
I don’t read political blogs anymore because fighting that hydra didn’t bestow satisfying benefit: the fight would go on and on, and whether or not I disengaged myself from any particular debate early or if I followed through the entire ordeal, the knowledge or information stores gained felt worthless once the next battle began. The tectonic plates of politics are largely moved by emotions and fallacies, and less by the straight-forward presentation of evidence or sound arguments. Reading up on that kind of news of the day just made me irritable and worthlessly argumentative with no personal payoff.
But now I read a whole heap o’ science blogs, and although the fight still exists (see: all of the above post), after the smart dust has cleared, I possess not only a greater knowledge of real-world workings, all of which are more amazing by the day, but my critical-thinking faculties are a bit sharper. In a debate I’d be more likely to trip over the podium than actually put forth a serious contention, but my toolkit of moves for fightin’ within the argument arena is slowly developing into a formidable opponent.
The collection and support of evidence and the methodlogy of critical thinking is a lengthy, time-consuming and dauting journey, but progress is noticable, and the proper practice makes the weak spots in the opposition as evident as pink skin showing between two plates of armor. But anyways, go read.
I dabbled with the color settings and framing of the photos a bit but kept the photo sequencing, i.e. the date and time when I took the pictures, pretty close to straight chronological. Combine the ordering with the keen little map of where each picture was taken, and it’s like the viewer is transported right to their own vacation in fancy ‘Cisco! Oh, so lucky!
Great trip, but I dunno when I’ll take the next one, since the April plan to San Fran is now in the can: the Summer vacation came down to either SF or San Luis Obispo, and I am goin’ to SLO. When it came to that decision, I didn’t even have a dog in the fight for ole’ sourdough city.
But I hope anyone who indulges the new picture gallery enjoys it, even if it is a bit weak on the good photos and heavy on the comment nostalgia. A video of the Sonata Arctica concert is in the works too, but as usual, no guarantees when it’ll be ready. The final production ought to be a treat, whenever it arrives.
Somewhere along the line, I became some kind of content-hoarder. Good content, sure, all of it, and something of a loving necessity in my daily routine. But the sheer quantity of all the content is edging towards a genuine problem (and the good kind of problem, really): I can’t keep up with it all.
Google Reader is keeping track of 90 syndicated feeds. Last week, and just before a desperate and marginally-successful trimming, the number of tracked feeds was above 115. That’s about 150+ new articles to read a day.
Besides the new media of RSS feeds, I’ve apparently rediscovered books and magazines, since I have about a dozen different tomes and copies of them laying around unfinished. Besides my own books that are perched on the shelf or strewn about in variable states of bookmarking and upside-down spine-cracking place-marking, I borrowed three books from the library in the past week. Haven’t started any of ‘em. As for an indication of the magazine realm of content, I haven’t finished reading Scientific American from four months ago.
Twenty audio podcast feeds. This is getting a little ridiculous, yes? A few of those ‘casts are updated daily; almost all of them are about an hour apiece. Nothing is finer in the evening than a new episode of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe and a walk, but I’d need to cover about 26 miles daily to stay up to date.
New music: Three new albums this week, and two new albums last week. This is a normal frequency, and, honestly, the continuing discoveries make me a happy dope. I will make time, between minutes if necessary, to discover and enjoy new artists and albums and songs. But being able to take in the deluge of new music still needs to be squished in between all of the other stuff.
The games — oh, those poor games. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is here but still shrink-wrapped because I haven’t finished my game of Trials and Tribulations that began back in November. Anyone remember the Beating Old Games project from a couple years ago? I haven’t completed the second game out of the big ole’ list. The BOG Project is dead, dead, dead.
And then there’s projects. Two current web pages to redesign; one goofy new page in the works that will likely never touch a real server. Playing guitar. The blog. The tumblelog. San Francisco picture gallery. Project 366. Scripts and code business.
And that’s just the personal itinerary. All of that usually is shoved aside for visiting and consorting with pals, which occurs a few times a week.
But there’s hope: the great pruning of books, magazines, podcasts, projects, and Web feeds has begun. (Notice that music stays put, and good that it is.) Well, maybe hope exists for getting a few things done once in a while after the firing line quiets down, but a lot of excellent, worthwhile content and potential is going to be up against the wall.
Something of a sign of the times, I think — new stuff is just too easy and convenient to procure in large quantities across many mediums all at once these days. Now I just need to learn the fine art of priority and organization.
I’ll look into it tomorrow.
Dear Internet Friends: I’m back from San Francisco! Hello.
Actually, I returned from the west coast a week ago, last Thursday, but regarding how completely dead tired I was after Wednesday’s return flight and resulting jet lag, most of my physical and ethereal body was still in San Fran. Too bad all of me couldn’t be there — the trip was lovely, lovely, lovely. Lovely in an oh-man-I-could-definitely-live-here kind of way.
Actually, I’m hoping to start looking for jobs in April, and after landing new work moving to California. That’s the big news. The bad news is that due to a restrictive lease that I stupidly renewed just two weeks ago, that April of prospective freedom won’t arrive until 2009.
But who knows — even after a year, the glow of a west coast abode will probably have worn off to a great degree, and I might rethink the whole escapade. But then again, something tells me that just looking at the 630+ photographs and couple hours ‘o video from this recent trip would rekindle the flame. Nothing is happening quickly for this move, that’s for sure.
On the bright side, during that year I’ll accrue another twelve months of resume experience — including an extra day, thanks to the leap year! — and twelve months of income to collect, all the better to assist a west-ward move and assimilation. Not bad, really, and besides, I have plenty of things here in Michigan to love at the moment. And besides, why San Francisco? Plenty o’ other nice Californian towns to consider too, although SF is a tough candidate to beat. In any case, the extra year of Michigan-nesse will be put to very good use.
I can’t stay away too long, though. Another San Francisco visit will take flight in late April, and then in June I’ll be off to visit family in San Luis Obispo. Needless to say, the funds gained through those ugly hours worked during the busy season (now over by about a month) are being put to a very good use.
As for an hour-by-hour recollection of the trip, I’ll let the multitude of photos do the talking for me. I’m currently sorting through and touching up the media, and a gallery is forthcoming within a week or so, and possibly within a few days. Some marvelous footage of the Sonata Arctica show is also on deck to be edited, but that’ll take a bit longer — I tend to fuss with these little video compositions for weeks, even if the original film lasts only a couple minutes.
But yeah — happy leap day. I am proud to announce on this tetra-annual occasion that my own Project 365 has grown up to be Project 366. Rejoice!
Actually, the only indications that the project was upgraded are the new album art, the button within the navigation bar on the right on this page, and the assumption that the gallery will end up with at least one picture for every day of this year (so far, so good). The name of the gallery is still Three-Six-Five — changing it to Three-Six-Six would require changing all of my current hyperlinks as well as blowing away the current RSS feed due to the way that the Picasa Web Albums handles identifiers, so screw it.
Three Sixty-Five, or Three Sixty-Six? Just like most art, it doesn’t really matter — choose what you like, and you’ll probably be wrong about it in one respect or another.
Pictures of the west coast due soon. I hope. Gah!
I’m hopping about in San Francisco-town for a few days. I don’t expect to do much blogging, but I’ll be posting pictures and small updates to the tumblelog for the duration.
And if I suddenly stop updating the t’log, it’s probably because of a sudden and untimely death. Surely.
Friends, success: I have joined the sub-elite class of Portal players that, having beaten all of the game’s advanced maps, have bitten down on the elusive Vanilla Crazy Cake achievement. Not that the Cupcake and Fruitcake achievements weren’t delicious, but layer cake is pretty high on my leaderboard of cake-like desserts. I’m pretty satisfied.
But now I’ve started on the challenge maps in Portal, and, living up to the namesake, appear so far to be more challenging than the advanced maps. How about that? Seem like they’d be similar in difficulty, right? How big can the distance between a “challenge” and an “advanced” map be?
The answer: pretty big, but by an interesting sort of contrast. Both the advanced maps and the challenge maps are revisions of maps from the original single-player game. Both modify the flow of the original levels, but in distinctly different ways. The advanced maps alter the geometry and mechanics of the original level, requiring the player to rethink how useful a portal gun really is, while the challenge require to pare down and refine a particular and already-familiar skill set.
Advanced maps are basically a further-along progression available after playing through Portal’s single-player adventure. In an advanced map (or in the original game), shortly after entering a room that is seemingly impossible to navigate, the realization sets in (again) that this isn’t the typical shooter, or one at all, really — this is a puzzle game, and the portal gun allows the player to move around the environment in a unprecedented way.
After grabbing ahold of that notion, the PC realizes that, “Hmm, I can’t jump way over and up there, but I can fire a portal there, which will get me halfway…” And so on. It’s a terrific gear shift from the usual run-and-gun-and-hop, one that required a entirely different set of wheels.
Speaking of wheels, my car has new brakes and tires, so I’ve been thumbing my nose at Mother Nature all week amidst all this nasty precipitation. Oh, but I wasn’t always the Road Warrior of the Winter. Two weeks ago, the Ford service dealership told me that 1) the car’s rear brakes were nearly down to the metal, and 2) the treads on all four tires were nearly gone.
The combination of the two maladies explained why driving while the road was even the slightest bit slick felt like one continuous, extremely subtle but perceptible fishtail from here to there. The best I could say was that I was generally in control of the car, but by that measure I might as well give equal culpability to how not-slick the road was on the days of haphazard travel.
But the days of fishtailing are over: the new brakes are good, and the tires, more than fair. And then I have my secret weapon: leather driving gloves. I swear, these gloves are serious +2 to steering control, which means I am, in essence, driving a front wheel-drive vehicle that behaves like a four-wheeler. These gloves are that sweet. Really.
But back to Portal. While advanced maps make the player create a passage across new levels using old tricks, the challenge maps are all about polishing up those old tricks. Challenge maps keep the same levels from the original game, but restriction the amount of portals, steps and seconds elapsed that the player can take. No more blasting a few hundred portals in the midst of a level, trying every which-thingy to get from the elevator to the end — now the player must get from the beginning to the end within five portals. No more sloppy, wasteful portal creation!
So far I’ve found the challenge maps to be extremely difficult. Chances are that the method used to beat the original level wasn’t achieved using five portals, or only 50 steps, or that the level was accomplished within 40 seconds. Nope, the methods of firing a weighted cube across the room a dozen times, and repositioning the portals each time to get the angle of trajectory correct, are over. The challenge maps graduate the player beyond beyond point A to point B — the player must now get from point A to point B using a very particular set of actions and movements.
Having limited portals is tough, but at least the PC can move around at his leisure, deciding and scheming where portal placement is most advantageous. The limited footfalls challenges are a couple fold more nasty since movement itself is no longer an adversary. Even just entering the level and entering and exiting portals takes a few dozen steps, leaving very little room to do the actual level legwork.
Finally, the time limit has the player character — me, that is — sprinting from wall to wall, vaulting cubes and myself across the room and firing off the portal gun as if it was the only way to keep breathing, all in an effort to beat the clock. Not surprisingly, I have yet to get even a bronze medal in any of the time challenges, but I’ve at least done decently at limited portals.
Portal: some of the best money ever spent on a game. And since Portal was given to me as a gift, the purchase indicates that the giver was not only an extremely shrewd shopper, but they had excellent taste as well.
— Actually, I just remembered that I have to be somewhere. Well, not right this minute. Not until Saturday, actually, but I’ll be roughly 2,000 miles and several time zones away for a couple days. The trip will be something of a vacation, although a hastily and perhaps foolishly planned one, having chosen to ship myself off to an unfamiliar city for a few solitary evenings. We’ll see how that turns out. The pictures ought to be good, at least.
With the complexity that must go into a massive, international, overnight and over-day shipping and tracking operation like FedEx, griping against the business when their cracker-jack operation cocks up occasionally feels a bit unappreciating. Speaking personally, however, while I won’t make generalized claims about how the sheets aboard FedEx’s frigate o’ business are managed, I can state that it is at least the kind of business that doesn’t deliver the packages I’ve ordered.
I bought a thinger from a store — well, this thing may have been something from Apple — or maybe it’s from a wholesale cracker and butter supplier — and FedEx was expecting to have it plonked onto my doorstep today, Feb. the first. That’s what Ye Olde Tracking Website said, which I accepted as high truth, just like everything I read that’s contained within an Internet browser.
Unfortunately, these shipping plans were evidently, as they say, penciled-in, because as the first of February — today — wanes, the package is absent, AWOL, MIA. I would’ve even accepted DOA (but not COD), because I would’ve at least had something concrete to complain about.
My hypothesis is that someone at FedEx is just simply having a bad day. Fortunately for me this statement is largely unfalsifiable, allowing me to charge ahead with arbitrary evidence like this picture:
Folks, that screenshot, an up-to-date info-graphic, describes the alpha and the omega of my parcel. Four days ago, the goods arrived in Sacramento. Then the goods departed from Sacramento. And then they were gone. As per usual in my life, everything bad goes down on Tuesday.
So maybe my package is somewhere over the Canadian border, nested within a crag in the Rockies, acting as deified monolith o’ worldly knowledge to the fairy folk, or enjoying a drink with a cooly-dressed ladyfriend within a Boise dirt bar. I have no idea, because Fed-effenheimer-Ex hasn’t said anything. It’s as if the person who manages the package tracking updates — and it’s just one person — received a call regarding a series of packages (“They’re gone? All of them! You’re kidding: termites?”), put down the phone, threw their hands in the air and then pushed the “We Give Up” button.
Or whatever. Anyways, the whole point of this post was to fret over the following famous literature passage that I discovered while reading, of all places, a productivity blog:
If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
Thus spake a very wise man, Paul Rubens. Or maybe Thoreau.
While the wisdom in Thoreau’s well-padded rhetoric is evident, even in light of the man having spent hours of his life holed-up in the woods and musing over the social and political structures of ants, this passage has given me an unexpected amount of grief since I first read it a couple weeks ago. In short, my sole New Year’s resolution has been cast into a stormy sea simply because of Thoreau’s vetting of vestments.
My one resolution for the year was to stop wearing white socks. The dresser stores of cotton-sewn crews would be thrown out over the course of the next twelve months and replaced with superior, non-white socks. The plan was going well until I stumbled, unwittingly, into the Duke of Walden’s screed against new silk suitcoats and the like.
Here was one of the great, famous and noted philosophical thinkers in American history tearing down what could be called my Polaris, my only guidance during a sea-borne adventure to the well-groomed lands to the west. What’s more, Mr. Tax Evasion wrought this destruction across time itself, from almost 150 years ago. I tried to dip my toe in the fashonista pool, and Thoreau reached from his place in the mid-19th Century across the Civil War, prohibition, and the creation of Twinkies to dump a bunch of piranas into the bath.
At first this rebuke across spacetime affronted me only mildly, as if I had been slapped across the face by a shortish, balding man who was well-attired, possessed a handsome and impeccably twisted mustache, and who brandished a single delicate velvet glove that had been slipped from a small, well-manicured hand as his weapon of choice.
But now I’m beside myself with torment — I don’t know what to do about the socks. Am I worthy to don the new argyles I’ve already bought? The socks are new, but am I new? How do I change? If I bought a new pork pie hat, would that act as a intermediate step to new-ness, considering the positive statement that a good pork pie hate lends to the wearer? Or perhaps if I bought white socks, but new white socks they’d act as my gateway to the new horizon of footwear. But then I’d have bought white socks, new or not, and the resolution would be shattered into tiny bits as if was a piece of dropped Corelle tableware.
Such a mess. What on Earth am I going to do?
As per usual these days, I’m going to take a walk in the brisk evening air and muse over what is, roughly, fashion or painful death. But you know what? I’m gonna wear my nice new wool Wigwam socks while I’m out musing and weeping. Suck that down, Thoreau, you damn ant-gazing drunk.
Film critic Roger Ebert is infamously well-known — within the video game community, at least — for commenting that video games, as a medium, will move beyond craft into art. If the great critic had played Passage he might reconsider his all-encompassing position.
Or not. In any case, Passage is worth playing for anyone who thinks that video games can’t be a medium for describing life in the abstract. People on the fence about games, folks curious to the idea of games as art, and of course gamers themselves should definitely give this brilliant work a try. And for anyone else I haven’t covered: how does the resolution 600x96, Passage’s native dimensions, sound as a canvas? Strange, aye? Why you don’t you give it a test and see how well that works, Mr. Incredulity Pants?
I don’t want to spend any time talking about Passage personally, because I think the game’s extremely tight composition will do plenty of its own talkin’. I have truly never seen a game so compact but offer up such a compelling experience for its comparatively miniscule breadth. Recent huge favorite Portal comes to mind, that being another relatively short, four-hour game that was magnitudes more enjoyable than almost every 10+ hour endeavor I’ve undertaken in my gaming history.
The game’s narrative is moving, surely, but the facets and details that expand or constrict the plot’s path — and plot in this sense is fairly loose and open, partially due to the game’s length of exactly five minutes — are wholly crucial to Passage’s overall tone and experience.
Passage is not a game of fun, really. It’s more like a user-controlled story, but it has some typical and familiar video game-trappings like characters met along the path of the journey, increasing your point total by opening up chests and finding goodies inside, and traversing different locales and levels. But if Passage was left to those mechanics, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar of notable time-wasters. Instead, everything in Passage means a little something, and after the player experiences many of the cohesive little somethings, this collective of things actually feels like it means something outside of the borders of the game world.
Not bad for a video game that lasts exactly five minutes, aye?
Okay, I’m done being vague and gushing. Go play it, and see what you think. After you’re done, the author has several thoughts regarding his creation, but see what you get out of Passage yourself before reading his take. (As for my take, I was glad to play it. That’s all. Although I aspire to someday make a taught, tightly-knit game like Passage.)
Remember: pay attention to the details. See the forest, the trees, the all. Just about everything in Passage was created in its own way for a purpose that ties into the full concept, including the unusual, vertically-challenged resolution.
I thought today was going to be the day when I’d cut across the finish tape for this grueling marathon of a busy season, but disappointment sticks to my heels these days like a shadow.
By mid-morning, my work load was looking to be clear of any urgent deadlines for the first time in four months. All of my products had been closed off on my side and just needed to be checked by the co-workers in charge of the respective products, after which one of my managers would OK the final result and fire the software into the great digital beyond for our customers. After the software is available online, any subsequent updates are made only at the behest of our user base. That means that a busy seasons quickly turns into a slow season, since I might be only spending a couple hours out of the full work week fixing any bugs that arrive.
Today was penciled-in as the beginning of the slow season. Like I said, the last of my products were sent out of my control by mid-morning, and the only business left was for the analyst and the manager to tick the boxes and push the last button to free me from my months of 70+ hour workweeks. As morning turned into afternoon and the software was out of my hands, I found myself massaging my wrists, as if shackles that had constrained and bound me to servitude for years had been broken away and cast off.
The imminent release was a lovely feeling in itself. New software is usually uploaded to the Web site at about 3 PM, so I just needed to sit back (figuratively speaking) for the happy news to roll in.
At 2 PM, as a grand, antagonistic gesture of divine teasing, a squirrel in the vicinity must have let a large nut slip out of his buttery paws, bonking the top of and fatally disturbing an electrical transformer in the area, because our building’s power abruptly cut out.
And that was all Friday typed, er, wrote — us programmers and analysts were all kicked off the premises, not being able to ship a single product.
The products will be shipped out on Monday instead, but the delay bugs me for another reason besides that the bloody things are still in-house and unreleased, like the presence of relatives or baked goods that have outlived their welcome and expiration date, collectively.
During this busy season I’ve learned that my analysts, kindly folks all, have a habit of spending the spare days or hours between fixing an initial bug and release by looking for more bugs. This bug-hunt is akin to squeezing a tomato for ripeness, except that the tomato has been heartily squeezed and squashed so many times already that the juicy guts of the luscious fruit is bursting out of its skin. What’s worse is that, after this busy season’s example, I have suspicions that the analysts conspire to coordinate their attack, sending the respective bug lists over my way neat, successive intervals just to make my life a living hell. (I don’t really believe that, of course, but I had wondered about it during the most hectic bits of the season.) In any case, I fully expect to have more little things to remedy come Monday morning.
But I also really enjoyed leaving work today three hours early today instead of, y’know, staying late four hours. Always a slice.
Somewhere in the middle of the last few paragraphs was a vague excuse — you may have to squint a little bit to make out the excuse, or, if that doesn’t work, throw back a couple of stiff drinks and quietly mutter aimlessly to stir up the right mood — about why the second part of the 2007 music line-up is so durned late. It’s late because I worked nearly 80 hours in the past bloody week, that’s why.
But hey, here’s part two now!
Now, if you’ll excuse me — and you WILL excuse me — I’m going to go pass out. See, I’ve got a little bit of catching up to do at the office tomorrow, and an elongated siesta will be necessary to muster the energy for the trip into work for just one more goddamn Saturday.
Argh!
Saturday update! I didn’t go to work today after all. Nyah ha!
The year 2007 was not a very good year for Lost Horizon, one of my favorite bands. This greatest of power metal groups only fogged the doctor’s mirror once for the entire year via a single update to the web site; the update appeared in February; and it was a notice to use an HTML form instead of email when prodding them for signs of life.
If only that sole, lonely update had been a notice announcing to the sleeping world that they’d finally, finally landed a new vocalist and that recording for the next powerful, fate-smashing and will-fortified record was firing ahead like a maglev train, 2007 might have even been a good year for Lost Horizon. Instead the band’s progress was stagnant, and for us fans, now hanging on for a new production by the mere fibers of the last thread of hope, the horizon was looking to truly be lost (or truly found, maybe, depending on if the horizon being lost is a good thing or not).
The past year for my personal musical awareness and catalogue, however, could not have been more different than Lost Horizon’s impotence. 2007 was definitely the best year in music for me since I broke out of mainstream pop music and into power metal in late 2001, a seemingly ridiculous shift in taste but one that ultimately brought the realization of other, non Top-40 genres and styles.
2001 was the year of epiphany — 2007 was the year of acceleration, growth and quantity. Not only did nearly every band I consider myself a major fan of release an album last year, but becoming a major fan of a new artist was a near-weekly occurrence, stretching both my boundaries of appreciation and my CD and digital music collection. The continuation of guitar lessons with the great Al Davenport and my frequent stops at the Ann Arbor Library to pick, at random, albums from the blues and jazz CD sections further expanded my own (lost or found) horizon.
In addition to the bounty of studio albums released, 2007 was an excellent year for concerts. I didn’t see catch every show that I would’ve liked to see, but the first six months brought a live Metheny and Mehldau show, three Porcupine Tree shows in the same month, a burner of a Reverend Horton Heat gig, and the marvelous duo Chick Corea and Béla Fleck at a performance just a couple miles from my home.
So here’re a few songs from 2007 that I really enjoyed. Some of these tunes were from artists new to me, and some are from favorite artists putting out new stuff. I have little stories to go with each of these — where I heard it first, why I’m attached to it, and so on — but I’ll let the music speak for itself and refrain from dirtying the score with my own anecdotes. Suffice it to say, I really like all of this music.
This is part one of the Y2K7 jams. If this part goes over well — with me, that is — and with my web host too, I suppose — then parts two and three will follow in the pipeline within the next couple weeks.
Steaming music removed on 1/25, woo hoo! Playlist:
b1ef511840b617d34e5fbe61b8e0a737
I’ll remove the above songs when the next playlist of 2007 music is ready, or within a week or so, or when I remember after that first week, whichever comes first.
Oh, and about Lost Horizon: these Manglers of Prophecy updated their web site on the first day of 2008 to say that they’ve decided to forge ahead without a vocalist and begin recording and mixing the third album. Moreover, the band has cast off the shackles of a label, proclaiming that all new songs will instead be distributed through the web site with the help of Valgorth, “The Apocalyptic Blaster Of Rats In Cosmic Fury,” who is always a good chum to have on your side during the war of art.
I hope my year of music in 2008 turns out as well as Lost Horizon’s has begun.
The whole go-into-work routine didn’t jive well with my wetware today. So I happily didn’t go, making this the first liberated Saturday since…late September. (Sundays were slightly less rigid — I had a couple o’ those off since September. Yay.) If I had been in a union, someone would have stopped by my home by now and tried to break one of my arms because of my lack of relaxation days. During some of the past Saturdays for these past months, bone fractures would have felt like an improvement.
But today I managed, through either cosmic coincidence, quantum mechanics or the benevolent hand of God, to roll out of bed before 10 AM on a weekend day, work or no-work, a occurrence in my life akin to a sighting of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker — in Arizona. If my life was a city, they’d be holding parties in the streets today.
Strange how just an extra couple of hours early in the morning can make such an effect on later parts of the day, parts that previously were spent awake and busy but were far less productive. For example, by noon today — noon being the usual wake-up time, sadly — had tolled its bells, I had accomplished several tasks in the extra two and a half hours morning hours that would have taken me through dinnertime on my regular schedule. On any other Saturday just gaining the volition to butter a cracker would be an accomplishment similar in scale to the inaugural launch of the Apollo space program. As for today’s progress I have no reason for this strange pre-noon discrepancy other than metaphysical time dilation, which is the most obvious choice.
Hopefully I can make this routine habit. My circadian rhythm has been changing time signatures and tempo since the college days — years ago, which is also a little surprising — and the challenge to steady the beat has become sisyphean. Unlike that poor Underworld sap, however, my stone of captivity is more like a marshmallow. A big one. Big marshmallow.
Analogies, like the one I just pushed out of the moving vehicle, are just best half-baked.
I’ll have to pay a visit to the office tomorrow to make up for my freedom today (“I’ll gladly have leisure today if I could toil on Tuesday instead”), but if I can manage another early — “early,” really — awakening, then I might be able to get a nice funky rhythm going for this new year.
That sounded a bit like a New Year’s Resolution. I had better cut this off.
Stuff on the sublime greatness of Portal and socks within a couple days, assuming the giant iron gears of salaried servitude don’t unexpectedly grind me into dust.
: owenra at gmail dot com
Listenin':
Readin':
