GREAT MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE!

MYSTERY THE FIRST!

Why is the phrase "the things you don't know would fill volumes" considered a snappy comeback?

The thinks I don't know DO fill volumes. In fact every library on Earth is chock full with volumes of things I don't know. And the same is true for everyone. In fact, it would be supremely arrogant to think that "the things you don't know" DO NOT fill volumes.

MYSTERY THE SECOND!

Why does every handyman think it's perfectly ok to throw all their spare crap in your garbage can without putting it in a bag?

Guys, the garbage service isn't going to take that stuff. They don't have many rules, but one rule is that they'd prefer to handle the garbage itself, and I think their request is reasonable.

How did you get this far without knowing to bag your garbage? Do you not have garbage service at your houses?

. . . Wait, maybe you don't . . . that would explain why you're leaving all that crap here to begin with.

MYSTERY THE THIRD!

What do kids in Junior High School say when their friends are dealing with interpersonal drama?

The go-to line I've been hearing since 9th grade is "I'm so sick of all this Junior High School bullsh*t." Even now, if I so much as suggest that another person has acted in error, someone will be right there to trot that phrase out.

But doesn't that make life hard for people who are IN Junior High? What do they say when they want to make light of conflict?

"I'm so tired of this . . . right here . . . right now . . . bullsh*t."

I like to think that the 7th grader who will one day be "the guy who accuses people of JHSBS," just stands there for a second, knowing he's supposed to say something but not being able to yet. He blinks, shakes his head, and says, "This sort of bullsh*t is entirely appropriate for our current station in life." And he walks away.

MYSTERY THE FOURTH!

Why is it that, as soon as you commit to going out of town for the weekend, awesome things are suddenly happening IN town that same weekend?

When I buy plane tickets now, I just go ahead and log onto facebook to watch the invites roll in.

"And . . . yes, confirm purchase . . . there's my confirmation from Delta. And let's see, one, two, three parties and a cookout, everything's free for one day only at my favorite coffee shop, concert, concert, . . . real live ninja giving ancient ninja magic class Saturday morning, that's a new one. Thanks, Universe."*

*Hello beautiful girl . . . no, I cannot go out for coffee with you next weekend. Yes, I know it's free that day."

Posted at 12:06AM

It must be difficult these days for the chronically late.

(I pause here to let my brain roll over my unintentionally appropriate use of "chronically," since it's a modification of "chronic" which comes from khronos, which means "time." Word origin thoughts regularly halt my thought process in this way.)

It used to be that, upon arriving late, you could simply blame your watch for not keeping good time. Or you could say that you didn't wear your watch today, and you were outside and didn't know what time it was. If daylight savings time had begun or ended in the past few days, you always had the "forgot to set it back/forward" line of defense.

But then came CST, or Cellphone Standard Time:

"Sorry I'm late. I didn't notice what time it was."

"Oh yeah? Hmm. It's too bad you don't have some small device on you that displays the current time by keeping in constant sync via radio waves to computer servers that are themselves synced with the national atomic clock, one of the most accurate clocks in the world . . . oh wait, I guess you do have one of those, it's right there in your pocket."

Never in history have so many people been locked on the very same minute. When my generation is very old, we'll tell crazy stories about how the "current time" was this vague, lucid thing that varied from person to person.

"In my day. If you asked a guy for the time, and he always sets his watch 5 minutes fast, then that guy just screwed you over good. You were gonna miss the bus and have to walk home in the snow. Only way you could get accurate time back then was to call the BANK."

"Uh huh, sure, the bank. (Grandpa's lost his mind.)*"

*"Don't you go using that 'loud whisper' joke on me, sonny. I invented that joke back in ought two, sold it to "The Simpsons," for a pretty penny. Speaking of which, doesn't the new season premier tonight?"

Déjà You

Anytime I have to see people-when I'm waiting in line for a concert, shopping at the grocery store, looking for seats at the movie theater-I get the distinct feeling that I've seen them before.

Not the EXACT people, mind you, but other people who are just like them. I don't know the individuals in any sort of personal way, but I've had enough experience with humanity that I've got a good general idea what they're about simply by looking.

Does that give us some form of relationship?

Should I greet them as we pass?

"Hello tallish bald guy. Hello heavyset guy with a crazy beard.* Nice to see you, grumpy-churchy white girl, I like that v-neck sweater.

Hang on a second, unkempt loose-clothes dude just walked in, I want to ask how his job hunt is going. And if you see attractive crazy-eyed girl, send her over, I think those two could really hit it off, just like they have so many times before."

To be fair, I live in a college town, so maybe I see a lot of people before time sands off the more generic elements of their personalities. Just as a young person loses his "baby-face" as he grows into adulthood, maybe the striking features of personality only become defined with a few more years . . .

. . . but there is one guy I can always identify. Doesn't matter where I am.

"Hello tool, who never has anything to talk about except how drunk or high he was this one time. How's your herpes?"

*Not wearing your Zelda shirt today? That's cool, the "Empire Strikes Back" shirt is good too.

When it goes wrong

You probably don't know what Playstaton Home is. You are the better for it. Playstation Home is, as Penny Arcade would say, "a stupid place for dumb people."

Should I provide a few more data points before we procede? I'll see what I can do.

Every Playstation 3 system comes with a clunky, shambling "virtual world" where a person can log in and, concievably, hang out with other users as they play games and chat together.

Sounds like a pretty cool idea, when you say it that way. But the reality is that the Home experience consists of constant waiting so that you can design a lifeless avatar, then run it around trying to find something worth doing.

Sounds a lot like high school, when you say it that way.

There are many problems with Playstation Home, and I don't have the patience to detail them all (and you wouldn't have the patience to read it all.)

So I'll summarize it's problems with one word: realism.

Sony has designed Home to be very realistic. The clothes, the furniture, the avatars, the environments, all of them were clearly made to look as lifelike as possible. It's as if they thought to themselves "you know what reality could use? Loading Screens."

But realism isn't what I want from a virtual world. It's not what I want from art. I HAVE reality. A lot of it. I've got some right here. You don't need to provide me with more. I'm good.

What I need, and what art is at it's best, is perspective on reality. I need a person or persons to give me the world from another angle so I can compare it to my own, then triangulate something of value.

When you create a "realistic" work like Home, you mute out any chance of an artistic voice. And without that voice, the experience feels empty.

A good counterpoint to Home is "Animal Crossing: City Folk."

8

This is a game that is far removed from reality. None of the visuals would be mistaken for a photograph, even forgiving the presence of anthropomorphic animals who live in houses and wear clothes.

Yet somehow it feels so much more genuine, and lifelike, than Sony's elaborate "virtual world."

The idea that a work is made better, or legitimized, by being realistic is simply a fallacy. When the credits roll, it's the deeper layers of a work that move us, regardless of what was used to express them.*

*Example: I'm fairly certain that Pluto's moon could not write it a song to make it feel better about not being a planet anymore. And yet . . .

Spec as a double entendre

You're probably familiar with mosaics, the kind of pictures made from individual blocks of color. It's an ancient, beautiful art form, and it's been used to immortalize things like the Holy Land, the Greek hero Ulysses, Jesus, and of course Pac-man.

Because mosaics came full circle when we entered the digital era. Suddenly the ability to create images out of colored squares was not a matter of styling anymore, it was built into the spec. Pixels were the new tiles, and we didn't have that many to work with at first.

And that's why the early era in digital art, which is to say the 8-bit (Original Nintendo) and 16-bit (Super Nintendo) periods, is especially remarkable. Take this image, for instance, which is rather close to my heart. It's the tiny image of Fox McCloud from the SNES game "Starfox":



You can tell that this is a picture of a fox, that he is anthropomorphic, that he is wearing a headset, that the end of his nose is shiny.

And all that from an image that's about 30 pixels by 26 pixels. When you realize that the "shine" on the end of his nose is, in fact, a precisely placed single white pixel, you'll understand why I find it impressive.

This kind of artwork represents a sort of mosaic haiku, bringing out a creative efficiency by way of limitation.

How appropriate that so many artists in this field are Japanese.

Today, we have much "higher resomolutions" to work with, so this kind of careful design isn't needed. There's no reason to carefully manipulate the human eye's visual perception when we can create images at a higher resolution than the eye can perceive.

And that's the terrifying part.

Oh I'm not scared that these great technical freedoms will spoil us as visual artists. I'm scared that, having reached the limits of what our minds can view, the only way for us to make better images will logically be . . .

. . . to alter our minds. Or our eyes. To change ourselves in some way that lets us appreciate the quality of images our screens can describe.

You thought the first cyborg implants* were going to come out of the military? I've got news for you, they're going to come from Sony.

*It's not a question of whether or not there will BE a robot apocalypse, gentlemen, but merely whether we can time it with the zombie apocalypse so that they end up fighting each other.

I'm your density.

There's really no good reason why "fantasy" and "science fiction" are so frequently spoken in the same breath.

One of them usually involves machines, the other usually involves magic.* Strangely they both seem to hit upon time travel on a regular basis. But personally, I see a pretty clear division there.

Yet go to your local bookstore. If fantasy and sci-fi aren't regarded as one section, they are certainly shoulder-to-shoulder . . . or spine to spine, I guess.

I wish the bookstore would just be honest, put a big sign that says "NERD" over the whole thing and be done with it.

It's too bad that those genre's are labeled, and at times dismissed, as geek territory, because there's also no good reason why "things that are or could reasonably be real" make for better or more legitimate storytelling.

In fact, the conceptual free reign that "magic" and "future technology" give you as an author is a powerful tool. "Back to the Future" (here I'm discussing the first movie, not the trilogy) purports to be about an awesome car that travels through time . . . and that's what it is indeed about, to some extent. But it's also a discussion of generational gaps, and how the path to adulthood involves reconciling your parents as real people, not just as the images your young mind constructed for them.

Harry Potter treads this ground, too. The narrative difficulties of character study are easily overcome when your setting includes bowls of people's thoughts.

In most stories you have to really put your character through the wringer to draw out his nature. In fantasy? Nah, bowl of thoughts! Done.

*And please don't trot out the old line about technology being magic. There's a difference, you know it. Close your Macbook, and walk away.

Molly's on the left platform

I know the roof of Mercy Hospital better than you could possibly imagine.

In my mind is a very detailed map of that place, all its topography laid out clearly. I could draw you an overview from memory.

The metal walkway leading up to the heli pad.

The narrow stairway that leads up to the air conditioning unit platform.

The two catwalks that flank the mounted machine gun.

Oh, hello! I'm talking about video games!

Of the four extraction points in Left 4 Dead's zombie apocalypse simulation, the roof of Mercy is widely regarded as the most difficult. It's got almost no open ground, so very little room to run. You constantly have to be aware of what's behind you so you don't get pinned in a corner. Compared to the other extraction areas (an airport runway, a farmhouse in an open field, and a lakeside camping area) that roof is like a postage stamp. A postage stamp of a middle finger.

And that would be enough by itself, but the icing on the difficulty cake is that this is all on top of a very large building. So if you get hit by a tank in the wrong spot, you go flying right the hell off the side.

That ladies and gentlemen, is not a "game mechanic." That is a "big 'screw you' from the programmers."

But Mercy is possible, even on Advanced mode where the proverbial men and boys are sorted into their appropriate groups. I've done it. We've done it (the we being my usual crew.)

But not without a lot of trying that level, over and over again.

I am still on the roof of Mercy Hospital being decimated. And I am on that helicopter with all 3 of my friends, looking back at the place that tested us. And I am standing in that chopper watching our fourth man get dragged away before anyone could help him. And I'm standing there alone because I left them all.*

I had to.

*And then we watched and episode of "Man v. Food" and called it a night.

This post gets a 7.8

If I could leave behind only one idea, it would be this:

(Actually, that's not true. There are lots of ideas I'd like to leave behind, but this is an important one.)

"The mark of a connoisseur is not that he knows what's good and what's bad, but that he finds both good and bad in everything."

That is to say, a person who's truly knowledgeable about something doesn't turn up their nose to anything but what is considered the "best." Instead they're always trying a bit of everything. To the master critic, there is only one insult: boring, and there is only one praise: interesting.

Another way to put it is this: "On the day I learned to appreciate fine cuisine, I didn't stop liking bubble gum."

And on the road to this sort of appreciation, I think services like Netflix and Gamefly are one of the best modern aids.

I think a lot of the snooty element of criticism ultimately comes from the purchase of it. People read reviews because they don't want to waste money on an experience they won't enjoy. As a side-effect, though, we develop the idea that some works are "good" while others are "bad,"* and many people miss out on things that, although not entirely sound, are still valuable and thought provoking.

But once your media becomes a single service, a single fee that gets you access to a large bank of material, it does a lot to change your perspective.

Why should I even read a game review now? If it seems even a little interesting I can add it to my queue and see what it's about. If I don't like it, I can just ship it back the next day and try something else. Why should I care what the current Metacritic score of a movie is? If I don't like it, I'll just stop the DVD.

The only review that matters now is the kind that don't score at all, but are instead just an intellectual discussion of a work's merits . . . which is really what a review is supposed to be anyway.

*This does not include movies with vampire turkeys.

L4D 4Life

I've always been a big fan of Steam, Valve Software's digital distribution platform, but there's one feature that I find unsettling.

It tells me how long I've spent playing.

It came to my attention a couple of weeks ago that I'd spent 30 hours (of the previous two weeks) playing "Left4Dead," Valve's popular co-op zombie apocalypse game.

I essentially had a part time job destroying the undead. Not even a job really, because I wasn't getting paid. I had an internship. (I'm using had only because the number is now down to a mere 10 hours out of the last two weeks.)

Zombie stories are frequently used as social commentary, most notably in the movies of George A. Romero. I guess when your genre has given you free reign to show humanity at it's most desperate, social commentary can really sneak up and get into your mind

 . . . like a zombie would, I guess.

But I'm always trying to figure people out, to find their "thesis," so I tend to treat creative works as the author's waking dream. And that's why, as I was spending all that time playing Left 4 Dead, I had a revelation about why zombies have remained such an appealing topic.

Left 4 Dead has a set of special "super zombies" that you have to manage.

"The Hunter" is always in a black hoodie, he leaps at you and pins you to the ground.

"The Smoker" has a stream of smoke pouring off of him, and he strikes from a distance by lashing out his long tongue and dragging you away.

"The Boomer" is a big, fat, burping thing that vomits on you, which attracts a rush of regular zombies.

"The Witch" lies crying in a heap, but if you disturb her, she'll scream and knock you down.

"The Tank" is a huge beast that's big on damage and defense.

What I found interesting about these five was how I started seeing them in real life. "The Hunter" looks an awful lot like the gang banger (or kid who wants to look like a gang banger) that you tense up around at Kroger. "The Smoker" is not so a not-so-subtle reference to cigarette smokers, who can annoy you from a distance. "The Boomer" is an exaggerated form of all the most unpleasant bodily functions. "The Witch" reminds me a lot of some tantrum-prone children at the supermarket. "The Tank" is . . . I don't know, an SUV? Let's go with that.*

When I look at this lineup of villains in the context of a game that's already about hordes of reanimated humans, it shows me one thing.

Zombies aren't about our fear of death. They're about our fear of humanity. Zombie stories are tales of people trying to survive against hordes of other (albeit undead) people. 

This is the nightmare world of the malcontent. This is how super antisocial people see the world. They're so afraid of other people that they stop viewing them as human, and think of them as mindless monsters.

*If I think of a way to fold auto-shotguns into the metaphor, I'll let you know.

End of year two

"Recursive morality" is a concept I've been thinking about for so long, I don't really remember what made me think of it in the first place.

I say "think of it" like I'm the sole author, but I'm not saying it's an entirely new concept. If you're working in a "young" or even "young-ish" field, computer programming or space station design, the chances of you coming up with a revolutionary idea are pretty good.

Morality is something humans have been thinking about for a pretty long time, actually, so it's somewhat more difficult to break fresh ground.

With the disclaimer aside, I'll explain what it's all about.

Most moral doctrines justify themselves with one of two ideas:

1. Because God says so - This casts God into what Brennan Manning calls an "eternal, small-minded bookkeeper." Just an entity making a tally of what we do right or wrong, scoring us as we go along. Not only does this perspective smack head-first into all my personal, spiritual experience, it also does nothing to explain why "good" is good, and why "bad" is bad. The moral concepts might as well be arbitrary, just a set of rules by which we play.

2. Because it's what you would want - This empathetic or "golden rule" is a fine idea, but it only works if you take it as self-evident. But "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is only an approach to morality, it doesn't explain why this is better than being out for yourself.


My "recursive morality," on the other hand, offers not only an approach to moral ideas, but an inherent justification for why some things are "right" and others are "wrong."

To sum it up as best I can:

"Happiness" is not only a matter of creating a certain state, but also of being receptive to that state. When you honestly earn the money to buy something you want, you've not only acquired the thing, but given it added value by working for it. When you steal money to buy something (or just stolen the item) you've cheapened it in your own heart, thus robbing it of the full enjoyment.

But more importantly, in both cases you've changed a little about yourself. The action of theft has caused you to do harm to someone else. In order to do that harm, you had conclude on some deeper level that either 1. You hate the people you've hurt or 2. You don't care about the people you've hurt.

You are, by your own moral action, a different person.

And that's what "recursive morality" is really about. You, as an individual, have authorship over who you are. Your subconscious may guide you without your notice, but you are also constantly at work on it. When you cause harm in the world around you, you're telling YOURSELF that you're the kind of person who acts without love or concern. When you help someone in need, when you pick up litter and throw it away, when you fold your clothes in the morning*, you are telling yourself that you are a considerate, loving person.

And only one of those two people, recursive morality argues, is CAPABLE of being happy. At the same meal, one person enjoys every bite, while the other complains, thinks about all the things that would be better, and suspects that he's going to get stuck with the bill.

Perhaps then there is no real judgment in death. Heavens gates are not barred, but rather some souls refuse to enter, incapable of receiving it's treasures.

*Maybe that's where I started thinking about it. This quote perplexed me for a long time:

"a spiritual thing is folding your clothes at the end of the day. A spiritual thing is making your bed. A spiritual thing is taking cookies to your neighbor that is shut in or raking their front lawn because they are too old to do it. That's spirituality. Getting a warm, oozy feeling about God is an emotional thing-there is nothing wrong with it-I think there is nothing more practical than real spirituality." -Rich Mullins