darkblog resonate

one of the big reasons i prefer downloading telly on the internet is because rippers will take any adverts out of the downloadable files. Resultingly i haven’t watched a steady stream of telly commercials in about five years, and thus feel outside of that aspect of what i’m calling “advertising culture”. In this context, (call it Television Advertising Culture), even if someone who watches an advert has no interest and only a vague understanding of what the advert is about, they at least still see it, and if they see it often enough, they can at least *identify* it and it becomes as casual common knowledge as the weather.

Even though i’m outside of that direct television advertising culture, i’m still affected by it. i’ve never watched even a snippet of “Survivor”, nor have i ever seen an advert for it, nor do i care to know anything about it given my general loathe of reality telly. Yet i know the basic premise, i understand that the idea of being “voted off the island” comes from it, and i know that the show typically runs on thursday nights - all from word of mouth. And that’s just one example out of millions of telly shows, products, people, etc that are not simply given to promote an immediate sell or immediate gain, it’s a process of immersion, a way of slowly shaping aspects of thought and behaviour.

When the internet started to rise in prominence, early advertising came in the form of large click-banners. Click banners at that time were very straightforward - billboard style advertising that when you clicked brought you to the site and also a) paid the company responsible for the banner ad based on number of clicks, and b) logged information on clicks to either generate new sorts of clicks or sold that click information to other companies to send you more banners or send you spam.

Over the years, banner advertising has evolved and become more sophisticated. Banners that are contextual, banners made in flash that can react to your mouse movements, google’s revolutionary contextual “ad words”. But all of those sorts of advancements still follow the same basic paradigm of “clicks turn into money. clicks will get people to my website.” What those advancements lack is the ability to do what telly adverts do over the long term: create a sense of immersion. Part of that has to do with the nature of the advertising, but part of it has to do with the fact that web surfers are now so used to identifying banners and ad words that they know how to filter it out to grab main content.

Enter facebook.

Facebook has, in my opinion, managed to evolve past the mere click-banner form of advertising. Sure, they still have the basic banner advert on the left hand side of the screen which is generally difficult to completely ignore because the adverts are smart in how they’re generated. But Facebook also has other avenues of advertising both obvious and subtle that aren’t meant to be true click-ads; they’re ads that help create that same sense of immersion that television had full reign of so long ago.

One: Sponsored ads that are intertwined with news feeds. Internet magazine and news sites try to do this too by posting part of an article, then showing some ad links, then continuing with the article. That kinda works, but in that context it’s typically pretty easy to quickly distinguish between what’s article and what’s advert. But aside from a subtle “Sponsored” tag, sponsored adverts in the news feeds look practically identical to regular news feeds making it harder to filter out the content without at least some absorption of the content.

Two: Gifts. When i first signed up on fb, i didn’t understand the concept of fb gifts, but it’s become clearer now that gifts are another form of immersion advertising. A lot of the time, the gifts may be generic virtual objects, but every now and again, fb will make a Brand into a gift - a 7-11 Slurpee on free slurpee day, a little “Wall-E” doll on the weekend of the release of the movie. And it’s clear that gifts are treated that way because while i can remove the gift application from my profile page, i can’t turn notifications off about them on my news feed page.

Three: Becoming a “Fan” There are certainly things that i’m a “fan” of that i like to share with someone else if i think they’d also be interested, but becoming and sharing that you’re a “fan” of something on facebook doesn’t feel like that as much as free immersion advertising instigated by the populace. I’m a fan of Einsturzende Neubaten. If i made that public using facebook’s “fan” concept, it appears on my friends’ News Feeds not just telling them that i’m a fan, but with a promotional picture, a category classification saying that they’re “musicians”, and how many other people on fb are fans of Einturzende. Having only a seed of infomation saying “Mendel Lee is a fan of Einsturzende” will generally either get people to say, “oh cool!” if they also like the music, or have people shrug it off if they have no idea what or who Einsturzende is. But by adding those extra snippets of information, those that don’t know anything about Einsturzende now do. Oh, it’s a band. Mendel likes cool music. And look how many fans there are! Maybe i should check them out. And again - intertwined in the news feeds like the sponsored ads and the gift notifications.

While facebook isn’t as important to me as livejournal for keeping in touch with people, i do go on there on a daily basis to play loose voyeur like everyone else and to play prolific and the biggest brain app, and i’m coming to realize that i am in some degree back in an immersion advertising setting. it’s tricky, and very clever on the part of facebook, and i’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about it other than deactivating my account - but it’s too late for that. Maybe just the awareness of it will help dull the effects of it all. We’ll see how i feel about it in, say, a year.

One of the marked differences between Classic Who and New Who is the role of the Doctor to his companions. Companions of the Doctor have always been made better people because of the Doctor, but in Classic Who, the Doctor was more of a father figure and mentor to his companions rather than New Who’s companions who are treated more as potential romantic companions or at the very least lifelong travel companions. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the more emotionally charged New Who, but as i watched the series four finale this past weekend, the fate of Donna made me realize how Russell’s more emotional treatment of New Who over the past four years corners some of the writing into a path that’s hard to wrestle away from.

Half a year ago, when Voyage of the Damned aired, fans knew that Kylie Minogue’s role as the Doctor’s companion was for the Christmas special only. So the moment the Doctor smiled his Doctor smile and agreed to let Astrid travel with him in the TARDIS, i knew it was the kiss of death - i would have been surprised if her character didn’t die by the end of the episode. In mid-series four, the Doctor expressed a similar approval for Jenny to travel with them in the TARDIS, and although that had more potential to go the way of Adam Mitchell, the attachment that the Doctor ended up developing for her throughout the episode made her death not only unsurprising, but the circumstances contrived and utterly ridiculous.

In a couple of episodes in series four, Donna put forth a sentiment that she would travel with the Doctor forever, and even though the relationship between the Doctor and Donna didn’t have that sense of sexual/romantic tension that Doctor and Rose had, the comfort that had developed between the two made it similar enough that it was virtually impossible for Donna to be written out of the series as a voluntary separation.

All of this to me is evidence that the New Who Doctor/companion dynamic has a negative side effect, a writing trap. Throughout New Who, travel with the Doctor has been greatly romanticised and glorified, a fantasy turned reality. And even though the adventures have their dangers and perils, you have the Doctor (and his sonic plot saving device) and you have the TARDIS - two things that represent a large degree of safety and security amongst all of the potential chaos around that kind of lifestyle. Given that set up, it’s no wonder that anyone who is blessed enough to become the Doctor’s companion would never want to leave. Martha is an exception to this, but I strongly feel that if Martha hadn’t felt like she was constantly living under Rose’s shadow, she similarly would have had no reason to leave.

Resultingly, it feels like there’s only three options for a lead companion’s end to their stint on the series: 1) Rose - alive, but separated with no possibility of return, 2) Astrid - death, or 3) Donna - retcon. And all of those options in the series have been set up as such Tragic Events whose dramatic effect on screen may be somewhat effective but ultimately and retrospectively prove to be more annoying than anything else, particualrly the retcon/reset button approach with Donna.

There are a couple of reasons why the resolution of Donna’s character angered me. First, we had just come off of a series where the resolution to the conflict was a large scale retcon (blow up the Paradox machine, and miraculously the events never happened, the ultimate deus ex machina). I’ll give credit to Russell for not resolving the Reality Bomb crisis with a similar “let’s break into the Time War and prevent Dalek Caan from rescuing Davros so that none of this ever happened”, but the fact that the answer to Donna’s fate as a human/time-lord hybrid was a “and then she woke up” felt like a cheap way to get her out of the series and also a cheap way to answer the implications of her demise given first by River Song and then by Dalek Caan - particulalry since i can’t reconcile that the human/time-lord Donna wouldn’t be able to handle it, yet the time-lord/human Doctor could.

Secondly, i was angered because i felt that the character deserved better. Not, understand, that i think that there shouldn’t be times when tragic things happen to good people. But in this particular case, it felt like it was more a product of the logistics of Tate’s contract that drove that decision rather than the dramatic effect retconning Donna would have at the end of the series. And of all of the ways they could have dealt with Tate’s role of companion only being for a single year, the way they handled it felt like a writing blunder. One of the big things that New Who has touted itself on is character growth and development. One of the reasons we go on journeys with fairy tale characters on the telly or in books or in comics is to see how people change either for better or for worse. Rewind to what Davies had said in Confidential at the end of series two - that the journey of Rose from her introduction to her departure was supposed to show how being with the Doctor turned her from random teenager who worked in a shop to a driving force in the alternate world’s Torchwood. That the Doctor would be more cautious with his travels and with his companions because of the huge loss he had suffered when he lost Rose. At the end of it all, you could see the bookend of how those characters would move on and become something new..

(Never mind that the Doctor never did seem to learn how to not neglect his future companions all that well, and never mind that Rose’s interactions with the Doctor in series four seemed to be no different than series two lacking the supposed maturity she had gained after suffering such a huge loss two years prior.)

Now look at the end of series four. Not only do we have a situation where the retconning of Donna makes her forward character movement null and void, but retconning in this instance felt like all of the character development for everyone seemed to go back to ground zero. Donna, the clear best companion of New Who, forgets everything that happened and goes back to assumingly her shallow office temp life. The Doctor’s judgement against Sylvia and her reaction to his harshness show that unlike the prior companions’ families, she hasn’t changed her attitude about him nor Donna. The Doctor himself goes back to being the “lonely god” and because of the way things have gone thus far (although who knows what will happen with Moffat at the helm), any change to his character as a result of having travelled with Donna will be lost because of the current companion and current crisis. The one character that seemed to go through a proper change was Wilfred, and thankfully so, but amidst all of the other characters that went absolutely nowhere in their growth and development (which includes Rose, Jackie, Martha, Jack, and Sarah Jane, whose characters in these episodes felt like too many people crammed into a lift), it left me thinking yet again, “oh, is that it?”

One thing that i therefore wish with the new series in 2010 is for Moffat to create a companion storyline in which the relationship between the Doctor and his lead companion be one similar to that of the Classic series or that of Martha but done better - a storyline where the companion decides that their time with the Doctor has come to an end for no real reason other than the fact that the journey is over, and they say goodbye with no big emotional tugs and sweeping string soundtrack by the melodramatic Murray Gold.

One can hope.

Above is one of the charts i’m more proud of from DSR Squared, a refined version of some earlier attempts at the BPM speed up/freeze effect i’ve used in a few other historical charts. Someone had asked about the details of the construction of the chart to which i gave a brief answer as it was in the middle of the tourney. This is the more complete answer which explains how a fundamental flaw with the stepmania step editor engine makes this more difficult than it should be and how to work around this flaw.

I can’t take credit for this technique - this was all Tyler.

The problem: The timing window for hitting an ITG “Fantastic” or a DDR “Marvelous” or “Perfect” is measured in milliseconds. However, the stepmania step editor can only measure absolute time at a grain of centiseconds and a BPM at a grain of hundredths. For charts with no or very few BPM changes or pauses this is merely an inconvenience, but for charts that make heavy use of BPM change and pause effects, this can create significant changes to the sync of the Fantastic window in relation to the audio, particularly if the “convert BPM to pause” feature is used (which should be never).

Example: Suppose you have a song at 144 BPM and you want to have the equivalent of a quarter note (a crotchet for those in the UK) of pause somewhere in the middle of the song. A single quarter note of pause at that tempo is 0.4166666… seconds. If you use the “convert BPM to pause” feature of stepmania, it translates this to 0.42 seconds (rounding up). Again, if used once this isn’t necessarily a big deal, but if used several times, the timing window for being “on” shifts drastically since each iteration will offset the sync by 4ms. After five times of doing this, what was previously a spot on Fantastic is now an early excellent.

Solution: Know where all of your key beats will fall in absolute time.

Start by creating a “template” stepchart that has no pauses in it. After ensuring that the sync through the entire song is to your liking, identify the areas of the stepchart where you plan on putting a pause. For all of these areas, choose the eighth/quaver or quarter/crotchet note after the intended pause and record its “Current Second” on a notepad. Once you have identified all of these key beats, manually put in all of the pauses and make small adjustments when necessary to ensure that all of the key beats still fall on the correct “Current Second”. Typically this means adjusting pauses by one centisecond here and there.

It’s important to note that you should find all of your key beats and record them from the very beginning as opposed to finding just the next relevant key beat and adjusting the BPM and/or pause at that moment and then moving to the next one. The reason for this is because whenever you make adjustments to your BPM or pauses and then key in on the “Current Second”, this is still rounded to the nearest centisecond and over time can still create a sync error. When i first wrote Smooth Criminal, i did it the wrong way first - i found my first speed up/pause area, recorded the “Current Second”, wrote in the code, and moved to the next one. Because of this, the end of the chart ended up being maybe 30-40 ms off of its original sync. Checking the key beats over the entire chart from scratch, i ended up having to make quite a few pause adjustments to get it to be on, moving about every fifth pause from 22 centiseconds to 23 centiseconds.

I found it easiest to write in the pauses and BPM shifts directly in the .sm file rather than mess with the fussy F7/F8/F9/F10 method of the stepmania editor. It involved me having both open, typing in what i needed in the .sm file, “reloading from disk” in the stepmania editor, and then double-checking that the “Current Second”s fell where they were supposed to.

That’s pretty much it.

i’ve found that the easiest way to explain Pop’n Music to someone who doesn’t know anything about it is to say, “it’s basically a much more complicated version of Whac-a-Mole.” and on the surface, this seems a decent analogy because you have to hit the nine buttons at a particular time, and the configuration of the buttons is reminiscent of what you see in Whac-a-Mole. Where the analogy falls apart is in how you know when to hit the moles or buttons - in Whac-a-mole, you get a visual “cue” directly on the spot where you have to hit. In Pop’n, you’re given a screen cue based on column notation that essentially mirrors what all music video games currently do.

Enter Jubeat - the true digital version of whac-a-mole, where you’re given a 4×4 playfield of “tv screen buttons” that you hit as the individual buttons lights up. Shrouded in mystery when first announced in December of 2007, this
newest addition to Konami’s series of bemani games created a buzz in the music video game community. how exactly does it work? how complex and demanding will it be? Will it reach tiers of difficulty like that of iidx/pop’n, or is it more of a fluffy game like Dance Maniax?

I happened to stumble across two new Jubeat vidoes on youtube that show songs on a level other than what i would consider “basic.” The videos also do a good job of showing the interface for choosing songs or options related to the song.

Video 1

Video 2

I have to say that after watching these two videos i’m suitably impressed, both in its conception and in its execution of “chart writing” (is it a chart in the same way that DDR has charts?). It’d be easy when given something like this to fall into a trap of “create a lot of random patterns and notes for no good reason whatsoever”, but it seems that at least with these charts, even the difficult one (Snow Goose), there’s logic and a sense of idiomaticism to this digital whac-a-mole paradigm that makes it look like it would be not merely fun to play but fun to develop skill in, especially considering how well the easier difficulties (based on earlier demo videos i’ve seen) help to get people used to the new style of play.

There are still a few questions that i have about it that aren’t very explicit in the videos:

a) how difficult is it to press the buttons to get a response, and what’s the mechanics behind them? Obviously finger pushes seem to do the job in registering the button, but light touch versus hard press can make a big difference in if someone is going to do long-term playing. The mechanics are important because it can help answer how easily the buttons can “break” (stop registering), and what happens in that case.

What would be clever is if the game could figure out that a button is broken and readjust the chart to compensate for that broken button.

b) Are there more judgements involved other than hit or miss, and how can you tell?

c) how easy is it for you to know exactly when you’re supposed to hit the button? how much warning/prep time do you get before you hit the button, and does it depend on the bpm of the song (as in is the warning relative to the bpm, or is it a static amount of time)?

it’s interesting nonetheless. I wonder if it will have any marketability in the united states.

so there have been a few times when people have linked some of my writings here, and as such, i would get trackback notifications.  until today i didn’t understand what was going on, and thought it was just botspam attempting to create a malicious external link.

oops.

i guess this hurts me more than anything else as i don’t know who’s linking my stuff prior to now, so i’m not too worried about it.  it just makes me feel like an idiot for not getting it until now.  this entry is thus the public dunce cap on my head that i’ll bravely wear for a little while as now i know better.

it’s tempting to create some sort of regular feature to this blog such as weekly telly show reviews or something, but i’m not sure that i want to be confined to that sort of structure, nor do i want to alienate readers who may not be interested in some of the geeky telly culture that i’m a part of.  We’ll see, though.  If i have strong feelings about upcoming things that i’m watching that i feel warrants a Resonate sort of entry, i’ll probably post it.

it is my blog after all, right?  i’m not sure what the heck i’m babbling about.

In the history of the revived Doctor Who series, there have been ten multi-episode stories thus far. If we classify these multi-episode stories into three rough categories of “hits”, “misses”, and “neutrals”, most of them frustratingly fall into the category of misses than anything else. The most recent two-parter helps to further solidify a theory i have as to what makes more of these New Who multi-episode stories disappointing and also touches upon a fundamental problem with the series overall.

When the executive manatees of New Who get together to decide which idea balls they want to put into the episode tank, i have to expect that one of the balls that never leaves the tank has “epic clash between the good guys and the bad guys” on it, and in a way, that idea ball has a frightening influence over how the rest of the episode plays out, particularly when it has come to the reintroduction of Classic Who enemies into New Who. The reintroduction of the Sontarans in The Sontaran Strategem was a very successful one - a proper representation of the warrior race in both their physical appearance and their mentality, complete with the single weakness of the probic vent in the back of their neck. The crisis of having poisonous gas being put into the air because of an overpopulated world of cars may have been a recycled idea from Gridlock, but even so, the mystery surrounding the Atmos system and the gas that it exudes made for a decent set up for the inevitable “Tune In Next Week!” that had me counting down the days until the second part - albeit with some skepticism given New Who’s track record of multi-episode stories and particularly with Helen Raynor’s prior attempt at a two-parter with Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks.

And true enough, while The Sontaran Strategem had me counting down the days until part two aired, when the second part (The Posion Sky) did air, it had me counting down the minutes waiting for the episode to be over and done with.

In truth, the “epic clash” idea ball is only one of the many annoying things that made the episode horrible, but while it may not be the most troubling thing about the episode, it was the most prominent to me because of how much the idea ball affected, specifically a) the “battle scenes”, b) the crisis scale, c) the crisis resolution, and d) the bigger implications behind how episodes arrive at the epic clash in the first place.

Addressing the battle scene first: for those that may not know the Sontarans from Classic Who lore, the reason why Sontarans were given the probic vent in the back of their neck in the first place as a weakness was because their armor was supposed to be otherwise invincible to any other conventional weapon, or at the very least damned near hard to kill. That being the case, the UNIT/Sontaran “brute force versus brute force” battle scene was disheartening because it essentially took all of the well-crafted and otherwise authentic exposition of the Sontarans from part one and reduced them to “generic enemy” in part two. Allowing the Sontaran to fall and “die” in battle using less than a single round of rapid machine-gun fire makes it difficult to believe that they are a truly formidable warrior race that can be in a war that has lasted for over 50,000 years, and makes the probic vent a pretty useless characteristic of the Sontaran. Oh, they have this weak spot? That’s too difficult to try to script in a battle sequence, let’s just pull out lots of ammo.

Granted, we might be able to stretch some credibility to this if we apply Why-The-Asgard-Needed-Humans-To-Help-With-The-Replicators reasoning, but it’s difficult for me to give New Who that sort of credit given how many times this “epic clash” idea ball has already been used. The clash felt like it could have been transplanted with the “Cybermen versus the army” scenes in Doomsday (and i think even the same music was recycled for it) or the guards versus the Ood in Planet of the Ood. That the Sontarans were spitting out war language dialogue or doing aerobic war dances versus shouting “Delete! Delete!” doesn’t mean all that much if the core of the battle amounts to the same thing of gun fire versus laser fire.

Secondly, the “epic clash” paradigm causes a problem because of the kind of bar that New Who set when it comes to crisis scale, something that they share with the show 24. At the end of most of the multi-episode misses and series finales in particular, New Who seems to think that it can only be exciting if the entire world is in crisis, and by a massive amount of enemies. In Parting of the Ways it was millions of Dalek ships, in Age of Steel it was the world being converted into Cybermen, in Doomsday it was “billions” of Daleks (never mind the question of how the Doctor knew that there were billions of Daleks in the prison ship when minutes before he didn’t know that it was a prison ship) and Cybermen, in Last of the Time Lords it was billions of Toclafane, in The Poison Sky it was the world being converted into Sontarans. Insert in some news footage that show scenes of the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty under alien threat along with close-ups of newscaster’s eyes or lips saying, “OMG WE’RE GOING TO DIE!”, and you have the perfect template for New Who crisis building.

And the problem with setting the crisis knob so high so often isn’t that the viewing public becomes too used to it and therefore numb to it. The problem is in how the solution to the crisis is typically a “press a single button” or similar deus ex machina like answer, the most insulting to viewer intelligence being The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords. The Doctor, upon discovering the paradox machine says, “i can’t stop it until i know what it’s doing” and that meddling with it haphazardly could blow up the solar system. Yet what ends up being the answer to the problem is Jack going in guns blazing and shooting the whole thing up, which causes the embarrassing i-wrote-myself-into-a-corner-oh-shit-now-what answer of turning back time as if the crisis had never happened in the first place. And while The Posion Sky didn’t quite reach that level of immaturity in the solution conception (because the idea that Rattigan’s lab contained the means of creating an atmospheric converter was believable given that element of the story’s plot), its execution was so “Reset Button” in nature that it gave me physical anxiety. Igniting the sky appears to have completely free the earth’s atmosphere of the Atmos gas in seconds including ground level even though it was only the sky level that ignited, and i guess all of the mountains and planes that happened to be flying higher than the Valiant didn’t suffer any issues and i suppose it makes sense that across the world all of the Atmos cars stopped spewing out the gas all at the same time and i guess all of the ground Sontarans were destroyed by UNIT and oh for fuck’s sake.

The thing about the Reset Button solution is that it belittles the scale of the crisis. In Doomsday, the solution of “reconfigure the machine to pull anything that has void stuff back into the void” would have worked if there were fifty Daleks and Cybermen or two hundred or two hundred billion or ten trillion. Numbers on that sort of scale end up not mattering if the answer would be exactly the same and be executed exactly as easily. It’s oddly analagous to the scene in The Sontaran Strategem where Ross and the Doctor dive for cover against the Atmos-fitted jeep and all it does is fizz out instead of create what they expect to be a big explosion. Hit this lever or this button or point the Sonic Crisis Saving Device at this panel or stick the mobile into the conveniently mobile-friendly slot with the destruct code or just unplug that machine, and i end up thinking about how much build up there was to the crisis, what the solution ended up being, and thinking (in my best Tennant imitation), “oh, is that it?”

(Thankfully the end of Torchwood series two didn’t fall into this trap, deciding to make the crisis essentially just Cardiff and the Torchwood team, although i still had the “oh, is that it?” sort of thought while watching a generally poor conclusion to an otherwise stronger series than series one.)

And ultimately this shows one of the fundamental flaws with New Who - that too often it seems like the stories don’t create the action sequences as much as the action sequences create the story.

Doomsday is a good example of this. The executive manatees look at the history of Doctor Who and say, “the Daleks have never fought the Cybermen before! Let’s get out our super expensive action figures and have them duke it out! yaaaar!” So they create a very unbelievable plot point of the humans and the cybermen coming to some sort of “truce” to deal with a common enemy because apparently having a handful of humans helping to shoot ineffectively at Dalek force-shields is better than pulling in the millions of Cybermen from around the world or even what’s concentrated at Canary Wharf.  And the only reason that they did it is to help create the ultimate child’s fantasy battle scene which doesn’t advance any plot whatsoever because eventually everything is solved by the Doctor and Rose pulling on the two big levers (so i guess the cybermen got the short end of the stick of that truce). A flimsy pretext creates the desired action spectacle, and the manatees pat themselves on their collective manatee backs because they’ve helped to create Doctor Who History, regardless of whether that History is a good idea or not, and regardless of whether or not that clas has any significance to the story - which it doesn’t, being upstaged by what truly motivated the end of the series in the first place, which was Rose’s departure.

When Lawrence Miles reviewed Planet of the Ood, he talked a great deal about how Russell thinks like a director and not a writer, and as that distinction sinks into my consciousness more, so does my faith in the quality of New Who. In general i like sci-fi televsion series more than sci-fi movies because i generally see movies as overbudgeted fluff entertainment whereas good sci-fi television series will build up the characters, the backstory, a mythos and set of rules that show the depth of storytelling and the depth of humanity. But with some notable exceptions, New Who episodes aren’t aspiring to be episodes in a television series, they’re aspiring to be a series of “mini-movies” favoring the fluff entertainment and using very broad story and character themes to glue the fluff together driven by a brand that had its precedence started almost half a century ago. Surely i’ll still watch it and enjoy it and find moments that are pure genius amidst that which is merely entertaining, but in the back of my mind there’s always that thought that the dazzle of New Who will never compare to the likes of some of the great Classic Who stories or the great Blake’s 7 stories whose special effects by today’s standards may be cheap but still hold a wealth of depth in creative sci-fi story-telling that will never have any equal.

Still, at least we have Moffat’s two-parter to look forward to.

the biggest difference between being employed in an academic medium versus a corporate medium is what i’m dubbing “irregular regularlity versus regular regularity.”

as an example, in my second year at the UofO, even though my weekly schedule was fairly regular, my daily schedule was highly irregular.  my mondays were 8:00-23:00 days between teaching classes, taking classes, teaching high school, and having 100th Monkey rehearsals, Tuesdays were 11:00-19:00 days with the occasional 8:00 at certain times because of the electronic computer lab, etc.  by contrast, my current corporate job has a fairly regular daily and weekly schedule, varied only by time of the fiscal year, special projects, or crises.  otherwise, it’s your typical 8 to 5.

When i was in school, the stuff that dictated my regular schedule also ended up dictating my free time schedule, mainly because of what needed to get accomplished for the next irregular regularity.  Homework for this class, writing music for this section of the marching show, finishing up some Max work, socialising with friends because we just got out of rehearsal, and the like.

again, this severely contrasts my current paradigm.  There’s very little structure to how i use my free time since all of my work obligations i handle during work hours.  This would be fine if i managed my free time well, but lately i don’t feel like i’ve had the proper balance.  if we break my free time down into five rough categories of poker, socialising (both online and in real life), projects, time-wasters, and other (being things like random british telly, social diddering, domesticism), i spend much more time on the time-wasters than i do on projects even though projects takes higher precedence over time-wasters in my head.

i attribute some of this to the fact that most of my projects lack of deadlines or goals like they did when i was in an academic atmosphere, whereas the time-wasters in a sense *do* have goals because i’m trying to break 700k on chain factor or achieve this ranking on prolific or the like.  This has been bothering me for a while, and i’ve been working to try to change it, but it’s been difficult to do so, particularly when the peak crisis i was dealing with at work ate up all of my time in late march and early april made me so burnt out that i didn’t have energy to do anything other than zone out.

Recently i started playing live poker games at a club downtown that’s open from 6pm until 2am, and this has introduced an element of irregularity to my regular week since i’ve been consistently going to the tuesday evening mixed games and the saturday evening tournament and cash games.  Last week i started to scheme in my head an idea to use this new irregular regularity to help designate other days of the week to specific projects and create a rough outline of a long term project goal timeline.  Not that the time-wasters would completely go away, as i feel they have their own place in my life that isn’t deteremental, just that those time-wasters would dominate my free time less.  So i might make, say, monday and thursday my online poker days with a mix of some minor project or admin related to said project that i don’t need to devote huge energy to or a lot of hours at a time whereas wednesday and saturday daytime is devoted to projects more completely whilst sunday is devoted to domestics and some “others”, all as broad big-picture guidelines that i can adjust or refine on the fly based on individual circumstances.

we’ll see what happens.  right now DSR Squared is occupying my project thoughts more than anything else, but a part of me is looking for some material to write a choir piece for Jenni Brandon (i’m thinking Steven Brust material), another part of me is coming up with some video game medley music for Laura, another part of me is trying to figure out what i want my next video project to be, another part of my head is thinking about marching band stuff again, etc. etc.

my head sometimes feels like it’s too full.

in the past year or so, automatic paper towel dispensers were invented, mainly for use in public restrooms.

At our workplace, the motivation for switching to automatic paper towel dispensers were touted as helping to “go green”, the new term for environmental friendliness. I suspect that it had more to do with cost-cutting as i imagine that they theoretically save the company money by decreasing paper towel use, or else the company would have bought all of us Hybrids or something.

But that’s besides the point. As i was thinking about the phenomenon of the automatic paper towel dispenser the other day, i thought about the next logical and brilliant step to take: automatic toilet paper dispensers. As opposed to having an individual dip into the toilet paper roll for whatever they’re worth, hit a button and it rations out the amount that is theoretically all you need to wipe. Maybe there’d have to be two buttons, one for “small amount” versus one for “large” amount to cover various needs.

Which sounds ridiculous, but so do automatic paper towel dispensers to me, even after all this time. Maybe we need to take cues from Demolition Man and figure out how to use the three seashells.

many will agree that the electoral college is an outdated system for determining our presidency, but no one can figure out what’s the best way to replace it.

here’s my idea:

everyone who decides that they’re going to vote has to take a comprehensive aptitude test. but not an aptitude test like the GRE or the SAT or something that’s just based on intelligence. it’s a much broader test that encompasses other things as well - mechanical things, house sorts of stuff, understanding of politics, awareness of issues, that sort of thing.

weight the individual questions based on some sort of predetermined system (as in answering 2+2=? isn’t as impressive as 13! mod 4). Then, based on the individual’s final result, weight how much their vote counts towards the final tally to determine who takes office. that way, someone who doesn’t know what end of the pencil is used to fill in the little boxes will only influence the vote a little.

there’d have to be some guidelines. it can’t just be an isolated measure of intelligence or practical things or awareness of social issues - placing too much emphasis on any of those things individually would influence the presidency too heavily. a balance needs to be struck, determined and governed by a well-picked council.

this way, everyone can still vote, which i think is important to the democratic process, but it eliminates the total free-for-all nature of the voting system being completely equal.

and then of course there’d have to be an air-tight auditing process to prove that it was all done fairly and no one breached the system and all that.

whilst sitting with katie in my favorite place to get hot chocolate, she noticed that there was a painting on the wall in which the frame was not flush with the floor. Ansel Adams on a slight tilt.

we’ve had this debate before about how i like to have a small degree of deliberate chaos in my life which could have its representation in a hung painting or poster slightly off-kilter versus her need for visual order, and this brought it to the foreground again. While nothing about our contrasting viewpoints was new, this time it spurned two new ideas into my head.

one: create a work of art within a frame where the work itself is deliberately on a slight tilt from its frame. That way, when the frame is completely flush with the floor, the work is slightly crooked, or when the work is flush with the floor, the frame is slightly crooked. This gives the person who hangs it on the wall the freedom to interpet it however s/he wishes with no correct answer (even though most people would likely keep the frame flush to the floor).

two: create a computer windows environment in which the windows and their contents can be on a tilt. of course it would have to be user-customizeable, but the particular configuration i would employ would be a slight tilt, maybe 5 to 10 degrees in either direction. And i would also program some sort of randomizer - whenever a new window opens (beit a web browser window or new word processing document or what have you), the computer randomly chooses which direction and what degree of tilt the window will appear within a specified degree range (like -8 to +8).

i’m surprised that number two doesn’t exist already. you’d figure that other people would be into that sort of chaos like me and have more saavy computer programming chops than i do. But when i did an initial google, i didn’t find anything either Windows or Mac OS that would emulate something like that.

i wonder if i could get anyone to do something like that for me.