The Rabbit Cube

Travelogue, day 6

2008-02-29T19:55:00.001-06:00

COMING SOON

Travelogue: Day 5

2008-01-31T23:51:00.001-06:00

COMING SOON

Travelogue: Day Four

2007-11-30T23:33:00.001-06:00

Coming soon

Travelogue: Day 3

2007-10-31T23:22:00.001-05:00

coming soon

Travelogue — day two: From Mercer to Grove

2007-08-31T23:15:00.000-05:00

All right, I got sidetracked for several reasons, not the least of which is that my router back home decided unexpectedly to explode, so I found myself locked out of the internet as soon as I got back home. But never fear, I have at last returned to continue the Travelogue, and here it is!

Travelogue, part one

2007-07-27T12:20:00.000-05:00

All right, my annual trip out west to Tacoma has begun, and I'll be chronicling the adventures we have on the journey.

Day One: "Sleep? What's that? Never heard of it!"

Wednesday, July 25, 2007 (yes, I know I'm 2 days behind, but I'll catch up soon)

At 5:00 AM, Dad and I were up and at 'em, and at 5:35, Laura came by to drive us to the airport. We talked on the way about early rising, and Lara said she was so excited by getting up early, how the day was rife with possibilities. I wondered about that.

The flights themselves were uneventful, the layover in Minneapolis disappointingly so. We found out that the Cinnabon branch at the Minneapolis airport had closed down or moved out, and that made us unhappy, so we just sat around, I had a couple of cookies and read. Dad got me this great book "Rebels on the Backlot" about several movie directors (Tarantino, David O. Russell, PT Anderson, Soderbergh, Fincher and Jonze) and how they beat the corrupt Hollywood system and got their visionary movies made during a time when the major studios were starting their decline into sequel factories. I adore stories about independent filmmaking. I was engrossed in the book all the way through both flights.

On the second flight, I took my meds with some soda from the in-flight cart. After that it was just reading, till we finally arrived at the Seattle airport (just after one PM their time). Mom was waiting for us there, and Bob was waiting to drive us all back to their place in Fircrest (my great-aunt Beverly and her husband Bob have this beautiful house in Fircrest, a great neighborhood of Tacoma, which has become our "home base" on these annual trips out west).

I had gotten about 5 hours of sleep the previous night and my sustenance of the day had been a couple of cookies and a can of soda, so I got a bowl of Orzo and some cherries as soon as we got there. It helped that we had been sitting down in the airplane all day, so I wasn't exactly worn out by this time.

It was about that time that I learned there had been a reply to my inquiry. You see, a few days earlier, I had escorted my neighbor to Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie, and been so enthralled by it that I had called ahead and asked if Austin and Marina (my cousins, aged 12 and 9) had seen it yet, and if not, if I might be able to escort them (and Mom) to the movie while I was here. I was pleasantly surprised that they had not seen it yet, and pleased that I was going to be able to show it to them. What really floored me was the news that the event was planned for that very evening at 6:20. I hadn't expected to get it done the day we arrived out here.

Well, they arrived around 4, so we had a couple hours to party. While auntie Bev led Austin and Marina into the dining room for a game of Monopoly, aunt Missy (Austin and Marina's mom) sat me down and talked about her new passion, Second Life. I'd heard of Second Life but never really shown much interest, but some of the elements she talked about sparked some resolve, and I made a note to poke around on the site when I got a chance.

Marina got bored with the Monopoly game (I don't blame her, I lost my love for that game a while back) and she came back into the living room and started pestering me to play Twister with her. Against my better judgement, I acquiesed, and Mom started spinning the old cardboard spinner to tell us where to go.

Let me rattle off a laundry list of the problems: Marina was a shameless cheater, the spinner was old and warped so it kept on landing on the same few spaces over and over again, Marina was cheating, the mat should have been fastened down and Marina cheated. Oh, and did I mention Marina's a cheater? But, in spite of all that, it was fun. I certainly worked off that energy (although my thigh muscles won't forgive me in a hurry).

After that, I showed them some videos I got off ebaumsworld, amongst them was that Roy Raphaeli card trick, that got them talking about magic tricks and wanted me to show a couple of the ones I can do. I did the king-switches-places-with-the-queen-then-they-both-turn-into-jacks trick, then, thankfully, it was movie time.

The previews that preceded the movie were not bad. They were well beyond bad. They were excruciating. As if the thought of a sequel to Daddy Day Care wasn't horrific enough, then they rolled out a preview for a Bratz movie, and a Dreamworks CGI cartoon about talking bees. I was covering my eyes and ears before the end.

Then, finally, we got to the movie itself. The print the theatre was using was in horrible shape, but that made no difference, the movie itself was fantastic. Everything Pixar does is fantastic.

A little side note here: The first time I'd seen Ratatouille, I'd recognized that Anton Ego was a not-so-subtle jab at the film critics reviewing the film ("Go ahead, review this movie negatively and be just like the villain!"), but what I didn't really realize the first time that I saw the second time is that the entire story is a metaphor for the movie industry. At least the animation industry. The food represents animation, and Gusteau's restaurant is Disney. In the movie, Gusteau's restaurant, once a pinnacle of high art and quality product (The Walt Disney Company once made great movies), has sold out after the death of its leader, and is now attaching its leader's face to a line of prepackaged frozen food products (the canned formulaic dreck and sequels that Disney is making now). John Lasseter and his crew see themselves as Remy and Linguini, breathing new life into the bastardized name and reviving its creators ideals to make good art, not canned lowest-common-denominator schlock.

Certainly a message that I can appreciate. John Lasseter and his team, I truly believe, are the best thing to happen to family entertainment in this country in well over a decade. Their dedication to quality over marketability has given Pixar its spotless track record, and now they're reviving Disney just like Remy revives Gusteau's (the Gusteau/Disney metaphor is marred a little by the fact that they felt obliged to portray Gusteau as a friendly, cheerful, warm-hearted character, whereas Walt Disney himself was a complete scumbag, but the movie doesn't really suffer for it).

Anyway, after the movie, we headed back to the house in Fircrest, where I showed Austin and Marina a couple more magic tricks. After I made the mistake of aquiesing to their demands to repeat a trick (professional magicians NEVER repeat a trick more than once per show), naturally on the third try they started to see it. Remember, all aspiring magicians out there: NEVER let your guard down around children. Children are far more observant and imaginative than adults, yes it's counterintuitive but in truth children are much harder to flimflam with sleight-of-hand than grown-ups. Still, even after they guessed the "Invisible Cards" trick, I still beat them eight straight times at the obligatory rigged game of Three Card Monte.

After eight straight games of being unable to find the Queen, Marina became frustrated, and so she decided to headbutt me in the stomach, stomp on me, and hit me repeatedly with sofa cushions.

What else is new?

After a few minutes of hurling soft objects at one another, we headed out to the table on the back patio, where the folks had been barbequeing, and ate steak. I had some corn on the cob and green beans. It was that time of twilight when it's physically impossible to see anything, so I went back in in a hurry. Austin and Marina followed me back in, and of course they started trying to maul me again. I had to pick Marina up and carry her around the house, laughing (she tried to gouge my eyes out and nearly succeeded).

After a while it was time for them to head home (Mom wanted them to clean up the pillows but Marina kept trying to attack me and I kept obliging), and the house was quiet again.

After that, I headed back into the living room with Bev to write, and we stayed up till about 1 AM watching Law & Order. After that I took my Remeron and slid into the hot tub out back for a while before finally going upstairs and getting to bed at 1:30 AM. It was about 3:30 AM CST, so I'd been up for nearly 23 hours, and I felt great.

An open letter to J. K. Rowling

2007-07-20T14:09:00.001-05:00

NOTE TO ALL: I wrote this a while ago, and it contains my predictions for the ending of the final Harry Potter book. I probably should have posted this sooner, since now that the pirated copies of the book are allegedly floating around, anyone who reads this will accuse me of having read one if I turn out to be right.
But the half-dozen people who actually read my blog can rest assured that I have not read any pirated copy, nor have I paid any attention to the "spoilers" leaked by one Mr. Gabriel (who seems to have the keyboard skills of a five-year-old yet claims to be a L33T Haxx0r who hacked into the computer base of a prominent British publishing firm), this is all my own conjecture.

Now then, shall we get on with it?

My predictions as to what happens at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:"

My predictions are based on the Celtic mythology that Rowling based her storyline on, the same myths that J. R. R. Tolkein and Lloyd Alexander drew from. Compare Albus Dumbledore to Dallben, the benevolent old man who was the only one capable of defying the death lord Arawn in Lloyd Alexander's "The Prydain Chronicles." Admittedly, Rowling draws from other material as well (for instance, the fifth book is an excellent retelling of the lead-up to America's involvement in World War II, with Voldemort representing Hitler, Dumbledore representing Winston Churchill, and Cornelius Fudge representing the American interests who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust until Pearl Harbor), but much of the mythology is based on that.

And one thing that "The Prydain Chronicles" has in common with the myths that they draw on is that at the end of the story, when the war is one and the villain is defeated, then something happens to cause all magic, all spells and enchantments, to vanish from the land. Wizards lose their powers, magical creatures retreat to lands unknown, etc., and the world enters the mechanical ages. Apparently when those myths were written, the authors wanted to make an explanation as to why there aren't still any wizards around or something.

My prediction, therefore, is that this is exactly what will happen at the end of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Don't ask me how it will happen, or who live and who dies on the way to get there, because I don't know, but I think that's what Rowling has had in mind since day one. And given that it's pretty much the only theory that HASN'T been spouted out on the fansites and message boards, in fact I have yet to find a single HP fan who sees it coming, which is odd given that every other wackazoid theory has been given ink, I think that makes it more likely.

It's especially likely given that while nearly every other wackazoid theory and bizarre analogy that can be drawn from the Celtic mythos can be found in the endless parade of books devoted to theorizing what happens at the end of the series, I have yet to find any author anywhere garnering this theory. Some part of me suspects that Rowling might be laughing at us even now, as she watches us rant on the message boards, at how none of us are suspecting it.

Let me start out by saying that I HATE the cliché in question. I loathe it, I hated the end of the Prydain Chronicles, and many elements of the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I especially detested the ending to Final Fantasy VI, since it had no connection to the mythos at all. But I saw it coming several books back, and I will not get my hopes up that she'll pull anything less on us. For that matter, she could be just deciding to use it just to get a reaction out of us, certainly it will stick in the public memory for a long time.

Long ago, I considered writing a letter to her begging her not to pull that trick, but given that she says the final chapter was written way back in 1999, I thought it futile to attempt to persuade her to change it now.

The only glimmer of hope I can find is that, after re-reading the books, I can find no hints or clues as to this possible outcome in the text of the first six books. And given that Rowling has been dropping oodles of hints to every other plot development so far since book one (an amazingly put-together story, for which I commend her), I take some hope in that.

So know this, Joanne Rowling. If you pull the end-of-magic plot twist, your status as one of the greatest writers of the past 20 years is, IMNSHO, forfeit. If not, you're fantastic, and I will thank you from the bottom of my heart for not falling into that pitfall.

Have a nice day.

Let's stop talking down to young people.

2007-06-29T18:37:00.000-05:00

The past 2 weeks have been hectic for me. I have committed to attend all 4 performances of YSP's production of the RSC stage play of Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickelby.

And it's been going splendidly.

Let me impress upon you the difficulty of this play. Performed uncut, the play covers the entire book, which means that the staging takes between 9 and 10 hours of stage time (not counting intermissions), it involves 130 separate speaking roles, over 50 stage changes, and some incredibly elaborate costumes and make-up.

And all of this is being performed by 36 teenagers.

Yes, this is being done by the Young Shakespeare Players, a troupe of schoolkids here in Madison who perform full-length, uncut, unedited Shakespeare plays, they are not Bowdlerized, they are not cut or dampened, they use minimalist stage props and virtually no special effects, on a stage smaller than my neighbor's front lawn.

Still, they've never done anything on this scale before. But nevertheless, they are doing incredibly well.

And this in spite of the belief held by many important figures in our society, that young people are helpless infants who are incapable of understanding anything more complicated than Spongebob Squarepants.

The infantilization of children and teenagers in this society is mind-boggling. Older kids and teens are warehoused together in unwieldy, overcrowded and underfunded schools, talked down to and treated as idiotic infants, and meanwhile adults are scratching their heads as to why these children won't settle down and behave. Gee, why on Earth could these kids possibly want to do something other than what they're told to do by adults who think they're morons?

I talked about this on the Lux forums, and Dustin Sacks, the head poobah of Lux, was nice enough to inform me about a book on the subject by Robert Epstein, called "The Case Against Adolescence." I picked up that book and started reading, and it captures so much of what I think is wrong with our society's image of children that I feel like it's a Godsend.

At YSP, 8-year-old kids perform full-length Shakespeare plays, uncut, unedited and un-Bowdlerized. This in an otherwise ordinary neighborhood in an only slightly non-ordinary town. Meanwhile, in the suburbs, parents who are terrified of giving their kids responsibility refuse to let their children be exposed to any TV or reading matter that in any way encourages thought and growth, outside of the sugary pablum "edutainment" that has sprung up in the last few years to take the place of genuinely entertaining and educational shows. Whatever happened to Square One TV? Or how about Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Those shows made learning fun and were actually interesting, they encouraged real thought and helped kids learn tough subjects. Now, all we have is an endless parade of talking animals singing songs about how one plus one equals two, each one more inane, stupid and pablum than the last.

Then there are the high schools, which warehouse teenagers together and teach them absolutely nothing, except of course for teaching them to loathe education for the rest of their lives. Our society hammers the message into them that they are not capable of making their own decisions, that they are stupid and naïve, and that they should let the grown-ups make their decisions for them. Meanwhile, concerned parent groups can't imagine why so many teenagers are rebellious, and heap the blame on everything in sight, from movies to video games to reality TV (don't get me wrong, I hate reality TV too, but it's a symptom, not the illness).

Apparently there is some magic cutoff age in which a person suddenly becomes a fully functioning adult capable of abstract thought, but of course the parental groups are raising that arbitrary age every chance they get.

What is it about our culture that insists on keeping people babies until they turn 26?

Some parents consider giving their kids "responsibility," but too often, that responsibility translates to giving them household chores, which does nothing to help their self-esteem, and only makes them feel like servants. They still can't hold property, they can't get married without parental permission (permission which can be withdrawn at any time for any reason or none at all), and can't vote. In short they have no say in anything that goes on with their lives, and the only recourse they have is to yell and scream in an effort to get their way, which accomplishes nothing but inducing stress all around.

I think we need to start giving individual people the credit they deserve. I think we need to stop thinking that a person suddenly becomed competent on their 21st birthday in a way that they were not when they were 20. I think we need to find out what each individual person is competent enough to be trusted with doing, rather than setting up an arbitrary age limit and being completely blind to special circumstances.

Have a nice day.

Online Game Review: "Aquaria"

2007-04-29T12:30:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine pointed me towards a graphics site called so-room, run by a Japanese guy. I was impressed with his art. In addition to lots of 2D anime sketches, he also did a little 3D work, which he uploaded into a special section of his gallery (he won't let me post the pics myself, but they're there for the viewing. Check out the glass birds and the hourglasses, those are great!

But the crowning jewel of the site is a stunningly beautiful Flash game called Aquaria.

The plot is fairly straightforward. You have been searching for the ancient ruins of an underground civilization called Aquaria, and one day you find an ancient relic that teleports you down there, and you must unlock the mysteries of the ruins.

The Myst influences are fairly obvious, not just in the storyline but in the gameplay as well. Like Myst, the game features a point-and-click first-person interface, where you click on a spot to move one screen towards it. No action or fighting in this game (a refreshing change indeed), it's all about puzzle-solving.
Unfortunately, the cursor does not change shape or color to tell you when something is clickable or not, but thankfully that's not too big of a hassle. And there is no phasing between shots, so it is possible to get turned around, but thankfully all turning is done using arrows at the bottom of the screen (except when you want to look at an actual object off to one side, in which case you can click on it), so that helps keep you from getting lost. It is still possible to get turned around, but thankfully the ruin is not that big so it isn't hard to get back on track.

But the triumph of this game is its stunning graphics. Each shot is beautifully rendered in a magnificent 3D graphics program, with results that would have been incredible even if they had been done by a company, but this game was all done by one person! These ruins are beautifully constructed and artfully designed, with a unique blend of sci-fi and ancient relics that reminds me somewhat of one of the later Final Fantasy games.
There are a few surfaces and textures on some parts of the game that I find somewhat uniform (the view of the ocean floor outside the windows, for instance, seems to have a bit too much solid color on the ground), but I'll forgive that since it was all one person doing it.

Unfortunately, several of the puzzles are ridiculously difficult, so much so that a couple of them of them seem fairly illogical even when I solved them. After playing, I looked it up on Jay is Games, and sure enough found a walkthrough. You might have to look it up if you get stuck (I won't tell if you won't).

The music, by the way, is appropriately beautiful, albeit a bit repetitive. The harp instrument melody reminded me strongly of TENMON's music in Makoto Shinkai's movie, "The Place Promised in our Early Days" (an excellent movie BTW, I highly recommend it).

One problem though, the final ends with a "To Be Continued," which I hate, because 9 times out of 10, it means the author is never going to release the sequel, so we never find out how the story ends. Still, it's a very good game in its own right, and not too much emphasis is actually placed on the story itself, so we're not exactly holding our breath for the next plot twist. Overall, a highly enjoyable game, and I heartily recommend it.

Graphics: 5/5 (SUPERB!!!)
Sound: 5/5 (beautiful)
Puzzles: 3.5/5 (a lot of them are too hard, but overall they're okay)
Story: 4/5 (nice setup, but points off for the to-be-continued)
Controls: 4/5 (simple interface, but the lack of a cursor alteration can surprise you)

Overall: 4/5

Lux: The Traffic Maze at Floyd's Knob

2007-03-10T13:31:00.000-06:00

In Martin Gardner's excellent book, "The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Conundrums," I encountered many interesting puzzles. One that I particularly enjoyed was a puzzle by Robert Abbot, author of "Abbot's New Card Games." It goes like this:

"Because the town of Floyd's Knob, Indiana, had only thirty-seven registered automobiles, the mayor thought it would be safe to appoint his cousin, Henry Stables, who was the town cutup, as its traffic commissioner. But he soon regretted his decision. When the town awoke one morning, it found that a profusion of signs had been erected establishing numerous one-way streets and confusing restrictions on turns.
"The citizens were all for tearing down these signs until the police chief, another cousin of the mayor, made a surprising discovery. Motorists passing through town became so exasperated that sooner or later they made a prohibited turn. The police chief found that the town was making even more money from these violations than from its speed trap on an outlying country road.
"Of course everyone was overjoyed, particularly because the next day was Saturday and Moses MacAdam, the county's richest farmer, was due to pass through town on his way to the county seat. They expected to extract a large fine from Moses, believing it to be impossible to drive through town without at least one traffic violation. But Moses had been secretly studying the signs. When Saturday morning came, he astonished the entire town by driving from his farm through town to the county seat without a single violation!

"Can you discover the route Moses took? At each intersection you must follow one of the arrows. That is, you may turn in a given direction only when there is a curved line in that direction, and you may go straight only when there is a straight line to follow. No turns may be made by backing the car around the corner. No U-turns are permitted. You may leave an intersection only at the head of an arrow. For instance, at the first intersection after leaving the farm, you have only two choices: to go north or to go straight. If you go straight, at the next intersection you must either go straight or turn south. True, there is a curved line to the north, but there is no arrow pointing north, so you are forbidden to leave that intersection in a northerly direction."

I had just finished work on Illusion and was doing those puzzles to unwind, and since it was 1:30 AM I suddenly found myself thinking, "Hmm, that might make an interesting Lux map."

So, I got to work. I drew up a little picture of the map in photoshop, blew it up and loaded it as a background image. I divided each segment of street up into 4 countries in each direction. For the one-way streets I only used four countries in a row, and for the two-way streets I had two rows next to each other (it required making some pretty small countries, but not TOO too small). I considered making each intersection a country in itself, but I wouldn't be able to restrict turn directions in terms of straight and curved lines, so I just kept it to the streets. I also made each of the highways on either side of town separate country, and connected them with each other. Also, to increase the user-friendliness of the map just a little, I made it so you CAN make a U-turn once you're on the highway, meaning that you can get on one highway, then turn around and head back into town at the same spot you left.
The tricky part was identifying all the one-way streets. The obvious choices were to make one-way streets leading towards any exit of an intersection that didn't have a head of an arrow, since there was nowhere to go. However, there was more to it than that. You see that in some intersections, there are arrows leading out of the other end of what would be a one-way street. Robert Abbot included those extraneous arrows to make the puzzle harder to solve, but in this map they'd make a street with no origin. So I had to figure out which arrow heads to erase

I expected to have one jolly mess of a time making all the one-way connections, and guess what: I was right. But there were also plenty of obstacles before that as well, most of which I hadn't expected.

When I drew the two-way connections, I opened it up and started to play a game as a test run (to make sure I hadn't missed any countries), and I got an error message saying that country "null" didn't connect to any other countries. This had happened before, and each time I just opened up the board in text editor, looked for the country ID that had been identified, and edited the polygon locations to make it visible, then deleted it. But this time, the first time I tried it, something went wrong and the entire map was fouled up (it wouldn't even open up in the map editor), forcing me to redraw the whole thing again, from scratch.

Once I'd gotten the countries named, it was time to divide them up into continents. I decided to make each segment of each street a separate continent. This would make the two-way streets hard to take, since you'd have to find a separate route back onto the other side of the same street to take it. However, the one-way streets would be much easier, and with the one-way connections they'd be a prime shafting spot and attacking point.
The country names were simple, I just game them street addresses. I named each street and just wrote out some random sequential numbers for the addresses. I used a few numbers that have significance in my writing projects, and a few others were years of historical significance, but most of them were just random.
But when I started making continents, I ran into a problem. The map editor is contained in one window, and as you create more continents, the row of colored squares representing those continents reaches down that window. But the row of squares does not wrap around and repeats, it just keeps going down, so eventually the squares reach offscreen. And since I have to manually drag a line from a country to the square to place a country in that continent, I couldn't reach the last few squares. So, I had to open up the board in text editor and manually write the continent details into the java script itself, then move the country info into those continent paragraphs in there. I had to create 7 more continents this way, and it took forever. Plus, I made a mistake with the first tag and this time, when I got the error message, it wouldn't tell me which country or continent was causing the problem, so I had to search through the entire document in text editor and find what the problem was. That alone took over a week.

Once I'd gotten that mess settled out, it was time for the fun part: making the connections one-way. I got to work editing the tags in the text program (over 100 countries and each one needed at least one tag deleted, several needed more), looking up ID numbers and deleting them. Oh yes, and did I mention that several times I misidentified a country and had to redraw the connections along an entire continent again, and repeat the tag removal?

Those were the major obstacles, my college classes and Shakespeare performances were others. Altogether, the whole process took over four weeks.

The theme and artwork were easier, I just looked around the internet for a couple of days for an aerial shot of some farmland, played with the colors a little to make sure it wouldn't stand out too much and distract from the board too much, and used that as the background. I just put a black stripe around the roadways for asphalt, and to increase the contrast. I also drew semi-transparent arrows over the roadways to mark which roads lead where (I drew one arrow and copy-pasted it over each country, in the appropriate direction). After that I wrote a brief description of the map and a summary of the puzzle, and put that right by it. I used the magic wand to select the whole text, chose "expand selection" by 3, and filled the background with a wood pattern to make a nifty wooden sign on which to post the info. I put that on the right of the maze. After that it was just the title and name at the top and my logo at the bottom (I used three cubes this time, red, yellow and green, just like a traffic light!!!), and it was ready (FINALLY!).

I played a few games on it and I think I did reasonably well. Now I'm crossing my fingers.

Online Game Review: "Travelogue"

2007-03-09T15:35:00.000-06:00

I stumbled upon this game while browsing Jay is Games, and was expecting something moderately fun. What I got was a game that hooked me.

In this unique twist on the "Escape-the-room" genre, you play a mysterious traveler, stuck in a dumpy hotel in some nameless metropolis, wide awake at 3 AM. Your character is depressed, kept going only by the dream of a faraway place, a paradise of sun, wind and waves. Your goal is to find a way there.

The graphics are subtle. The style is a 3D-rendered photorealistic environment that seems plain and simple, but it is really surprisingly beautiful, capturing the quiet melancholy of a no-frills hotel. There is an elegant simplicity to the graphics in this game, accented by the live-action clips on the TV in your room.

Picking up a TV guide on the desk will give you a list of a few channels to select, each one very interesting. There is a music channel showing jerky shots from a rock concert, a sports channel showing clips from a soccer game, a religion channel showing a preacher lecturing about the Coming of Christ, and a shopping channel showing a dolphin bottle opener for sale. Each channel actually plays a loop of the same stuff over and over (it is a game after all), but the loops are all long and seamless, to give an excellent impression of an actual TV program. The TV element is very well-done, oh, and each channel gives you a clue to the game's solution. ;-)

The navigation is smooth and Myst-style, like Crimson Room and Viridian Room. Getting around the room can be a bit tricky at first, and at firt I didn't realize what you were supposed to do. You see, as the game starts you are laying on the bed trying to get to sleep, and in order to really move around the room you have to get up off the bed first (HINT: roll over so you're facing the door, and click on the door to move out of the bed).
As usual in escape-the-room fare, you have to click on everything and look everywhere to find clues as to the escape route. Fortunately the cursor changes slightly when you roll over something clickable, so it tells you when something's clickable and when it isn't (always a plus).

But what really makes this game is its story. The creators of this game are masters of the art of storytelling, in that they are able to convey volumes with just the tiniest bit of information. Despite knowing nothing about the main character, the subtlest elements of the game (usually little things in the narration) really give you a sense of understanding the character and his/her motives. The tone of the game is moody and melancholy, undercut with a sense of exhileration and excitement. The ending of the game conjured up a whole rainbow of emotions.

The solutions to the puzzles are elegant and fairly logical, and several of them are nothing short of ingenious. You are not required to piece anything together from just a single scrap of paper, and the narration doesn't hammer you over the head with clues, the game lays out its ideas and puzzles very cleverly. Figuring out how to tune the other stations in, where to find the third token, etc. are all very interesting and almost exhilerating. This is an easy game to get into, to feel.

Overall, the game takes about a half-hour to figure out and beat with no help. It's a nice simple adventure and a fascinating story (and no, I had no hand in the creation of the game, and if I were being paid to advertise the game I would say so :) ).

The Jay is Games walkthrough isn't really necessary, since a functional walkthrough is available from the game itself (just click on the "help" button at the bottom of the window). Still, the community discussion is good, I wrote a few things myself.

Graphics & Sound: 4.5/5 (a bit sparse but that works for this story, well-rendered, and extra points given for the TV)
Gameplay: 4/5 (points taken off for the difficulty in figuring out how to get up at first)
Story: 5/5 (just plain beautiful)
Puzzles: 4/5 (the safe puzzle was too hard, and we could have had at least some hint with the suitcase, but the rest is excellent)

Overall: 4.5/5

Another 2 Lux Maps: Illusion & Pac-Lux

2007-03-05T17:26:00.000-06:00

I've done two more maps for Lux, the first of which is called "Illusion."

How I came up with Illusion is an interesting story.

When making "The Lantern," I had become intrigued by the idea of concentric rings moving in opposite directions, and decided to expand on that theme, simplifying it as well, making that the sole gimmick. I made the concentric rings accessible through any given space this time, meaning that you could move up and down the "shafts" of aligned spaces freely. This perhaps made it a little too easy to move around the board, since my whole point had been to provide an interesting gimmick for movement, but oh well, it was still a pretty cool idea.
Instead of having arrows in the overground image, I just made the countries arrow-shaped this time, to make it easier to remember which ring went in which direction.

As for the theme, that was real fun. I opened up Adobe Illustrator and filled a large square with the gray pyramids pattern available in the swatch panel. I then converted that file to Photoshop format, opened it up, and adjusted the size of the canvas a little so the square edges of the photoshop image would align perfectly with the edges of a large square filled with square pyramids (align the edges).
I then duplicated that layer to make two squares full of pyramids. On the top one, I used the "Polar Coordinates" filter and selected the "rectangular to polar" option to make an even circle of pyramids, and cut that circle out with the circle marquee tool. I then applied a 50-pixel twirl to that layer to make a slight spiral.

Now for the fun part. I selected the gradient tool and armed it with the rainbow gradient, set the transparency to "color" and the layout to radial and gave that mess a nice rainbow hue. Then I set the transparency mode to "difference," selected another gradient, and went to town, laying out gradients again and again, one on top of the other, to make a beautiful rainbow pattern on the top layer. I used nearly every colorful gradient I had in the pallete, several gradient alignments, a few different transparency modes (mostly difference and overlay), and from a different, random location each time. I then fiddled with the brightness and contrast a little to bring out even more of the colors, and the circle was perfect, practically glittering with bright colors.
I then selected the bottom layer, the one that still had the square pyramids. I repeated the process, laying down gradient after gradient set to various transparency modes and from a different location each time, and then toying with the brightness and contrast to really bring out the colors. And there you have it, it looked unbelievable.

Now to make the map.

In the overground, I saved a copy, and in that copy I brought out the little arrangement of countries I'd laid out, selected them with the magic wand, and then deleted their shapes from the overground PNG to make holes for the countries. After that it was a simple matter of opening up the editor and drawing around the edges of those shapes, connecting the countries, and then going into the file using text edit and making the one-way connections, the same way I did on The Lantern, and I was good to go. I put the title and my name in the overground, but flipped the image to make it backwards (as part of the whole "illusion" motif).

My next map was a little different.

I had a feeling that to get the attention of the community I had to do something a little brazen. The obvious choice, of course, would be to take another established game and make a Lux map out of it (such as RickLionhart's "MonopoLuxy" and "Lux Invaders").
The first thing that came to mind was Pac-Man. It was simple, just make the dots larger and turn them into countries and make the corridors into paths. Oh, and make the big dots worth a bonus each and the ghosts worth a negative bonus. I also added a few dots in the middle corridors (where there aren't any dots in the original game for some reason) to make more paths, and I made the home of the Ghosts a country in itself.
Deciding where to put the Ghosts was a little tricky, but I figured since they were worth a negative bonus, it made sense to place them at intersections to make it harder to avoid them, to increase the strategy a little.
I at first drew the dots in the map editor with the "Create stock shapes" tool to make hexagons, but after a lot of trial-and-error I realized they'd be too small to click on that way, so I drew a bunch of squares by hand. Thankfully there were no one-way connections to deal with this time, so the connections were more straightforward.

For the theme, I downloaded a large Pac-Man wallpaper and copied and pasted some stuff for the overground image. I made it clear in the new theme how much each bonus was worth (this took some creative cutting and pasting of letters to make new words), and also copied some icons to make a lineup of bonus listings.

And here you have it, "Pac-Lux."

The Great Improvization

2007-03-01T21:59:00.000-06:00

Last weekend (forgive me for not posting this sooner) was the first performance of the new Hamlet workshop. I was playing Hamlet in the final scene (the duel), and Caryl was playing Laertes.

During the final scene, the blocking calls for me (Hamlet) to knock the fencing foil out of Laertes' hand after I get stabbed, and then step on the blade to stop him from picking it up, and then I hand my own foil to him and stab him with the one he just stabbed me with (I should probably change the pronouns, since the character is being played by a woman in this cast).

Anyway, during all the rehearsals, when I knocked the foil out of her hand it stayed onstage, not rolling off.

On performance night, all through the scene leading up to that incident I was nervous about the possibility of it rolling off stage and we wouldn't know what to do (it was only a workshop, but still, a performance is a performance). And lo and behold, when I knocked the foil out of her hand, sure enough it rolled offstage, down into the front row of the seats. I was petrified, and so was Caryl, but then the improv kicked in, and we leapt down into the front row after it. I stamped on the blade there, and we did the switching of the foils right there, less than two feet from the front row of seats. Then, we started to climb back onstage without a word, and I took Caryl by surprise, stabbing her with the foil (don't worry, the play says it's unbated but we at OSP still kept the button on) as she was climbing back onstage. She was surprised, and had to crawl back up before falling over (Laertes is poisoned, remember?), and I leapt back up and finished the play.

I think the audience might actually have believed we planned it that way as a sort of gimmick. They loved it, that was for sure

Lux: "The Lantern" (part 3 of 3)

2007-01-26T20:00:00.000-06:00

First, I wanted to create a theme for the map. Should it just be an abstract background with a lot of pretty colors, or would it actually have a setting?
Well, I'd kept the name "Lantern," and the image that brought to mind was the old-fashioned streetlamps that used to line our streets. That brought to mind wrought-iron and glass adornments, and a rough idea came to me: An old-fashioned streetlamp on an old stone bridge overlooking a small town that had resisted modern change, with a big modern city in the background, with all its lights and skyline.
My company's focus group committee (consisting of me and a ventriloquist's dummy with serious attitude) tossed around a few ideas (trust me, you don't wanna know), and I made my decision: The Lantern board would be played on a small wrought-iron and glass sculpture placed over that lantern.

Time to go to work. I considered using a photo of an actual streetlamp, but I looked up a few photos on the net and played with them for a while, and realized that using a real one would look too contrasty, too jarring. So I just made one using a mix of squares, picture frame shapes and photoshop filters. I put in a white background at 50% transparency to simulate glass around the lantern, and I airbrushed a big cloud of milky yellow emanating from the center (plus a Lens Flare render) to simulate some light coming from the candle at the center.
Now for the wrought-iron frame for the squares. Simulating a wrought-iron sculpture in photoshop is easy, you just trace the outline of whatever you want sculptured, type some Hoefler Text Ornaments (that loopy abstract font) around the edges of that and run the Photoshop "Emboss" filter on it, then just highlight the whole thing and paint 50% black to make it dark enough. I just traced the outlines of the squares and did that, placing it neatly over the lantern.
Now for the background.

For the bridge and the town below, I opened one of my desktop wallpapers (an image from Hayao Miyazaki's movie, "Kiki's Delivery Service," one of the greats), which shows a scene on a bridge overlooking the town.

I highlighted the skyline below and a bit of the bridge (a lot of people would use the "Extract" filter to cut out a large part like that, but the polygonal lasso is much more precise), and copied and pasted that onto the bottom of the background image behind the lantern and sculpture, and altered the shape a little to fill up a little more of the screen, to make the view of the town below, from a section of the bridge that was also in the rectangle I cut out.

For the big city's skyline, I opened up another desktop, one from the Perplex City website, and copied the image of that skyline. It was perfect, it had buildings ready-made and a very nice stylized tree line. All I had to do to make a nightline was highlight the "windows" (slightly lighter shade of gray) and paint them bright yellow, then select the rest of the buildings and adjust the brightness/contrast to turn them black. The brightness/contrast had the unintended side effect of creating a yellowish glow coming up from the bottom of the buildings, just like lights from cars creating an upward glow, it was very nice). Then I highlighted the trees and adjusted the brightness and saturation on them to make them brighter green.

Now, I needed something to fill up the space between the tops of the buildings from the anime wallpaper and the bottom of the cityscape from the Perplex City wallpaper. I looked through my "scrapyard" folder and found... A photo of a vacant lot that I'd used for another project a few years ago (NOTE TO ALL PHOTOSHOP ARTISTS: Always save your leftover source photos from past projects, they can come in so handy on later ones).

I played with the colors on that, turning part of it dark blue like a lake, and put that behind and between the two city images. It still looked a little choppy, so I whipped up a picket fence pattern (I made it wood-colored instead of a white picket fence for the sake of color), and laid that in between the "lake" and the trees.
That took care of the bottom 2/3 of the background. Now for the top part, the sky behind the cityscape. I considered making it black, but the cityscape wouldn't stand out then, so I made it a deep blue, as though the sun was just barely getting ready to rise. I dotted it with stars (just use the paint bucket with the transparency at "1% Dissolve" and then blow up a small section of that to make it bigger), and that was done.
Hmm, the top looked a little bare. I considered raising the height of the whole thing somewhat, but then I decided to have some foliage at the top of the screen, like a tree or ivy or something. I toyed with a few ideas, then I just drew a bunch of shapes with the "custom shapes" tool and overlapped them a few times, painted them green with various textures, and that was that.

After that it was ready, I just signed my name and the name of the piece in the corner and it was ready.

For the overground (something that you can use to overlap the shapes of the countries on a map), I decided to use the whole thing at 25% transparency, so you could see through the spaces on the board to simulate playing on glass. Plus I put some some arrows over the spaces to indicate which direction you can go on those spaces.
That's it. Enjoy.

NOTES ON THE PROJECT: Here's where I list a few things that I realize I could have done to get the job done much quicker, so I can remember to play to my strengths next time.

Part One: The Layout
a. I could have saved a lot of time on the first few rectangles by doing it in Illustrator instead of Photoshop, and then importing that file into Photoshop later. You see, Illustrator has an "align even" and "distribute even" button to do it automatically, whereas in Photoshop I had to do it by hand by zooming in. I still did it right, but I spent a lot of time on it that I could have used on other things.
b. I had to copy, paste, select, nudge, resize, rotate and so on quite a few times, a lot more times than I would have liked, in order to put all the rectangles in order. NOTE TO SELF: Before making any more maps, sit down and think about finding some way to lay out and place down more rectangles with fewer clicks.
c. With regards to the layout of the map itself, one thing I could have done was to make three concentric outer rings (instead of just two), with two of them going in one direction and the middle one in the other direction, and each space would connect to the adjacent space in the other ring, so you'd have more than six junctions between the rings, and more spaces on the board besides. But maybe that would have made it too easy to get around the board, which would leave too little room for strategy. I'll use multiple concentric rings on my next board.

Part Two: The Map
a. I realized too late that I could have saved a lot of time and wouldn't have had to use nearly as much precision in drawing and editing the country shapes if I had decided early on to use the background image as an overground PNG file. What I should have done was create country shapes bigger than I needed to, then create an overground file and laid the background art down at 25% transparency, then pasted the original template grid from part one onto another copy of the background and deleted those shapes, cutting the precise rectangles out of the background, and placing that one over the first at full transparency, which would have given the same effect with much more precise country shapes. From now on I'll do that.
b. With my text editing program where I adjusted the country's tags to make the one-way connections, I spent too much time figuring out a way to use the automatic find/replace all option without editing any parts besides the country tags. Still, I did work out a good system eventually. Still, I hope dustin includes the option to create one-way connections in the map editor itself in his next update to the game.

Part Three: The Background
a. When looking for a good photo of an actual lantern to doctor, I think I gave up a little too quickly. I was in a hurry since I was going through a slight family situation at the time, so I rushed myself.
b. I need to choose a different type of Lens Flare filter, it was too hard to see the shape on this one.

Other than that, I think I did pretty well.

Lux: "The Lantern" (part 2 of 3)

2007-01-26T19:59:00.000-06:00

(continued from part 1)

I opened up the map editor in Lux, loaded that JPEG as a background image, and got to work tracing the spaces on the map to make "countries." It was fairly easy. You can't zoom in on the Lux map editor, however, so I had to do some serious squinting to match the edges of the "countries" to the edges of the white exactly, but I just told myself, "it doesn't have to be perfect, Lux makes a thick border around the countries that I can't see now during the actual play, so nobody will notice if it's not completely exact," and I was okay. Still, once again, I did the best I could, making it finger-tight.
Now, to set the country connections. I just made it so you could travel between adjacent countries, simple as that. But of course I needed to make some one-way connections so you could only attack from the shafts towards the center.
Lux's coding does allow for one-way connections between countries, so that you can attack and move armies from country A to country B but not in the other direction), but you can't do that in the map editor. All you can do in the map editor is draw normal 2-way connections like in any Risk game. To make a one-way connection, you have to open the map's code as an actual text file, and edit the code by typing and deleting fragments of the code.
Fortunately, dustin and mbauer (the chief heads of the Lux community) posted instructions in the forums about how to do this, so that even a layman like me could figure it out. If you want country A to be able to attack country B but not vice versa, you just go to the "" tag of country B's code and delete the ID number of country A.
It still took a lot of typing and scrolling (the ID number of each country you make has nothing to do with where they actually are on the map), but I managed to make all 6 countries on each of the six flanks one-way streets towards the center.

Now to divide the countries up into continents.
I of course made each of the six flanks a separate continent (hold all 6 countries on one flank and you get a bonus added to your income), and then got to work dividing up the outer rings into continents. I decided to have the spaces in between the junctions with the middle ring and the shafts be the continents, they're easier to defend and you don't have to go through them to get to the shafts, which allows for more convenient troop build-up.

At first I made the Lantern a stand-alone, where once you were there you couldn't get out. But I realized that that wouldn't work, since there has to be a route, albeit a long one, from every country to every other country on the board, or else one person who has only one coutnry left can automatically lose the game since he can't go anywhere.
I had to think up some new ideas. I could have the Lantern attack one single square elsewhere on the board, but I wanted the board to be symmetrical six ways. I could have it attack every country on the map, but being able to attack every country on the map from a 30-income single country was just plain unfair. Then I realized that having a single country worth 20 income was kind of unfair as well.
So I scrapped the original "Storm the Lantern" idea, it was an unfeasible map. But I didn't want to waste the work I'd done so far, so I decided to do something else with this board. And that made me think of another idea. Inspired by RickLionheart's "Borg" map, in which the "systemwide buffer" at the top of the map can attack the first country in all ten continents, but holding it reduces your income to the lowest possible number (3), I made the Lantern able to attack every other country on the map, but set the income to minus 100, so it would reduce your income to the lowest number if you held it. I renamed the map, "The Lantern."

Well, the map was done. Time for the fun part: making the background theme art!
I went back to Photoshop and got to work.

Lux: "The Lantern" (part 1 of 3)

2007-01-26T19:56:00.000-06:00

I started playing Lux, an online Risk-style game by Sillysoft, a few months ago. It's a highly addictive game for several reasons, not the least of which is that you get to design your own maps and boards to play Risk games on. You can design a map and a background image.
So of course I had to show off my graphics skills.

I won't bore you with details of what Risk is or what Lux is. Want to learn more, go to http://www.sillysoft.net and look around. The game's only 25 bucks (and that's a one-time payment, there's no monthly fee or any such crap), I highly recommend it.

Okay, first off, I needed an idea of what to do for a map. I was mostly inspired by the innovative gameplay ideas of a veteran independent mapmaker named Rick Godman (AKA RickLionhart, designer of such great Lux maps as "Borg," "Monopoluxy," and my favorite map of all time, "Get Factored"), but I needed an original theme to work around. So I started browsing the Sillysoft forums and found a page where people could post map ideas that they couldn't do themselves. And found something that sounded promising. Someone had posted:

"Storm the Lantern - Picture a board a bit like Trivial Pursuit, with a centre continent (single country) - call it lantern - which can be attacked in one direction from 6 flanks. Each of these flanks should only allow attacking in single direction towards the centre. Maybe two rings instead of 1 to allow troop build up. Make the lantern worth a ridiculous high bonus (say 20) so that claiming it be a major factor in winning. Make the flanks worth a couple as well."

Well, it was an idea. I opened Photoshop and created a blank file, filling it with a simple colored background. I drew a white hexagon at the center, and then copied and pasted some white rectangles for a while to make a little Trivial Pursuit board with an extra outer ring, like the entry recommended. The rectangles themselves were plain white, since I'd be drawing over them in the background anyway. They were spaced apart precisely with just a little zooming in and measuring.
For the rectangles in the outer rings, I wanted more of a ring shape, to make the edge look a little more circular, so I decided to make the outer spaces quadrangles instead of rectangles.

To make the extra area line up, I drew a straight line from the exact center of the work out right across the inner corner of the rectangle, out beyond the outer corner. Then I just highlighted the vertical space between that line and the edge of the triangle, and filled that in with white, then repeated the process on the other side.

Then I just copied and pasted that in a ring around the six shafts towards the center. I put six of those special spaces down, one at the outer end of each shaft, then I copied and pasted that circle to rotate it to make some spaces in between those shafts. I found that by holding down the SHIFT key on my keyboard as I hand-rotated the copy of the circle, I was able to make a very nice ring without even having to type in a precise degree in the "rotation" box at the top once.
For the middle ring (I wanted one space in between the two rings, at the same place as the junction), I just copied the original inner ring and increased its size to 120% easily. Then for the outer ring of the board, I flattened the three six-space rings of the inner ring into one eighteen-space ring, and increased the size on that to 120% twice and that was done. I saved the file as a JPEG to make it loadable in the Lux map editor, and it was ready to go.

Time to make the map.

Perplex City card #219: "The Master Of Secrets"

2006-12-02T12:20:00.000-06:00

Yes, it's true, I have recently joined the hunt for the Receda Cube. Learn more at http://www.perplexcity.com .

One of the first cards I got was a black card (the cards are sorted by difficulty; black cards are the second-hardest cards, second only to silver). #219: The Master Of Secrets.

At first I thought it was a simple substitution cipher, where one hieroglyphic stands for A, another for B, and so on. But as I looked for patterns (pattern recognition is a must in deciphering codes, and it happens to be a specialty of mine), I realized that many of the glyphs don't repeat. With a sinking feeling of horror, I looked up some hieroglyphics and realized that it is no code; this card is a message actually written in hieroglyphics.

I suppose I should have guessed it earlier, since black cards are the second-most-difficult tier of cards, a substitution cipher would have been way too easy. On the other hand, all was not lost. The fact that the card is written in hieroglyphics actually gave me a few clues right off the bat. Namely, it told me that the card's solution has something to do with Egypt. It also told me that it probably had something to do with ancient Egypt in particular, since hieroglyphics haven't been used in over 1000 years (the current national language of Egypt is Arabic).

So, I set out to translate a message written in hieroglyphics. I do not happen to have easy access to the Rosetta Stone (yes, that's a joke), so the next best thing was to look online for a translator. This took a while, as most online translators are just used for translating English into hieroglyphics, not the other way around. What I found after a little more searching was an online excerpt from Gardiner's Grammar. Sir Alan Gardiner was a famous Egyptologist from Oxford who wrote a lot of books about hieroglyphics and what they mean, and thanks to the internet I was able to read a little of what he wrote, and after a few hours I finally managed to figure out a crude system of translation.
I hope I don't need to tell you that it wasn't easy. translating any language into another language raises issues of grammar and context, especially one that communicates entire words in single characters (I took three years of Japanese class, and I still need hiragana to translate from Japanese to English). But I will point out that it's not nearly as tough as Chinese.
Eventually I got a method figured out. It involved a complicated method of running a symbol through two programs, looking it up on a chart I'd written by hand, and then putting it through another program. It took over a minute to translate each character, and that wasn't counting the hour and a half I'd spent setting up the system.

The first line took the longest since I was still learning how to do it, but after several dozen minutes I managed to translate it as something resembling, "I am revered by the King"
The next line was a little quicker, and it came out as, "I carry the love of my father." I was scared for a moment that it might be referring to Jesus, but the Perplex City Puzzle Scribes didn't seem like the religious types from what I had heard.
The third line said either, "I nourished the ford bull," or "I was nourished BY the ford bull."
I couldn't quite figure out the fourth line no matter what I tried, but it said something like, "The multitude of scribes to me."
The fifth line was only a bit clearer: "Scribes of the old times of Egypt hand over to the mouth of Egypt"
Line six was a bit clearer: "I am the trustworthy scribe of his fingers,"
Line 7: "I am the green gardener of his finger"
And Line 8 was the easiest: "What is my name?" And it was the hardest as well.

What I first found when I looked up these lines was that they were remarkably similar to a section of text in an Egyption book, Urk IV, and they make reference to the Nile river. It made sense, given that the river makes the plants grow. So with a sigh of relief, I closed the programs, put the papers I'd written away, and entered that answer into the form, and got back... a negative. I tried different permutations, but got the same reply: "Sorry, that's not the answer."

It wasn't going to be that easy. I realized that there were more differences than the context from the text from Urk IV. The card wasn't talking about the Nile.

I rolled up my sleeves again, reopened the programs, got the papers back out, and got back to work. I had to start again from scratch now.
I was in no hurry, given that I had another 24 hours before I could try again (the Perplex City solve form has a safeguard to prevent random guessing: If you make three wrong guesses, it doesn't let you try again for 24 hours), but I still got down to work.
I wondered if the key was in the 4th line, the one I really couldn't translate. So I spent the next long while looking for that. It involved a lot of random searching and wild guessing, and puzzling over a reduntant word that appears in two different forms in the same line ("writing" and "written"), but eventually I managed to figure it out, it said: "I have written many books about the writings of ancient Egypt."
Ahah, it was a person, not a body of water or a natural phenomenon. And it was an Egyptologist, to boot.
In retrospect, that should have given me the answer right away, given which books I'd been reading to help me learn how to translate the hieroglyphics in the first place, but hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?
So I went about revamping the other lines, seeing if I'd missed anything the first time through. I reworked the system a little to accomodate what I knew it was referring to (I had to revise what I was looking for in the translations), and that was a royal pain in the ass, but eventually I sort of crushed it, and this time this is what I got.

"I am the one revered by the King,
I am the one beloved of my father,
I learned at the ford of the bull/ox,
I have written many books about the writings of ancient Egypt,
I made flourish the words of Egypt,
I made the plants and the trees grow,
I am a scribe whose fingers are excellent,
I am a gardener who is green of his finger,
What is my name?"

Okay, I was looking for a scribe, and a "gardener," and one who was "revered by the King."
I tried dictionaries and encyclopedias, but I wasn't quite sure where to start. Then, on a whim, I googled the whole mess, "Scribe," "ancient Egypt," "books," "gardener," and "King."
And found the guy whose works I had started with to get started on the translation: Sir Alan Gardiner.
That was just plain mean of the puzzle scribe (who the card said was some "guest architect" named Margaret Maitland), but it made perfect sense. Sir Alan Gardiner was a "gardener" (well, technically it was spelled a little differently), he was "revered" by the King (being knighted, after all), he wrote many books on the writings of ancient Egypt (several of which I myself had been reading over the last few hours), and the third line...
The third line was just plain horrible. "I learned at the ford of the bull/ox." The ford of the ox. Ox's ford? OXFORD! He was educated at Oxford. See what I mean?

Well, the end is a bit anticlimactic. I just waited out the clock, punched in "Sir Alan Gardiner" into the solution line, and got the 55 points.
That's 12 cards down, 750,000 to go. See ya there.

Project Funeral

2006-10-18T23:10:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I had to design some T-shirts for a funeral.
A friend of mine told my mom that his cousin had been killed in a car crash. And they asked me, because I was a graphic designer, to design some T-shirts for the funeral.

This is the subject, Frank Carruthers. Arion and his pals gave me three photos they downloaded off his yahoo gallery.

Now, the first part of designing any topical pictures is deciding what information to include. With a memorial picture, you should probably include the birthdate and deathdate (just in case anyone doesn't know what's going on). Well, that was actually rather convenient, since the digital camera these photos were taken on is one of the dorky kinds that automatically inserts a date stamp onto the photos when they are uploaded.

...like this.

This date stamp is usually annoying, but today it worked to my advantage. All I had to do was change the date so it would read the death date, then add an identical one listing the birth date.
Now, since the stamp was actually part of the image, and not just a text file, the altering was a bit tough to do. First off, I had to erase the existing month and day stamp on there. This meant highlighting a small area of his shirt right above where the date was printed, copying it, and then pasting it down over the offeding numbers on the date stamp.

Now you see it, now you don't.

Once that was done, I had to put in new numbers, which was the only realy hard part since I couldn't tell just by looking what font it was, and I wanted it to match. I could have just airbrushed over the entire stamp and put in new numbers, but efficiency is my watchword, and it would be a shame to waste the stamp on the one occasion in ten million in which part of it may prove useful. So, after a little trial and error with a few thin sans sarif fonts, I located it, scaled the size and entered in some new numbers, namely the date of the accident.
Then I copied it and placed a new number right beside it, this one his birthdate (Arion was kind enough to supply me with that). And I put a little "~" between them to symbolize that time had passed between the two dates.

Now, to make them stand out more, I had to change the color to indigo, a color that stands out more than the pale lemony yellow of the stamp, and surround it with a bright yellow border instead.

Here's a little tip: when contrasting with yellow, it's best to use indigo, not purple.
Purple, the direct complement to yellow (meaning the opposite color on the color wheel) has the highest contrast with yellow, so in theory it should stand out more, but it doesn't. You see, the sun is yellow, so yellow sunlight refracted into our corneas skews our perception of colors, causing us to see purple instead of blue as one of the primary colors. Now here's a little secret they don't teach you in art school: complementary colors do not work well together. Go with a split complement (colors adjacent to the opposite color), which in this case means either red or indigo.

Now that the borders were completed, it was time for a message. Now this is the part that requires the least nitpicking and the most creativity. Especially since I had to work with input on this. A short poem (it'd have to be pretty short to fit on a T-shirt)? Or something simpler?
Eventually, Arion's friends and I agreed to keep it simple, just a simple, "WE LOVE YOU, FRANK."

Since two of the three pictures had Frank's face in the center (not full-body shots), there was space above his head in the photo. So it made sense to put the message above him.

Like that.

Now, I had to arc the text to make it look more organic (text in a straight line on a picture looks too clinical), and do the same other stuff with a border (but since it was a larger text, I had to make it a larger border), and that was done. After that all I had to do was put my company logo in the corner of each pic (I did feel a pang of guilt about advertizing this, but I had to take a little credit for helping out, besides I didn't make it too prominent), and it was just that simple.

Two of the photos were done with the same format.

But the third photo was a sideways shot.

This made it a little tougher, since there was so little width and so much height. The date thing was done the same way, but there wasn't enough room across the top for the same message to fit.

However, there was plenty of space along the right side of the photo, which opened up the possibility of doing something there.

By clipping the word "Frank" off the message on top I scaled that message down enough to make it fit on the top of the picture, and by putting it on the side vertically I did something interesting with that space, and the vertical format drew the eye onto the name.

After that, my job was done, and it was onto the business part, getting it printed onto the T-shirts themselves.

Well, that's my part of the story. Hope you liked it.

Congested Shakespeare: "Thoo be ord dot thoo be..."

2006-09-19T22:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't been to acting school (which is probably one of the reasons that I'm good at it), but here's one lesson that I doubt they cover: "How to do Shakespeare during allergy season."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's the backstory.
On Monday night at the Shakespeare Circle, we began the blocking for the Fall workshop.
The Shakespeare Circle is a subprogram of Young Shakespeare Players, put together for the family and friends of the kids, and the tech crew supporting Richard DiPrima (needless to say, the Adult Circle quickly gained the nickname, "Old Shakespeare Players," OSP for short). I joined the circle in Fall 2005 for their first full-length play, Twelfth Night. And I was a hit, but that's another story.
Now, the OSP is doing a workshop, in this case a series of important scenes from Hamlet. And on Monday night, we began blocking (that's a sort of preliminary rehearsing where we first receive our stage directions).

And, like I said, this is allergy season for me. For the better part of Monday evening, I was getting literally no air through my sinus passages, and the air flowing through my throat was punctuated by a hacking cough, so when we began the blocking for the first few scenes of the workshop, I had some interesting interpretations of Shakespeare's prose. Here are a few brief samples of my new and improved dialogue:

From the opening scene, in which I played Horatio:

(what Horatio's supposed to say: "Friends to this ground.")
what I said: "Fdeds tsoo dis growd"

(Horatio's line: "What art thou that ursurp'st this time of night, together with that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Denmark did sometimes march? By heaven I charge thee, speak!")
what I said: "Wha ard dou dat ahshap's dis tibe of dite, tagida wits dats fah ad wahlike fobe id twitch da bajesty o bahwied Dedbark dad subtigs botch? Bah hebbed I chage dee, tpeek!

(Horatio's line: "Before my God, I might not this believe without the sensible and true avouch of my own eyes."
what I said: "Befoh by Gah, I bite dot dits bewiebe witsout da setsable ad twue aboush af by owd eyez."

Later, I played Marcellus, and had some pretty unique interpretations of his lines as well. Let's examine a few, shall we?

(Marcellus' line: "Look, with what courteous action it waves you to a more removed ground: but do not go with it!")
what I said: "Wook, wit vat curtias acshah ih wabes ya tsu a borra reboothad gwowd, baht too dot gah wits at!"

and of course, let's see how I interpreted Marcellus' most famous line: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
what I said: "Sahbdig is rotd id da stayts af Debach."

(I can just hear Tom Servo's voice commenting on my delivery: "Ah, Garrison Keillor.")

Online Game Review: "Kafkamêsto"

2006-09-09T20:01:00.000-05:00

A video game based on the works of Franz Kafka (no, I'm not kidding).

And before you scream in terror and run away, let me tell you a few details.

PLAY THE GAME AT: http://www.abc.net.au/gameon/kafkamesto/

REVIEW:
The game was first created for Gameon.com, an Australian-based website that brought together a bunch of up-and-coming flash animators to make up ten online games to boost interest in the digital gaming industry in Australia. Smoking Gun Productions was one of the ten groups recruited, and what they came up with was a cerebral game called Kafkamêsto.
In the game, you play someone who wakes up one morning in a small apartment in Prague, in the mid-winter of 1922, with no memory of who you are or how you got there, and you must wander around the city (in a point-and-click environment), collecting clues and trying to figure out who you are and what you're supposed to do.

I found this game while exploring the site for another game, "Chasm" (but that's another story), and having some knowledge of Kafka, I figured that this would probably be pretty funny. And it was, in its own way, but it also stuck remarkably close to Kafka's tones and themes.
If you know anything of the works of Kafka, you've probably already guessed that that means that it's confusing and morbid. And you'd be right.

The game was apparrently inspired by a quote in a letter Kafka wrote to Max Brod in October of 1922:
“…and in that recurring dream, I found myself trapped in some sort of gigantic game of which I was unfamiliar with the rules; lost in a labyrinthine town of dark and damp, criss-crossing streets, ambiguous characters of uncertain authority having no idea of why I was there nor what I had to do, and where the first sign of the beginning of understanding was the wish to die.”

I recognized the references to two Kafka stories right away, "The Castle" and "The Trial." The references to "Mr. Josef K," and the two men in dark suits who claim that you have committed some crime of which you are unaware.
However, I then noticed that the game takes place in Prague, in winter of 1922. 1922 was when he wrote that letter, and Prague was the place of Kafka's birth. And as I wandered around the game, I realized that the game was a pastiche of Kafka's own LIFE, just as much as his works.

You can tell from the presentation on Gameon's page that the folks at Smoking Gun Productions had tremendous fun making it. When the site's creators interviewed them, they wrote down some quotes from Kafka instead of answering the questions.
In fact, they even made up a fictitious scholar, Emeritus Professor Janusz Kazmierczak, and printed a letter they had written for him in which "he" bashes the game and decries its attempts to emulate the feel of Kafka (yes, Professor Kazmierczak is NOT a real person. I looked it up).
Unfortunately, this humor, while appropriate and witty, came at the expense of actually saying anything about the game. And since the game was so confusing, then for the better part of a day, I was thoroughly convinced that there was literally no way to get anything important done in the game, that it was just a lot of wandering around town aimlessly, looking for answers to no riddles (which would really be in sync with the overarching themes of Kafka's work).

But then I Googled the game's title just to be sure, and found http://jayisgames.com/archives/2005/11/kafkamesto.php , an archived thread at jayisgames forum, and found that there is a way to achieve an end to the game. In fact, several endings, and though none of them is entirely happy (Kafka didn't go in much for happiness), there is one possible end that is slightly more sweet than bitter.
Of course, other endings include having your romantic rival tattoo you to death with an industrial drill (and it's a good sign that this ending is just as hard to achieve as the happy one) and literally dying of old age waiting for the law (now THAT'S a Kafka-esque ending), or, my favorite of the unhappy endings, sitting on a chair in the doctor's office and suddenly turning into a cockroach (the obligatory reference to "The Metamorphosis," the most famous of Kafka's works).

Superb graphics, by the way. The backgrounds are almost photographic, though a bit choppy when moving, and the characters are surprisingly well-animated (without being too over-the-top). I was very surprised to learn from the gallery that the backgrounds were entirely rendered on computer from scratch, I was almost sure that at least a few of them were photographs.

Overall, I like the game a lot, although it's probably not to everyone's tastes. I like it partially because it was just so funny to see a video game based on the works of Kafka (really, how ridiculous an idea is it?), and because they managed to somehow stay true, to some degree, to Kafka's themes of surreal futility.
Obviously you need the walkthrough on jayisgames.com to get anywhere, but even if you only want a few hints without having the entire path laid out for you, the forum does that too, since jayisgames.com has a special feature on its forums that puts each spoiler in a separate tab, so you have to click on special tabs to read each post fully. You can scroll down the entire thread and not get any spoilers you don't specifically want to.
Anyway, this game won't be to everyone's tastes (especially since there isn't a perfect ending, although there is a pretty happy one), but I highly recommend it if you want to waste some time with a surreal experience.

DETAILS

Development: Smoking Gun Productions

Shane McNeil, writer/producer
Kristian Moliere, producer
Nahum Zierch, designer/animator
Trevor Boyle, programmer/developer

OVERALL:
The Game Itself: 4.75/5
Smoking Gun's presentation of the game at Gameon: 4.5/5
Jayisgames.com walkthrough: 5/5