(Genkhed from faxcelestis)

I have real trouble asking for money for doing something I enjoy.
I think the internet has gotten to me.

In Other Words: recently I've been doing contract work before I've even seen a contract.

Stardust: great movie, or the greatest movie?
Justin called it the new Princess Bride, and I must heartily agree.
Though there was a significant lack of ROUSes.

It is painfully obvious that this film was written by a television writer. The movie is like a cock-tease from a one-armed hermaphroditic midget with four missing teeth.*

* That is, it's not very arousing unless you have that very particular fetish, and even then it only gives you less than half the experience. Nothing resolves, a lot of the time in the movie is wasted on plot and character introductions that don't even hold any significance until a future movie which, again, you'll only be able to appreciate if you happen to already know everything that's going on by having watched the entire series which they're attempting to recreate through this new medium with which they clearly have little experience.

I think the final line of the movie (which at least understands itself well enough to know that nobody will watch the next one unless they can be convinced by tantalizing previews) best sums up my impression of it:
"Ah, and there will be plenty of fan service!"

Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool (KB892130)
1.1 MB , less than 1 minute
The Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool enables you to verify that your copy of Microsoft Windows is genuine. The tool validates your Windows installation by checking Windows Product Identification and Product Activation status.

... so, let me get this straight. I need a program so that I can verify that my copy of Windows is genuine? I THINK I KNOW IF MY COPY OF WINDOWS IS GENUINE THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Also why do I have to download, install, and run a new version of this thing just about every single time I connect to Microsoft Update?

I think it's neat that Trillian Astra tags the current time onto the default away message ("Away since 11:41 AM"), so often when I set my away status, all I replace is the word "Away".

I'm going down to Planned Parenthood today for my biannual STD screening, so my current away message is "Being Safe since 11:41 AM"

I lol'd.

BREAKING NEWS (aka unimportant stuff moved to the bottom of this post)

IRON SKY RELEASED A TEASER TRAILER TODAY

WATCH IT BITCHES. WATCH IT AND FEAR!



I just listened to the lyrics in Ayreon's "Across the Rainbow Bridge" for the first time, and was struck with a bolt of inspiration. I want to make a machinima music video of this song in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

If you know the game and the song, it will make absolute sense to you why.

So, I decided to pull an all-nighter and go the whole seven yards* (I'm still not dealing with vacuuming yets), washing my bedcovers and schtuff as well... and I was cleaning out my wallet for good measure and it has a zippered pocket in the divider between the two cash pockets, which I must not have opened in a couple years because lo and behold sitting inside was a check my mom gave me for textbooks in January 2006, back before I knew how to cash checks. A pleasant surprise to discover, though I'll certainly ask before depositing it (is there a limit to how long a check can go between written date and cash date?) as my parents are in a different financial situation now, and I'm not quite -starved- for cash (though a little extra is always handy).

In other news, I had a lot more stuff to pack than I originally considered. Damn I wish I didn't have to drag my clothes back and forth from Worcester to San Jose every time I moved. Ah well, should only be four more times I'll have to before I can hopefully start to afford to maintain two wardrobes.

School's been out for five days now, and the most productive thing I've mustered is downloading and listening to ten hours of music from Cowboy Bebop.

( Emo Alert )

See you Tuesday, California.

SO MANY ARGS!

Disclaimer: In this post, I am not telling the stories, I am reviewing them.



WPI Oceanography Club vs. Havet Research:

Story: 7/10 - Some pretty nice twists, reasonable character development, but minus points for the entire thing happening remotely, which totally failed to engage me personally. It was a very good story... for an episode of a TV show.

Puzzles: 4/10 - The puzzles meshed very well with the story, but they depended too heavily on succesful completion of previous puzzles—I was unable to join in the puzzle solving after missing a day because I wasn't familiar with the strategies. Also minus points because just about every single puzzle was taken more-or-less directly from the MYST series.

Characters: 6/10 - I didn't really follow each member of the team individually, but the way they interacted on the forums definitely convinced me of their realness. I might have liked to have had more background on them: blogs, bios, team roles, etc., (especially if it would have helped me judge their characterizations and motives better—maybe the ARG would have been solvable by a method other than following the rails provided us by the Atlantean prophesy), but it wasn't really necessary with the game as it ran. I appreciated the establishment of Carl's blog, but he really didn't seem like much of a character after he introduced us to Havet. For that matter, none of the characters felt particularly intelligent when it came to solving puzzles—in dire straits, they would sooner MacGuyver a mechanism for solving a problem, complete with remote web-based flash simulation (without either of their tech guys, by this time) than solve the problem themselves?

Multimedia: 3/10 - The entire game consisted of one blog, one website and a forum. I'm not going to count the facebook group because it really didn't have any purpose other than to serve as a surrogate forum. The one blog didn't really have anything to do with the actual game; it and the website served only really as a portal to the forums, where the entirety of the game took place. The "live event" to kick off the game is hardly worth mentioning, as it consisted of basically a goose chase around campus for no reason whatsoever, with no actual personal interaction. The only really redeeming qualities of the multimedia were the rather high quality flash applets, though they even had the drawback of making the ARG feel even more like a videogame (MYST, specifically).

Experience: 4/10 - It was neat to watch the story unfold, but that's all I really felt like I was doing. There wasn't much I could do to influence the story other than (were I able to solve the puzzles myself) progress it along its linear path. It felt very much like a game on rails. Moreover, there was quite a "big brother" effect as soon as we began to suspect the villain might be one of the members of the expedition. The forums were no longer a safe place to communicate, and the facebook group was only moderately accessible. Moreover, I got the impression that more communication was taking place privately between players on a meta level (perhaps during classtime, of which I was not a part), since there was a lot of information missing from all of the central communication hubs. There was also a distinct disconnect between the players and the story—the players were supposedly prospective members of a "WPI Oceanography Club", and the story taking place among members of a professional archaeological dig. Not only did this distinct thematic disconnect damage my immersion, but it also discouraged me from participating, since the initial contact between the two groups went a little something like this:
Oceanography Club: "Hai giuse, wats up? I'm from the Baby Seal Club at WPI!"
Havet: "Um... excuse me? Who the hell are you and what are you doing on our forums? This is a professional research group. Please leave us alone kthxbai."

WPI Mystery Club vs. Carpothecarium:

Story: 3/10 - Can you spell "clusterfuck"? Who the hell are the Renegade Sentinels? Why the hell does Carter want to poison the entire city of Worcester? Who was his second accomplice, and, for that matter, who was his first accomplice? How did Carter find Andrew (and why did he stop there while we continued to investigate him on the forums)? What did the manuscript have to do with anything?

Puzzles: 4/10 - The puzzles were neat, but didn't seem to tie in with the story. They also had the problem that many of them (particularly the Carpothecarium promotion puzzles) depended entirely on sequential completion. I got stuck on one puzzle, and couldn't proceed to the next ones (which were being posted on the forums, and I could actually -solve) because my progress was linked to a user account.

Characters: 3/10 - Andrew didn't really exist. The Renegade Sentinels were basically a big Wizard of Oz trick and there's no looking behind that curtain. Carter and Adolfo had some neat development in the eMails, but nothing really gave us any clue toward Carter's motives. His accomplices existed even less than Andrew did, and we still don't have any closure on the characters (for all we know, RS is still holding seige on Carter).

Multimedia: 8/10 - The centralized forums were a very good thing, especially that their purpose was to solve mysteries, and that's exactly what they were used for. It was very good to have full websites for the Carpothecarium and Adolfo's stuff. The use of eMail was good except that it excluded the players who did not receive the eMails (see Puzzles). External websites were also referenced (good use of already existing content) such as Chess.com and Flickr. The live chat was a good idea, though I hear from people who actually participated it was rather useless. The on-campus scavenger hunt was pretty awesome but entirely gratuitous—I saw no logical reason for it nor for its location at WPI. However, pay phone stakeouts are a tried and true method and it worked very well for the actual game (even though it really confused the story).

Experience: 8/10 - This game kept me on my toes. There was always something for me to do as a player, and with the exception of the sequential puzzles on the Carpothecarium, it was always something I -could- do (and even in that one case, players were posting the puzzles on the fora and I could solve them through that). I very much enjoyed staying up and helping with the Midnight Raid, and also running around campus solving puzzles in the scavenger hunt. I really felt like a member of the Scooby Squad as I did everything, which was very immersive, even though even after solving it, the mystery itself still remains a mystery.

Disclaimer: This is not emoness, just creativity ; )

The difference quotient of your expression converges to mine.
This problem would be so trivial if it didn't depend on time.
But since we're constrained to this interval, there's just one thing to do.
In order to solve our integral, I'll need a substitution of you.

I believe in Quantum Immortality.

I have for many years, but never until now realized that my belief had a name.
It is for this reason that I don't really fear death myself, even though I may worry about other people.
Likewise, I do not fear pain. It is an inevitable consequence of life, and at the very least it is a signal that I am not yet dead.

2-3: Mathematical Optimization
3-4: Lifeguarding II
4-5: Combinatorics

6:30-(7)-8: Glee Club
7-9: IMGD Master Class

l33t.

I look forward to this sort of solid schedule.
On the downside, I'm technically underloading since I decided to cut Risk Theory, and almost all the P.E. classes are either full, waitlisted, or at conflicting times. Maybe there's some way I can get P.E. credit out of New Voices...

Inspired by reichmarshall's interpretation on Jump-Swing from Hell, I decided to compose an a cappella arrangement of Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse". Here's a render of the MIDI file so far (just the more popular "Powerhouse B" right now—I may add part A, or I might just extend this one). Hopefully I'll be singing this with the Audiophiles sometime in the near future.

( LJ-Cut because I can't for the life of me figure out how to turn auto-play off on VOX embeds )
Powerhouse from http://cakoluchiam.vox.com/

In other Audiophiles news, our arrangement of Katamari is shaping up better than we had hoped, and we may yet have it to performance quality for this Friday's show. Also, I managed to weasel my way into part of the duet lead : D

I've become frustrated with the IMGD (Interactive Media and Game Development) major at WPI of late. My problem with it is that despite all its high boasts of doing more than just video games, when it comes down to it, that's all they're really preparing you for. If you're an artistic IMGD major, you're being trained to work in a render farm. If you're a technical IMGD major, you're being trained to work in a code mine.

I recently realized that I was neither a visual artist nor a programmer. But I think I've decided that it's more than that. I'm not even an artist at all. I don't have a message I want to convey to the public through a work. I just want to improve the world. On the plus side, it tells me I chose my school wisely; Worcester Polytechnic Institute is, by name and creed, an engineering school. It's made for people like me who want to invent, not just create.

The problem is, that's not where IMGD is pushing me. The IMGD program at WPI is pushing toward the creation of content, rather than invention. I would argue that the degree currently has so little to do with the science behind gaming or interactive media that it might be more appropriate as a Bachelor of Arts program.

So I decided that it's not the path I want. I talked to a few professors about doing independent study in music as applied to interactive media and game development, in order to substitute the advanced IMGD courses required for the major, and they gave me the opportunity. In spirit with my idea about engineering the medium rather than being an artist, I proposed the following two concepts:

( Interactive Media: Music in Games, with project application: design an interface to connect a game engine to a dynamic music engine )

( Interactive Media: Music and Synaesthesia, with project application: design a dynamic visualization engine for music )

Unfortunately, I did not explain as above why exactly I wanted to move my study away from mainstream video game content creation, because at the time I did not quite understand why my ideas were so important to me. The professors replied with suggestions that I revise and instead for the first ISP, create the score and sound design for a video game using an existing game engine, and for the second ISP, to study specifically in the game environment the relationships between sound and visuals.

The second one is not very different from my original proposal, but the first one is back on the content-priority track that I'm trying to avoid as an engineer. I really don't think I can succeed as an artist in an artistic field, which is what that first revision would require me to do.

I need to convince my professors that my original ideas are just as applicable to the field of Interactive Media and Game Development as their revisions. So I wrote up a reply. It's about four in the morning right now, so I'm not quite sure how intelligible or intelligent it is, so I think I'll wait 'til tomorrow to send it off, but I'd appreciate some feedback if any of you wouldn't mind reading through it.

Professors,

First of all, thank you for giving such prompt response and for the constructive feedback. Your suggestions do sound like valuable study for a video game developer. However, I would like to defend my original suggestions as a student of Interactive Media and Game Development.

Both of your suggestions focus on the video game aspect of IMGD, however, I have studied games for three years now, and I think it's time I started getting into the Interactive Media aspect of the major. Yes, there is a lot that can be learned in that field from games, as I noted in both my proposals, but my interest in IMGD doesn't lie in the mainstream video game market. I don't want to hone my skills at working in a code mine or a render farm for a company that's going to keep churning out the same games we've been playing since 1987 with updated graphics, slightly more intelligent opponents, and perhaps better social networking. I don't even want to tell stories in new media. What I want to do with a degree in Interactive Media and Game Development is to develop more intelligent tools for the people who do want to do those things. I want to study Interactive Media.

When it comes to music, game engines like C4 and Unreal (I haven't used Torque yet) give very few options to developers. When sounds have to be pre-rendered to wave formats, there aren't really any efficient ways to for example conduct an orchestra in real-time. MIDI format is a great way to allow music to be conducted or even composed dynamically, but neither of these engines (and I would wager very few other mainstream engines) include MIDI controllers, and it would be very difficult to find a MIDI controller that one could also use to build games.

In order to have games with truly interactive music, a new interface is required. This interface would represent the interactivity between a game engine and a music engine. This is the sort of interactive media I want to study. What is done with that medium is certainly important to its design and development, but when it comes down to it, without the medium, there can be no message.

I am not an artist. I do not have a particular message I want to send.
I am an artistic engineer, and I want to make it possible for the artists to send their message.

-Joseph

p.s. Another problem I'm facing with this is that I need to talk to two sets of professors: those who would advise me on the ISP, and those who would judge whether the ISP is worthy of advanced IMGD credit. So far I have only heard from potential advisors, and their suggestions seem largely to do with making sure the ISP would fit the requirements for credit. So while this message is in reply to my potential advisors' suggestions, who I really need to read it are the judges.

p.p.s. After some thought and discussion with a couple friends, I think what I need to do is scrap this eMail, send a different reply which would instead clarify that I am asking whether the professors would be interested in advising such a project, regardless of its credit type, and then write an entirely different essay to the judges, defending my propositions' validity for credit.

p.p.p.s. MAN it feels good (to be a gangsta') to be putting into words all the self-discovery I've been doing over the past several months. I just hope it helps me get somewhere and do something with my life.

Dream One: LOST
The basic premise of this dream was that The Island in LOST was a parallel reality to our world, in which if you elevated yourself fifteen feet up on the island, gravity would reverse itself and you would be pulled straight up onto the ground in the real world. The reason few people reach the island coming back is because the gravitational border is much higher in the real world. Gods even know how boats could get there. Anyhow, this dream, while vivid, was lost to the others.

Dream Two: Hell
Somehow, I got sent to this apartment with a ton of people. The apartment was ruled over by a great demon, who demanded offerings of fruit from each of his subjects. We all blindly obliged, because of course who is to say no to a giant flaming devil with horns bigger than your entire body? There was a factory with conveyor belts the fruit went down, into great ovens and lava pits.

The people at this apartment, however, got along pretty well, that is, until they realized there was another apartment available down the street. At this point we realized that these were not just ordinary apartments, but lodges in the middle of snowy mountains, with nothing else in sight. All the men moved into one lodge and all the women moved into another lodge, and we began to war.

The physical battles consisted mostly of snowball fights, but each house also formed governments, which passed legislation to support our apartheid. Nonetheless, we all gave offerings to the same demon-god. Now, yes, his stature as god was ordained primarily by our fear, but his rule seemed benevolent enough. He supported our house and often gave us gifts and blessings.

At some point, however, I realized that this place was indeed hell, and I started to recognize the faces of the people around me. None of us were particularly high sinners in life, just ordinary Joes. And then I realized the face of our demon overlord. It was none other than Adolf Hitler himself.

I began a campaign to unite the nations in rebellion against our common ruler. It did not take well at first. There were simple protests wherein groups of people would refuse their fruit offerings, and would be punished accordingly with starvation and burns, as you would expect from a demon overlord in hell, but eventually it began to be effective, and at that point this story ceased to interest me and I moved on to another dream.

Dream Three: Problem Solving
For some reason I never noticed that the sky around my school was always black.

I had a class at an outdoor school, you know, the kind where classrooms open up right onto the sidewalks. The class seemed to be some sort of problem solving, because when I got the syllabus, it described several final projects which involved first coming up with tasks of great difficulty on account of oppositional forces, and overcoming those forces via lateral thinking. One such suggestion was to "play the devil's advocate" (or perhaps it was "play the part of an enemy"), and, basically, through manipulation of other people, get something done that normally would not happen.

I had no idea what I was going to do, but before I could even figure out what I was going to do, a pair of students was out of the room and already working on their final project. One of them leapt from the second-story and twisted his ankle. Clearly this was not enough for him, as he then proceeded to climb to the top of the building (which was of course several stories high now) and leap from there. He landed with a crunch just outside the classroom window, clearly breaking several bones.

I ran toward the classroom phone to dial 911, but the cord was already cut. I ran outside and toward the nearest pay phone, but as soon as my hand reached out for the receiver, the box burst into flame. I ran toward a blue-light phone, but it did the same thing. Every phone I could reach would spontaneously combust before I could touch it. Frightened, I looked around, and there was panick everywhere. Then I saw the girl from my class, holding a dial and a button, laughing as she pressed the button and another phone burst into flame.

Dream A Half: Housing
Basically, people were looking for housing for next year. Particularly Nick and Moe (though separately—it's still weird to realize that). I offered that there was a vacancy in my apartment since the Hitler demon incident, but they did not accept.

At this point I realized I'd been hitting the snooze button for an hour and a half and decided to wake up.

I am currently running what is quite possibly the world's most inefficient code.

I didn't even bother to consider execution speed when I was writing it since all I really care about is whether it gets me correct answers (which it does, thank you very much). Basically, I'm building tables which grow from the front, comprised of vectors which also grow from the front, inside of multiple while loops, then only after those tables of exponential size are created and held in memory, stripping those tables down to the only four to eight values which are actually applicable, averaging them, and getting a single discrete value.

This process is done five times. EACH EXECUTION. I'm executing this code for four different values of h, which decrease by factors of ten (growing the length of my vectors by a factor of ten each time). Then that code is executed for each of seven different values of k, which decrease by factors of 0.5 to 0.2 (growing the width of my tables by a factor of two to five each time).

I started this code running about half an hour ago, and am currently executing the table with the sixth value of k (=0.0025), on row with the fourth value of h (=0.0001)

This could take a while.

I wonder if there's anything good on TV.

( p.s. here's the code that I'm running 4*7=28 times—not included are the functions F which are just simple one-pass functions of a couple variables )

p.p.s. not sure if I mentioned, but you can probably notice by the code that instead of writing out a function to handle the Runge-Kutta method in each problem, I just copied and pasted the Runge-Kutta method five times and then tweaked the values that differed.
p.p.p.s. thank god this is a math class and not a programming class or I would be so flunked I'd be dropped back to remedial remediation

I am considering creating a metric space of tasks, with a magnitude of any task defined as the difficulty of the task, and the distance between any two tasks being some combination (probably a linear average) of the difficulty of reaching completion of the second task having successfully completed the first, and the difficulty reaching completion of the first having successfully completed the second.

If any given task is successfully completed, the difficulty of reaching completion of that task is zero. Thus, the distance between any task and itself is zero. If completion of a task would require the completion of another task (for example, walking a mile first requires you to walk half a mile), the difficulty of reaching completion of that second task having completed the first task is said to be zero. If completion of a task would not necessarily require the completion of another task (for example, getting fully dressed in the morning does not necessarily require you to tie shoelaces—what if you wear sandals?), the difficulty of reaching completion of that second task having completed the first task is said to be positive.

The difficulty of completing any task at all (the magnitude of the task) shall be positive—tasks with magnitudes of less than one are those that would be considered "easy" and those with magnitudes of greater than one shall be considered "hard" or "difficult". Tasks with magnitudes of one shall be considered "reasonable".

Most tasks will be linearly independent to several degrees, and I am going to avoid defining bases or even dimension of this space for now, and I conjecture that it is a practically infinite-dimensioned set for any human intents or purposes.

I have not yet determined an adequate method of addition, multiplication, or inversion of tasks, so this space isn't necessarily a vector space.

Now what to do with this...?

Questionable Content right now is full-up with sexy man.

That is all.

I haven't slept in 40 hours and I have to be up in 6 hours to go to Hartford to sing in the choir with Professor Bianchi's Virtual Orchestra.

Hurray!