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Andrus

August 20, 2009 /

Kara’s Dad, Robert, along with her brother-in-law Ty, made a biographical documentary last year about the late illusionist Jerry Andrus. It’s a really, really good movie, unimpeded by the title Andrus: The Man, the Mind & the Magic. In particular, I found the breakdown of some of his optical illusions fascinating, and the close-up magic he demonstrates is unbelievable; one of the most interesting things about Andrus was that he used both to provoke skepticism and critical thinking from his audience, rather than to cultivate an aura of mystique.

If you’re in Oregon, you can watch an hour-long cut of the movie at 10 pm tonight on OPB’s Oregon Lens. I recommend that you do!

Yes, I realize Proserpina’s name blocks several other links. What do you expect from her?

August 19, 2009 /

I just completed a personal obsession that’s been occupying a few minutes of my time every day for the last several months: every Anacrusis story is now tagged with the names of each character who appears in it, which means you can see a much more accurate cloud of every name I’ve ever used.

The ratio of effort to payoff on this project was not high, but at least I’ve shut up one of my own tiny nagging voices, and brought the site up to this-was-cool-in-2006 standards. It had the side effect of cleaning up all my old crappy markup code from 2003 to 2007, which should help things go smoothly when Dreamhost inevitably decides WordPress is too resource-expensive and makes me downgrade to flat text files.

I am not a fast reader

August 15, 2009 /

Time it took me to read A Deepness in the Sky: about a year.

Time it took me to realize that the plot is an endorsement of free-market capitalism to an almost Randian degree (minus the class issues): about six months more.

Time it took me to grasp that the localizers in the book are a pretty clear metaphor for the actors in an idealized anarcho-capitalist society: eight months after that.

At this rate, I should be really catching on to some of the subtler symbolism ten years after I’m dead.

My posts aren’t showing up on LJ. I don’t know why.

July 16, 2009 /

Which means that a bunch of you haven’t seen the last Proserpina story, or at least the last within the context of Anacrusis. (And indeed won’t see this, since the NFD feed isn’t working either.) At 65 entries over 29 months, it’s the longest continuous series I’ve written, and at 6565 words, one of my longer stories.

It needs to be longer yet–I haven’t come close to answering several of the questions posed in the very first one, much less figured out what happens to Radiane and Elijah. Also the next part is basically Proserpina Down Under, which will be difficult to write until I manage to get to Australia. But none of these things will be going in 101-word boxes.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the story so far, and that you’ll find its next incarnation an improvement.

Thanks to everybody who commented on the project management software entry, by the way

July 16, 2009 /

A few weeks ago I attended my second Go Play Northwest, and as before, it was one of the best weekends of my year. I played a lot of games, and wrote up reports on some of them, including Attack of the Crimson Apes (with Danger Patrol), Steam Tank versus Marble Army (with Principia), and Saga of the Goblin Headbag (with Lady Blackbird). I also ran a game of Rubble (discussed), and played my second game of Mythender (discussed, although it may not make any sense). I played just enough of a game of Anima Prime to make me want more.

Finally, I played in a game of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach adapted to take place on Wall Street in 1986, which was very funny and which we will never discuss again.

I did manage to go the entire weekend without playing a single game with Jackson Tegu or Joe McDonald, which, I mean, what the hell guys. They were (along with John Aegard and the Richmond-Smiths) two of my most potent catalysts in getting involved with the Pacific Northwest gaming scene, and now they’ve retreated back to their frozen Canadia. This will be rectified, gentlemen!

GPNW alone is enough to make me reconsider moving to Seattle every year. Then I try to get anywhere in its blighted hellscape of streets and quickly discard that notion.

Do ba doo ba deedeet! Doo ba da doo.

June 9, 2009 /

Matt twittered this thing called the ToneMatrix by André Michelle, which is a nifty Flash piece that combines a musical sequencer with visual effects. It was interesting to play with because I started by making what I thought would be interesting musical patterns, and they did in fact sound pretty and interesting, and then I realized that you can pretty much just scribble any old thing on there and it still sounds good because it’s all keyed together. It’s the harmonica of Flash music sequencers.

But! That same fact means that you can have some faith that, if you copy any arbitrary simple black-and-white pattern onto it, it won’t sound awful. I’ve been thinking about pixel art for a secret project anyway, so I started drawing some 8-bit sprites onto it. You can highlight and copy one of the strings of numbers below, then go to the ToneMatrix page, right-click on it and hit paste see it yourself.

I think the fire flower is the prettiest!

  • 0,12288,18432,85744,110476,130366,126766,63750,30982,63750,126302,130916,118092,84180,20576,12288
  • 3968,7392,30800,38984,68808,69572,81892,68852,67708,79996,67700,68840,40904,31120,4320,3968
  • 960,17456,47112,71952,77984,86160,127240,69636,69636,127240,86160,77984,71952,47112,17456,960
  • 7168,8960,82048,49216,57504,12176,76040,42504,26120,108808,20368,8352,8256,24704,123648,7168
  • 48,62408,68740,69636,40964,24584,49668,82178,81922,49154,16610,17412,8424,6148,1924,120
  • 0,3584,768,7552,10320,18528,21184,4224,4224,21184,18528,10320,7552,768,3584,0
  • 101888,97160,68254,68850,69780,74228,84466,87330,71138,81856,51072,51072,74496,79128,85862,115010
  • 60816,118200,104892,113596,113556,105428,121812,56024,40152,7752,23624,18700,10540,47400,114088,101680
  • 4672,1042,8872,1344,2720,38720,11920,24424,6096,7120,28648,1936,23360,1152,43304,144