Singing

Back in college, I was majoring in computer science, but I had a broad range of interests so I took enough credits in several other subjects to count as minors (though I didn't claim any of them), including languages, philosophy, math, and music. The first music classes you take at my college were the obligatory 101 class that covered the history of music, and then MUS 119, the introduction to music theory and notation.

On the first day of that class, the teacher told us "and we'll be learning some sight-singing," eliciting a groan from the class. As the teacher expected, since it happens every semester, more than half the class considered themselves people who "can't sing" and in many cases thought of themselves as "tone deaf." He explained that most of the people who thought those things simply hadn't been taught, or taught right. Which makes sense; music class in my elementary school was basically them handing out books with sheet music, not explaining what the sheet music said, and then having us sing. (I always thought that I'd missed when they taught us how to read the staff notation during the year I was skipped ahead, but I was told that they never taught that stuff.)

Sure enough, by the end of the semester, most of the class felt confident that they could sing. They weren't a bunch of Ella Fitzgeralds, mind you, but they were able to carry their own in a chorus. They were also able to identify notes and intervals by ear; perhaps not with the kind of "perfect pitch" ability that lets them tell if a note is a bit off when it's played on its own, but well enough to tell a major third from a perfect fourth.

Near the end of the semester, the teacher took some time to talk to all of us about where we would be going from here in our music studies. He took me aside at one point and said, "You remember how I said almost no one really can't sing or is really tone deaf? Well... you might be one of the few." It sounds mean-spirited when I retell the story, but it really wasn't. He was giving me advice about where to focus my music study -- on composition and theory -- and he was entirely right. I had always had a terrible time with instruments (I could practice a week until I could do one song on the guitar, then try to learn a second one and I'd always lose the first one).

In subsequent classes, we learned to take musical dictation by identifying notes, chords, and intervals, and separating out the parts of a song, identifying rhythm separate from melody separate from harmony, and writing them all down. I did all right, but I had to work a lot harder at it than most people, and made weird errors. I learned how to identify different intervals and chord progressions, and sometimes I could tell notes, but oddly and inexplicably, sometimes I could tell that two notes were a perfect fifth apart but not which one was higher. Sometimes to take dictation I couldn't figure out each part on its own, I would have to go back and figure out some of the notes not just by how they differed from the previous note but also how the following note differed, and what that meant the intervening note had to be to fit all the rules. Like solving the same puzzle one solves when composing, only I had to do it to tell what not just some but most of the notes in a piece were.

Of course the music program at the university didn't really have a tidy separation for composition from performance. After a certain number of classes, you got to where you had to take a musicianship test to qualify to take the next class, and everything else required that class. The test involved some verifications of understanding of theory, but also practical tests, including one about keeping rhythm (by tapping) and one that involved sight-singing. I knew I wasn't going to do any well in that one, and without it I couldn't pass, but I gave it a game try. I felt sorry for the proctor, who kept trying not to wince visibly, but it showed sometimes. (In hindsight, I would have done a lot better an octave or two lower. No one ever told me that my voice works better in lower registers.)

I never actually got a score on the test. Instead, an advisor talked to me and said, "perhaps you should just stick to composition and theory." And I said, that's what I wanted to do in the first place! So I actually got a waiver that allowed me to take the two-semester series of classes on advanced music theory and composition, which was great. Even then, I ran into some troubles for the oddity of coming to the class from the wrong direction: the teacher tended to assume anyone in it could at least play piano and one other instrument. We actually had a final project that involved creating your own musical system and then performing in it, and I had to get special permission to lug a Commodore 64 to the college and play compositions I'd prepared ahead of time on it.

Music was always an interest or hobby, not ever intended to be a big part of my life. And I was glad to have learned that I lacked the aptitude -- sure, if I poured enough effort into it I could probably become not-wholly-bad at it, but the same effort could make me genuinely good at something else for which I had an actual talent. After college, I didn't do much with music. In hindsight, I probably could have done a lot better at it if I'd focused on rhythm (drumming) since my tone-deafness didn't affect that, and I always had a good sense of it.

When we bought a microphone for Rock Band, it was always intended for the other players, and I'd focus on drums or guitar. But one day, just out of morbid curiosity, since I was home alone, I fired it up and tried out the mic. The first song Rock Band picked was Blitzkrieg Pop by the Ramones -- a song in which there's relatively little actual singing, and most of that is pretty flat and very simple. I got through it without failing out, but my score was pretty bad, down in the 70%-80% range somewhere. I can't remember what the second song was; I think it might have been Creep by Radiohead. It was something I mostly knew through Rock Band. Whatever it was, again, it wasn't exactly challenging, but at least it was singing. I failed out less than a quarter of the way through. Tried a second time and failed out again, even faster. So I figured I'd simply confirmed what I always thought, that my singing voice and the actual notes were rarely within range of one another, and I was just exactly as awful as everyone always said.

Last night, I was fighting with Rock Band trying to get my cheapie Frontman guitars to work with any version (the USB drivers haven't worked for many PS3 firmware versions now, and while there were some klugy workarounds that made them work for a while, not even those help anymore), I accidentally activated the mic (since one of the klugy workarounds involves using the DualShock controllers, which Rock Band associates with the mic) while testing Rock Band Beatles. I was home alone, and frustrated about the guitars, so I decided to kill a few minutes by failing out on a Beatles song, I think maybe Tax Man.

To my surprise, I finished with a 96% and never even got into the red (warning you you're about to fail out). So I kept trying other randomly-chosen songs. I got scores in the high 90s each time. So I tried medium difficulty and still got scores in the 90s. Even in hard mode, I was scoring in the 80s, and it took about ten songs before I failed out on one.

I'm curious and puzzled about this. Are the later Rock Band titles far more forgiving on the singing than the earlier ones? Does my voice far better match John Lennon's voice (for some reason the game never chose me a song sung by anyone else -- another oddity, since the game certainly has them)? Or is it just that, since I know these songs so very, very well, having heard them countless times for my whole life, this somehow transcends my native lack of ability? Or all three -- but even combining all three I would have expected at best I would get a "barely passed" score on some easier songs in easy mode, not high scores on hard songs in hard mode.

I have a very tiny bit of curiosity about whether my voice just isn't as bad as it used to be. Maybe realizing to come down an octave helped more than I think. I'm slightly tempted to ask some innocent bystanders to listen and tell me, but I'm far, far more reluctant to do so, because making someone listen to my terrible singing seems like an unwarranted cruelty. I even feel bad about making Siobhan listen when I sing in the car (though she insists she doesn't mind).

Tron

It's no surprise that, with Tron: Legacy coming out this December (and I am so excited by the trailers!), the original movie's being cleaned up and trotted back out. It's aired in HD and there's a Blu-Ray edition coming out. So it seems a great time to watch it again.

One certainly walks into it expecting the 1980s-era movie to feel corny and dated. There's no question a lot of it does, even more than other films of the same era, because it was trying harder to look ahead, and because it focused on things that have advanced very greatly since -- computers, and the computer graphics that were used to depict them. Those are the two main areas where the film seems awkward. The subject matter talking about computers in concepts that seem entirely ancient, with a depiction of the computer's interface that seemed passé even then, and doubly so now. A lot of the effects were really straining even by the day's standards and look positively antiquated and corny now.

And yet it's not nearly as corny or as dated as I expected. First of all, even today's cutting edge depictions of computers on TV shows and in movies tend to be wrong in much the same way as Tron was; people are still typing natural language commands into bare prompts today. The prompts are surrounded by Google (or Google-knockoff) logos and animated icons in windows, but they're still doing the same things. Computers in movies are simultaneously far smarter (in that they're always turning out sapient, treat natural language like it's easy, and excel at pattern-matching without parameters) and far stupider (in that they need everything spelled out for them, and their protections are always trivially easy bypassed) than in real life.

While the depictions of computers from the outside world are dated (and seem more suited to the computers of the time, huge timesharing systems, than today's), the depctions inside are actually surprisingly compelling. The idea of showing cyberspace as a physical, visual location in which "real world" concepts like I/O and file deletion have physical analogues is a very challenging thing to do well, and while many authors and filmmakers have attempted it, and some have done far better than others, Tron really does very nearly as well as anything that's been done since. There are certainly things that make no sense ("user power", a bit that can actually give off at least five different signals, how easy it was to break out of the game grid, and many others), but I've yet to see a depiction about which that wasn't true.

What's more, Tron attacks that from a far more ambitious angle than most: while many depictions of cyberspace describe something intentionally created by programmers, Tron attempts to depict one that the programmers don't even understand, which means it has even more to answer when making the cyberspace analogues to real-world concepts all line up and make sense. When you think about the movie in terms of "what could I have come up with" it actually is strikingly foresightful and quite impressive in how many of the concepts still work after 20 years of rapid change in the world of computers.

That doesn't mean it's fun to watch. I think it is, but I have to admit a lot of that is nostalgia, and an insider's amusement at the creative concept and the depiction of the computer world. I can well imagine that an average teenager or young adult of today would find it not just corny but also no fun to watch, or only fun to laugh at.

And that's not even talking about the special effects. There's only so far you can go with excusing it based on "this was a long time ago" particularly when some movies that are older (like Star Wars) still look so much better. But so much of what Tron depicts can't be really done with the kind of approaches that Star Wars used and which still look good today. A lot of the stuff in Tron makes you feel sympathetic only because they were trying so hard to reach past what their time was able to achieve, and given that, impressed with how much they did accomplish. But some of it is still howlingly bad. (There's a throwaway scene in a totally different style of animation depicting "grid bugs" which is particularly awful, and which doesn't actually relate to anything else in the movie. One feels they must have owed someone a promise that they could put something into the movie, or something.)

So much of what makes Tron feel dated and corny is precisely the stuff that they can improve so much in this year's movie. While so much of what was done very well in the original, better than we even realized at the time, might hold over quite well to the current movie. So my hopes are very high that this can be a really great movie on all accounts. They've certainly got a lot of fantastic things to work with. Doesn't mean they can't screw it up, but there's plenty of room to hope it'll rock.

I just hope that having seen the original won't turn out to be too necessary to appreciate it -- and that the kids of today don't all go watch the original, judge it harshly without accounting for the time period adequately, and get turned off from the new one without giving it a fair try.

MAME controller, and next steps

I haven't spent any more time thinking about the video issue I have with my MAME system, and no one posted any ideas, so that's still on my list of issues. But last night, my Classic Controller arrived, so the video question is now secondary.

This controller is positively huge. It's easy to underestimate how big it is. I of course read the measurements; 35" across doesn't sound huge, but when you're hefting the whole 34 pounds of this thing, and when you set it in front of a widescreen monitor that it's suddenly dwarfing, it looks like it's just acres of buttons. One of the (far too many) things I hope to get done this weekend is examining it, making measurements, and using them to finalize my cabinet plans.

It hooks up with three USB cables, and then it's immediately working, because it's just emulating mouse, keyboard, and joystick inputs. However, a default MAMEUI installation's interpretation of various keys, and the mapping of the keys, produce a configuration that's not entirely usable. Most damningly, the default keyboard configuration in MAMEUI for the fire button is left-control, but no button on the board is programmed to send that. I am able to play Tempest with the spinner (which is wonderful, it's steady and spins like a gliding dream), but no button works as superzapper recharge, plus the configuration wants you to use your left hand on the spinner which doesn't bother me, but which Siobhan insists will not be possible to adapt to, so I will probably have to remap keys for that.

There are at least two different ways to address this. First, there's some fairly complicated-looking software that lets me remap the control panel itself so that any button I like sends any key I like. This software is far from user-friendly, though. I would first have to create the board's configuration and then I could alter it. The MAMEroom people provide a configuration file that's supposed to do that, but it seems to perhaps be for a different version of the software... or maybe that's not what it really is, I can't entirely tell.

Second, MAME itself provides a lot of options to map different keys and controller inputs to different game functions, even on a game-by-game basis. But it doesn't even have a GUI for that; it's all editing configuration files, and poorly documented ones at that.

Most likely, the MAMEroom people have already done all this, so once I can get the right files, it's probably drop-in-and-go. However, I can't find them on their less-than-well-organized website. The webpage for the controller mentions that the manual is no longer shipped with the controller but is available for download, but stupidly, that text is not a link to the manual, nor is the manual listed under downloads farther down, nor is it anywhere at all I can find on their site. Even Google hasn't turned it up.

So while I know I can address this problem in several ways, I'm going to wait a bit for the MAMEroom people to answer my email, and hope that the manual gives me a better idea of what happens next, and saves me having to spend a lot of time on fiddling with configuration files. In the meanwhile, I can sorta play Tempest, but without a fire button, not much else. And I can certainly plan my cabinet.

Think inside the box

Thinking outside the box -- that is, avoiding preconceptions and considering unorthodox possibilities -- is important, and we all need to be reminded to do it now and then. But it's easy to overshoot. Because we always hear the phrase, we tend to imagine that it's a unilateral virtue, that it's always better to be thinking outside the box, and that's a mistake.

The reason we have to have that phrase, but no phrase to remind us to think inside the box, is not because thinking outside the box is always better. It's because we all already have a natural tendency to think inside the box. No one needs to remind us to do that. Instead, we need a constant reminder to nudge us back out of it.

But the fact is that there are a lot of good ideas inside the box, inside the realm of what is accepted and conventional, too. In fact, when you come right down to it, most of the good ideas are there. All those ideas in the box were outside the box once, but they got put inside the box because they were, at least at one time, good ideas worth keeping around. They're the ideas that already passed the test. Sure, some of them stuck around after they stopped being good ideas, after time passed them by. But that still leaves a lot more of them good than the wild mess of random untested ideas outside the box.

We have to get outside the box because we can't improve except by innovating, and there's not a lot of room to innovate from inside the box. But when we've found something outside the box that's good, it still will probably be good only in combination with things inside the box. Even if not, we have to think inside the box a lot just to know what's been done and what hasn't, and why.

But it's dangerous to get into the habit of thinking that every established idea is inferior to everything outside the box.

MAME system video issue

I haven't been able to put much time into trying to fix this yet, but I have one odd problem with my MAME system's configuration that I thought I'd post about in case anyone had any ideas. It's not a showstopper, and oddly it doesn't seem to affect the games themselves very much (though I haven't tried many), just the Windows system you use to select them.

The computer is a ASUS Eee Box HD 1006 Nettop PC which uses an HDMI port for its video out (and no other options, though it does include an HDMI-to-DVI adapter), and ATI Catalyst Control Center for its video software. The monitor is a Vizio 22" 720p LCD HDTV whose native resolution is 1366 x 768. The only information I can find about what video it supports is the following:

• Signal Compatibility: Supports 480i (SDTV), 480P (EDTV), 720P (HDTV), 1080i (HDTV)
  
• Colors: 16.7 Million
  
• Computer Support: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1366 x 768 via VGA

When I hook these up via HDMI, the video resolution that I get is 1024 x 768, which gives the video a jagged, uneven resolution in Windows. When I go into games, that jaggedness generally disappears since we're scaling up from much lower resolutions anyway; Tempest, for one, looks exactly as good here as anywhere else (that's not a vector monitor, I mean). But other games will probably get some artifacting from having the resolution scaled twice, and certainly Windows itself does, as does the MAME UI.

I've tried setting various other resolutions, even forcing 1366 x 768 and using the ATI Catalyst Control Center to manually tweak the size to match the resolution, but it never gets rid of the jaggies. It seems like it's a consequence of using HDMI to hook things up, and perhaps the native resolution is only available via VGA, but I'm not sure what I can do about it. This computer doesn't have a VGA port. HDMI to VGA converters are expensive, but even if I got one, I suspect that the same issue would arise. I wonder if this cable might help; it seems unlikely, but I am not sure what situation it would be helpful in if not this one, and if I can get it for a few bucks it might be worth it for the experiment.

It seems like a silly limitation in any case. The computer ought to be able to use the resolution of any HDMI device it plugs into, automatically. Maybe it would on most, but the oddity is in the monitor. I don't know.

It might be that the best solution is just to choose a front end to MAME that uses big enough graphical icons for the games that the jagginess is unnoticeable, and hides Windows entirely. I don't mind seeing the jaggies on the rare times I need to get out to do Windows updates or stuff like that. But I'm not sure if there is a front end that'll avoid the jaggies. And it's certainly an extra step -- MAME itself would be enough front end for me otherwise. So a true solution would be nice, if I can find one.

MUSHclient maps

For years the client of choice for connecting to MUDs was Zuggsoft's zMUD since it had robust scripting and a great mapper.

For those unfamiliar with MUDs, scripting is where you write short programs which either automate repeated actions -- for instance, you type one command to repeatedly craft some item -- or react to things going on in the world around you -- for instance, if you get attacked, you automatically heal to the extent you can. This might seem silly -- having a program play the game for you? But the games are made with this in mind. Combat is a zillion times more complex and fast-paced than in games that don't do this sort of thing, with lots of afflictions and combinations of afflictions, and merely having a "system" to cure is only a part of combat. Besides, people sell systems, so you don't have to be a programmer to compete, and while being a good programmer can be a benefit, it's not as important as being a good tactician, being very cool under pressure, and especially, being really good at isolating the important information from a screen of fast-scrolling text.

zMUD used to be a good choice for this, but as systems have had to get far more complex, it's showing its limitations. It's too slow to keep up with the thousands of "triggers" (lines that the system has to watch for), and it gets prone to crashing when systems get too complex. It's not just that it has training wheels welded on so you can't get them out of your way when you don't need them, like a Mac. It's more like Microsoft Access, where all the decisions made to make it really easy to get started and do easy jobs, also cause huge problems which, in the end, take you far more work to work around than it would have been to just do the job in a program that doesn't try so hard to "help" you.

And Zugg hasn't maintained it for years, so it doesn't even work in modern versions of Windows. He's pushing everyone over to his new program, cMUD, which is basically a rewrite of zMUD. Good idea (even if he mostly did it so he could charge everyone who had a lifetime license for zMUD again), but he didn't really make much improvements because he's trapped between backwards compatability issues and fixing the extensability problems. Plus he just did a bad job, so cMUD's actually less stable than zMUD under complex systems.

For some MUDs, zMUD is still pre-eminent because it can handle what they need. IRE MUDs are far more complex, though, and Lusternia the most complex and tactically rich of any of them. I think it's fair to say it puts the most strain on a client of any MUD in existence.

However, zMUD still has the best mapper anywhere. It presents a map of the world in visual form and with some very rich scripting control that lets you do much more than simply walk to anywhere automatically, but also have your travel be shaped by the lay of the land, and react to things as you travel, and organize your map, and use it for special modes of transport, and let it help you do things like patrol or harvest.

With zMUD dying and cMUD failing as its heir apparent, a new contender was needed, and at least in the Lusternia world, the winner appears to be MUSHclient. Formerly shareware, now freeware, MUSHclient is built a lot more streamlined and efficiently. The creator, Nick Gammon, did not succumb to the temptation to focus on being able to make very easy scripts very easily, in a way that made hard ones impossible to manage, like zMUD did. Instead, MUSHclient is built on a solid foundation of extensible script languages that are far more robust and flexible, but at the cost of making it hard to get started. You can just make an alias that turns into three commands, but you can't just add some simple conditional logic to it; that requires switching to an actual script, and it gets rather trickier. Quite easy once you learn it, but you have to learn it.

But MUSHclient doesn't have a mapper. So for several years, I have stuck to zMUD, despite the instability. I've developed quite a lot of cool stuff in zMUD, and my curing system has some great functionality, but it's also incomplete -- I never kept up with adding all the new triggers, afflictions, and skills to it -- and it's getting to where I can't add more stuff to it without slowing it down too much and making it too likely it'll crash on me mid-combat (meaning I come back dead). It would sure be nice to grab someone else's curing and just tweak it, instead of having to develop it all myself, too. And gain the stuff I never added, like illusion protection, and all those missing skills. But I'd have to lose the things I've done, and the mapper without which I couldn't live.

But now MUSHclient is getting a mapper. Nick's developing one as a plugin, which should make it nicely able to handle different MUDs without having to overburden you with the code required for all the MUDs you're not playing. As of this writing, it's missing a lot of necessary functionality, like support for special exits, marking rooms as unsafe or costly to enter, and the ability to overcome problems when moving and keep walking. But it looks like it might well get that functionality in a fairly reasonable amount of time.

The mapper also has two huge advantages. zMUD's mapper is based on the idea that all you can work from is the text that goes by, and that text is usually meant to be human-readable (and sometimes is deliberately obfuscated to make "systems" harder to make). But in recent years some new protocols have emerged to make a "sub-carrier" of information in machine-readable form that percolates under the text. It carries such vitals as your character's current health and location, explicitly for making systems easier to build and far more able to reflect information accurately. One of them, ATCP, was pioneered by IRE and is particularly suitable for working with its games, though it's being adopted by other games now too. By using ATCP, the MUSHclient mapper can be far better at knowing what room you're in, where it is, and what it looks like. zMUD relying on text on the screen had a jillion ways it could get mixed up about your location, and you could keep making more triggers to try to correct for those, but you could never get them all.

And the IRE games are now exporting full copies of their maps in XML format. The MUSHclient can import these maps. So on your first day you can already have a complete map of the world; no need to explore every location before you can simply walk through your city. Though there is a problem: that complete map export isn't really 100% complete, as it won't have private residences, or your notes about what rooms cost or what rooms aren't safe, or your special exits or notes. So Nick's thinking about ways to make it so you can use the new export to import and update your map without losing your own stuff.

Once these issues are addressed a bit more, it might be perfectly possible for me to move over to MUSHclient and learn how to code for it. The key point is, I need enough functionality to get through day-to-day things at a minimal level before I can move over, so once it reaches that critical threshold, I can start developing the more advanced stuff for it. (I can even sell some of it.) It's daunting to think of how much I've developed for zMUD, rewriting it all, and in a language I don't really know yet. But it's also exciting to think of doing it better the second time. And being back in the mainstream of supported software so I can download new updates to curing and be a viable combatant without having to pour hours into coding.

Inception

The reviews for Inception have almost universally been glowing. It's described as cerebral, challenging, entirely original, brilliantly made, exciting, and a sign that maybe movies that aren't retreads of familiar formulae, sequels, remakes, and mindless thrill-rides, still have a chance to become blockbusters.

Well, they're right.

The only thing about this movie that I'm puzzled by is why the fact that it doesn't hold back anything, doesn't dumb itself down for the audience at all, doesn't resist making you think for the entire movie's run, why isn't that making it bomb at the theaters? There's a conventional wisdom that says that thinking movies can't succeed the way big explosion movies can. Then there's an equally pernicious (or more) conventional wisdom that says that the previous one is just Hollywood being cynical and stupid. But there's truth to both: Hollywood does dumb things down more than it needs to, but by the same token, challenging movies rarely succeed, and usually, nothing kills a movie faster than "when it ends you won't be sure what happened." Yet this movie is doing great business. I hope it's not a fluke. I hope Hollywood takes it as a sign. And I certainly hope they keep writing Christopher Nolan more blank checks to do anything he likes.

There's almost nothing bad I can say about this movie even when we get down to the smallest details. I can get philosophical and ask why things work like they do in the movie's world, but that's not a quibble: with perhaps only one tiny exception (which I'll mention after the spoiler-break) there's not one thing I noticed that doesn't work precisely as they say it will, with perfect consistency. The acting is solid, the production values are spectacular, and the storyline is breathtaking.

There's also a good amount of really interesting action sequences, including some that turn the usual martial arts fight scenes in totally new directions (and you didn't think there were any new directions, but they sure found one!). There's a lot of CGI, as you've seen in the trailers, but this is absolutely not a movie where anyone's going to smugly proclaim how they should have used less since it was distracting from what really matters, or that it doesn't feel as real as stunts. Also, there wasn't as single use of the too-close shaky-cam. Take that, League of Evil Cinematographers!

I will concede that there's one segment, set in a place with snow (I won't say anything more about it so as not to risk spoilage), where it was sometimes hard to tell who was doing what, due to the costumes used. That's about the only thing I'd suggest to Nolan might have been done better.

Apart from that, it's a downright amazing movie. The most striking thing is that there's just no other movie you can really compare it to. While Salt isn't quite a Bourne movie, you can certainly say it's in the same vein. But while I could think of two movies to compare Inception to, the comparison is so slight that it's likely to be more deceptive than illustrative. (If you're wondering anyway, they're Dark City and Strange Days, but remember, they're not that similar, really.) In the end, it really is a truly original movie. Not only is the premise pretty much new, the execution is new, too. (To be sure, there've been books and even movies to tickle at some similar ideas. There is nothing truly new under the sun. But this is as original, as inventive, and as unprecedented as a movie can be. No one has told this story before.)

I'm sure that half the people in the packed theater came out of it not entirely sure what happened, and thinking they might need to watch the DVD a few times to finally get all their "ah hah!" moments lined up. I came out feeling like I did understand what happened and how it all fit together, apart from a few relatively minor details, but that I had to be firing on all cylinders the whole movie to keep up with it. If the movies that reviewers say are too complex feel just about complex enough for you, watch this movie. Even if not, watch this movie.

Spoilers after the break. Do not read them before you see the movie.

There is one, and only one, thing where I think they broke their own rules, though I can understand why they did. Each character has a "totem" which is how they can be sure if they're in the real world or a dream: it's something that only they would know in all its detail, so if they were in someone else's dream, it wouldn't be quite right. And yet the one totem we see the most of is Cobb's spinning top, and the way he can tell is that in a dream, it never falls down. Well, that makes no sense. If he were in someone else's dream and they didn't know the specifics about it, they would of course make it fall down, because that's what tops normally do. It's nothing like the loaded die whose specific feel couldn't be replicated; anyone can make a top fall over, and would, by default. I think they "cheated" on that one totem because we needed something more visual so we could watch the test being performed.

I can understand why, if your body in the real world gets shaken, your dream persona feels the world shake, because I've felt the same thing. If it gets cold, my dreams tend to venture to cold places. But in the movie it's shown that if, in your dream, you enter into another dream -- a second layer nested dream -- the things happening to your body in the first dream have the same kind of effect on you in the second dream. That's certainly simpler to understand, but it seems a little arbitrary on the face of it. The only reason I can see why that would be so is because that's what the mind might expect to be so. But the real reason for it is because it would overburden the audience to make the rules change any more.

There's actually a fair amount about what you can and can't do in a dream that, if you stop to think about it, you have to ask, "why can't you just do this?" and the movie answers some of them but not all of them. For instance, why can't you just reshape the world around you constantly to be whatever you need it to be? Because this draws the projections towards you. Ariadne learns this with a knife to the gut, and later, we never know if the few times they dabble in it ("You must dare to dream bigger, darling.") bring more attention -- they were already pretty solidly beset, so how could you tell? (Then again, when everything's going to hell already, why not imagine whatever you need?)

So can anyone tell me why in the first "kick" they dropped Cobb into a tub full of water? All he really needed was to be knocked over, as we saw later. Someone went to a lot of effort to make it also involve a tub, but it doesn't seem to have changed anything (other than providing another striking visual within the dream world). Might it have something to do with the fact that that was a nested dream?

I'm also a little confused about how they got Saito into the second level dream in the first sequence without him knowing, considering how, in the second set of dreams, they had to have a situation within one level of dream that could lead to the characters in that dream going to sleep and being brought into a dream to do it. I suppose maybe he just didn't remember.

For as much as the movie kept me on my toes, I guessed long, long before the reveal that Moll was Cobb's first inception. But I totally missed how trains tied into it. Even so... when Cobb explained to Moll how they did grow old together, that brought tears to my eyes.

(IMDb lists her as "Mal", but it really sounded more like "Moll" as if it were short for Molly. "Mal" has a different pronunciation, and its linguistic implication seems comparatively heavy-handed for this film, and besides, how many females are named "Mal"? I wonder if IMDb is accurate on this point?)

Some review or other I saw made a point of the fact that Michael Caine was in the movie, but he had all of two scenes totaling about a minute and a half of screen time. It's not like he was really stretching during those, either. Seems odd to make a big point of it.

Cobb's point to Ariadne about how you never remember the beginnings of dreams is a very keen insight that has never really occurred to me. Gave me an "ooh, yeah, that's true" moment.

I wondered if the clever moment where Ariadne's circular maze let her do what she couldn't do on graph paper would end up being significant later, but the worlds she created didn't seem unusually circular or anything, and nothing particular came of it.

While Moll's comment about the real world feeling like a dream since Cobb was being constantly chased by faceless corporations, resembling the projections in a dream, seemed very spot-on (and is backed by various other similarities between action in the dream worlds and the real world), I really don't think that the real world isn't the real world. First of all, that's an overused cop-out, and secondly, too much of the story focused on Cobb's coming to terms with being in the real world. That said... the top not getting around to falling at the end was a nicely ambiguous question, not about whether the whole movie was inside another dream, but only whether the last few scenes were.

How the hell did they film those fight scenes with Arthur in the hotel halls with gravity shifting and then going away? Those were just amazingly seamless and unrelentingly convincing. I imagine there's some combination of green-screen, wire-work, and rotating sets, but even so, it feels like there has to be more to it. I know the actor did most of his own stuntwork in those scenes, but that's all I know.

Despite them making such a point of putting the Penrose Stairs trick onto the mantle in the first act, it still caught me a bit by surprise when Arthur used it later in the movie. That was a great moment.

Salt

Based on some of the reviews I saw, I expected Salt to be a pretty straightforward action suspense thriller thing with lots of chases and gunfights, and just enough plot and character to tie them together, like Knight and Day or any of the other popcorn films of the summer. And it certainly covered those bases, with a lot of chases, action sequences, martial arts fights, plot twists, things exploding, and guns being fired. (In the obligatory way-too-close, way-too-shaky camera work that Hollywood seems to love so much, though not one single moviegoer I know likes it. When are they going to check with us again?)

But I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had a lot more going on than just that. It actually felt like a real spy movie. Plenty of people have compared it to the Bourne movies, and while I won't go so far as to say it was as gripping or well-done as those, the comparison is illustrative of the difference between this movie and stuff like Die Hard. Don't get me wrong, I like both kinds. But it's good to know which one you're getting.

Of course, since I saw it on the same day as Inception, which I'll be reviewing tomorrow, I hesitate to use the word "cerebral", but really, if it weren't in that august company, you'd really have to use that word to compare it to the other kind of action movie.

It did have its share of plot holes, and I have the feeling that if I watched it all the way through knowing what I know at the end, some of the actions taken by some of the characters would not really be explicable given their actual motives. The ending adds a particularly big plot hole that seems calculated solely to set up the sequel, but that doesn't make much sense within the movie itself.

But the "discredited spy/cop" storyline has been done so many times that this movie deserves a lot of credit for taking that and making a story where we really didn't see everything coming, where we wondered how things would turn out, and where the action fit into a story and served it instead of only being served by it. Salt probably isn't going to be an instant classic but it's a solid movie and a notch above most of the summer action movie fare. I'll go see the sequel.

Knight and Day

Given that I'm about three weeks ahead on blog posts, when I say that "today" we went to see Knight and Day, I mean back on July 10th. I was expecting a light-hearted, goofy, funny action movie, and that's precisely what I got.

Some of the reviews have been pretty scathing. Some people seem to want to treat it as an action movie and then grouse about plot holes. About half of those complaints are simply people not getting all the twists and turns. For instance (and don't worry about the spoiler, it's from the first ten minutes of the movie), the plane that the characters board is supposed to be fully booked yet ends up almost entirely empty; this is a significant plot point, and is discussed in the film, and yet it's actually listed on the IMDb goofs page as a plot hole and several reviews I've seen make a lot of hay out of it.

The other half are intentional things that reflect the comic element of the movie. Again, don't worry about this spoiler: at a few points, an implausible sequence of action-movie nonsense is replaced with a montage of blurry shots because one of the characters has been drugged. This isn't a cop-out; it's very much a joke at the expense of the genre itself. That's not to say that every joke and metajoke works perfectly, but most of them do, and in any case, a criticism that says it's a bad action movie element misses the point that it's not an action movie element at all.

Reviews that got the joke were generally kinder, but a few found the jokes tired and worn. Certainly, there's not much we haven't seen before in some form, but that doesn't mean they're not funny. A particularly good sequence involving a truth serum is reminiscent of True Lies yet also very different, for instance.

That said, even when the plot twists and action sequences aren't intentionally spoofy, there are still bits of plot that don't bear examination. A few of the jokes are a bit flat. This is not going to be a movie we'll be talking about in ten years, or even two years. But it's definitely a movie that's enough fun to justify going to see it. It has some great action sequences (there's some car chase stuff near the end that's particularly effective) and a lot of great laughs (not all of which have been telegraphed in the trailer). It's also a bit unusual for action movies these days for the plot twists to require a little thinking to piece them together -- usually they're handed to you in a nicely wrapped package.

Of course if you can't see Tom Cruise without gnashing your teeth and saying "Tom Cruise Tom Cruise hate hate hate" then you probably won't be able to enjoy this. Never had that problem myself. Don't really care what a jerk he is off-camera, any more than I feel a need to find out if the guy who made my dinner plate was a jerk.

Scofflaw bicyclist!

Let me first say that I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the police and law enforcement. In addition to the reasons everyone has -- they have a crappy, thankless job, filled with stringent requirements, vast bureaucracy, mindless tedium, and the occasional wild danger -- there's also the fact that my family was active in the volunteer fire department so we knew a lot of them personally and my parents worked with them.

This has been slightly strained by my recent brush with injustice, in which I got a $173 ticket for being the only car not speeding. It seems like Vermont's troopers are on a mission to further erode my appreciation for them. Or maybe they're just bored and need some real crime.

Every day at work, twice a day, I do a bikeride along the bike path on which my office sits. I ride to one end (through Peace Park, coming out by the water treatment plant), then turn around and ride to the other end (near the Taylor Street bridge), then ride back to my office. Round trip is about 15 minutes and about two and a half miles. At one point, the bike path crosses Bailey Avenue, passing through a clearly demarcated pedestrian crosswalk.

As one approaches that crosswalk, a bicyclist on the path can easily see the oncoming traffic despite a line of trees because there's enough gaps in the trees, and the bicyclist has the time to focus on them. A driver on that road, however, probably won't see the bicyclist approaching at all through the trees; they have little reason to be looking that way, and bicyclists don't make so visible a target. So if a bicyclist gauges the traffic and zooms across the road through a gap, a driver might find his sudden appearance a surprise.

I did that on yesterday morning's ride, entering the gap with plenty of time; I was across the road and into the bike path on the other side before the car even got to the crosswalk. That car was a state trooper's car.

Apparently they had nothing better to do than chase me around town for the next ten minutes. Not easy since I was on the bike path which doesn't particularly well parallel the roads they can travel on, but they were really determined. I was on my way back when they caught up with me. And stopped their trooper car so it blocked traffic on the most major road in the area, the one leading right to the Interstate, so they could come across the bike path to yell at me.

They not only threatened me with a $156 (or something like that) ticket, for not coming to a full stop before entering the crosswalk on the bike path, they (yes, it took two of them) also insisted that since they couldn't see me, I couldn't see them, so therefore I was driving recklessly. (The Bugblatter Beast of Traal's got nothing on these guys.)

Frankly, I think that a lot of it was a face-saving emotional reaction. To them, I suddenly came out of nowhere. When I pointed out that I could see them even if they couldn't see me, rather than recognizing that they were wrong, the guy I was speaking with dug in his heels and deflected, and got more confrontational. That's a classic response to being shown to be wrong. My reaction was just to back down and say it doesn't matter, if you say I have to do this then I have to do it. And in hindsight I think that was the right response.

Of course, technically there is a stop sign, and technically bikes do have to obey all such signs, and while it's also technically true that cars (like that trooper's car) are supposed to stop for traffic in the crosswalk but never do and the troopers didn't bother to say anything to anyone (including themselves) about that, technically, they could have given me the ticket. I think I would have contested that one. But I still can't flout the law. If I want to cross there I need to stop, as much of a pain as that would be.

But I'm not actually doing it. Instead, I've changed my route to avoid the intersection in question. It was always a pain in the butt to have to deal with traffic there. If I have to come to a complete stop even when there's no traffic, it's just not worth it. So instead, I'll treat it like it ends at that crosswalk, and instead of doing one "round trip" (the whole length twice), I'll do a round trip and a half (the whole length three times), by going to the Peace Park end twice. It's about the same distance and time. Unfortunately, it means more time on the worst part of the bike path, poorly maintained and hilly, but that's still better than dealing with traffic and bored cops bent on making me dislike them the way most people do.

The dentist thinks I'm lying

Dentists and their staff must get really jaded and tired of telling people, over and over all day long day after day, about all the things they need to do to care for their teeth, knowing that most of them won't do most of it. They undoubtedly get to assuming that they're talking to a wall. Doubly so if, six months later, the patient has the same plaque build-up, or whatever.

So every time I go to the dentist, I know just what they're going to tell me. Brush a full two minutes when you brush. Hold your mouth mostly closed to get to the back of the uppers. Hold the brush at an angle. Be sure to floss regularly. And I know they're going to be telling me how, since I'm not doing that stuff, that's why I have this or that or the other issue, or that's why I'm going to have some issue in the future.

The problem is, I do all those things. I do more than they ask. I probably do three minutes of brushing, more than half of which is focused just on those outer uppers. I floss; in fact, I get icky-mouth if I don't, and a few spots that collect things, so I don't even have to try to remember, my mouth reminds me. I hold the brush at an angle. I keep my mouth closed. I use an electric toothbrush to get more movement on the outer uppers than I could do in such tight quarters. I do a dry-brush and another time with toothpaste.

And Siobhan does maybe a third as much as I do, and doesn't do everything they say as often as they say to, and yet I usually get chided more than she does. I guess my teeth just naturally build up plaque faster, or have the wrong kinds of gaps, or something.

I don't bother to correct them or offer a self-defense. They would just assume I was lying. But sometimes I wonder if my dental care might not be better if they knew, and believed, that I really was doing those things, and the mouth they see is the result. Maybe they'd make other suggestions. But they're so used to being ignored that's just not possible.

Designing a Z-Wave controller

One of the downsides of being an early adopter of a technology is having to live with the lumps of the first versions. Actually, that's really the only one. We bought all-new Z-Wave home automation hardware when we were building our house so we could have it all pre-installed, and that includes the central remote controller which is in a way the heart of the system -- even if you rarely use it. (In fact, they recommend you put it in a drawer and never touch it. How's that for an odd design.)

The problem we keep having with it is, once any module dies, there's no way to fully remove it from your system, and I mean fully, other than wiping the whole thing out and rebuilding. If you are just using the remote, that means maybe an hour of walking around the house, pressing buttons, and rekeying names into the remote. If you also use a computer with HomeSeer or the like, it's a lot hairier, since you'd also have to rebuild your devices and those events that linked to them. As long as you don't do that, there's a chance of having some groups fail to turn on and off for a pause of 30 seconds or so, which may not seem like much, but it's sure annoying. Not annoying enough yet to actually do the full reset.

What would tip me over the edge is if we could get a nice controller in the process, since the one we have now, pictured above, is really badly designed. Other than six devices, you can't get to any device other than by scrolling through the whole list, and once you get there, you can't turn it on or off; you can only toggle it, but the toggle depends on whether the remote knows the current state, and (and this is amazingly dumb) the remote makes no attempt to keep track of the state being changed by anything but itself. Despite the fact that it could hear other Z-Wave commands, and despite the fact that Z-Wave can poll devices, and despite that Z-Wave has "on" and "off" commands, not just "toggle" commands. So the upshot is you usually have to do several dozen clicks to turn the device on or off, and then do the same several dozen clicks a second time.

Another mind-bogglingly dumb design decision: the tiny LCD screen isn't backlit. Why would you want the screen to be backlit on a device you are using to turn lights on and off, where you need to be able to read the screen to operate it?

So I found myself imagining the perfect design for such a device, and I don't mean the "genie out of the bottle" design where cost isn't a factor, but a design that would be pretty much as cheap to manufacture as the one we have, or only a little bit more. And you could make a really rocking controller at that price point just by applying some principles of design to it. This is what I came up with.

The remote is about the size of a TV remote, or a bit wider. The top two thirds of it is taken up by an LCD screen that has six rows, with a button on each side. This doesn't have to be pretty color high-res LCD screens you're seeing even on cheap MP3 players these days; it can be the clunky old LCD screens from calculators. It just has to have six rows with 10 or more characters per row. Below all of this is five more buttons arranged in the familiar "directional cluster" formation, up down left right select.

The controller is normally off: nothing shows on the screen at all, to save battery power. Press any button, and it turns on, including a backlight. It turns off after 30 seconds of not having any buttons pushed, or when you press and hold the Select button for 3 seconds.

Normally, it'll show the first six devices in the current location, one per row. The button to the left turns each device off; the button to the right turns it on. Press-and-hold the left to dim, if dimmable; press-and-hold the right to brighten. The remote will also make some attempt to get the status of those devices (on, off, dimmed) and indicate this with an icon on the right edge; but nothing needs to wait for those statuses to be updated.

Use the directional up and down keys to scroll down to the next six items, if there are any. (The screen should have a "more above" and "more below" indicator at top and bottom to indicate whether there are any.) Use left and right to move to other locations (location in this context would normally mean a room, but you can use it however you like). The remote would remember what location (and where down the list in that location) you were when it turned off and return you there.

The select button would switch to a menu system navigated by the arrow keys, which is where you'd go to do everything else. That includes setting up devices and their locations; setting up and playing out scenes; setting up timers; and system stuff like exporting settings. (It would probably be set up so the first thing on the first menu was where you'd go to execute scenes, since everything else is mostly setup stuff, but that's execution stuff.)

In terms of hardware this is less ambitious than many Z-Wave remotes, and yet it would be far more functional for the everyday activities of turning things on and off, instantly, without having anything in the way. It's neither too dumb (like my current remote) nor too smart (like those which are trying so hard to have pretty graphics that they don't put the things you need to do right now at your fingertips right now). Why doesn't anyone consult me for the design on these things? I'd happily offer my services for cheap. All I'd want is one of these controllers.

Tsianina's cryptogram journal

I've recently taken up a second character, or "alt", in Lusternia, in part to break up some of the less pleasant things about my main character's life and circumstances, and in part to explore some intriguing things about one of the cities (but which wouldn't suit my main character at all). My new character is a scientist, and a gangly, geekish one. I'm modeling her personality on a mishmash of similar characters and stereotypes, including some things from the Venus Equilateral stories, and a few elements from Big Bang Theory.

But I'm also including a few elements solely so that I can fit them into Lusternia, and be able to do the stuff in Lusternia I want to do. One thing is I like writing, but I also like earning goodies for my writing. Lusternia's bardic contests do accept non-fiction pieces, but they very rarely win, and the more dry and scientific, the less likely to win. So I decided to make this character have a penchant for word puzzles, though she treats them as no big deal, just something she does to while away the boring times. She creates word puzzles and leaves them for herself to find a year later, when she can solve them since she no longer remembers them. Puzzles have some chance of scoring in the bardics, as long as I make them uniquely Lusternian.

Following from that, and her tendency to be constantly scribbling notes and diagrams in her journal, I decided that she does her entire journal in cryptograms. Even the little notes are jotted in code. Not so much to keep things secret as to give her something to do. Whenever she goes back to her notes she has to solve the cryptogram to read them. She doesn't write down the ciphers, either. But since you can't always solve the cryptogram on a very short note, she needs a "safety hatch" so she won't lose her notes. Plus she might need to read them quickly.

I solved this by developing an algorithm by which she uses the title of a piece to create a cipher. Thus, every piece, whether a short note or a lengthy dissertation, has a title, which is written in plaintext. The algorithm to produce a cipher from the plaintext of the title is consistent, and produces a unidirectional, asymmetric cipher (that means, if T in plaintext becomes R in ciphertext, R in plaintext does not necessarily produces T in ciphertext, so applying the cipher twice won't give you back the plaintext). It uses all the letters (but isn't case-sensitive) plus the digits, but not punctuation, so it has 36 elements.

Since the cipher is determined by the title, she can always use the title to create the cipher, then reverse the encryption, fairly quickly and with complete reliability.

I decided it would be more fun if I actually did this and wrote in her journal that way. So after doing a little bit of the encrypting by hand to make sure I could, I wrote a program in C which generates the cipher and then enciphers the plaintext with it. This is now what the first page of her journal looks like (just the start, it goes on at some length):

_________________________________________________

               Project: Conjunction
_________________________________________________

Sfesu1g: Zu yfjnz5av j1zeu7upv 5nzu j 1c5gncg jn4 5nzgpejzg 5z i5zh ufe fn4ge1zjn45np ua jgun5c1 jn4 zgdsuej7 shv15c1, zu 5dseuqg ufe fn4ge1zjn45np ua j1zeu7upv jn4 5ncegj1g 5z1 gaagcz5qgng11.

Nuzg zhjz zhg gaagcz1 ua 0u4v ejv1 4gsgn4 un zhg zjepgz'1 njz5q5zv 5n j ijv ih5ch 51 j7egj4v aj5e7v ig77 fn4ge1zuu4, jn4 zhf1, zh51 51 ufz154g zhg 1cusg ua zh51 seumgcz. 5n 7jzge shj1g1, zhgue5g1 j0ufz zhg cjf1g1 ua zhu1g gaagcz1 d5phz je51g j1 j njzfej7 154g-gaagcz ua zhg seucg11.
_________________________________________________

SHJ1G 9: CJ7GN4JE

U0mgcz5qg: Cegjzg j cj7gn4je zhjz 4gdun1zejzg1 zhg cvc7g1 ua duz5un ua zhg s7jngz1 jn4 0u45g1, 1fch zhjz ig cjn auegcj1z zu jnv je05zejev 4jzg 0v cj7cf7jz5un zhg 1jdg 5nauedjz5un zhjz iuf74 0g seuq54g4 0v jn j1zeu7j0g.

Dgzhu4u7upv: Djkg egpf7je u01geqjz5un1 jz zhg j1zeu7j0g jn4 egcue4 zhgd. J1 5z i577 nuz 0g su11507g zu 0g jz zhg j1zeu7j0g gqgev 4jv, zhg 4jzj i577 hjqg pjs1, 0fz 5z 51 gbsgczg4 zhjz gjch 0u4v i577 hjqg cvc75cj7 sjzzgen1 ih5ch i577 gqgnzfj77v gdgepg, j77ui5np ejnpg1 ua cheunu7up5cj77v 1gsjejzg4 4jzj zu 0g fn5a5g4. Zh51 gaauez djv zjkg djnv vgje1, 15ncg 5z 51 knuin zhjz Jjsgk'1 zejn15z 51 dueg zhjn j vgje jn4 1gqgej7 cvc7g1 djv 0g egyf5eg4 zu a577 5n j77 zhg pjs1.

Cuna5edjz5un: J1 gjch cvc7g 51 54gnz5a5g4, seg45cz5un1 cjn 0g auegcj1z 0j1g4 un zhjz cvc7g, zhgn cuna5edg4 jz zhg j1zeu7j0g. Ihgn j cuna5edjz5un zg1z aj571, 5z i577 cegjzg ngi 4jzj aue jnuzhge jzzgdsz zu 54gnz5av zhg cvc75cj7 sjzzgen. Ihgn j sjzzgen hj1 0ggn cuna5edg4 un df7z5s7g uccj15un1 1gsjejzg4 5n z5dg 5z i577 0g j11fdg4 zu 0g cueegcz (zhufph cunz5nfg4 cuna5edjz5un1 i577 gn1fg zheufphufz zhg afezhge shj1g1).
_________________________________________________

This is eminently solvable -- even more if you consider what words are likely to lead sections in a research project proposal -- but certainly it would take more work than it's worth for most people to solve. I hope that this comes across to people as an interesting character trait instead of just an annoying one.

(Incidentally, Project: Conjunction is a research project she's planning to propose that will attempt to quantify and make scientifically analyzable the skill of astrology, which in Lusternia is a real thing, and not about fortune-telling. The above is just an abstract of the purpose, plus the first of six phases.)

---

Incidentally, the algorithm for generating the cipher is to use just the letters of the title, and turn them into numbers, where A is 1 and Z is 26. Repeat the title as many times as needed. So "Project: Conjunction" becomes 16 18 15 10 5 3 20 3 15 14 10 21 14 3 20 9 15 14 and then repeats. Now, set up a cipher as follows:

Plain : 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher:

The first number is 16, so count right 16 steps (placing you under the F in the plaintext) and put an A. The second number is 18 so count right 18 steps and place a B where you land (this time under the X). The third number is 15 so count right 15 steps, wrapping around when you reach the end, and place a C (this time under the C -- as it happens, Cs don't get converted). Continue this, but if you reach a spot where there's already a letter, keep shifting right until you find an empty one. Place all the letters, then all the digits. The result for the title "Project: Conjunction" is this cipher:

Plain : 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher: 892w6lxotrj0c4gaph5mk7dnusye1zfqibv3

Pressure washing the deck

The good thing about having a nice, powerful pressure washer is that it's fantastic at getting things clean. The bad thing about it is that it's too good at getting things clean. For instance, doesn't this look like a pretty normal bit of patio decking, maybe a little in need of a deck brushing in spots, but otherwise, perfectly normal?

Most of my deck looks this way. I've been cleaning it with a deck brush and cleaning fluid, then coating it with Thompsons deck sealant, every two years, and it's only six years old. Looks like it's in pretty good shape, right?

Well, this is what happens when I use the pressure washer on it to clean up those little spots that seem like they need a deck brush:

Holy cow. Turns out that it's got a thick layer of grime that's gray in places, and brown in others. Looks like the "natural weathering" of the deck, people say, but it turns out to be something which washes right off, leaving the wood looking much more vibrant and attractive. The difference is so striking it feels like I'm painting woodgrain onto it rather than peeling off gunk; each swipe leaves a clear border between grime and wood.

Then again, maybe what I'm really doing is the equivalent of sanding it, stripping off a layer of "weathered" wood to reveal the wood underneath. I think that's unlikely, though. If I hold the washer in one spot, I never get a groove, I just get it to a particular level of golden yellow wood color and then it stops. And the clean spots don't feel even slightly lower than the dirty spots. I find it very unlikely that the wood is that weathered on the surface but completely different so close below that you can't feel the difference. Besides, a scratch in the wood doesn't show the "clean" surface that the pressure washer is exposing, even if it's a gouge. And finally, the washer's doing the same thing to mildew stains in places. In any case, if it's really sanding the wood, that's fine too. That's actually recommended before treating with sealant, though it's far too much work for people to actually do it.

The downside as I mentioned earlier is that it does such a great job that I feel like the work is never done. I look at the huge deck and see some areas that seem clean and others that need a washing, but once I wash those, the other areas now look dirty. The job has ended up far larger than I originally anticipated, and even though it's not really arduous work, like scrubbing would be, it is time-consuming. Especially when I keep going back to redo areas that seemed good enough before.

Unfortunately, even the pressure-washer won't take off some of the grease globs and stains that the grill has left behind. Maybe next time I do this in two years I'll experiment with adding some detergent to the pressure washer (it has a system for that).

Skunk adventures

Thursday night about when we were going to bed, Socks got riled up about something in the backyard and went out to bark at it. Nothing unusual about this, though the barking had a different tone than usual. Turns out she'd not only found a skunk, but it was inside her penned-in area, and she had it cornered under the tiny bit of deck that serves as the stoop, and Siobhan didn't quite arrive in time to save her from getting sprayed.

Fortunately she got a very light hit. Even minutes afterwards it was entirely possible to stand right next to her. I've experienced full-blast skunk sprayings on dogs before and even with my notoriously weak sense of smell I couldn't stand next to them without feeling like I was going to lose my lunch. Socks was flipping out and rubbing her nose on the grass, and occasionally trying to menace the skunk again, but I was able to get her and lead her in without getting sprayed. The skunk later found its way out of the yard and down to the neighbor's shed.

We had a pretty late night trying to bathe the dog and mop the floor, and find enough ways to get rid of the smell to get through the night. Again, all this was only possible because we had a very mild hit to deal with. Siobhan has never experienced this before (and while I think she believes me that this was a mild hit, I don't think she quite gets just how mild) so we had some of those miscommunications that'd be comical if you saw them on a TV show. Thinking back on it, I think some of them come from the fact that she was reading advice that assumed you'd had a full-fledged spraying, and which, if followed, would get us down to probably about the level of stink that we already were at. Thus she had a sense of urgency that I lacked because we were already at the kind of "tolerable" level that's probably the best you can achieve, other than by waiting it out. It was a very frustrating and exhausting night. (Great preparation for having a long drive to a concert tonight, and then back from it afterwards).

Socks stopped being upset about it after her bath last night, once the smell wasn't hurting her nose anymore. About the only distress she had was that we weren't letting her up on the bed so much and not petting her as we would usually, since we didn't want to have to wash our hands after. Since then she's been pretty back to normal.

The house still has a smell about it, but for me, it's mild enough that I can stop noticing it until I go out and come back in. Roomba and Scooba are working on the floor, and we have the fans going (enough to make it chilly in here). Of course the smell is still strong enough to bother Siobhan. There's probably nothing for that but to wait it out.

Approaching the unreal

Last night we went to see Rush playing at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Saratoga Springs. This was my first time seeing them in more than twenty years, and I'd decided if there was one band I'd really like to see again, even enough to brave a crowded hall full of raucous fans, it was Rush.

The drive out to Saratoga Springs went all right though we arrived a little later than planned due to a detour, some traffic, and an unplanned stop, but we had plenty of slack in the timeline and assigned seats so nothing bad came of that. I had pulled my right rear calf muscle earlier in the day so the steep climb to the footbridge over the highway from the west parking lot to the path to the arena was a bit of a strain.

The venue itself seemed disorganized and like it was mostly counting on the visitors to already be familiar with how things worked. It's not like I expect a stadium that hosts rock concerts to be a sparkling model of customer service. But they didn't even have signs suggesting where the (far too few) bathrooms were, or how to find the right part of the arena where your seats were, or even where to go next.

A lot of people said that I would love SPAC, and I can see how it might be a good venue for some kind of events, despite having seats so tiny and close together that even Siobhan was crammed in. It was a nice blend of indoor and outdoor, at least. But it turns out it was a terrible, terrible venue for a rock concert, and I will not be returning.

The first problem is that the sound quality was abysmal. I don't expect a live concert to be as crystal-clear as a CD player and headphones, of course. But these speakers were almost nothing but hiss and crackle. You literally couldn't tell in some songs when Neil stopped playing the cymbals or high-hat because every other sound tended to come out as the same kind of hiss. I don't know how much of the blame to place on SPAC; maybe the problem was in the band's equipment or its setup, though I find that far less likely.

The previous times I'd seen Rush were back in Nassau Coliseum, which is much, much bigger than SPAC. Sitting in the back sections up pretty high, I was farther away from the stage then than the entire width or length of SPAC. And yet, I could see the band at Nassau Coliseum far, far better. Again, SPAC can only take part of the blame, because of how the rows were so close together and each row was only a tiny bit higher than the previous one. The biggest problem was the crowd.

Apparently it's now standard for rock concerts to be held in a completely standing position. Everyone gets a chair and promptly ignores it. This is a kind of mass stupidity, in my opinion, because so long as everyone stands, no one actually gets a better view than they would have had if everyone sat. Except maybe a few tall people, and if so, they're explicitly getting it selfishly at the cost of their neighbors. In my teenage years, people didn't do this, at least not at the venues I went to on Long Island (and it's so rare to find a way that my generation wasn't as stupid as later ones, so I should probably revel in it!).

Standing for three hours needlessly would be a discomfort at most (made worse by that strained calf muscle), but something I'd be willing to endure to see Rush. In fact I had it in mind before buying the tickets that that was a possible outcome. (It's one of the reasons I don't go to big concerts of big names these days. You don't get this kind of sheep-like conformity to foolishness at Bobs concerts.) But combined with the fact that the rows were so close together and so lightly sloped, the result was, if anyone in the 30 rows in front of you was taller than you, you probably weren't going to get to see anything. This is the view I had, from eye level, while standing:

This was actually an unusually good moment for a view because a woman three rows ahead of us had her head down at that moment. It's the shortest dark lump in the middle. When her head was up, her ponytail tended to block most of the drum set, which is all you can really see in this picture (it's the blurry shape in the center lit in green lights -- wasn't blurry for me, of course). If I strained onto tiptoes I could see a little bit more, but I couldn't do that for three hours (especially with that pulled muscle), and even if I had, I could barely see anything anyway.

I kept thinking, hey Geddy, just tell everyone to sit down and they will. You're probably the only person who could do it and have it happen, too. Of course he didn't. Though I've heard of other bands doing so. Some bands, and some venues, have made some attempt to reverse the "everyone stands" thing, perhaps because they see how it really benefits no one and hurts the shorter (or older, or disabled) people, or perhaps just because they don't want to lose customers.

But nothing else would have worked. Even if a bunch of people simultaneously sat down, it wouldn't be enough to get everyone else to sit down. Heck, if 95% of us magically chose the same moment to sit, the other 5% would still have no reason to sit. Once some people stand, everyone else has to stand. Makes me wonder why people don't go the next step and stand on top of their chairs (I was tempted at times) -- as long as everyone does it, it'll hurt everyone and benefit no one, but if one person does it, everyone else has to. It's the logical next step in mob stupidity.

On the up side, for a rock concert, there was surprisingly little weed in the air. I only got a few mild breezes of it. I saw one person being kicked out for using it, too. Maybe SPAC takes it more seriously, or maybe times have changed, I don't know.

You've noticed I haven't said much about the show, for the obvious reason that I could barely see or hear it. What I could see struck me as being a good show. The band was in solid form. They weren't deviating hardly at all from the album recordings; even the solos were mostly note-for-note, and there was only a minimum of running around, talking to us, or anything else other than the set list. (Of course, that might have come later.) The pyrotechnics were solid and only rarely distracting. The set dressing was fascinating and made me want to get a better look -- lots of steampunk brass-and-chrome stuff (the drum set was particularly cool in that regard). The video stuff they played on the screen behind the band was sometimes distracting (might have been less so if I could see the band) and if it added much I didn't see how, but maybe it was just not for me. The performances were crisp, polished, energetic, and of course, masterfully skillful.

But since we could neither see nor hear it very well, when the intermission break came, we decided to leave. No sense enduring those discomforts and facing a later drive home (as it is we got home around 1am) just for the chance to choose between watching the back of a teenager's head, or the back of his shirt. It would have been nice to see the solos, but not worth it to stay just to not see them.

SPAC must be a great venue for something, since so many people told me I was going to love it. I'm not sure what kind of things they do there and whether it works well for them. They certainly get a lot of great bands, but even if I felt like the crowd at a Tom Petty/CSN show wouldn't stand all night, I still doubt it'd be worth the high cost, the long drive, and the discomfort, to endure bad sound and a bad view. Add the "everyone stands" factor, and it's definitely not worth it. I won't be coming back to SPAC.

Costs and benefits of RPG rules

Roleplaying games tend to be arranged along an axis of complexity: rules-light games are very simple, rules-rich games are more complex. On its face, "simple" seems like a virtue, so why wouldn't we all use rules-light games? (This argument might seem absurd, but it's actually a widely made one.) Because that complexity buys you something. Or more accurately, three things.

Assisting the GM
A GM has to balance a lot of things. Keeping the story going in a satisfying direction, ensuring all the players are engaged and getting what they need, adjudicating conflicts, improvising when the players go in unanticipated directions, and playing all the NPCs, to name a few. Rules-light games also pile onto the GM a lot of additional work: deciding what various outcomes mean, inventing results for actions, etc.

A good, experienced GM can keep up with more of this stuff, but no matter how good a GM you are, there's always times when doing more of one thing means doing less of another. Having to spend more time thinking about what it means that the player just rolled that particular roll, means spending less time thinking about what the NPC's reaction should be, for instance.

And this tends to make us fall into ruts. Some kinds of reactions or events are closer to the forefront of a GM's thoughts, and will thus tend to happen disproportionately often. Others will happen too rarely, even though they might be fun or make sense (or both), just because the GM's mind doesn't run there as readily. Free up more of the GM's mental processing power and he's more likely to be able to think of unusual or uncharacteristic things to happen, as well as being able to make NPC reactions more fleshed out and less one-dimensional, pay more attention to keeping all the players engaged and having fun, etc.

While rules can occupy some of a GM's mental processing, they can also free up a lot of it by taking care of things for him. They can also allow the players to contribute to running things by handling their own arithmetic, table lookups, and to some extent, rules and action resolutions. In a rules-light game, usually the GM has to do all of that... in his head, off the cuff, in the moment.

Expectation Calibration
It happens more often than you might realize, that your expectation of what your character can and can't do, or what the likelihoods are for various outcomes of some situation, don't match what the GM thinks. This means the decisions you're making for your character can turn out to be wrong through no fault of your own. You might try something with less chance of success than you'd expect, or fail to employ a tactic that would work if you had. Most of the time, this is a minor issue, easily overlooked. At its worst, you can get your character killed trying to jump a chasm that you think your skill should let you jump, but your GM doesn't.

Rules help to firm up a lot of these things because it's up to the rules whether your character can do this or that, and the way the dice work determine the probabilities in a way that the players can figure out (or just pick up from experience). It's never going to be a 100% calibration, of course, but there's a significant gap between a rules-light game where the outcome of a combat comes down to "the GM makes it up" based on the advice of a die roll, and a rules-rich game where specific wounds are determined by a specific numerical process.

Verisimilitude
Good rules tend towards being more "realistic" to the world setting and genre feel, by ensuring that all possible outcomes are possible, and come up with the right probability. Note that we're not talking about realism in the sense of accuracy to the real world: no one wants to play a swords-and-sorcery game where the dragon can't stand up because of the cube-square law, and can't breathe fire because of the second law of thermodynamics. But we do want one where the rules produce results that accurately simulate the way things work in that world, and that's why we say "verisimilitude" instead of "realism". Rules-light games can be only as accurate as the limited amount of the GM's mental processing available for ensuring verisimilitude can achieve, but as we make rules more complex, one of the main things we're aiming for is more verisimilitude with each extra rule or element.

---

So what is the cost of all these rules? They're real costs, and they're why for some types of games, rules-light is the right solution, and for some games, rules-rich is better.

Slowing The Action
More rules mean more time you have to spend looking things up, adding things up, figuring things out, and working with rules instead of with the world and the action. In the extreme case, a combat that represents a half-minute of frantic, action-packed gunplay and acrobatics can take a few hours to play. And that can mean by the end of the session you don't feel like you got very far, which can be dissatisfying. You don't come away with the breathless excitement you'd get from watching that same fight in a movie.

Intimidating Learning Curve
More complex rules tend to scare off new players. They see a big sheet full of numbers, and despair at the idea of being able to jump in, or have fun. They worry they're going to "do something wrong" and they figure they'll never quite figure out how to make a character that isn't crippled because they forgot something, or make the right choice in a combat. They might even feel like instead of playing a game they're learning something as dry and unexciting as chartered accountancy.

Disconnectedness From The Genre
Often the GM is trying to convey something of the emotion or atmosphere of a setting or genre. Running a horror game? You probably want your players to feel a little bit scared, a little frisson of chill up the spine. Your space opera might want to convey a sense of the vastness of the possibilities around us. Your game of mysticism wants to feel shrouded in mystery and symbolism. Your historical fiction should convey the sense of being in that period of history, or alternately, in the fiction from that period of history. Your modern suspense should make your players feel like they're the ones hanging from the chandelier dodging bullets as they try to get to the bomb before it goes off.

None of those things really dovetail well with asking your character to look something up on a long list of numbers, add it to three other numbers, then cross-reference the result on a table and record the result on another sheet of paper. (Unless you're playing a game set in a bureaucratic dystopia, maybe.) Rules tend to pull the player's focus away from the world you're trying to immerse them in, by pulling them to thinking about the rules themselves, the numbers, the dice, the hit points. It's like watching a movie and paying attention to trying to see the wires by which the hero is dangling, or guessing what CGI rendering engine they used, instead of being drawn into the story.

---

We usually assume that there is a simple cost/benefit process in play. Every new rule, or new element to a rule, that increases complexity, serves to increase the benefits and the costs. That's probably true in some sense, but it's an oversimplification. The real point is the cost/benefit ratio.

Some rule additions will add very little complexity, and thus, increase the costs very, very little. Some will add a lot. Some will provide very little benefit (or even, in the pathological case, no benefit), while some will provide a lot.

Game design is really all about finding the best ratios. Finding ways to add more of the benefits while paying less of the costs. The difference between a good rules-rich game and a bad one is not how many rules they have, or even how much verisimilitude they have, or any of the other benefits. The difference is how good a ratio they achieve between costs and benefits. It's easy to make a set of complex rules that accurately model weapon ranges or encumbrance; it's hard to make one that does so while still staying out of the way of the GM and the players.

The most important fact about game design that is typically overlooked or oversimplified is that there is a huge range of cost/benefit ratios available. Some of the rules employed in some rules-rich games cost a lot for what you get. They slow things down too much or pull us out of the world too much. But that doesn't mean some other approach, some other rule, couldn't do just as well (or better) while costing far less. What game designers need to be doing is finding techniques to maximize the ratio, more than worrying about where on the light/rich spectrum to fall.

A sucker for tempo changes

Meat Loaf's "All Revved Up And No Place To Go". Pat Benatar's "Hell Is For Children". The Yardbirds' "For Your Love". Credence Clearwater Revival's "Lookin' Out My Back Door". Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen". What do they have in common, besides being good songs? In each case, one part of the song is in a markedly different tempo from the rest, and it's not just a time signature change, or a song where the tempo changes so often there's hardly a real baseline, or a song where the tempo is being subtly played with: it's a song which abruptly changes tempo (and in some cases, changes back).

For some reason I can't put my finger on, this technique really has an impact on me. It's such a simple, even simplistic, trick. And it's probably one that you couldn't use too often before it would lose its impact. But those songs always appeal to me more, somehow, than they should. The moment of transition is so engaging, it gives the whole song a new sense of life.

It's kind of embarassing to be tickled by such a cheap trick. But I can't help myself. And I have no idea why.

You Rock Band 3?

About a year ago Inspired Instruments announced the You Rock Guitar. It's an electronic guitar that you can play like a real guitar, but it can also work as a controller for games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Each piece of guitar string over each fret, while feeling and playing just like real guitar string, works like a button when it's used as a game controller. There's also set of six strings to pluck which are attached to sensors. The result: it will let you play those games, and then advance to real music, and when you play real music it's a brilliantly powerful guitar because it works from a library of samples to sound like almost any kind of guitar you can think of (and other instruments too).


This was revolutionary, but it took them a long time to get them out the door. They were originally supposed to be in our hands last September, but they're only just arriving this summer. During the ensuing gap, the same idea has come along at least two more times in forms that are built into the next generation of rhythm games, which take the next step towards being about really playing music. Power Gig comes out this fall and features a six-string guitar controller very similar in design to the You Rock, though limited to being just a controller for that particular game. More visibly, Rock Band 3 is due out before Christmas, and its two biggest changes: the addition of keyboards, and a "pro" mode in which the guitar, keyboard, and drums all have you actually playing the song using real techniques. Which necessitates a new controller which again looks almost exactly like the You Rock.

Actually, Rock Band 3 is talking about two new guitar controllers, one of which is just a controller like the Power Gig one, while the other one, the Squier, is a fully functional guitar as well as being a controller, similar to the You Rock. No word yet on its functionality. You Rock has a lot of guitar features that I bet the Squier doesn't have, but it's too soon to tell.

I'm wondering if Inspired Instruments is going to suffer the "first to market" curse. We like to imagine that being first to market with an idea just before it catches fire is always good, but if you go back through the recent history of technology, you'll find quite often a small company hits with a revolutionary idea, a bigger company grabs the same idea and makes a much bigger splash, and the first company goes under. (Apple loves to be that second company. Often, to avoid the risk of going first, they'll wait until they're fifth or sixth instead. Steve Jobs would, off the record, admit it: he'd rather do it "right" than "first" at least by what he considers right. How much is really them doing it right, and how much is them selling it sexy, is a topic for another argument.)

But Inspired Instruments has made one very right choice that could save them. The functionality that lets the You Rock work with each game is in the form of a separate component, a GameFlex cartridge. It's basically a cartridge that links the YouRock to the game system, and makes the YouRock appear like the controller that game and system expect. That means that the day after Rock Band 3 comes out (or well before), they could be working on a GameFlex cartridge to make the You Rock be like the Squier, only better. If they can get that out fast enough and sell the advantages that the You Rock has over the Squier well enough, they can be swept along, not away, by Rock Band 3.

Not only would that be good for them, it'd be good for me! It'd mean I won't need to buy a new guitar when I get Rock Band 3. I just need a new GameFlex for my sexy sexy guitar.

So I hope that the people at Inspired Instruments are having these exact same thoughts right now. Naturally they wouldn't be saying them publicly. (Actually, since they're rushing their first shipment of guitars out the door after a nine-month delay, they're probably too tired to be thinking much of anything.) But their website does now say this: "For gamers, the You Rock Guitar provides a more guitar-like gaming experience with existing games and is gamer-ready for the next generation of more complex games." I hope that "next generation" comment, and a few vague and non-committal comments on their forum and their Facebook page, mean what I think they mean. I can't wait for Rock Band 3, particularly if it'll work with my You Rock.

(There's also talk that Rock Band 3 will be sold with a MIDI interface that means you can plop any MIDI-compatible instrument, including the You Rock or just about anything else, into your Rock Band 3 system, and it'll work as a controller. If so, that would be an amazing step, though it would probably also be a lot more complicated, and probably more expensive, than just another GameFlex cartridge. More on this as they make it clearer!)