pareidolia

Things about radio commercials I never noticed until recently

I have tried almost my entire life to ignore com­mer­cials of any kind. But, as of late, I have been forced to not only lis­ten, but pay atten­tion to a great deal of radio com­mer­cials. Here are a few things I’ve noticed.

1. You know how in mag­a­zines they have those “spe­cial adver­tis­ing section“s? Well, they do that in radio, too. They try really hard to make com­mer­cials sound like they’re actu­ally con­tent. Often, the hosts of the shows will “tell” you that they really love a prod­uct, but they’ve never used the thing at all. Well, in a mag­a­zine, they put “adver­tise­ment” at the top, but in radio, they don’t. You’re just expected to know. Or not, more likely.

2. They try really hard to make peo­ple sound like they’re being con­ver­sa­tional. But when you lis­ten to a com­mer­cial over and over and over again, the ticks and affec­ta­tions start to stand out. And then you start to won­der if they’re doing it on pur­pose. And then you know for cer­tain that they are because they don’t do any­thing unless there are a mil­lion dif­fer­ent num­bers back­ing their decisions.

3. I used to really be both­ered by the pledge dri­ves on pub­lic radio. Now, though, I will will­fully and gladly take that if this is the alter­na­tive. The peo­ple that adver­tise on radio these days are the worst of the bottom-​​feeding, pyramid-​​scheming lot and it’s incred­i­bly insult­ing to any­one with at least two brain cells.

cleopatra hair

I made this at work today. I couldn’t use it, but I liked it too much to just let it die.

wig

I need a word for this

I love wikipedia. I enjoy read­ing an arti­cle, and then read­ing other arti­cles that relate to it. Tonight I watched The Foot Fist Way, a very funny movie about a Taek­wondo instruc­tor. I didn’t know any­thing about Taek­wondo, so I looked it up on wikipedia. Some­how, I ended the night read­ing about sex­ual slav­ery as prac­ticed by the Japan­ese dur­ing the first part of the 20th century.

But I’m not here to talk about the bor­ing ways in which I spend my free time. There is a ten­dency, in wikipedia arti­cles, to be less and less accu­rate when the topic of the arti­cle is less and less gen­eral. For exam­ple, dur­ing my read­ing adven­ture tonight, I was read­ing about break­ing in regards to mar­tial arts demon­stra­tions. At a point, the arti­cle starts to make ques­tion­able statements:

Peo­ple often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically.

In most other wikipedia arti­cles, it would prob­a­bly look like this:

Peo­ple [who?] often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven sci­en­tif­i­cally. [cita­tion needed]

This amuses me. I know I’m pretty much done read­ing wikipedia for the night when I start to encounter these.

I have a the­ory for why this phe­nom­e­non exists. I read a lot of arti­cles tonight about Japan­ese war­crimes dur­ing the 20th cen­tury. Those had plenty of sources and were very clearly writ­ten. I think many peo­ple are inter­ested in these top­ics. They are his­tor­i­cally significant.

But break­ing boards and bricks for mar­tial arts demon­stra­tions is, to say the very least, less sig­nif­i­cant. I imag­ine that far fewer peo­ple read the board break­ing arti­cle than read the war­crimes arti­cle. And the peo­ple that are read­ing the board break­ing arti­cles have no prob­lem with claims of dubi­ous qual­ity. I’ve seen this when­ever I come across an arti­cle that seems to have lit­tle pos­si­bil­ity for gen­eral inter­est. Arti­cles about anime, musi­cal gen­res that I’ve never heard of, and fanboy-​​inspiring top­ics in general.

It’s really easy to imag­ine the guy from The Foot Fist Way read­ing and pos­si­bly con­tribut­ing to the arti­cle on board break­ing. In fact, I can’t imag­ine any­one else read­ing it, really.

I want to come up with a word for this drop in qual­ity. It is the point at which wikipedia stops being use­ful and sim­ply elic­its a cho­rus of “yep, that’s pretty much how it is.” And it will never get any bet­ter for these kinds of arti­cles because nobody who knows any­thing about writ­ing or truth will ever read them.

Grim Fandango

So, after all these years, I finally com­pleted Grim Fan­dango.

I love the char­ac­ters and the set­ting. I even think some of the puz­zles are pretty good. Cer­tainly it’s a very good game. I love adven­ture games, and I would even say that it’s a rel­a­tively good adven­ture game. But Grim Fan­dango is not the best adven­ture game ever. Lots of peo­ple seem to think so. It even tops a lot of best-​​of lists.

Appar­ently, Lucasarts was in a tran­si­tional period when this game was made. It ended up being their second-​​to-​​last adven­ture game, which is a shame, because they made some really fun adven­ture games over the years. Most of this is due to the writ­ing and game design of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. Ron Gilbert left the com­pany before Grim Fan­dango was made, and this game served as Tim Schafer’s last hur­rah. It seems that Lucasarts used Grim Fandango’s per­for­mance as a way to test the mar­ket waters. If it didn’t make a boat­load of money, then they would stop focus­ing on adven­ture games. And, well, it didn’t make a boat­load of money, so they stopped focus­ing on adven­ture games. I assume that some of the dif­fer­ences between Grim Fan­dango and other Lucasarts adven­tures, then, were because they knew that the genre was close to death, and they were try­ing like hell to attract new play­ers. So they debuted some new exper­i­men­tal features.

The trade­mark Lucasarts writ­ing remained excel­lent. The puz­zles remained excel­lent. But the graph­ics were con­verted to 3d. I know this was 1998, just into the Playsta­tion era, but holy hell, these graph­ics are ter­ri­ble. They did the best with what they had, I guess, but the char­ac­ters are blocky, and the pre-​​rendered back­grounds are, well, I guess they’re fine for pre-​​rendered back­grounds, but even the art from Myst looked bet­ter, and that was 5 years before. I admit that the idea of using tra­di­tional Mex­i­can art is quite inspired. I can only imag­ine what the ini­tial con­cept art looked like.

Even though I gen­er­ally dis­like 3d graph­ics, that’s not the game’s biggest down­fall. That dubi­ous honor is reserved for the hor­ren­dous fuck­ing con­trols. There were so many times play­ing the game that I would attempt to walk some­where, but couldn’t, because the Resident-​​Evil-​​style-​​rotating-​​point-​​of-​​view move­ment is so incred­i­bly bro­ken it makes Res­i­dent Evil seem like Super Mario Galaxy. Once, I acci­den­tally went up and down the ele­va­tor by the Blue Cas­ket in Ruba­cava four times just try­ing to walk past the god damned thing.

So, with the graph­ics kind of suck­ing and the con­trol really suck­ing, I couldn’t help but think that this game should have been made in the style of Lucasart’s other graphic adven­ture games, like Full Throt­tle or Day of the Ten­ta­cle. The art in those games is far supe­rior because it’s based on actual draw­ings instead of poly­gons. It has char­ac­ter and warmth.

Just try to imag­ine a Grim Fan­dango that looked like this:

Calav­era Drawing

instead of this.

Manny Calav­era (aka ol’ block­head) from Grim Fandango

I think maybe I will always pre­fer pens to poly­gons. I believe that the tran­si­tion to 3d did more harm than good. I guess it’s just hard for me to shake the idea of Grim Fan­dango look­ing as good, as, say, Sam & Max Hit the Road.

And the con­trol was so much eas­ier in those games. You just clicked on things instead of mov­ing your char­ac­ter around with the arrow keys.

In most types of games, I pre­fer a direct approach to game con­trol. For exam­ple, in role play­ing games, I pre­fer games like The Leg­end of Zelda where you push a but­ton to swing your sword, to command-​​driven RPGs, where you push a but­ton to con­firm that you want to swing your sword. It’s more vis­ceral and it feels like you’re actu­ally doing some­thing instead of just trig­ger­ing cutscenes.

Maybe if they had spent more time work­ing on the con­trols, I wouldn’t be com­plain­ing so much. I played Escape from Mon­key Island, which was a later game built on the same engine, and I didn’t have nearly as many problems.

In this arti­cle, Tim Schafer talks about their intent with the con­trols. They wanted to min­i­mize menu screens so it looked less like a com­puter game, mak­ing it more immer­sive. And they changed the con­trol scheme from mouse based to key­board based for the same rea­sons, I guess. If you see a big crosshair cur­sor in the mid­dle of your screen, that makes it harder to sus­pend your dis­be­lief. Their inten­tions were good, but they fell short. Mov­ing around is frus­trat­ing, manip­u­lat­ing your inven­tory is annoy­ing, and, for me, this made it nearly impos­si­ble immerse myself in the story.

I do want to reit­er­ate, though, after all this crit­i­cism, that I really liked the game. If it had been made maybe 3 or 4 years pre­vi­ously, or maybe 10 years after, I think it would have been one of the best games ever made. But, I guess it’s bet­ter that it was released than being shelved, like Full Throt­tle 2.

Comments Off

Any time I’m read­ing a long arti­cle on a web page, I’ll occa­sion­ally glance over at the right side of my browser win­dow. I’m look­ing for the scroll bar, try­ing to fig­ure out how much longer this thing is. Some­times it’s because it’s bor­ing, some­times it’s because I have to go to the bath­room but I’m really inter­ested in it and want to fin­ish read­ing it before I go.

This behav­ior isn’t lim­ited to the inter­net. I do it when read­ing books, too. When­ever I eat at a restau­rant by myself, I bring a book. Often, I’ll stay much longer than the time it takes to fin­ish the meal, just because I want to fin­ish the chap­ter. Some­times chap­ters are long. If it’s more than 10 pages or so, I’ll usu­ally just call it a loss and leave.

In any case, I often try to assess the length of what­ever it is I’m read­ing. I think it’s use­ful, and you prob­a­bly do it, too.

And now I finally come to my point — any­body who makes a web page with com­ments, please make the com­ments a sep­a­rate page. Or make them hid­den until you click on “reveal.” Or just turn them off. I don’t care how you do it — but they need to not add length to the page.

Like I said, when the arti­cle is long, I’ll look at the scroll­bar. If it looks like I’m halfway through it, I’m usu­ally wrong, because there are com­ments at the bot­tom and some­times they’re as long or longer than the orig­i­nal arti­cle. This is bad.

In my mind, the page does not exist for the sake of leav­ing com­ments — it exists so you can read the words of the orig­i­nal author. Now, let it be said that I think com­ments are are a good idea. I under­stand their rel­e­vance, but they are cer­tainly not as impor­tant as the orig­i­nal arti­cle. News­pa­pers don’t print ever sin­gle let­ter they get. The have a spe­cial page for let­ters and they only print a few.

Unless the pur­pose of the site is dis­cus­sion, com­ments should be de-​​emphasized. And, also, they tend to be poorly writ­ten. So I make it a point not to read them. Some­times I do, when it’s tech­ni­cal infor­ma­tion or it’s a site where the com­ments have a decent rep­u­ta­tion, like Slash­dot or Metafil­ter. But usu­ally they’re bad and not worth reading.

If what I’ve said before hasn’t con­vinced you, think of all the lost pro­duc­tiv­ity. If com­ments on inter­net were mag­i­cally turned off, we’d have entire com­mu­ni­ties look­ing up, blink­ing their eyes and stretch­ing, and going out­side to paint the shed.

Cer­tainly you’re as sick of all those unpainted sheds as I am.

Hey Headline People

For the love of god please stop ref­er­enc­ing old song titles as news arti­cle titles. If I have to see “The X are alright” at the top of an arti­cle one more time I think I might vomit.

No No No

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have a new album com­ing out. Accord­ing to this, appar­ently it’s all about syn­the­siz­ers and danc­ing. I haven’t even tried to lis­ten to their leaked tracks — I have absolutely no interest.

I used to like this band. Turns out I was duped.

I said it before and I’ll say it again — any music that encour­ages danc­ing is music that I never want to lis­ten to.

Review of Pitchfork’s Review of The Sophtware Slump

Here are a few points that I feel I need to declare before I start.

1. I love Grandaddy, and The Soft­ware Slump in particular.

2. I gen­er­ally hate Pitchfork.

I was look­ing up this album on Wikipedia, hop­ing that there was some­thing new and inter­est­ing about this album that I could learn. There wasn’t. But I did click on the link to the Pitch­fork review. What a mis­take that was.

It’s been almost 10 years since this album was released. When eval­u­at­ing a work of art, know­ing when it was made helps you deter­mine the con­text. But, and this is appar­ently very impor­tant, the album was released some­time in early 1999. So much of the review is spent talk­ing about how this might be an early con­tender for “album of the year.”

I don’t under­stand why crit­ics fix­ate on these arbi­trary year-​​to-​​year dis­tinc­tions. Espe­cially in a review. And espe­cially in a review that is avail­able on the inter­net 10 years after it was first written.

Peo­ple talk an awful lot lately about how online jour­nal­ism (blog­ging) is killing print jour­nal­ism. Every time I read some­thing on Pitch­fork, it makes me sad because even smelly old Rolling Stone is bet­ter than this garbage. And it’s never the albums they choose to review or their rat­ings or any­thing like that — it’s entirely their tone that both­ers me. See this old post.

Still, I guess 8.5/10 ain’t half bad. I give this review, how­ever, a 1.475 out of 10.

Sadness

My mother died recently.

It wasn’t sud­den. My fam­ily knew for a long time that this was going to hap­pen. She’s been sick for too long and I’m glad her suf­fer­ing is over.

Of course, I wish it hadn’t hap­pened in the first place, but it wasn’t really any­thing she did to cause it. It’s not like she drank her­self to death or died sky­div­ing. It was like can­cer, but it wasn’t can­cer. I still don’t know what caused it, I think it’s quite pos­si­ble that no one does. It’s just one of those things that happens.

I think that my mother’s emo­tional state was greatly affected by this dis­ease. The first occur­rence of the brain tumor was before my par­ents got divorced. 1987, I think. I know when she had brain surgery my dad was still around.

But they got divorced in 1989. Again, the details are fuzzy, but I think she had no more brain surg­eries until some­time in the early 90’s. I know she was really sad about the divorce. But any­one that knew my fam­ily could eas­ily see that it was for the best. My dad is kind of a dick.

She got a job and worked to sup­port me. I can’t even imag­ine doing some­thing like this, con­sid­er­ing she was a stay-​​at-​​home-​​mom and her mar­riage of 20+ years was now over.

Some­time around this time she got rear-​​ended by a drunk dri­ver, her car flipped over, and they had to pry her out with the jaws of life. Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t remem­ber if this was before or after the divorce. She had more brain surg­eries. I moved out, and she had more brain surg­eries. She stopped work­ing and started get­ting social secu­rity money. And then more brain surg­eries – Into the dou­ble dig­its. They cut her skull open 10 times, at least.

I think she prob­a­bly felt like the unluck­i­est per­son in the world. We never really talked about this. I know she resented what hap­pened with my dad. I know she didn’t under­stand why she had all these brain tumors. I know she was really upset about the car accident.

I think she felt that suf­fer­ing was what she did.

I went back to michi­gan when my mom died. I looked at a lot of her things — old pho­tos, news­pa­per clip­pings, etc. I saw a poem she had saved. I don’t remem­ber the poem exactly, but it was basi­cally about an ado­les­cent girl who feels like she isn’t pretty and doesn’t have much to offer the world. It was very sad. My mother had saved it in a box of keep­sakes, and wrote next to the poem “me.” I don’t know when she did this. It looked old, but not too old. I imag­ine that she did it in high school, before she was mar­ried to my dad.

I didn’t really know too much about my mother’s child­hood — just that she was artis­tic and that her older sis­ter often had to drag her out of bed in the morn­ings when they went to school.

Now, look­ing back on all these things, I am forced to con­clude that I am much more like my mother than I ever real­ized. For the most part, I tried very hard to not be like my mother — but I guess that’s how it always goes. I’m sad about most things. I feel like bad things hap­pen to me more fre­quently than any­body else I know. I feel unlucky in love.

I don’t think any­one could say that my mother lived an amaz­ing life. We were really poor, she was sick, she didn’t have any roman­tic rela­tion­ships that I know of since the early 90’s. Her father died in 1995. I have a very real desire to do bet­ter than that.

I know that my mother did the best she could — and, for the most part, I believe that her cir­cum­stances, that is, the things in her life that were out of her con­trol, were truly unfor­tu­nate. So far, none of the really bad things that hap­pened to her have hap­pened to me.

But I can’t help but think that her atti­tude might have some­thing to do with her sad­ness. And, since I’ve just recently noticed that am pretty much just as sad as my mother was, I am wor­ried that I will end up the same way. I don’t want that. I don’t want to die at 60, unable to clean myself and basi­cally alone. I want to have an inter­est­ing career. I want to find love. I want to be happy.

So I have decided to try to change some things about myself. I want to stop think­ing that bad things always hap­pen to me. I want to make good things hap­pen. I want to be less pes­simistic. She suf­fered. But maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe I don’t have to.

I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s worth a shot. This rejec­tion of the qual­i­ties I inher­ited from her isn’t meant to dis­honor her. I think if she knew that I was happy, it would have made her happy, at least for a lit­tle while.

I don’t think she would have wanted me to be sad. I would not wish sad­ness on any­body, and I don’t think she would, either. So I don’t think she would dis­ap­prove. I hope she would be happy that I’m try­ing to make things better.

I miss her.

Chicagoist Redesign Critique

I tried to post some of these com­ments on the forums, but their instal­la­tion of Move­able Type seems to be run­ning like frozen but­ter since the upgrade. So I’ll write it here instead.

Chicago­ist imple­mented a new design recently. Chicago­ist is part of a net­work of sites cen­tered around cities, Lon­don­ist, SFist, etc. Com­men­tary about what’s going on in the city. The redesign affects every site in the net­work, so these com­ments should apply to any of the other –ist sites as well.

Let me start off by say­ing that I like it over­all. But I still have some problems.

1. It’s too nar­row. The old design, and I’m bas­ing this on my mem­o­ries, seemed wider. It’s a fixed width design — I mea­sured the width of the con­tent of the site and it’s approx­i­mately 850 pix­els wide. I have no idea if there is any objec­tive rea­son to make a web­site 850 pixels.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, I design web­sites to be 960 pix­els wide. This width is based on the view­able area of a browser when the win­dow is max­i­mized on a 1024 x 768 mon­i­tor. There is research to sup­port that this is the res­o­lu­tion most peo­ple have their com­puter set to. Here’s a good one. I’m sure there is more out there.

So, unless there’s some­thing I don’t know, there’s no real rea­son the site should be this nar­row. Per­haps there’s some pur­pose that the orig­i­nal designer had, but with­out know­ing it, I assume he/​she is just stupid.

The new site has a bor­der around the entire thing. This con­tributes to the boxed-​​in effect. The old design, how­ever wide it was, had no def­i­nite edges. It’s pos­si­ble that the bor­der is part of what’s mak­ing it seem so narrow.

2. Move­able Type. It’s a dying pro­gram. No one should use it any­more. And fur­ther­more, this imple­men­ta­tion is really really slow. Per­haps they need a new server. But if it’s Move­able Type’s fault, it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m pretty sure that Kot­tke also uses MT, and his site isn’t unbear­ably slow.

3. Mis­cel­la­neous things. It’s pos­si­ble these are bugs, so they may be fixed soon. But they still need to be mentioned.

a. Near the bot­tom of the page, the “Next” and “Pre­vi­ous” nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments — when I hover my mouse over these but­tons, as well as the “1 2 3..” but­tons, it becomes an opaque brown box. This doesn’t seem like it was intended, and if it is, there’s no rea­son that I shouldn’t see what I might want to click on.

b. Search Results — The space between each of the match­ing arti­cles seemed really nar­row. Too nar­row to be intentional.

c. Mis­cel­la­neous other prob­lems — On this page, the page title is really really big. So big that it pushes all the tags out of the box and they’re cut off. It’s pos­si­ble this is just a Safari thing. I’m not going to bother check­ing it in other browsers, because that’s the job of the web designer. Also, at the bot­tom of every page, the “stats” link seems too close to the footer text. Also, who puts pub­lic links to stats any­more? That’s so 1997.

That’s about it. I was read­ing through the com­ments on their redesign announce­ment page, and so many peo­ple com­plain­ing about the changes as a whole. When­ever a redesign occurs, in any medium, peo­ple tend to com­plain quite loudly. Logos, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, web­sites. Peo­ple are com­i­cally afraid of change. I’ve seen it before, time and time again, so I feel it’s pretty safe to dis­re­gard what these peo­ple are saying.

My crit­i­cisms are all things that I think are errors in design. I don’t really care about things like the head­lines being in a non-​​bold font. That seems like it was inten­tional. The things that I men­tioned could be fixed eas­ily. My crit­i­cisms are con­struc­tive. This redesign isn’t really chang­ing much. The logo is the same. The color is the same. They still use Arial for their main body font. These peo­ple need to shut up.