Stuff Nerds Like

I was recently introduced to a family I had never met. One of the daughters of the family had drawn a respectable looking female head at a three-quarters profile on the paper table cloth. The head was most definitely drawn in a generic anime style with slightly angular eyes and small triangular nose. Everyone near the table was remarking how good it looked and the artist was accepting the compliments well. Amy, who I think was looking for some nerd cred, remarked on its anime style. That's when the girl piped back, "Hey, someone else knows about it!"

And that right there, my friends, is what will perennially bug me about stuff nerds like. As a nerd myself, I understand the mindset. We certainly have a proclivity to dig into a particular topic that we enjoy and mine it until the depths of its caverns are seemingly unblemished by other human interests. Jewels of unique and interesting content remain partially un-mined and sparkling from smooth, unblemished walls, ready to be plucked for our discovery and marvel. It always seems to us, as we dig deeper into aspects of gaming, music, culture, whatever it may be, that no other person could have possibly ventured as deep into the mountain as we have. But it is guaranteed that someone else has done so but that we just don't know it yet. We fail to understand that this path has been worn for some time.

So my initial reaction to the girl's comment was to simply think to myself, "Oh great, one of those." Another budding fan of Japanese pop art and culture who feels as though she is alone in her obsession. Alone in terms of what scope? Her family? Sure, I could see it. My parents didn't and to some extent still don't understand some of things I like. Her friends? Less likely but still probable. But start expanding that scope from a narrow band to a wide, global radius and she will begin to find the kinship of like minds. It's inevitable.

Perhaps as someone who knows of life before the world suddenly became connected with itself, I understand better what it was to know the isolation of the nerd. Not many people I knew would seek out some of the gems that I did. Bulletin-board systems existed during my childhood, but I didn't understand them and therefore failed to see the amazing potential of interconnected machines and databases of information until early in my adulthood. But now that we have the opportunity to perseverate on any topic we so choose simply by powering on our Intertrons, we can easily find others who can share in our interests.

For now, however, we should leave this girl in her perceived wilderness, in her age of wandering. She will find her niche. She may not see it now, but she will find it. She will join us.

This Thing Rules!

The Korg DS-10 I ordered finally arrived last week. I've been playing with it intermittently when I get time and I'll say it again: if you have any interest in real music creation and not just playback of pre-made samples as in Jam Sessions, this is the real deal. It's set up with step sequencers and a tracker that can store up to 16 patterns made by you. The reason I like this more than Jam Sessions is the sound synthesis. If I wanted to play a guitar, I'd just play a guitar. But not everybody has access to vintage analog synthesis. There's enough control with the DS-10 that you won't run out of ideas for new sounds any time soon.

I have one song almost finished and another is in the works although I'm not sure I like it. Here's a video to demonstrate some of the flexibility I'm talking about. This guy gets some things wrong. For instance, there's no sine wave available in the either of the synths. There's triangle, sawtooth, pulse, and noise, but no sine. OK, I'm nerding out now. Here's the vid for beginners:

Klingons and Wookies

This is the funniest thing I've seen in the past couple of weeks. Jim, the guy in the blue shirt, is trying to bait Dwight, the guy in the foreground, into wasting time at work. Dwight is a stickler for canon in sci-fi/fantasy fiction. Hilarity ensues.

Nerd Funny

I don't ever pre-order things. But the Korg DS-10's US release has me giddy with excitement so I did the unthinkable a couple of weekends ago: I plunked down my cash to purchase the idea of software. I pre-ordered this thing and I can't wait until they ship it to me on October 14th.

For those not in the know, the Korg DS-10 is a full-fledged synthesizer with step sequencer for the popular Nintendo DS. I was just over at Amazon watching the tutorial videos and getting excited about programming this thing. I haven't had a chance to really dig into sound synthesis for quite a while and this is going to be my fix for sure.

I can't think of any better concrete way to learn about the science of sound in a hands-on capacity than using a sequencer that lets you build a sound from its basic elements: sine waves. VCOs, VCAs, VCFs, EGs, S&H: all of these are acronyms with which you'll quickly become familiar and then after you play around for a while, suddenly it all starts to make sense. Actually, I think the VC part of those letters is pretty funny in the context of the DS. Those letters stand for Voltage Controlled, meaning actual electrical signals are being produced to generate the desired effect, but there's nothing voltage controlled about the DS-10 software. It is software, after all, and already completely in digital form. See? Ha ha. I told you it was funny. Nerd funny.

I'm a Happy Robot!

I wanted to give another quick plug for chip tune music so here it is. I've been listening to the stuff for a few years now and I'm really fond of a handful of musicians. I urge you to start surfing and check out the scene. There's lots of free, full-length mp3s to sample at 8bitpeoples.com. Personally, for anyone just starting to explore, I would recommend anything by Bit Shifter and Paza at that site. Bit Shifter works exclusively with Game Boys I believe and Paza did some remixing for Beck's iTunes exclusive single Hell, Yes (the one with 4 tracks). Paza's Ninjani Diskus collection is fantastic Atari ST noise. If you're in the Christmas mood, check out the 8-bit Christmas collection. Fun stuff, that. One more that I can suggest is mmfan316. mmfan316's starbase is in Japan and his songs sometimes include natively inspired melodies which can be a nice change of pace from the Western melodic influences. Hope you like the tracks. Enjoy them, my robots!

Musicbox Massacre: Part 2 - The Slothening

October has been an incredibly busy month for us. So far, all but one weekend has been filled to the brim with family and friends to visit and fun things to do. Even the weeknights have been busy. We've been attending our regular tabletop gaming night on Wednesdays and hitting some bars to celebrate birthdays of coworkers. It's times like these when work seems like that thing that just gets in the way of my real schedule.

Last weekend, we attended the second annual Musicbox Massacre, a 24-hour festival of horror movies. I'd seen a lot of the movies on the line-up, but I'd never seen any of them on the big screen. For me, the highlight of the 24 hours was watching John Carpenter's The Thing in a packed theater, hearing people gasping at the design and make-up wizardry, and starting in their seats at the scary moments. It's a real testament to the quality of the movie that despite after almost 25 years, it is still so tense and spooky that it can both scare and disgust an audience like it does.

Other personal highlights included finally seeing Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a movie that's more about tone, lighting, and pacing to make an audience uncomfortable than going for the popcorn-throwing scare. It's a film very much in the spirit of The Wicker Man, in my opinion, which is also one of my favorite movies. I was also treated to seeing Night of the Creeps for the first time in almost 20 years. When I was younger, I never really understood a lot of the comedy in the movie outside of the overt slapstick stuff, but watching it as a middle-aged man, I was able to piece together more of the references that they tucked away in the characters and settings. It's a movie dripping with 1980s cheese, but I would argue that that's an intentional decision in order to juxtapose the 1986 time period against the anachronism of the detective's character. The people sitting behind me had never seen it and said that it was the best suprisingly good movie of the festival. I would most certainly concur.

There were two surprise entries to the schedule that were both fantastic. The first was Imprint, Takashi Miike's submission for the Masters of Horror series on Showtime that was never shown because it had been banned from cable broadcast. That ban was for good reason, too. Imprint was one of the most difficult movies I've ever had the (dis)pleasure of watching. If you are a fan of Miike's other work, I would most certainly make an effort to see Imprint, but its 63-minute running length ends up feeling like a full 180 minutes by the time the end credits roll. Seeing Imprint once was enough for me but I will never forget it. The second surprise was The Eyes of Edward James, a short film that is shot entirely from a first-person perspective with continuous, interconnected, un-edited walking shots. If you find this movie as a rental, please check it out as it is a unique experience.

My only regret was the timing of Dario Argento's Deep Red. The festival had actually been given the unedited 126 minute Italian release and not the 96 minute American mess, neither of which I've seen. However, if you've ever experienced an Italian horror movie by the masters like Argento or Fulci, you'll know that it was very slow paced without much action. So, because it was also the next to last movie shown, I was so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open and ended up sleeping through most of it. If I had been smart, I would have slept through Friday the 13th Part 2 in order to see Deep Red.

On a final note, Movieside auctioned off some items for charity throughout the evening and I ended up getting a 12 month subscription to Netflix for their 3-at-a-time (Unlimited) plan for $50. Considering that the plan would cost over $200 normally, I was quite pleased with that deal. I'm most certainly looking forward to next year's Massacre!

Wizard World

I went with Jordan, his cousin Neil, and Lora to the Wizard World - Chicago convention this past weekend. For the most part, I went mostly out of curiousity because, for whatever reason, my geek gene for comic books has remained stunted over the years. When I was fourteen, I tried to embrace the geek arena of comic books, but it wasn't to be. I didn't care one iota for super heroes. I didn't care about the art or the writing. I really only cared about the collectability of the available product. In my own childish way, I was investing in the future by searching for any issue marked with '#1' on the cover.

That was how I started collecting DuckTales comic books. I really liked the cartoon and since Disney had just started their own publishing company, there were DuckTales comics on the rack with the precious '#1' printed in the corner. Not surprisingly, I did not find any DuckTales comics at the convention, which was stuffed to the brim with colorfully spandexed, tightly packed wads of mighty-muscled meat, dark, noir-like anti-heroes drenched in trenchcoats, and blonde, spikey-haired cherubs with huge, squarish eyes, dagger noses, and swords that would weigh 4000 pounds if they were real. If I had revealed that I was searching for something as cutesy and childish as DuckTales, I might have been thrown out of the convention center by a nerd throng. Anyway, after perusing that link, if I remember the covers well enough, I think I have fifteen of the eighteen issues that were printed. To be honest, I've never been able to find out what they were worth these days until I found that link and I'm plesantly surprised to discover that they have increased in value somewhat. In the end, I guess my investment of about $40 has increased to maybe $80 depending on the condition of the books, but that's better than I had assumed it to be.

Besides DuckTales, the only comics I collected faithfully, were reprints of old EC horror comics like Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror. Those comics were the ones that imprssed me because despite the fact that they were reprints and would probably never increase in value, I still bought them. I liked the stories. I liked the art. Without really knowing it, I was looking at some of the comics that helped usher in the comic industry's banishment to the sterilized realms of children's entertainment. What happened to comics then is trying to happen to video games now. For the sake of the hobby, I hope history is a good teacher because it took comic books forty years to crawl out from under their oppressive legislation and back into adult mainstream entertainment.

On a final note, Jordan purchased starter packs for a few variations of a game entitled HeroClix so we got together last night to play it at his place. It's actually a pretty fun game. The major hurdle for the game is the color coded powers that are marked on various character attributes (speed, attack, defense, etc.). All of the special abilities/powers are sometimes interrelated so for quick gameplay to take place, rote memorization of what each color means for each attribute is a necessity. The root gameplay of attacking and defending is actaully quite simple, but it's these powers that quickly become a tangled web of rules for novices like us. We managed to play through one full game with four characters per side however, and it only took us about an hour and half, most of which was spent with the reference cards and manuals cracked open so that we could deduce what was going on. Once we get faster at remembering the intricacies of the special power rules, we could probably play a full game in about an hour, which is much better than the huge committment that is running a D&D campaign, something that always seems romantically attractive but usually becomes drudgery when trying to balance the schedules of busy adults.

No Wii Puns Here

As the five out of seven of you who read this blog probably know, Nintendo recently shed the Revolution alias of its next gaming console meanwhile unveiling the true moniker of the machine: Wii. Pronounced "Wee", the name has unleashed a veritable Katrina upon the internet, drowning most logical people in a flood of childish puns and cries of anguish from many people who call video games their hobby. But, while I can't say that I haven't laughed at some of the puns, I have read in full every text that has opined upon both the name and the system that I have encountered and I have come to only one conclusion about what it all means. The Wii is not for me.

Basically, I am the kind of consumer that Nintendo is trying to avoid because I and my ilk play games already. We are comfortable with dual analog sticks controlling avatar motion and viewing angle simultaneously. We are comfortable memorizing and practicing long strings of button combinations in order to pull off that one uber, game-winning move. But, there are less of us in the world than there are people who really don't give a rip about any of that. Those people just want to have fun. The Wii is for those people and the name of the machine is Nintendo's ultimate declaration of its shift in market focus.

Nintendo is setting itself apart from its two primary competitors by neither making a direct reference to games a la the Playstation 3 nor a half-hearted attempt, as is the Xbox brand, at creating an "extreme" image by putting as many 'X's or 'Z's as possible into the name. While I don't see Wii as being a label that is going against current marketing trends in names for technological devices, it does what I believe it is intended to do which is to set itself apart from the direct competition. Wii is after all, a simple, rather friendly name despite the fact that it takes a whole paragraph of text to explain itself.

In the end, I am still interested in the machine and what it will be able to do. Despite the fact that it is "not for me", I still want to belong to what it stands for, that is, a different way of thinking about games. Viva la Wii.

SWRAP It Up

I went with Jeff to the SWRAP Expo this weekend which was quite an experience. It was my first time going to the expo and probably won't be the last. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore 64 but these guys and gals take it to a whole new level. They are truly pushing 20 year old computers to their limits and beyond. One of the most impressive demos was Steve Judd showing the SLANG language compiler for the SuperCPU. Basically, a programmer can assign any keywords she prefers to its equivalent command in assembly language. In BASIC terms, instead of passing the CPU a POKE statement with a numerical value like 53281,0 you could say screenbg(black) instead. If that still doesn't make sense, don't worry. Just trust me that it was cool.

Another impressive demonstration by Jim Brain addressed software that allows things like .zip archives and even HTTP sites to be mounted as storage drives on the C64. Jim showed how it is possible, with his software, to make the C64 think that it sees a storage device when it is actually looking at a web site or any number of archive file formats. He said that he plans to include FTP sites in the future.

Other demos included a prototype of the C-One, a Commodore machine emulated in PC hardware which was running in a very sweet modded case, by the way, an expansion device (the VIC REL) and software that lets you automate other electronic devices (a radio controlled truck was used for the demo) with your C64, a C64 BBS including real time chat hosted on a Linux server, and a Nintendo Light Zapper that had been modded to work on a 1702 Commodore monitor. I also got to see the IDE64 in action. The Last Ninja loaded up in 2-3 seconds instead of the usual few minutes.

In terms of purchases, I was able to acquire two new Epyx 500XJ joysticks, music composition software, an Incredible Musical Keyboard overlay, a Commodore Programmer's Reference Guide, and a near-mint , boxed copy of Might and Magic. Needless to say, I spent a decent amount of time using my C64 for the rest of the weekend! I had actually forgotten how fun it was to program with this computer. Not long after my parents brought our old machine to Chicago, I dug back in to BASIC programming for a refresher and yesterday I finished a program that pretends to predict your future but mostly just spits out nonsense.

After the expo, Amy and I went with Dennis to the Music Box theater to catch a midnight showing of Forbidden Zone. I had never been to the this theater before and it was awesome on the inside. The theater was built in 1929 (probably before Black Tuesday) and it was thoroughly ornamented to look like you're sitting in a small Mexican town. At least, I thought it looked like a Mexican town. Anyway, the inside of the theater looked much like the inside of one of the restaurants in the Mexico Pavilion at Disney's Epcot Center. Strangely enough, the music that was playing before the movie started was game music from the C64 with a woman singing some kind of gibberish over it. One of the tunes she made up words for was the theme from Auf Wiedersehen Monty. I was truly struck by the synergy of events that day. By the end of the movie, I had been awake for about 20 hours so I wasn't entirely coherent, but seeing as though the movie was even less coherent than I, it hardly mattered.