Live from Austin!

At Staple! (the Austin Independent Media Expo), I met rkmilholland, creator of Something*Positive and various other web comics. He asked if I read the comic. I said (truthfully) that I had read a few. He said thanks, and asked if he could draw me something. Obviously, I suggested a parakeet. He didn’t seem really sure on what a parakeet looked like, so I said to go with a parrot.

I suddenly find myself wondering if the real-life PeeJee isn’t the Asian girl with blue hair who used to hang around Diesel Cafe in 2002-2003. Not that I ever talked to her, of course…

Update: Fixed typo in URL, sorry.

Want to feel like you’re part of SXSWi? Yesterday I made a binaural recording as I walked through the hallways of the Austin conference center. It’s available as an MP3. Listen on headphones and it’s almost like being there.

See if you can pick out the kids playing with the big pile of LEGO, the espresso machine and the sound of a portafilter being emptied, and the buzz of some fluorescent lights whose ballast is failing.

If you like field recordings and ambient sound, I recommend Framework, a podcast of such things.

A month ago, I wrote about myself and other myths–some interesting scientific results from research into the nature of consciousness. I missed a couple, however.

For many years, scientists have studied the nature of sleep, and of dreams. These studies have started to overlap with those looking at the nature of consciousness. One experiment involves stimulating the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, and watching the outcome on an FMRI scanner as the patient is gradually anesthetized or allowed to fall asleep.

In the conscious, self-aware mind, TMS results in patterns of excitation that range over large areas of the brain. This kind of non-localized excitation is now being used to prove that coma victims are not brain-dead; they are asked to visualize playing a game of tennis, which produces an easily measurable and distinct excitation pattern in FMRI scans.

So similarly, TMS excitation of a conscious mind produces a clearly distributed pattern of neural firing. In a non-conscious mind, the excitation is highly localized and remains wherever the stimulation occurs. In a dreaming mind, the excitation stimulates adjacent areas, but doesn’t range as far as in the conscious mind.

So in effect, the difference between being alive and being in a coma is like the difference between a lab full of disconnected computers, and a lab full of computers connected via a network. Dreaming is like a degraded network where the signals are rerouted to nearby systems instead of their proper destination.

What struck me as shocking is this: When you’re in deep sleep, not dreaming, the network is down–exactly like when you’re in a coma, or have just died. The difference between being awake and being in non-dreaming sleep is a difference of kind, not of degree. Awake versus dreaming, on the other hand, that’s a mere difference of degree. And non-dreaming sleep versus coma–well, that’s a difference so subtle that we don’t really understand it, and it seems to have nothing to do with thought patterns.

In other words: My conscious self-awareness, the mythical “myself”, literally ceases to exist every night, just as much as it would if I actually died. There is no “me” until I start dreaming, at which point self-awareness re-emerges partially as the network comes back online. The fact that I’m a lucid dreamer is probably just my network activating more than average.

As the ancient Greeks put it, “sleep and death are brothers”. The Bible uses sleep as a metaphor for death. Now science is starting to discover that our ancient intuitive guesses about the nature of sleep and of death are pretty close to the truth.

I had always assumed that what made me me was some sort of continuity of mental process; that when I went to sleep, the activities that are me continued–just at a lower level, beneath my conscious awareness. It now looks as if this is completely wrong. But if there’s no continuity of thought process between me and the consciousness that will be animating this body tomorrow morning, then in what sense is that person actually me? He’ll have my body, and my memories, but surely that isn’t enough?

I’m only beginning to adjust my worldview to this new knowledge. The odd thing is, rather than keeping me awake at night, it’s almost comforting. If I’ve died over 10,000 times already, the thought of dying one last time seems like much less of a big deal.

A common trap we fall into is to assume that if we could only be someone else, we would be happy. I remember as a lonely single person, thinking that it must be so easy for the hot Asian babes of the world. Later, when I got to know a few hot Asian babes, I discovered that they’re just as unhappy as everyone else. (In fact, possibly more so, because of all the sleazy guys fetishizing them.)

Similarly, it’s tempting to think that if only I could write one of the novels I have notes for, and do it well, and somehow become an acclaimed author, that the sense of accomplishment and the feeling of having created an artwork of lasting value would lead to happiness.

The death by suicide of David Foster Wallace, at the age of 46, shows just how wrong that notion is. He was almost universally hailed as a brilliant author, with even his detractors admitting that he was very talented.

Or consider Thomas M Disch, an absurdly talented SF author, who also wrote criticism, poetry, and Gothic novels set in Minnesota.

We’ve all heard that money doesn’t buy happiness. It’s not just a saying either, as a great deal of scientific research and survey data has demonstrated the truth of the saying. Beyond a certain point, increased wealth really doesn’t lead to increased happiness–unless you give it away.

Another article in the New York Times reports this startling fact:

In fact, a poll of New Yorkers found that those who earned more than $200,000 a year were the most likely of any income group to agree that “seeing other people with money” makes them feel poor.

So if you’re still thinking that you would be happy if only you were someone else–a successful business owner, say, or a famous musician–it’s time to abandon that thought. If you think that being wealthy will make you happy–no, it won’t.

What will make you happy? Hey, if I knew that, I’m sure it’d make me rich.

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that my trusty full-size headphones were incompatible with my glasses. It wasn’t the fact that they pushed my ears up against the arms of the glasses and made them sore that clued me in, though you might have thought it would have. No, it was when they pushed my glasses sideways enough to push a sore spot onto the side of my nose. I suppose I could wear different glasses, but I really like these.

Anyway, a few weeks before my nose issues, I had bought a new headset for the PlayStation 3. There’s a bit of a story behind that.

The PS3 is weird, in that it has two sound output channels. The game sound is sent out via standard RCA jacks on the rear, as well as via HDMI. The voice chat is almost an entirely seperate system, and its sound is routed either via Bluetooth or USB. The two never mix–unless you have no headset at all, in which case the voice chat audio is mixed into the game audio, but of course you can’t reply.

I’d started off with the Logitech PlayStation 3 Vantage USB Headset. It worked fine for a few months, but when I eventually knocked it from the coffee table one evening it broke. Also, it only handled voice, so the game sound still came through speakers–and was picked up by its mic. That was tolerable with games like Team Fortress 2 where you need to push a button to talk, but didn’t work out so well with games like Burnout where the mic is always active.

For a while, I tried a Bluetooth headset–a cheap old Motorola that takes replaceable AAA cells. The problem was that, like the Logitech, it picked up game sound from the speakers. Not much, because it was also really crap at picking up sound, but it did succeed in convincing me that I didn’t want to try the official PS3 Bluetooth headset. That product may have better sound, but still has the game crosstalk issue. It also has the additional issue of a non-replaceable battery, which means that you have to worry about charging, and eventually end up with a nice piece of e-waste once the battery gains a memory.

I don’t know what Sony were thinking here. The official solution basically doesn’t work, and you can’t use a regular gaming headset or a regular USB headset.

Finally, though, I discovered the Turtle Beach P21, a headset specially designed for the PS3. They’re now replacing it with the Turtle Beach Ear Force PX21 (sic), which adds Xbox 360 compatibility. Since I don’t have an Xbox and never will, that wasn’t an issue for me, so I bought the P21 at clearance price.

The P21 actually solves the PS3 audio problem. You plug in both the RCA jacks and the USB, and an inline amp mixes the two audio streams together. You have separate sliders for the mix levels, too, and there are passthrus on the RCA jacks in case you need to pass the signal on to your TV or amp. Turn the speakers down and rely on the headphones, and you can hear everything–and people can hear your voice too, and only your voice. The only downside is white noise from the crappy badly-shielded inline amplifier, but as soon as you start the actual game you stop noticing it.

But that was a massive digression. The point is, the Turtle Beach headset is circumaural–that is, it has old fashioned full size earcups which go all the way around the outside of your ears.

I hadn’t had a set of headphones like that since the 1970s, and had forgotten what it was like. What it was like: comfortable. Or at least, more comfortable than full size earpads, with my current glasses.

So I decided it was time to swap the trusty 10 year old Sennheiser HD445s for a pair of circumaural headphones. I read a bunch of reviews, and now I’m in another situation I haven’t been in since the 1970s: I have non-Sennheiser headphones. Specifically, a pair of Shure SRH 440 headphones. They’re a slightly cut-down version of the Shure SRH840s favored by studio engineers; fully enclosed, DJ style, designed not to leak sound in or out.

So far I’ve been checking them out using the Mac, with audio routed through an external M-Audio 24 bit D/A. The main thing I notice is the incredibly clarity; they resolve details the Sennheisers didn’t, like the individual guitars on the final track of Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm, a good test for that kind of thing because of Trevor Horn’s exacting production at Sarm West.

Another good test track is “A Mile Long Lump of Lard” from The Orb’s Cydonia album. The Orb are tough for audio systems at the best of times, but this track in particular seems to be a real challenge for audio systems, sounding like a vague formless mush on the car stereo or through cheap earbuds.

Then there’s “Two Days Off” by KiloWatts (MP3 for download here), from the rather awesome album Problem/Solving. Reminds me most of Speedy J; some awesome production work, and I’m surprised he hasn’t received more attention. Apparently he’ll be in Austin at the end of the month, I should probably do the live music thing… Anyhow, it’s a good test of headphones’ ability to resolve a wall of sounds without turning them to pulp. Try it.

I was at Staple!: The Independent Media Expo at the weekend. As I browsed the stalls, I wandered into range of a conversation between (I think) a guy from Dreampunk Productions, and someone who mentioned that he was a video game developer. Nothing unusual so far, there are a lot of video game developers around Austin. They were talking about a comic strip I hadn’t heard of, and the artists’ interest in making a video game about it–also not unusual. Then, the man with his back to me mentioned which company he worked for: Retro Studios.

The comic book guy hadn’t heard of them. But I had, and couldn’t help myself. “You made Metroid Prime. The best first person action-adventure game ever.” And so it was that I found myself talking to Mike Wikan, senior game designer for the Metroid Prime series.

Returning home and searching my web site, I found that I had written very little about the Metroid series–surprising, given how impressed I was with the games.

Let’s get the obvious statements out of the way first: If you have a Nintendo Wii, you should go buy the <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ATY7JE?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ATY7JE”>Metroid Prime Trilogy Collector’s Edition</a>. You should probably hurry to do so, as Mr Wikan tells me that it’s out of print, and no more will be produced; prices are already starting to climb.

If you have an old GameCube sitting around somewhere, you should go buy at least the first Metroid Prime, which is the all-time highest rated GameCube game on Metacritic. Yes, better than Legend of Zelda. Better than Resident Evil 4.

If you don’t think first person shooters can work on a console, then you particularly ought to at least buy Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Wii and try it out, for reasons I’ll get to later.

First, let’s go back to the mid 80s. Having achieved commercial success with classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers, Nintendo wanted to branch out and prove that their NES console could do more. So 1986 saw two groundbreaking games: the original Legend of Zelda, and the original Metroid.

Metroid was designed to be approachable to players expecting arcade action. At first, it seems like a scrolling platform game with a heavily armed protagonist. As you continue to play, however, it emerges that there’s a more complex story going on, and that exploration and mapping are an important part of the game.

There were many details of the game which were brand new at the time: The player was given freedom to explore in any direction. The soundtrack was moody and ambient, giving a feeling of loneliness. Completing the game required revisiting already-explored areas. Power-ups were permanent, rather than timed. Most famously of all, the protagonist was revealed at the end of the game to be female.

Metroid II continued the franchise on the Game Boy, before Super Metroid moved it to the SNES and added an inventory and save points. Super Metroid was universally acclaimed, and amongst SNES games is perhaps second only to Super Mario World.

So when Nintendo decided to revive the Metroid franchise for the GameCube, there was some major skepticism expressed by fans. The announcement that the new Metroid would be in first-person 3D convinced many that it would be another dumb FPS, especially since a US development team was building the game.

Retro Studios defied expectations, however.

Metroid Prime started me off in a wrecked spaceship, where I quickly discovered I would have to scan objects for information if I was going to get very far. The screen used translucent graphics to provide a heads-up display with radar and rotating 3D short-range map, and I learned that I could switch visors to go into thermal imaging mode–a trick I often used to get the jump on enemies lurking in the darkness. Before long, I was following a trail of clues to the planet Tallon IV.

As I left my ship, I discovered that it was raining. Water droplets speckled the view through my visor. As I scouted further into the wet vegetation of this new alien world, I noticed condensation forming. Seconds later in a nearby cave, I fired my blaster at a threatening creature and caught a glimpse of my face reflected from the inside of the visor. That was it–I was captivated. Mimesis achieved.

This was also the moment I referred to back in 2006, when I said that I really didn’t need video game graphics to get any better. Metroid Prime is beautiful. Compare it to the other big console games from that year, like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the PS2, and it blows them away. Not only that, but the game runs at a rock solid 60 frames per second throughout, no matter how complicated the action on screen, and the controls feel responsive at all times.

By the time I acquired the ability to switch into the morph ball, I was so engrossed in exploring ancient alien ruins that I didn’t stop to worry about the physics of the transformation. Instead, I delighted as the Tron-like neon glow from the ball left subtle tracer effects.

More beautiful still was the scene that greeted me once I managed to make my way through the old transport tunnels to the snow-covered Phendrana Drifts. That was where I learned that different alien creatures would require different tactics to defeat them, with my scanner providing hints.

Yes, there were boss fights–something I personally dislike–but they were mostly fair, and required some intelligence to get past rather than simple twitch reflexes. When the game was finally over, I was genuinely sad that it had to end.

I wasn’t as happy with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The first and most obvious annoyance was that I suddenly had to worry about ammunition. Coming to the new episode straight from the freedom of the first game, this was an unwelcome development.

The second annoyance was that Prime 2 had me travel to a dark energy world where the atmosphere continuously ate away at my suit’s shielding. This effectively introduced an arbitrary time limit to exploration, and I hate arbitrary time limits almost as much as I hate random mazes.

The third annoyance was the level design. I’m not a big fan of bottomless pits, and I started falling into them with annoying frequency towards the end of the game. So overall, a disappointing outing compared to the first Metroid Prime, but still worth playing.

Third time was the charm, though. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption made the jump to the Wii, and that allowed a whole new control scheme. Now I could move around in any direction at any speed using the analog control stick on the nunchuk, while simultaneously aiming and firing at any part of the screen using the Wii remote. (This is called “expert mode”, and isn’t on by default.)

As IGN put it, this new control scheme “simulates the accuracy of PC first-person shooters almost perfectly”. In fact, I’d go further–when I try playing games with keyboard and mouse, I find the lack of precision achievable with WASD movement keys extremely frustrating.

The nunchuck was also used for the grapple hook and for ripping armor off of enemies, giving battles a very visceral and physical feeling. The switch to 16:9 format for the graphics also helped improve my feeling of immersion in the game.

The annoyances from the previous game were mostly gone. I fell into infinity a few times in the cloud city, but it never felt as frustrating as leaping over chasms in the dark in Prime 2. Also gone was most of the annoying backtracking, as I could now call up my spaceship to travel between distant parts of the world, an innovation so welcome that I remember saying “Aww, yeah” when it was revealed to me.

I don’t really understand some of the negative reviews the final installment received. Perhaps those reviewers didn’t find Expert Mode, or were expecting an FPS? I had a wonderful time, and resolved to replay the entire game some day.

So with that in mind, I’ve ordered a copy of the now-discontinued <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ATY7JE?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ATY7JE”>Metroid Prime Trilogy</a> for the Wii. If you are any kind of video game fan, I strongly suggest that you do likewise. If nothing else, you’ll get the chance to play the greatest GameCube game ever, with the added bonus of precision aiming via Wii controls and widescreen graphics.

From “Stay Free” magazine:

Here’s a road-trip game that won’t exactly change the world but will at least give you a laugh at SUV drivers’ expense. Take almost any SUV model (the Ford Explorer, for instance), add “Anal” to the title, and— presto!—you have the Anal Explorer, or the Anal Rodeo, or whatever. There’s something about SUVs that makes them more conducive to this semiotic game of revenge than cars (the Anal Civic doesn’t really work, nor does the Anal Camry). That’s because most SUV names are all about dominance and penetration: of nature, puny cars, or pedestrians. If SUVs are the tops of the vehicu- lar world, then I guess that makes the rest of us bot- toms, and if you’ve ever had an Anal Blazer on your ass, then you know what I’m talking about.

—Kembrew McLeod

Joel Johnson, Gizmodo, 2010-02-03:

It’s taken me a couple of days for me to understand the wet sickness I felt in response to all the post-iPad whining, until it finally came up in a sputtering lump: disgust.

The iPad isn’t a threat to anything except the success of inferior products. [...]

This noxious attitude has permeated our tech culture for the last couple of decades, from a half-decade of open-source devotees crying about Microsoft on Slashdot, on toward the last few years of Apple ascendency. It’s childish. It’s defeatist. And it shows a simultaneous fear to actually innovate and improve while spilling gallons of capitulative semen to a fatuous, dystopian cuckold wank-mare. [...]

Apple is selling a product. They’ve chosen to keep it closed for demonstrably reasonable benefits. And—yes, okay!—several collateral benefits that come from controlling the marketplace that services their products.

Three weeks later, Joel Johnson, Gizmodo, 2010-02-23:

If you need another example of why the iTunes App Store’s walled garden is flawed, Apple has been only too happy to oblige, capriciously and arbitrarily removing an unknown number of “sexy” apps without warning. [...]

With a closed ecosystem comes a lot of responsibility. Apple has taken on the heavy mantle of arbiter, ostensibly to manage quality. I can forgive them for that, even if I don’t like it. But the only reason to ban blue apps is taste. And if these apps were a matter of taste, why were they approved in the first place? What will the next set of apps be that Apple decides are inappropriate long after people have spent hundreds of hours creating and marketing them? [...]

Apple has made a declaration: that sex and sexuality are shameful, even for adults. But only sometimes. And only when people complain.

Unfortunately, they’ve accomplished the opposite. The only thing I’m ashamed of is Apple.

Looks like Joel Johnson was fine when Apple was blocking things he didn’t care about, like open source software and apps he didn’t use; but when they started blocking stuff he cared about, like jiggling boobs, suddenly he started to have second thoughts.

He still doesn’t quite get it, though: He still likes having nanny tell him what he can run on his phone “to manage quality”; he just wants nanny to make only decisions that he agrees with. Good luck with that.

Last night I dreamed that we got a new pet. A horse. Except it was a micro-horse, about the size of a hamster. It loved to gallop across the floor and jump into my hands. I was a little concerned about how manageable a pet it would be once it grew to full horse size.

Since this was one of my dreams, obviously the horse could speak too. I decided that eventually it would need to be an outdoor pet, so I’d better tell it about man’s relationship with horses so that it wouldn’t be surprised. I had just finished telling it about horseless carriages, and was trying to decide how to approach the topic of horse racing, when I woke up.

Full title: Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species

This is an important book. It’s not an easy book to read, by any means, but if you’ve ever considered getting any kind of parrot as a pet, you need to read this book. (Yes, the author’s real name is “Tweti”, and yes, it’s pronounced “tweety”.)

There are estimated to be 50-60 million pet parrots in the USA. They range from the tiny budgerigars, to the large macaws that most people think of when they hear the word “parrot”. The book starts out by examining the situation of these pet birds.

It used to be believed that parrots were just brightly colored birds with a talent for mimicry. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Irene Pepperberg and other researchers, we now know that parrots are as smart as human children. They also have long lifespans. While a parakeet may only be as smart as an 18 month old baby and live for just 10-15 years, an African Gray can be as smart as a 6 year old and live for over 50 years. Parrots are also noisy and messy, something which people often don’t understand before it’s too late. Like many small children, they will screech when they are angry, sad, or just overexcited.

Take budgies, for example. Their normal morning routine is to fly around for a couple of hours tweeting and squawking to each other to keep in touch, and forage for food on the ground. If you don’t spread the food on the ground, they’ll do it for you. They’re quiet compared to any larger parrot, but their noise can be heard anywhere in the house–or even at the far end of the back yard, with all the doors and windows shut.

Take a look at online pet forums and you’ll find people begging for ways to get their pet birds to quieten down. It’s not surprising, then, that there are thousands of unwanted parrots. The lucky ones end up in parrot sanctuaries; the unlucky ones are euthanized. The really unlucky ones live for years in solitary confinement, trapped in a cage, neglected, fed on cheap unhealthy bird food until they die young.

At the same time, breeders are still adding to the problem. The book continues by examining the legal parrot trade in the USA. The life of a lonely captive pet parrot may be bad, but the conditions in the industry are often like a concentration camp for birds.

Apparently many big breeders know little about the birds they raise; they’re only in it for the money, after all. Many believe that birds will breed more if they are kept in the dark; ironically, the exact opposite is true, as birds are triggered to breed by lengthening daylight hours. Nevertheless, thousands of parrots are kept confined in cramped, dark boxes, fed a poor diet. As soon as they raise young, the babies are taken from them. They will scream and grieve for days, but eventually they will try again.

As I said, this is not an easy book to read–and the first half of the book, about the legal parrot trade, is light relief compared to the second half, which considers the illegal parrot trade.

The 1992 Wild Bird Conservation Act in the US made it illegal to import any wild bird, unless it could be demonstrated that the capture of that species did not damage exotic bird populations in the wild. Before the law changed, the US was responsible for 40% of the captured wild bird trade; since the law, that has dropped to almost nothing. But of course, some trade continues in the underground economy, and conditions there are horrific.

Texas is the destination for a lot of parrot smugglers. Head into Mexico for 20 minutes and you can find all kinds of illegally caught wild parrots openly on sale–and being kept in deplorable conditions. Street vendors will help you stash the birds in paper bags or cardboard tubes, and secrete them about your person–or even inject the birds with ketamine or other illegal drugs, to knock them out for a few hours while you cross the border. If they live, you save hundreds of dollars over the cost of a legally bred pet bird. This potential markup makes parrot smuggling more lucrative than cocaine–and yet, the chances of being caught are lower, and even if you are caught red handed, you can often escape jail.

The birds, of course, aren’t so lucky. They end up in solitary confinement for years until they can be used as evidence in a trial; after that, the government often sells them at auction, typically to the very people who pay the smugglers. Many birds are just euthanized.

Then there are the practices of some of the people who keep parrots as pets in Mexico. I’m not going to describe them here; I feel lucky that I haven’t had nightmares about it. By the time I was two thirds of the way through the book, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it any further.

I did, though, and got to the final section, which talks about parrot conservation in Latin America. In many communities where the birds were once viewed as a cash crop, they are now seen as a precious resource thanks to the development of ecotourism. Rich gringos can now travel to research stations where they take part in long term studies of parrot populations. Instead of being sold for $25 each to smugglers, the parrots are now attracting tens of thousands of dollars a year in ecotourist trade.

If you’re looking for a happy ending, though, the book will leave you disappointed. Even if we save the parrots from poaching, we’re only postponing what currently seems inevitable. Before long, their forests and jungles will be clearcut to grow soybeans and make toilet paper and books, and the parrots will die off quietly as their habitat disappears. The book ends with a plea for readers to consider going to Eco-Libris to pay for a tree to be planted to offset the destruction caused by reading the book itself. I wish I could believe that that would be enough to make a difference.