Live from Austin!

[Very minor puzzle spoilers.]

As a piece of graphic art, Myst IV should win awards. Unfortunately, as a game it leaves rather a lot to be desired.

The most immediate problem is the speed–or rather, the lack of it. While my computer was comfortably over spec and could easily handle scrolling the screen around even with all the effects turned on, each transition to a new location involved the game freezing for a few seconds while it loaded in the next set of graphics. Usually the delay was around 4 seconds, but sometimes it was as much as 10 seconds. That’s not too bad when you’re somewhere you’ve never been before, but when you’re wandering from place to place trying to solve puzzles spread over a world, it gets tiresome very quickly.

The second problem is that even as of late 2005 and 3 patches, the game is buggy. I couldn’t persuade the mangrees to do their thing, even though I had resorted to a walkthrough and was sure I was doing what it said. I tried saving the game, quitting, restarting and loading, and suddenly the puzzle was solved. If I hadn’t been working from a walkthrough and hadn’t known the game was misbehaving, I would likely have wasted hours unable to solve that puzzle for no good reason.

The puzzles themselves aren’t as satisfying as earlier Myst games, either. Some of them make no sense at all–like stroking a snake to make a machine work. Others don’t quite work right, like the slider puzzle on the gate, abruptly making you conscious of the fact that you’re not dealing with a real physical object, but instead with a computer simulation that has extra constraints that wouldn’t be there in the real world.

In Riven, the puzzles were carefully woven into the worlds; the machinery mostly had a good reason to be there. Myst IV is more of a throwback to the original Myst, with elaborate locks in arbitrary locations, strange apparently pointless mechanisms, and worlds in an initial state that really doesn’t make sense except as a way to throw puzzles at you. To make up for this you’re given an amulet which is basically a clue machine, a rather blatant plot device which again destroyed the feeling of being in a real world.

The puzzles are also tough. When you’re forced to resort to hints, you should always think “Aha, yes, of course, I should have got that.” In the case of one of the Myst IV worlds, I still didn’t understand what was going on even after reading the solution. Combine that with the click (wait wait wait) click (wait wait wait) slowness when wandering around, and you have a recipe for frustration.

Still, the music was great–easily the most impressive soundtrack of a Myst game so far. But that wasn’t enough to overcome the defects and keep me immersed in the game.

If you’re a Myst fan, you’ll buy this anyway. If you’re not, I’d suggest that you steer clear of it and get one of the other games in the Myst series.

We just found the time to watch Battlefield Earth. As I mentioned a while back, this movie is allegedly worse than Xanadu, which I had rated as the absolute worst movie I’ve ever watched. So, how does Battlefield Earth compare? Well…

The first thing to note about the movie is that the entire thing is shot in tilt-o-vision. Every single scene has the camera at an odd angle. Not just slightly, either—we’re talking 30 or even 45 degrees. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that they were unable to find enough people willing to work on a Scientology-backed movie, and ended up employing a cameraman with one leg.

If you think about the process of moviemaking, you’ll realize that there’s a major problem with shooting at odd angles: it makes it really difficult to edit the material seamlessly. As a result, what you get in Battlefield Earth is a funhouse maze of cuts. One moment John Travolta is sloping to the left; we cut for a reaction shot, and when we cut back he’s sloping to the right.

Once you get into a fight scene, of course, you’re continually trying to work out what the hell is going on—are they going to leap on the enemy from above, or are they hiding at ground level? Can the guards see them or is that piece of machinery in the corner of one of the shots supposed to be hiding them? Just working out the geometry of what’s supposed to be happening is taxing. Perhaps that’s just as well, because it’s the only mental stimulation you’re likely to get.

Sometimes the effect of the sloping is just comical—like in the opening scene, where it seems as if the primitive humans are so regressed that when they put up a tent on a hillside, they drive the poles in perpendicular to the ground; or later on, when John Travolta bangs his head on a piece of scenery getting up, but it looks as if he slid down into it.

The fascinating thing is that at some point, someone must have sat and watched the early rushes and thought “Hey, this is great, yeah, let’s do the entire movie like this.” They spent enough money to make the special effects look good, but somehow couldn’t find the cash for a tripod.

Another thing that apparently seemed like a good idea, is that every time something exciting happens the movie goes into slow motion. Gunshots, explosions, individual punches in a fistfight, people jumping off stuff—all slowed down. It’s like watching the movie with an eight year old kid playing with the remote control. Yes, I found slow motion fascinating, back in 1980 or so.

The acting? Oh, the acting is competent enough. I mean, this is sci-fi, so you can overlook the Shakespearean scenery-chewing whenever an old human guy talks about Our Great Heritage. Everyone even manages to act with bits of string dangling from their noses, because that’s what someone in props decided the breathing masks ought to look like.

Anyone can make a crappy movie by putting crappy actors in it. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Start with an award-winning screenplay; hire Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves and Ethan Hawke; drop them into the mix, and watch them work their magic. What impresses about Battlefield Earth is that they’ve made a film where everything else is awful, but the acting’s not bad.

Let’s talk plot.

Again, this is sci-fi, so we’re not expecting perfection, but a little attention to plausibility would have been appreciated. OK, so mankind was enslaved by an alien race who wiped out all our defenses in just seven minutes, it’s now the year 3000, and the remaining men and women live as scattered nomadic tribes in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. I can buy that. What I can’t buy is an alien race advanced enough to have teleportation technology, who still communicate by carving their messages into cast metal plates.

These aliens are smart enough to travel across intergalactic space—but dumb enough to give a spaceship to a bunch of humans who have already tried to escape several times, set them down in the middle of nowhere, and leave them alone for two weeks to mine gold. They have advanced surveying sensors which can locate gold seams in the unpromising geology of North America, and they know all about our history, but somehow they missed the fact that Fort Knox was sitting there filled with gold the whole time—oh, and the dying human guards conveniently left all the safe doors open too.

The humans find a military flight simulator that’s still in perfect working order after a thousand years, and the electricity’s still on too. Yeah, right. The non-literate humans use the flight simulator to learn how to fly a Harrier jump jet in combat conditions, in only seven days. Mmm-hmm. And then they find an entire fleet of armed and working Harrier jets, also totally undamaged by an alien invasion followed by a thousand years of neglect.

A giant glass habitation dome has a bomb detonated on its framework. Every single pane of glass shatters, yet somehow all the shards stay in place. Then a hero flies a hoverplane into it, and the entire thing explodes. Ohh-kay.

I’m not trying to be picky, I just really see a few minor implausibilities. Well, let’s be honest, huge gaping plot holes. It is, as more charitable reviewers have said, “a little unbelievable“, like a 50s sci-fi B-movie is a little unbelievable. Unfortunately, L.Ron wrote the book in the 1980s, and it’s a safe bet that Travolta did his best to make sure the great man’s masterpiece was translated to the movie screen with plot intact.

But all that aside… Is it worse than Xanadu? Well, yes and no. Xanadu has plenty of moments where I found myself cringeing with embarassment for everyone on the screen. However, Battlefield Earth impresses with its constant level of awfulness. It avoids being bad in all the easy ways, yet sustains a steady wretchedness for almost two hours. It’s an amazing achievement, and I wish the MST3K team were still around to give it the review it really deserves.

Two nights in a row now I’ve dreamed about Austin.

Finances permitting, I think we’ve worked out where our house is going to come from. Today we got a Zipcar and went out to Acton, MA to visit Deck House.

The woman on duty at the sample house turned out to be an architect, a recent graduate of MIT who had worked for Autodesk and was now designing houses for Deck House customers. She’s very keen on green design, energy efficiency, and modern architecture, and had just returned from a green building conference in Austin, so it couldn’t have worked out any better, really.

Deck House make custom designed houses using parts prefabricated in their factory in Acton. Prefab components have a number of advantages. Firstly, because they’re assembled using factory equipment, there’s less waste, and the materials tend to be of higher quality (because otherwise there’s a risk of screwing up the machinery). Secondly, the construction standards are more rigorous, because the components have to withstand transport. Thirdly, building time and costs are reduced.

Unfortunately, most prefabricated and modular housing looks really awful. In fact, having looked at literally hundreds of house designs in the last couple of weeks, I have to say that houses in general look really awful. Like any business, the construction industry responds to consumer demand, and consumer demand is mostly for generic boxy ranches with enormous floorplans. Deck House have been forced to respond to demand by launching a line of more “normal” houses called Acorn, and apparently a lot of people ask them if they can hide the wood beams and put in multi-pane windows.

When it comes to architecture, sara and I are both prepared to think inside the box, as we seriously considered the possibilities that Glidehouse might offer. However, I’ve experienced the delights of living in a piece of modern architecture, and the bauhaus influence didn’t really lead to buildings which work as practical machines for living in. There are many good reasons why roofs should be pointy, it’s not just something mankind did for thousands of years for no good reason.

I’ve been reading lots of books on architecture and home construction. As far as materials go, our hope is to use as many natural materials as possible, and avoid chemical exposure. Wood, glass, metal, rock, cotton… and concrete. You can do amazing things with polished concrete. Wool is natural, but I’m allergic, and carpets are a great breeding ground for mold. Again, all this is subject to budget… I’m gradually building up spreadsheets of cost estimates. Next I think I need to select some major appliances, and on Monday I need to chase up the UK estate agents.

Quote:

I began by scolding my friend. I told him that he had been wrong to feel and display so much emotion upon so slight an occasion; that it was inappropriate. The word “inappropriate” roused him to fury. “What?” he cried. “Do you measure out your emotions as if they were potatoes?” I did not like the simile of the potatoes, but after a moment’s reflection I said, “Yes, I do; and what’s more I think I ought to. A small occasion demands a little emotion, just as a large emotion demands a great one. I would like my emotions to be appropriate. This may be measuring them like potatoes, but it is better than slopping them about like water from a pail, which is what you did.” He did not like the simile of the pail. “If those are your opinions, they part us forever,” he cried, and left the room. Returning immediately, he added: “No—but your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong. Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere. I happened to feel deeply. I showed it. It doesn’t matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not.”

This remark impressed me very much. Yet I could not agree with it, and said that I valued emotion as much as he did, but used it differently; if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones, and of being bankrupt at the crises of life. Note the word “bankrupt.” I spoke as a member of a prudent middle-class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities.

[…]

The English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface—self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

—E.M. Forster, Notes on the English Character

My photography is completely digital—except for the initial exposures, which I still do on film. This isn’t because I like film; it’s because I don’t have the cash for a digital camera with comparable resolution, and because color negative film has far better exposure latitude.

Exposure latitude is very important to me, because everything I do is natural light. I just don’t like fill-flash, even when it’s exposed perfectly. It makes the photograph look artificial and flat. Sure, it gets rid of shadows on people’s faces, but in real life we see shadows all the time.

So I expose film—usually Kodak Royal Gold—and then get Kodak to develop it into a negative strip. I chop the strip and run it through the film scanner, hand-optimizing the scanner response curves for each frame. A 35mm negative has a lot more information than can be shown on the screen, and by tweaking the curves I can bring out shadow detail, prevent loss of contrast in highlights, and use more of the available contrast for the bits of the image I want.

With a digital camera, you’re stuck with the information captured by what is effectively a scanner, and you don’t get to adjust response curves. In fact, it’s worse than that: my film scanner measures 10 bits of red, green and blue in every pixel. By comparison, a digital camera has only 8 bits of resolution per color channel, and each pixel is actually only measured in one of the three primary colors—the missing information is interpolated in software.

Anyway, the reason I’m pissed off is that the trained chimps at Kodak just stuck the roll of developed negative unprotected in a dusty piece of carboard tube, then put that in an envelope. So my negatives are covered in dust, and probably scratched to hell as well. What they should have done is put the negatives in a strip of protective paper before rolling them up.

Of course, the only reason I bought my own scanner was that Kodak screwed up producing Photo CDs for me, and managed to badly scratch one of the discs. They can’t be trusted to expose prints properly either, as you probably know if you have a camera. But there’s really not much you can fuck up when simply processing a strip of 35mm negatives—these days it’s pretty much a matter of sticking the film in one end of the machine and taking it out at the other end. I didn’t even ask them to cut the film into pieces.

Trivia: My grandfather invented the machinery used to automatically clean and dry 35mm film after processing. I spent a week working at Rank Film Labs as part of a work experience scheme, and got to repair several of those machines.

I think I’m going to see if I can find some place locally that actually does the film processing themselves. Since I’m only getting the negatives processed, I can probably afford to pay pro prices.

I missed out the final step, of course. Although I have a color printer which can produce output comparable to one-hour photo labs, I find it far more easy and convenient to order prints from Ofoto. I quarter the resolution of the negative scans, then compress to JPEGs of around 100-150K each. The end result is true photographic prints that look better than 3-day optical prints from the local photo stores.