People have asked if they may assuage any guilty consciences by bringing drink to trade for books. This is just fine. Also, if you have bibliophile friends who are otherwise Good People, you may bring them, too.
Author: John Winkelman
The Great Book Give-Away
That’s right. I’m weeding my library. This Sunday, October 26 2003, somewhere between 150 and 300 books will be free for the taking. Show up any time between 2:00 and 9:00 pm. Genres include, but are not limited to: science art religion languages philosophy Russian photography poetry literature misc beer design computers martial arts etc. There may also be some CDs in the mix.
There are only three rules:
[1] The books I am NOT giving away will be kept separate from the books I AM giving away. Stay away from the books I am NOT giving away.
[2] Some of you may be tempted to grab an armload of books and drive straight over to Barnes and Noble to sell them. If you do this I will kill you.
[3] This is a book GIVE AWAY , not a book SWAP . Don’t bring books of your own and try to get in on my action.
If there are any books remaining after the GiveAway, I will take them to Barnes and Noble and sell what I can. Any remaining after that will be donated to the Grand Rapids Public Library. Any profit made from the Selling of the Used Books will probably go into … MORE BOOKS. Or beer. Depends on how much I get.
Email me for directions, if you don’t already know where I live.
I :heart: Words
Now that I am done with The Fountainhead I am plowing through Quicksilver . Sometimes I forget what a joy it is to read the work of someone who is deeply in love with the English language.
On that note, a particular word has wormed its way into my subconscious recently, and probably won’t let me go until I give it a good thinking-about:
Fix. Or, fixed. Probably because I hear it so much at work. “John, can you fix this?” “I fixed it yesterday.” “Fix it again.” “It’s still fixed.” “Then make it even more fixed.” “Consider it fixed.”
Fix can be used in several different confusing and contradictory, not to mention amusing ways:
Fixing a car means making something a little more perfect. Fixing a cat means making something a little less perfect. Fixing a deal means that it will go through according to agreed-upon rules. Fixing a bet means the exact opposite. Being in a fix is a Bad Thing. Getting your fix is a Good Thing. The Fixx was a band in the eighties is still around! Who’d’a thunk???.
So as you can see, when using this word it is important to be a precise as possible.
“Fixing something with pliers?”
“Yes. A boxing match.”
“Dad hurt himself golfing?”
“Dad fixed himself golfing.”
“I just fixed my cat.”
“Good for you.”
“…to the ceiling.”
…etc. In my next lecture I will meditate on the GeoSocioPantheoPolitical ramifications of the Co-option of Tradition in the Acceleration of Nostalgic Meta-Journalism.
The Fractal Nature of Space
Lately I have been working on this game which I have had stuck in my head forever. More specifically, I have been building the tools which I will eventually use to build the game. Doing so has forced me to learn a lot in the way of data architecture.
My primary influences for this game are Nethack , the early Ultima games, and Diablo . All of these are adventure games, but there the similarities end. Nethack is – not to belittle it at all – a straightforward dungeon crawl, very simple graphics, simple rules, and astoundingly complex gameplay. Ultima (c. the Commodore-64 era) is middle of the road. Slightly more complex graphics, simpler gameplay, but a much more complicated world. It also gives you the option of controlling multiple characters.
Diablo – specifically Diable II – is an interesting blend of extreme complexity (the size of the world) and extreme simplicity (you play by clicking on stuff).
For the mechanics of the game I am building, Ultima IV – which cost me many a grade-point in college – has the most to teach me.
The interface was quite simple: Your character was always in the center of the screen, and the world shifted around you. Every time you hit a doorway, a city, the entrance to a dungeon, a teleport trap, or any number of other things, you would find yourself somewhere else.
One of the goals for my game is that absolutely all of the data for the game be held in XML files. Flash, while improving with every release, still chokes on huge files, so I had to come up with ways of [1] keeping files small, [2] keeping things modular, [3] keeping things consistent, and [4] keeping things interchangeable. This meant, to coin a phrase, “small pieces, loosely joined”.
Later I decided that, not only did everything have to be saved as XML, but even the images had to be built in XML. And that included multiple-frame animations.
So now I needed a logical system of creating maps and maintaining the internal logic of “When I exit room [1]at door [a] i need to appear in room [2] at room [b]”. How to connect all of these XML documents in a manner which maintains logic at the administration level, the file level, and the gameplay level?
Then it hit me: portals.
In Ultima IV, every time you hit a door, or a cave entrance, or a city, you were dumped into a new map in a specific place. That meant that there was something about the thing you activated which knew where to send you. It didn’t matter WHAT that thing was; every portal, no matter what it looks like, does the same thing: sends you somewhere else. Therefore each door, pit trap, ladder and trampoline has a set of coordinates identifying an XML document and an X and Y coordinate within the map which is built by that document. Scope and scale don’t matter; only the target. Let the new map take care of physics and context once you arrive at the new location.
So this long train of thought has made me think about the various portals in day-to-day life. The door of a house. The door of a car. A stairway. A slide. Each leads (for practical purposes) to a space with its own rules. Inside to outside. Rest to motion. Down here a fall will bruise me. Up there a fall will kill me. Out there is bright and cold. In here smells funny.
Portals, as initiators of action, rest in an indeterminate state. They are neither here nor there, and at the same time are both; like a shoreline. I imagine Schrödinger came up with his famous theorem after watching his cat stand halfway out the door for fifteen minutes. The cat was neither in the state of being inside or outside, but was half of each, yet it was a single cat, so logically it must be oscillating between one state and another. Yet the cat itself isn’t moving, so it must instead be in neither state until it makes up its damn mind.
My next big random train of thought will be on the object-ness of events, and consensual reality with reference to discrete units of time.
October Already??!?
I finished The Fountainhead on Tuesday, and now I am plowing my way through Quicksilver. 200 pages down, 700 to go. Then, at long last, I will give myself permission to buy…Another Book. No idea which one.
I have noticed that, as cool as Flash is, it loses some of its charm when I am required to use it constantly at work. Makes me long for a nice complex table to build…maybe some form elements…images…
Nah. I would still rather do it all in Flash.
When I am feeling a little less burned out I will dive back into the tile/adventure game. look for updates somewhere around the end of the month.
A Proper Autumn Day
The sun came out today, so I celebrated by walking the two miles to work. I took this picture (facing West) on the corner of Monroe Street and Monroe Avenue.
At lunch Scott and I wandered down to the waterfall as we do every day. The salmon are running and we saw a fisherman pull one in.
It didn’t out up much of a fight. Actually, it looked dead tired, exhausted, worn out. It probably would not have made it over the falls or up the fish-ladder.
Spending my free time redesigning the Yoga Studio website, stripping paint and reading The Fountainhead.
25
Last night I attended the 25th birthday party of one of the yoga students. It was low key and full of wonderful people, and as we were joking about car insurance and adulthood it hit me: 25 years old. Damn.
I turned 25 in St. Petersburg, Russia, on June 5, 1994. I had cake and vodka and made out with a beautiful Russian woman named Janna.
When I was 25 I had been working at the bookstore for about a year. I lived in one of the worst houses in Grand Rapids, on the northwest side a block from the Parkway Tropics strip joint. I had hair down to my shoulder blades and drove a Pontiac 6000.
When I was 25 I was heavily into Ken Wilber, Tom Waits, The Pogues, Jim Harrison, Vampire: The Masquerade, Anne Rice, black clothing, the cafe scene, and vegetarianism.
I began practicing tai chi, when I was 25.
That was a long time ago.
In College FOREVER!!!!
MIT’s OpenCourseWare has gone Gold !!! If it wasn’t for this pesky job, I would spend every day of the rest of my life on this site learning EVERYTHING!
The End of Summer
A Few Books
In my copious free time I have been reading. It is a skill I picked up a few years back, which seems to have fallen out of fashion. My current stack looks something like this:
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
Jaynes posits that consciousness, the “awareness of our awareness of the world” arose as recently as 3000 b.c. A superb book, easy to read, but should be read slowly as the concepts introduced are, well, huge. I became aware of this book through reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
At long last, I am reading Ayn Rand. Oddly enough, I am reading the book because of the intervention of the eviscerated inestimable Bock . I had loaned him my copy of Terry Goodkind’s Faith of the Fallen and, after reading it he said with a snarl, “If I want to read Ayn Rand, I will pick up a book by Ayn Rand.” Though I am but thirty pages into The Fountainhead, I already agree with him.
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Picked it up today. Will be reading it for a while, I think.