Archive for 2004
Heaven's Not Enough
Nostalgia seems to be a common theme for me nowadays. A deep-seated yearning for days gone by that I know I can never recapture. It’s a sobering thought, and not one that I particularly like to experience. I look back at everything that has happened to me, and the brief flashes of colour, smells, emotions and words all flicker past my conciousness. I think I miss the feeling of everything being new, of always being in a different place that I’ve never been in before. It’s a liberating feeling when you’re young, but one that you can’t tangibly recognise as everything is so malliable in your head; once it sets and solidifies, that liberation gives way to the dread of new experiences and new places, the so called “comfort zone”. I rarely go places I haven’t been before nowadays, everything is old hat and stagnant, and I wonder sometimes whether this is what growing older is. Is this the common ache of my generation, is it something that everybody looses at one time or another, but don’t vocalise?
I think of what I have, what I’ve achieved; carving out my small niche in the world, the warm little centre of the world. Is this the life that I want though? More and more I get the feeling that I want to utterly disgrace myself, to fall from my self-imposed grace until everyone around me despises me. I think only then could I sever all ties and drift to a new reality. My self contained little cosmos is what I have at the moment, my routine, my clothing and everything that makes up this routine I feel is my constriction, my cage. I look back at what I’ve just written, and I can’t remember crystalising my thoughts like this, I’m in free-flow, from brain to fingertips.
It’s been a common theme of my latest entries of this idea of growing old. I know a lot of people only get these feelings on birthdays, as if somehow marking years from your birth illuminates some far forgotten memory of how things used to be.
I read catalogues at work now, and see MDF Mouldings called things like “Toro” and “Osiris”, as if they’re some sort of talking point at a dinner party. “Yes these Mouldings are from the Toro collection, MDF no less.” Is this what people do? The unreality of the situation is astounding, it brought me up and slapped me in the face that this could one day be me. Drifting through a haze that used to be myself.
I have no fear of the inevitable, only fear in what I think I can’t change.
This is not the way I'm wired
What exactly can I say about Half-Life 2 that has not been said a thousand times my a multitude of other people? Not a lot, but just because others have said it, does not degrade the validity of what I’m saying. If you want a short version that says all that needs to be said:
Edge gave Half-Life 2 it’s 5th 10/10 rating.
Now that’s out of the way. The original Half-Life was something that I picked up on a whim when a lot of members of a Quake 2 mailing list had recommended it. I picked it up on the Saturday and only stopped playing it to sleep and eat. I finished it on Sunday evening. This is not to degrade the quality or the length of the experience, it was just THAT good. I doubt I could have done that with Half-Life 2 as it seems a lot longer, but the experience is just as good.
What the original Half-Life did better than any other first person shooter then and since, was give you an experience. No longer was it a game, it was storytelling, characters, scenes and all that goes in between. People have chastised the hackneyed story, but the story wasn’t the point, it was how it was told. No FMV, no cut scenes, every second you can be, you are in control of Gordon Freeman. This ethos hasn’t changed for the second incarnation, and I doubt very highly that it will have changed for the rumoured third. Half Life 2 is the pinnacle of gaming excellence, it immerses you in this wholly believeable, interesting world, where everything is new but totally familiar. No part of Half-Life 2 is filler, there is no unwanted aimless wandering, wondering where that next keycard or PDA (yes I’m looking at you Doom 3) is for that pesky door. The feeling of progression and interaction is absolutely unsurpassed.
The Source engine that Valve made, unlike the Doom 3 engine in which the game was a glorified tech demo, the Source engine is so innocuous because it’s so straight forward. Of course you can pick up this and that and throw it about, that’s how it should be. Everything is expected but so totally new. You never find yourself wandering through the world and wishing you could have X or Y; this is pure design excellence.
Valve have made great leaps and bounds in the realms of character animation and lip synching, both of which are used to startling effect. Every character feels important and the sense of bonding you get with them really builds up a rapport with them. Even the mute, “Dog”, I became attached to, so it was all the more heart-rending when he decided to go for a ride on a Hunter…
People will bandy about the physics engine for months to come simply because it’s so well implemented. Everything feels so solid, with weight and and texture. Bodies don’t just flail idly about, being thrown tens of feet into the air from a nearby gust of wind, they’ll flop in a sickenly realistic manner. Barrels fall, wood splinters and grenades are now a bitch to throw. The gravity gun is perhaps one of the best new toys ever invented, more than likely becoming the new sniper rifle in terms of overuse; I’m sure there will be a hackneyed way of crowbaring it into the glut of WWII games.
It’s not surprising that nothing is explained as to just what has happened to the world since our departure, Valve and Vivendi Universal know all too well that they have a franchise on their hands. While Half-Life 2 stands superbly on it’s own just as the original did, Valve have created a living breathing universe. One of texture and grit and magnitude and my only hope is that successive games keep up Valve’s now stellar reputation for quality. And as a precursor to all of the “I told you so” that will no doubt erupt if this is true, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if Half-Life 3 is set before Half Life 2 but after Half Life 1; someone in Valve central has a big plan mapped out for the Half Life universe, and HL2 is just an itty bitty small slice of that.
People refer to Freeman constantly throughout the game as the “One Free Man”, while easy to idolise someone, I’m sure the Black Mesa incident didn’t glorify him that much. There is a story to the legend that is Gordon Freeman and with a side-swipe of time-travel thrown into the HL2 story, this is not surprising.
Undeniable Dilemma
Translating other peoples’ designs into workable HTML has left me unable to design myself as of late. I can do simple, simple is fine and dandy with me, however, many of the natty little web design stuff I want to achieve are hopelessly out of my creative depth. I am far more of an image editor than an image creator, I can edit images to quite a degree, but actually creating from scratch, be that from photographs taken by myself (I can’t take photos for the life of me) or illustrated items, I just can’t achieve. I’ve recently graduated to icons, 16x16 pixels is about the maximum I can achieve, and even then it’s a bit hit and miss.
The more I translate other people’s designs however, the more I realise what I’m missing. There are a lot of subtleties that go into making a workable web-page, and one of the main aspects which has always eluded me is the lengths people go to with columns. This is a good hangover from the print side of design whereby your eye can naturally form columns from items on a page, be that printed or digital. So when you have tabs running along the top of a webpage with logos and other paraphanelia, I would construct a workable page to what I considered a carbon copy of the design. Of course, I have to go back and align everything up, which can sometimes be an entire ordeal unto itself.
Nowadays however, I’m far more attentive to the spacing and padding which goes around page items, something which a lot of web designers would do well to pay more attention to. Now my margins and paddings are pixel perfect. Of course, when you get things like the IE Double Float Bug, it took me a while to even figure that something was awry. This is of course because IE was consistent with it’s buggery, rather than an errant margin every now and again which I would instantly spot.
The latest workable design I’ve created uses just about every CSS trick in the book. From the IE underscore hack to Undoing browser specific CSS. It’s all there.
Wow my afternoon has been fun.
Don't fret precious I'm here
Web development never gets any easier. You start out, and the most challenging thing you have to learn is the HTML tags and attributes to make images of your cat display correctly. You keep going with the webpage shennanigans because it’s pseudo-fun, then you get into table layouts. That’s a big jump from the linear, straightforward layouts you’ve used before, suddenly you have invisible nested tables till kingdom-come (whatever that means). Then, depending on what era you come from (pre or post dot-com bubble), you either learn about server side technologies, or the namfangled CSS layouts. CSS Layouts are about as big a jump as from linear to table based layouts, it’s a whole new way of thinking and a whole new bag of tricks. Suddenly you’re not writing for the standard computer web browser anymore, browser versioning difficulties are the start of your troubles as you wrestle with text-based and accessibility issues. Server-side technologies is yet another leap in the old noggin, no longer are pages “static”, they are “dynamic”. You didn’t know your pages were statically charged until you learned what the alternative was. Pages are now created on the server and served to the user, for all intents and purposes, the user is unaware of anything going on in the backend. They still get their page.
And then what?
Well, server-side is only really the beginning of your woes. Server-side technologies used to be so simple, you’d write a monolithic script that did everything from adding a row to a database to telling the user that what they just entered was complete crap. Your script was linear, simple and to the point. And even more to the point, it worked. Now the onus is on object-orientation and abstraction and using “mature” programming languages to create fully integrated business-backed web “applications”. There’s the crux, no long are you making static pages, you’re making applications now. And all the fun that comes with developing applications is now magnified for your web development.
My ongoing beef with Java continues, as I delve once again into the convoluted and badly document depths of Tomcat, Apache and other projects. The problem with Java projects is because it is so strongly object-orientated, far more strongly than C++, people thing that developing their own lingo is the way to go. I’m sure to all the developers, making valves, engines, services, filters, pipes and fully-fledged sewage treatment plants part of their program jargon was a great idea when they were drawing flow diagrams. When it comes to someone developing for it though, do I give a shit that valves are connected to filters and there is only allowed one engine instance per container? I never used to have to deal with all this crap, all I want to do is write a nice web application with a database backend and enough seperation from code and display. I’m sure all twelve Java enterprise developers are singing the praises of the Tomcat dev team for highlighting the high-level overview of Tomcat, but for the hundreds, nay thousands, of other Java developers out there who want to make the switch from PHP or old-style ASP to Java, it’s a minefield contained within a labyrinth. That’s on fire. With ninjas.
Arguably, my beef with Tomcat isn’t directly connected with my beef with Java (that’s a lot of beef I can tell you), but they all get lumped into the same barrel. I’m sure Tomcat is a powerful tool, but no one place seems to give you a straight answer on how to go from step 1 - idea, to step 16 - hello world. It’s all, “oh we’ll just tell you about the cabbage connector, and you’ll have to download another inappropriately named Jakarta project, THEN we’ll tell you how to do this. Well, we won’t really because we’ll destroy your will to live long before that, but look how pretty these diagrams are!” Tapestry, Cocoon, Forrest, Ant, Struts, Velocity; sounds like an abstract 19th century theatre production…
So what is this if not a general vent at the Java community and projects as a whole? It’s a plead for someone to initiate the Plain English Campaign for the Java community.
Equine
“After a certain length of time has passed, things harden. Like cement in a bucket. And we can’t go back anymore. What you want to say is that the cement that makes you up has set, so the you you are now can’t be anyone else.”
- South of the Border West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami, pg 13 (trans. by Philip Gabriel)
“Maybe it was an illusion, I thought. I stood there a long time, gazing at the rainswept streets. Once again I was a twelve-year-old boy staring for hours at the rain. Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free the world’s reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.”
- South of the Border West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami, pg 86 (trans. by Philip Gabriel)
“Watching the children grow, day by day, I could feel myself ageing.”
- South of the Border West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami, pg 131 (trans. by Philip Gabriel)
“I used to have dreams too, you know. But somewhere along the line they disappeared. Before I met you. I killed them. I crushed them and threw them away. Like some internal organ you no longer need and you rip out of your body. I don’t know whether that was the right thing to do. But it was the only thing I could do at the time… Sometimes I have this dream. The same dream over and over again. Someone is carrying something in both hands, and comes up to me and says, ‘Here, you’ve forgotten somethings.’ I’ve been very happy living with you. I’ve wanted for nothing and never had any complaints. Still, something is chasing me. I wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat. I’m being chased by what I thre away.”
- South of the Border West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami, pg 184 (trans. by Philip Gabriel)
Darkness, night-driving, bowling as means to show the competetive and consolatory personality, classical music listeners
Brain Debris
“We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.”
- A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami, pg 60 (trans. by Alfred Birnbaum)
“The “world” - the word always makes me think of a tortoise and elephants tirelessly supporting a gigantic disc. The elephants have no knowledge of the tortoise’s role, the tortoise unable to see what the elephants are doing. And neither is the lease aware of the world on their backs.”
- A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami, pg 96 (trans. by Alfred Birnbaum)
“There’s nothing worse than waking up in total darkness. It’s like having to go back and live life all over from the beginning. When I first opened my eyes, it was if I were living someone else’s life. After and extremely long time, this began to match up with with my own life. A curious overlap this, my own life as someone else’s. It was improbable that such a person as myself could even be living.”
- A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami, pg 274 (trans. by Alfred Birnbaum)
Norwegian Wood
after the quake
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World
A Wild Sheep Chase
South of the Border West of the Sun
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Dance, Dance, Dance
