June 2005 Archives
Well, I downloaded and assembled that dragon illusion. It took a lot more time for me that I expected, but it's done and it looks great! You have to keep one eye shut, though, or the illusion doesn't work.
Rich told me a great story about one of his old roommates here in Japan. This guy - a foreigner - was on the train, and it was about to pull into the station. He noticed this weird looking guy, standing up, staring at a woman sitting down close to the door. When the door opened, this weird guy grabbed the woman's breast, and then made for the door.
Well, Rich's friend, the foreigner, chased after him, caught up to him, and tackled him to the platform, all the while shouting "chikan!" (pervert) until the police arrived. After they did, the foreigner picked up a little notebook that the pervert had dropped in the scuffle. He opened it up and it was filled with hand-drawn renderings of women's breasts. Weird.
The whole scene of this guy tackling him to the ground, shouting "pervert!" is for some reason hilarious to me. At least in Japan. The whole chikan phenomenon, though, is no laughing matter. It's a serious problem, especially in Tokyo. There are now women-only cars on the trains to help alleviate this problem. Rumor has it, though, that these new cars are now being infested with female lesbian chikan. Doh!
Grand Illusions has a really incredible video of a paper dragon illusion that really has to be seen to be believed. You can also download a PDF to make one yourself. I just printed mine. I can't wait to make it and take it to work!
I wonder if there are any cool applications of this technique towards computer graphics, in terms of reducing animation load, or for cool new techniques. Anyone know of any already out there?
Fireflies - Hotaru (蛍) in Japanese - are a rare treat in Tokyo. Perhaps even all of Japan. Two weekends ago I went with Heather to about an hour away from Tokyo to attend a firely-viewing. We waited for about ninety minutes in line, if you can believe it. The line was wrapped around the block. Why did we do this? Fireflies are a dime a dozen in Ohio at this time of year. But it sounded like a good idea at the time.
While waiting Heather and I joked about how this was probably a robo-hotaru exhibit. We got up to the entrance, and discovered this was no joke. There was a simulated scene with flashing Christmas lights all over the trees of this park. I have to admit that it was pretty realistic-looking, despite the fact that none of them were flying around.
Anyway, that wasn't it. After that we were led to a building where they breed real live hotaru. It was like a big research facility, essentially. I got the sense that none of these people had ever seen a firefly before. It was a real pleasure to see their excitement.
Last weekend, for some reason, I went with my buddy Rich to this, well, outdoor marriage reception facility. It is one of the most beautiful places in all of Tokyo - really. From each point, at each angle, the scene is beautiful. This time of year there, in a certain ravine, this place holds a firefly viewing. This time it was real and more enjoyable. The best part, though, is that every year they import the fireflies from another growing facility specifically for this experience. Only in Japan.
I heard a funny story about one of my bosses. His hobby is to try to pick up women every weekend. It seems he rarely - if ever - has any success, but his exploits are comedy gold.
Two weekends ago he and his buddy went to Odaiba - a very swanky part of town. Apparently, you can rent dogs there, and walk them around the town. The dogs in Tokyo are all very cute. The scheme was, they would walk the dogs and try to get girls to talk to them. A rented dog. The best part is, these guys are so cheap that they shared the dog between them for the day! I bet rented dogs in Tokyo don't come cheap, on the other hand.
Thursday evening, I left work around 9:00. I changed into my bicycling clothes, which are far from fashionable. OK, they have sweat stains and a few holes. And I was wearing some mesh shorts. Anyway, as I got on the elevator on the eighth floor, I was startled to find four people in business suites coming down from the ninth - the management floor. Anyway, I got on, and one lady probably around 25 says something like "blah blah blah Kakkouwarui!" to her colleagues. This word means, for example, uncool, unfashionable, perhaps even in some cases unseemly or disgusting. I wanted to tell her that these were my bike clothes and that I normally don't dress like a slob (*ahem*, this much of one, anyway), but I wisely kept my mouth shut.
Anyway, I got off the elevator, mounted my bike and rode past them. I stopped at Seven Eleven to get Heather and me a new food that I knew we both would like - "Cheese in Potato" - when they passed me again. This is want I heard from the same woman: "blah blah sonna gaijin wa" which means, "Those kind of foreigners..." I could have misheard her, but I don't think so. And she could have been talking about something completely different. I acknowledge all this, but it still bummed me out. I don't often encounter this admittedly small-time racism - most people here are really cool - but even the impression of it really ruins my day.
The "Cheese-in-Potato" were great, by the way.
Yesterday - Friday night - we had an enkai - a kind of after-work banquet. These things are really raucous affairs with lots of noise and everyone often talking at once - definitely not my scene. Each time an enkai is scheduled I dread it a little bit.
They're thinking about instating a policy at work here where, if you're late for the daily meeting and you don't call, you have to pay 100 yen (about US $0.85). This doesn't bother me that much because I'm almost never late - I'm normally the third person in the door every morning. I don't think it's difficult since the work day starts at 11:00 AM, but I guess others do. Still, if I were by chance late one day and I couldn't manage to call in for whatever reason, I would really resent having to pay that 100 yen. To where would that money go, I wonder?
I recently read two great articles on Gamasutra.com. The first one, Berbank Green's One Button Games, talks about many different control schemes that have been long forgotten or underutilized. There really is an astounding amount of control that one can effect with just a single button, isn't there? Really worth the read especially with the flash examples.
The second article, I read just yesterday. Into the Woods:
A Practical Guide to the Hero's Journey by Bob Bates discusses the power of myth, and how myths are ingrained in our essense as human beings. To such an extent, he argues, that people who told and believed myths were evolutionarily selected-for over those who didn't. This is a powerful and valid argument for me. The Rollo May citation I felt was a little too generic - "Myths are what lie underneath our moral values," he argues, for example. But there certainly seems to be more just an element of truth to all of this.
I had read about Joseph Campbell before, who was cited in the article as well, but I'm excited to read more about him. This guy seems to have made a powerful impression on the game industry.
I also loved how the author describes the Three Act Structure, a storytelling methodology apparently formalized by Aristotle.
Particularly interesting to me was how the author advocates a Fractal three-act structure - meaning that each act may contain three mini-acts, which may contain again three mini-mini-acts, and so on and so on, and all conforming fundamentally to the Three Act Structure. Of course, I was a little amused that the author used a mathematical construct being used to describestory-telling. Despite this, though, I appreciate his contribution of the term to the game design lexicon. As many of us are steeped in the discipline of computer science, it behooves us to borrow and apply ideas like recursion and adaptive iteration to the discipline of game design.
There's a great experiment on the BBC website about identifying real smiles and fake smiles. Can you tell the difference?
I got less than half.
I can't believe it's been over two months since my last entry. I've been really busy at work. Fortunately, things are finally starting to let up, I think.
About three weeks ago my Aunt Barbara died. She just had knee replacement surgery, and I guess it went bad. She got infected and came down with pneumonia, and it was all downhill from there. She died pretty quickly, it looks like, though I am unsure of the details. I couldn't make it back home for the funeral, which was only a few days after her death - the immigration authorities possessed my passport trying to update the visa in it. It seems that they held it for over a month. Anyway, it was a big bummer. :(
The work that I'm working on right now is related to my earlier post about Delaunay triangulations. However, the client's needs require realtime constrained Delaunay triangulations - which means, in essense, the application not only passes a set of vertices that must be triangulated, but also a set of edges that must be inserted (elements of the constraints). The code is working pretty well, but it's a tough piece of software, and there are a lot of insidious errors like floating point epsilons that aren't quite right; dot product calculation errors etc. It makes me really appreciate the utility of regression testing - I truly have a new-found respect for it.
Here's the research paper off of which I'm doing most of my work: Fully Dynamic Constrained Delaunay Triangulations by Kallmann, Bieri and Thalmann. This paper has really opened up my eyes to the very interesting field of computational geometry, which I had heretofore considered a pretty dry subject.
