Seven Lions

The more I code, the more I think coding is for tools.  For tools, by tools, to keep all the power in the hands of the needy pedants that have the time and delusion to keep track of the absolute normative disaster that are programming languages.  For instance, let’s just say you want to have a little border resize to your image in your wee Flex app, that should be easy, right?  Just get the size of the image and change the border to be a bit bigger.  Oh wait…

1. width is the width of the Image loader control and not the loaded image’s. If this property is not set, it will be adjusted automatically based on the loaded image’s width. The auto adjustment will not occur in the Image control’s complete event. This value will be updated in the last updateComplete event (the one after the complete event).
2. contentWidth is the width of the loaded image when scaled. The loaded image has not been scaled yet in the Image control’s complete event so you won’t get the correct value, you will get the original width instead of the scaled value. You have to wait for the Image control’s updateComplete event after the complete event finishes to get the correct value.
3. content.width is the width of the loaded image without regard to scaling. This will be immediately available during the Image control’s complete event. Note that content is actually the loaded image.

Right?  And Actionscript is one of the easy languages (reason number two why it’s now cool to hate Flash, along with “Steve told me to.”).

Some days, when you’re working with spatial analytical software, looking for a way to shoehorn techniques used to study bighorn sheep into studying the historic gravities of power, you forget that you’re dealing with some of the most beautiful imagery to have graced the retina.  There’s something about radar topography and electron microscopy that reveal shapes and patterns both foreign and familiar.  Here’s Canada and the northern United States, round about the Rockies.

North America - 250m Resolution - Albers Equal Area Contiguous

Guess What 14-legged Monster Just Got a Taste for Humans - Be Afraid

Apparently, the ocean is sick of being abused and it’s sending up armored hellbeasts to devour us.

See Isopocalypse 2010 for more.  In all seriousness, the guy there is the closest thing you can get to an Isopod expert, and gives a great expose on how breathless reporting of strange creatures can go from divorced-from-reality to full-blown-crazy-talk in no time flat.

It’s also aware to me she might (I don’t know because it’s a personal issue) be a femenist. Nothing really wrong with that. But sooner or later even femenist have to face judgement.

The Internet, where you can see Bangkok and Smallville without leaving the comfort of your own seat.

For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I wouldn’t have known except they mention it in every post, along with how impressed they are by the cinematic quality of John Cusack Presents Hot Tub Time Machine starring John Cusack) and are intrigued by the idea of “time travel” I direct you to a blog, from the future.

Ascii Dreams

Note the dates, note the prescient information that could only come from someone who actually came back from one week in the future.  Or perhaps the blog has become quantum entangled with a stray waveform tabby, and it exists both now and later.  Note that Dwarf Fortress Alpha is about to have a new iteration that includes the kinds of features I spent eight years looking for in Nethack (and all I ended up with was a rusty longsword, which is not, thank you very much, a metaphor).

We’re all spoiled by cartoon maps of the allies storming Normandy or the melting ice caps, and so a visualization of spatial change in medieval China, while accurate (at least according to the Songshi, Taiping huanyu ji & Yuanfeng jiuyu zhi), doesn’t seem nearly as dramatic as thick-lined cartoon arrows rushing across the French countryside.

You can make your own slowly shifting maps of Song Dynasty political geography by downloading the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty. Or maybe you can just load it into Flash and draw some arrows flying from Wang Anshi’s hands out toward the northern counties, abolishing them hither and thither.

It wouldn’t be hyperbole to call this one of the most amazingly sung and choreographed pieces ever created.

Chunari Sambhal Gori

Unfortunately, the folks who posted it disabled embedding, and it seems to be the only full-length version on YT.  The male voice is Mohammed Rafi.

You remember Space Quest, don't you?

Or, at least, that’s what I expect to hear soon enough, now that Apple is in the battery business.

Just finished watching Will Wright’s presentation for the Games for Learning Institute.  It’s cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will Wright, who’s actually considering the difference between “the social landscape and the material landscape” and has been doing so for years.  The talk itself focused on the concept of games and stories as schema, fostering understanding of our world through lessons and cause-effect chains.

Wright obviously has been engrossed in story for his entire career, and during the unplanned delay before the talk engaged with an audience and pointed out that games do not supplant the linear narratives of books, but rather modify and complement them.  This comes up at the end of the talk, where he discusses Fractal Entertainment– How modern “properties” or “worlds” are not a single piece of media, but rather multiple expressions (some cinematic, some interactive, some linear, some board game, some RPG).  This includes not only top-down licensed expressions but also crowd-driven epiphenomena such as machinima and graphic novels based on Sims gameplay.

Also interesting is the concept of emergence not only within a game but also around a game, where the activity that surrounds, say, Wii Bowling, is as important to the enjoyment and definition of the game as the hardware and software.  As Wright puts it, the absurd gesticulations one makes while trying to bowl with a plastic stick.  But emergence plays a role outside the story proper, and becomes part of the meta-story, where the story is dissected and used as lesson (Wright notes that Blade Runner is the inspiration for city planners for The Dystopian Future to Avoid) and also as Story deconstructed into components to create what the designer calls “possibility space”.  And once that space is created, story emerges from it, to start the dialectical chain all over again.

Of course, story is too narrow, and Wright deals with this by settling on describing movies and books as linear narratives, which is broad enough not only to cover romance novels but also monographs and encyclopedias.  The convergence presented by Wright is mirrored by the convergence of high end research, focusing on model building and schema pattern strategies.  And while these schemas and models are arbitrary, they allow, as Wright points out, the ability to map the patterns that emerge within possibility space.

So many years of so many toys has left the theorists of the world in flux.  That’s why we have so many would-be philosophers with no background in the matter and so many academics struggling to understand their place in  society cut loose from the linear narrative.  It’s good to see someone like Will Wright, who is knowledgeable and systematic in his understanding of how the digital world and the social world mesh and the new subtleties available as a result of that meshing.  And on top of all that, there’s a great story about the Soviet space program accidentally crash-landing in China.

“Dinner for wolves”

It’s hard to tell if there’s such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they’re right next to each other but, because of how we project them, they get split in half and floated away on an imaginary ocean.  You know, like Greenland when you run a Lambert Asian Conformal Conic.

To muddy the water a bit, I offer this piece of <3000 viewed Youtubedness:

What’s going on here?  Is it an attempt to show how absurd dancing is, or to show how absurd arguments are?  Or is it just playing a game with highly responsive digital tools (that’s about the only excuse I can imagine for the Brendan Frasier clapping meme) and the actual message isn’t a message at all, other than, “Look, I did something cool with Final Cut!” which is, ultimately, so idealistic as to be childlike, and hence the exact opposite of the ironic implication of much of these memes.  I think there’s a serious schizophrenia in modern underculture media production, to the point where I’m no longer sure if anyone is reflecting at all about what they’re producing and how it’s communicated.