Category Archives: Fiction and Poetry

100 Days Kickoff

100 Days has been kicked off with a story called The Backups. We’ve had a few hard drive failures over the last few months. First my wife’s MacBook went, then Maggie’s, then one of John’s G Drives. Then I got paranoid and started up a Time Machine routine.

The question became: when do you back up the backup.

The larger question, of course, is generating a story about the issue and making sure everything required is covered. Middles are the key. And their study through the medium.

In Tinderbox, I have notes filled with titles and brief idea sketches, soon to be developed daily into stories, not much more that flash or sudden fiction length.

Anyway, we’ve begun.

Tunxis Stage

Drama is life exaggerated. What a thrill to see it in action at the college tonight. George Sebastian-Coleman with Patrice Hamilton performed three plays by Christoper Durang: The Book of Leviticus Show, Kitty the Waitress, and Funeral Parlor. In addition, we also had Patrice’s own short work, The Hail Mary Pass, to enjoy.

The actors were very good. Currie Ricci played a sensual Kitty. Amy DesRoches exposed the currents of bereavement in Funeral Parlor, Andrew Frederickson vulnerability as Jake in Hail Mary Pass, and Christine Rodrique awkward surprise at murder in Leviticus. But I thought Jim Revillini stole he show with interesting performances of Curt and Marcus. Energetic. Active. Natural.

Everyone did a great job.

I found the setup for the performances most intriguing. George arranged the audience around an intimate floor-level stage, with the first row of the fourth wall within easy reach of the actors and backdrop. The sets were effectively minimal, the lighting exquisite. The arrangement gave the impression that the audience was enclosed with the actors. Very interesting. Of course, this got me thinking about possibilities for hyperdrama.

We need much more of this at the college.

Games and Premises

I took a little rest from work this weekend and picked up Mirror’s Edge. The game is fun, some of the play is interesting, but the movement gets tiresome and the controls are just odd for my hands; I’ve been stuck in certain areas simply because I couldn’t nail the order of buttons, especially on 90 degree wall runs.

I’ve also been playing Pixel Junk’s Eden and find the simple beauty of this game much more satisfying than the big EA game. A few months ago I also played through thatgamecompany’s Flower effort and was just wowed by the art, concept, and sound. Both Flower and Eden are Ten dollar downloads on the PS3 and well worth the money; they carry more value than fifty dollar games.

One item interests me about Mirror’s Edge and Shadow of the Colossus in that both of these games make for interesting relationship between the controller and simulated human movement. In Colossus, we use the controller to have a knight jump on a horse, climb a colossus, tumble, and leap to and from ledges. In Mirror’s Edge, a first person perspective game, much like Half Life, the controller is used for leaping, sliding, clambering, balancing, and grasping for edges. Such games are pushing game controllers beyond their usefulness, however. In Colossus, for example, the knight will often jump several times for his horse and miss badly and awkwardly. This is often the case when a colossus is coming close and the player is in quick need of the horse but can’t get on, and he’s standing just beneath the horn of the saddle. Similarly, Faith in Mirror’s Edge will take a great leap and miss a pole on a wall because the controller’s crosshair is off just a tad to the left or right. Or, she leaps up to a pole and the effect is the same (of course, when I can’t line her up and struggling to aim her into the correct position, I start to groan, especially as the bullets are coming). It’s not the avatar’s fault. It’s mine given the “limits,” but there is something interesting about this whole controller business: the programming and controller choices.

Complex simulation is a technical question in Mirror’s Edge–Faith responds to the environment, for example, but only within a predetermined set of instances and never as an intelligent agent. She can’t, for example, adjust an angle to correct for player error. An avatar can jump on a box with the click of a button, but determining how to simulate complex human motion and human response–for example, the influence of momentum or the various kinds of impact and velocity or given an element of fatigue–with the typical game controller is reaching a comical limit in games that aim for high fidelity.

What are the limits of the technical model?

In Eden, for example, minimalism drives the controller as the world demands a specific kind of interaction: jumping, holding, and spinning. Flower, for example, wants the user to turn and rock the controller, which seems natural, as flight has been tied to rocking and stick motion in and outside of planes. While Mirror’s Edge aims for a high degree of representational value, the method of controlling Faith, the protagonist, just seems primitive. And boy do I have a pain in my right shoulder.

Prizes

Congratulations to Mary Ellen for Trinity Honor Day prize:

Apparently it does, because I have been summoned to attend Honors Day to collect a “prize or award”. Cool. Third place in my category is a $100 prize, a very fine amount. This will be the first time I receive money for something I have written. Very cool. Having sought such recognition and actually receiving it is the coolest of all, because it feels genuinely deserved.

New Days, New Words

The poets at Poem Addiction are doing some impressive work. Their work proceeds.

Neha

The day asks for a new creation
something different and untold

Evan

seven days of senseless revolution
and the children are hanging from the trees

aprilpoems

In slanting waves
what once was a trickle

Interesting patterns developing

Tinderbox Dashboard Part 2

A few changes to the 100 Stories Tinderbox deck. Thanks to Mark Bernstein and Mark Anderson for lots of help on additional visualization methods  and general housekeeping.

tinderdecksmall

This version refines on the old by adding some plots to the containers on the right and to the POV agents in Hunting.  The plots will track word counts in stories as the project builds.  It’ll be interesting to see how trends on story length and thematics will develop–what might pop out as a result.  In addition, I’ve added an additional similarity search for stories of about 100, 200, and 400 words.  Motif was an important concept for 100 Days and agents did a great job of seeking them out.

I’m really looking forward to what’s going to come and adjusting and augmenting the dashboard to suit.

Tinderbox Dashboard

Here’s a screenshot of my Tinderbox dashboard.

tinderdeck1

This is a basic set up for the upcoming 100 Stories project.  The top left adornment contains each month’s prototype, which sets color and display expressions for individual stories as they come.  Hunting contains agents that will search for and collect similar stories.  A few agents will also search for and collect stories with likely point of view phrases.  On the right side is a column for keeping daily updates in order, counting published stories and sorting them by their creation date.  These are containers.  You can see that the Practice container contains stories already published on mediaplay.

The big blue adornment beneath Hunting is the deck for stories either in progress or those about to be dumped into the right hand containers.  I should rename this: the deck.  Backing it all is a slice of Carianne’s painting entitled “scattered.”  Likely to come is a container for stories that don’t make it, as such a project will result in lots of stories that won’t make it onto mediaplay but that play a brainstorm role.  I have lots of these from 100 Days.

Links and Stretchtext in That Night

That Night I Saw on My Homeward Way is an example of poetry that uses hyperlinks in two ways. The first type of link moves the reader through the poem’s parts. The second reveals hidden pieces of the poem’s stanzaic patterning. This link typology is trivial to some degree. Of course hyperlinks move the reader to each section of the poem. If the poet has hidden some moment of the poem from view, a link might act as a target for revealing that text. Of course.

As hypertext, That Night is read as an intrinsically linked work, meaning that the poem can’t be read beyond more than one node without recourse to its links. It’s physically coded, materially mathematical, a computed artifact. Links are also, beyond their structural code, a poetic devise. This non-trivial characteristic is a persistent potentiality in digital expression. The following brief analysis illustrates my meaning.

There are two stanzas in the following image of That Night. Each quatrain has a different subject and spatial orientation. There are two links in the first and third lines.

footprint.png

One can read the lines with typical interpretive gestures. But the reader can also read the links in any number of ways. Clicking on the link “rubbed” will reveal sections of hidden or invisible text, as in the following image.

footprint2.png

The revealed text has a different stanzaic pattern and should, in some way, relate to and change existing substance materially, formally, grammatically, imagistically. As JR Carpenter teaches us in How I loved the Broken Things of Rome (db8), there are many aesthetic and meaning surfaces to digital poetry. Learning to read them: This is the fun of it all.

The devise of the link is used throughout That Night. But the stretchtext technique is not, as I saw no need for other nodes to incorporate it, but the technique remains a potential force nonetheless. Hence, it could be said that That Night uses minimal animation, minimal stretchtext because it required no more than is necessary. Additionally, the poem has a traditional surface and avoids decorative or substantial media strata. It also makes for good reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Further Reading on digital poetry: Born Digital by Stephanie Strickland