This is my first creative writing post. It’s not much right now, as I’m still trying to figure out my first assignment. It seems I have some time today to write. No work until Thursday at 3P. Good. Poems are cool to write. :)

Genesis Log Page 43

June 9′th 1929; 1:30 AM

Twenty years ago today, I began building a machine. Now, nearly the size of a $2/hr room in San Francisco, I have finally been able to name this monster with a name signifying it’s being. Genesis. Why? Fuck you, that’s why. I call it Genesis.

Sure, that may be a piss-poor explanation, but this machine is beyond the realm of revolutionary. Fuck, it can build itself! Well, since last night that statement has been false. There’s a guy I met who owns a metal shop. Genesis, in big, brassy letters. On the door or awning or something–and it wouldn’t be so much for the letters, because obviously I could handle that myself, as to, finally validate our existence to the world–but not until this bitch is again reproducing.

June 9′th 1929; Around 3 AM

I’ve stopped working on the machine for a few minutes to log my progress and have a cigarette. Along the way I’ve discovered the master unit started binding on all metal materials. Explanation at this point is beyond me. Note to self: Discover a method to minimize vibrations in the cutting module near the back end of master unit without disturbing the spacing of lower modules (which would of course throw timing off too).

June 9′th 1929; 4:30 AM

Another smoke and log break. Two smokes, and now for the log. I should really get an eraser. I tried coating a fraction (every other twice) of the fingers (in the master unit, both main and secondary clusters) in a light polytetrafluoroethylene, but did too many. The machine dropped the first production unit and spilled molten glass all over the conveyance, which is luckily made of iron slats. The scrap pan below caught the rest. I cleaned the glass. And I still have no fucking clue why it was loading glass. Maybe it’s getting a bit late.

June 9′th 1929; 5AM

Another smoke. This is killing me. Not the smokes, they are too, it’s the nicotine. I guess it is the smokes

June 9′th 1929; Around 6AM

During my last log entry I had an idea regarding my smoking habit. I took four cigarette butts and coated them with the polytetrafluoroethylene and wedged them under plates that mount the cutting module. No more vibrations. Rather, few enough, and muted enough, that it can manage. Didn’t fix any other problems though. Also not really a production-ready design decision. Why is it still choosing glass? A logical explanation continues to allude me. Everything seems to work but the final product is still a heap of shit!

June 9′th 1929; 8AM

The cigarette idea was a bad one. Polytetrafluoroethylenes main property is that it’s slippery as fuck. I won’t bother with the coefficients, it’s just amazing stuff. Once it started producing again, before any new parts could get to the assembler, one butt shot clear across the room and landed in my hair. Note to self: don’t be an idiot, cigarettes should not be a part of any sound engineering decision. Nothing else in this shop can harness the vibrations of that tad of cotton wrapped in paper, however; so tomorrow during the day I’ll design something similar to a cigarette butt.

I’ve also realized these coatings reach a sweat spot after breaking in. Though the master unit still malfunctions like fuck, due to the slick shit, I can turn it up past ten which blurrs the movements of the finger clusters in my vision. This really helps with motivation to continue. My shoulders hurt. If I had a stroke right now I’d be very pissed.

June 9′th 1929; 9AM RECAP

They day is getting a bit long and I’m afraid all of this noise is going to start attracting some unwanted attention. Will continue tomorrow night. Both Genesis and I are very tired. Oh, the glass. I figured out why it was choosing glass. The entire time it was trying to install vacuum tubes everywhere. Perhaps it decided it needed more logic but wasn’t keeping track of what part of what module of what unit it was constructing.

The final machine we made today did, however, surprise me. When it came out, it turned itself on. Not sure if Genesis wired it that way, or if Genesis somehow evolutionarily developed the machine as I worked on her. We did generate four full iterations last night, not counting the most recent. It’s still a heap of shit, and just sits there. Still, I’ve yet to see how it’s actually built. I tried plugging Genesis’ material harness into it, but it had no valve control and spilled shit all over the floor. Another try, more spilt shit.

I get a different feeling from this machine though, and perhaps I won’t recycle it. It’s no where near as complete as the first successful repro, but seems to have more life. It sits, on. Powering itself much like it’s mother machine, but doing much, much less. I got the feeling when it powered on automatically, it may be that action that continues to prod at me. Or it could be that I’ve recycled four other machines tonight, is it my own guilt?

Most likely, it’s two fucking packs of Lucky Strikes. I need a regular god damn night job.

People however do not read regular news, either. Newspapers are only read by a small microcosm of people… as a film maker I can not even count on people reading title cards. And yet, people read everything. Advertisements anyway, flashy shit that catches their attention in one word or less. I live in San Fran-fucking-cisco and it seems like the advertisement capitol of the world (though I realize that’s not true, many cities have LITTLE or NO regulation on the matter).

Practically every word one sees in this city is intended to sell the viewer something. There is signage everywhere, and it’s insane. I bargain that people’s senses, their ability to read or underlying, subconscious desire to read gets so watered down that when they actually _should_ be reading and _should_ be paying attention that they’re not. Fuckers. It’s subconscious though, and they can’t do anything about it. I just fucking ignore it.

And I certainly don’t expect people to realize what they should be reading.. and what they shouldn’t. No, they would have to be told to.

DON’T READ THIS SIGN

Perhaps it’s the problem with how little people are involved with art, and how it can help one become a better person. One learns an unmeasurable amount about themselves when creating art, no matter what it is, as long as it makes them artistic and they realize what that can do for them. Few people I’ve met other than artists even realize what self expression is, much less how to do it. It doesn’t involve buying new sneakers, or even buying old sneakers. It doesn’t involve buying anything, in fact, and it god damn well shouldn’t.

Pick up an art and start expression your emotions with it. Stick with it for long enough until you no longer are thinking about _the art_ and thinking about yourself. So many people think they can express themselves by how they dress… and mostly what that indicates is that person has absolutely no idea how to express themselves, and this is their closest interpretation. First time expressionists… we’ll call them expressionists, should also not look at blogging as a form of self expression. Choose something that is definitely not on a computer. Choose painting or acting (but for god sakes keep your head straight… remember to express!)

Most bloggers that I know, or not necessarily bloggers… people who write “blogs.” IE: friends, people from school, the regular joe schmoe… like me (?)… will pull up Firefox to write a blog, open tabs for My$psace, F@cebook, Gmail, etc, etc, read through those first, spend hours perhaps re-connecting with their friends they re-connected to last night. Their heads are wrapped up in an entirely wrong space. Social time is not expression time, for me anyway. I don’t believe people can really express themselves in social situations and that is increasingly what computers are becoming for young people.

Wow the thought process was weird on that entry…

If you are planning on blogging, just remember this: shut the fuck up. Just write exactly how you feel, as fast as you can. Force yourself to ignore punctuation, spelling, grammar… whether your writing’ll get you into trouble or not or whether your piece makes sense, those mechanics can get in the way of getting out what you really want to write, perhaps working through an inner mental problem (if you do it this way, writing will help you think).

The environment is a beautiful wooded mountain valley. There are many completely-destroyable buildings throughout the valley: and they destroy beautifully on a massive scale. A building destroyed by a strider completely breaks down into the many components of buildings-2 x 4s, and other building products that all crash and explode, each piece falling randomly-the animations are not scripted.

After your trouble with the strider/hunter battle, the cinematic experience really takes off. Even though it’s the end of the game, movie mode is put on overdrive. The characters all seem to pour into their performances. You’re knocked to the ground and your camera movement is restricted. Shit goes on around you that you can’t help. Some people may be annoyed by this-but it’s vital. The restricted camera movement, the low angle, you, Gordan Freeman, pinned to the ground and helpless, like a human on the very same level as the rest cast-is all really engaging.

Imagine a movie director: Terry Gilliam, and a movie: 12 Monkeys. By the time of 12 Monkeys, a re-make of an older French experimental film, La Jete, Terry Gilliam is already a brilliant and accomplished director. It is classic of his style to use camera angles to convey a feeling, perhaps that of the protagonist or subject of the scene. Though it’s just not camera angles that contribute to the feel of the Gilliam film-it’s the entire experience. Terry Gilliam creates cinematic experiences.

The game industry has always been one that emphasizes experiences. As games push the boundaries of realism, they will naturally draw upon their past experience as super-naturalistic experiences to become hyper-real: as in movies, they will exaggerate real life in real life terms in an effort to be more engaging and more realistic. Game companies know this, look at The Sims 2. Though they had the capability to create a life simulator, it’s much more fun in the cartoony manor they executed it. The Sims, however, can be analogous to a Judd Apatow (Superbad, 40 Yr Old Virgin) movie. They have some real elements but are largely a projection of real life, an obvious fabrication.

A movie like 12 Monkeys, however, is much more fitting as an analogy for the Half Life series. Sims, as with 40 Yr Old Virgin embodies what our psyche wishes it could be: fun, without care, essentially, as infants. Half Life 2 follows a much more serious thread: world destruction and the destruction of our race. It’s cinematic story line includes charismatic, likable characters, one of whom you get to be. The story line is as thick as it’s directing: you are but a mere human, your entire race is being used as slaves and thinned out, restricted from reproducing - your race backlashes and you can now reproduce, and who is this Alyx character, among the other Gordon admirers, her family and her familys collegues? It’s all rather impressive for a game. Which will, within a minute’s time take you frome near death to flirtatious conversation. Very compelling.

Where am I going with this? No where. I’ve come back to this post at least 10 times, wanted to post it and then haven’t because I have no ending.I’m just hoping games get more and more cinematic and compelling! I’m tired of Doom 3! Fuck Doom 3! What did Doom 3 innovate (or Quake 4 or COD 2,3,4 or Crysis or …)?

Out of all the places I’ve been in my life, next to the Bluegrass festival in bumfuck Hamilton, MT, San Francisco is the most invigorating. It has such a great vibe to it. You can’t seem to do anything in the city without running into a really dynamic selection of people. The people all seem to have energy. There are a lot of artists in the city, and this is a serious part of that energy.

You play guitar, don’t you? Everyone in San Francisco plays an instrument.

I took that picture out the window driving on the 101, still across the bay from San Francisco.

What I didn’t think was going to work out, ended out working with a lot of help from my parents. I’m moved into an apartment in San Francisco with two room mates in the inner richmond district. Two room mates: JUSTIN MARCUS and CHRIS MULKEY. They dig on movies and shit too.

As it turns out, I did not get more posts in last year than the year previous. Like I had hoped to. Which is fine because I wanted to only write when I felt like it.

Yesterday was the day I went in for a hiring event at the Apple store. Not so sure about the Apple store anymore. The place gives me the creeps. The people there… I’ve never met a group of people so extremely happy with the fact that their brand, in the past 10 or so years went from a 5% market share to… 7. I knew they existed… but I didn’t know they were real. Like, real people that you can touch, and not just weirdos on the internet. Imagine corner of the store filled with 35 digg-reading, macrumors-creeping mother fuckers biting at the chomp for a job. It’s competitive too. One guy had the gall to say he out-qualified everyone there, without a doubt.

Christ, I’d pop my head like it were a zit, working there. Though, you never know, I still might.

What I really want is a job at Revision3, which I’ve just submitted a cover letter and resume to, pointing them to my new SamuraiFilms website. If you’re reading this, and aren’t using a browser that sucks (you know who you are), then check it out. It’s not all the way finished, but I think it gets the point across. The point of the website is the video, so I designed, basically, a video player application. It’s designed for people with big monitors, or at least decent-enough resolution, higher than 1024×768. It’s also designed for people with new browsers (I don’t even know if IE7 works…), Firefox 2, Safari 2+ and a fast connection, 1.0mbps or more. I figure that’s most people who’ll be looking at the site. Also, blip.tv sucks. Their flash encodes are way jumpy and drop a ton of frames. Fuck blip.tv.Also, it seems that Safari’s javascript is quite a bit quicker than Firefox’s, because the animations and such are way smoother on Safari.

I think I’m going to make a film very soon. Perhaps another mob-themed sort of film, or maybe a horror. My apartment is cozy.

Check it out:

You see, it seems video sharing websites are all out to get ‘cha. They get bumpers at the end of your video, overlays, special buttons and what seems to be the whole 9 yards when it comes to usage rights. The video quality is bad. Your uploads can not exceed 100 MB. They’re allowed to play your video in desecrate desktop applications and server advertising along-side.Whoa! No thanks.

What I’m going to do is just run down the list. Each site has its drawbacks but ultimately sucked, save one.

YouTube

YouTube is the traffic king. Yes, we know that and every other comparison out there puts them at an advantage for that. Well, fuck YouTube. The picture quality of the youtube flash transcodes are absolutely horrible because they use a very low bit rate for the re-encodes. They do this, it seems, so they do not have to drop frames as all other video sites I’ve tried seem to drop frames from the video and create a jerky feeling to smooth animations and forget about pans. YouTube videos also have relatively decent (compared to all but Blip.tv) audio encodes, but they still sound like no more than 64kbps, perhaps less, and still on a mono track.

The video I uploaded to YouTube turned out looking pretty shitty. The words in the titles blend together due to artifacts. The motion is nice as it seems full frame rate was preserved and audio was almost acceptable.

Veoh

Veoh - I don’t have much to say about Veoh. Their video upload process is not a nice single page interface like most other sites, in fact taking 3 pages. Like Revver, they tell you your video is ready to watch somewhat quickly but it usually still takes another 5-10 minutes. The picture quality is decent, and without scaling the videos look pretty clear. Even so, the frame rate is drastically lower than the source video, making the animations jerky. The audio quality was horrible, ditching 2 channels for 1 and using what sounded like like less than 36kbps.

The video I uploaded to Veoh looks decent. It’s way more jerky than the source footage. The titles and their edges are clear. If I had to choose between YouTube and Veoh I’d choose YouTube. Using Veoh would make me feel like a whore. They pretty much get to do whatever they want with your video, including whore it out to other video sites, like MySpace, YouTube and Google Video (primarily).

Brightcove.tv

Originally I picked up Brightcove because I perceived it as having the best video quality. I saw Garry Newman over at garry.tv go through this same process a few months ago. He eventually settled on Brightcove so I thought I’d give it a try. Their video player is really nice. The interface is clean and subtle. Not surprisingly, the video quality is half-way decent, relative to other flash video sites. I would put its video quality on the Veoh side of a comparison between Veoh and YouTube. Despite that-they drop a high number of frames to maintain that quality and the audio is terrible. The interface to their website also kind of sucks after you upload the video. The uploading process is nice, but the so-called “dashboard” is not.

The video I uploaded to Brightcove must be in some sort of limbo right now, possibly being reviewed for copyright infringement or something like Revver does.  Regardless, it turned out decent but with poor audio and low frame rate.

Blip.tv - the winner, surprisingly

After all this uploading and waiting, I finally choose Blip.tv. I did not expect to choose Blip when I started on this journey, well, because of it’s name. It sounds like another bullshit rip off video site (like Veoh, Revver or Metacafe). That said, they have the best interface, best upload process, quick processing, no ads, allow direct downloading, will transcode your video into multiple formats, and as far as I can tell there is no upload limit. Their flash video player is really clean and lightweight, and blends in well in white-background sites AND supports 16×9 videos.

Despite dropping frames, the videos look really good. The transcodes seem miles ahead of all the other video sites. The audio is damn near true to the source footage, with, get this: TWO channels, encoded at what sounds like 96kbps or maybe a little more.

The video I uploaded to Blip.tv seems a little washed out (more so than the source) and is a bit jerky with good audio. You already know the story, I won’t patronize you with the details. Instead I want to show off this feature which I think all the other sites try to do with “channels” and such-but executed horribly. Blip.tv calls them “shows” but none-the-less, its just a group of your videos-executed the right way. Check it out, my “show” on Blip.tv. It gives you a large video area with a small browser and information area-exactly how it should be. There seems to be built in support for serial episodes of whatever you like, and it automatically creates video a video podcast for you. Fucking sweet!