Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in yaleartificer's LiveJournal:

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Friday, June 19th, 2009
2:37 pm	The Katamari Blues More Garage Band fun! I wrote lyrics and sang this time. Blame neveryou. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
1:00 am	Still Alive Jazz Now that I've figured out how to use Garage Band, sort of, here's one of my jazz improvisations on Still Alive. I like my two improvisations in the middle, but man, trying to record myself to a steady beat was a good way to find out how sloppy I really am! EDIT: Man, I really can't hear that bass on my Macbook speakers. (I recorded it using headphones.) Maybe I'll fix it up tonight. LATER: Much better ... though maybe I went a little too crazy on the percussion this time. Now with bonus vamp chords, too! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
1:18 pm	Coraline musical with music by Stephin Merritt There's a production of Coraline running right now (through June 20) in New York with music by Stephin Merritt, the composer/singer for the Magnetic Fields. I thought you'd enjoy these audio clips. Reviews say it's creative but kind of cerebral. I say, where can I buy the CD? (Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
12:58 am	Tweets about getting fired from the New Yorker I don't really understand why this story is written entirely in tweets, but its conclusion is interesting: that even writers, and even exceptional writers writing for the New Yorker, have to take office politics into account. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
10:16 pm	Game making stuff I've been enjoying looking through the various tools available for making video games, in preparation for a class I'm teaching next year, and thought I'd share: ( Game Maker, RPG Maker, Flash, Unity, Inform ) Each of these is at least free for 30 days, and Game Maker Lite and Inform are free permanently, if you're feeling creative. (You can also make Flash stuff with some added difficulty using command-line tools.) Anybody know of cool tools I'm missing? I'm aware of the Neverwinter Nights Aurora engine tools, but I'm looking for stuff that is at least free to try, to keep student costs down. Mac compatibility and the ability to make standalone games are big pluses, too. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
4:53 am	An American Geek in Japan I think I still thought of Japan as a mecca for geeky things when I arrived, which is why it's been so surprising that I find it so hard to find a good geeky souvenir, or even do anything geeky. ( On trying to find the geeky in Japan ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 15th, 2009
6:06 am	Japan Any recommendations for what C. and I should be doing in Japan? We're in Kobe, near Osaka and Kyoto. Our mastery of Japanese is slim and none, respectively, so we're having trouble finding things that appeal to our illiterate Ph.D. demographic. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 9th, 2009
10:01 pm	A great story Best story about a ray gun ever. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
7:52 am	Truesdale: We've seen your 2nd person magical realism crap before This is a tremendously interesting essay analyzing the "slipstream" or "New Wave Fabulist" movement in speculative fiction -- the most recent attempts to make SF "respectable" or "literary." Dave Truesdale is an editor of Tangent, a periodical that reviews SF short stories, so he's read a lot of them. He points out that this same trend has occurred several times before, such as during the New Wave movement of the 70's. Each time, another young bunch of SF writers trots out the same batch of stylistic affectations -- 2nd person, stream of consciousness, plotless internal conflict instead of external -- that go all the way back to the college periodicals of the early 20th century, in the hopes that they'll finally get some recognition from the literati. And he makes a pretty strong case that the SF writer does not want to be those people, forever reinventing the style-without-substance story; the SF writer wants to be a storyteller, and SF is actually a great genre for telling new stories, which is why the SF short story magazines remained commercially viable after the mainstream magazines mostly folded. ( More on New Wave Fabulism ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
9:33 am	Spelunky is my poison I have several big-budget video games that I haven't finished scattered around the apartment -- God of War I & II, Disgaea, Eternal Poison. But the only game in a long time to have me up until 3 because of its addictiveness is free and available online. Spelunky! is a game by Derek Yu, maker of indie hits Eternal Daughter and Aquaria. If you have any idea what I might mean when I call it a "Roguelike Metroidvania," that should be sufficient for you to pick it up and give it a try. If not: Metroidvania refers to a side-scrolling adventure game where half the fun is figuring out how you can get to hard-to-reach places. Over the course of the game you get special items let you jump higher, or walk over spikes, or whatever, so now you can grab the goodies that were out of reach. I loved both Metroid and Castlevania back when I was in elementary school, going so far as to promise my parents that if I got a Nintendo I'd only need Metroid and like one other game to keep me happy forever, and randomly swinging my sweatshirt around the playground as if it were the protagonist of Castlevania's whip. Roguelike usually refers to RPGs, the original of which was Rogue and the classic being Nethack, where the dungeon is random each time. But Spelunky is like Nethack in other ways, too. On the debatably good side, it includes Nethack's permadeath -- no saves, no continues, nothing -- which really gives you a sense of danger in the deeps. It's less frustrating than it would be in nonrandom game, because you never have to play the same level twice. But Spelunky is also like Nethack in that as the game goes on, you discover that you can take advantage of your environment in ways that you didn't realize were possible before. Wait, I can pick up that arrow the trap just fired at me, and throw it at something? And that triggers the other traps to go off! But what the hell do these gloves do -- oh. You always feel like you can do better on the next run, because you're a little more forewarned about the rules of the dungeon. So, Roguelike Metroidvania ... it's like it's genetically engineered to give me the maximum dopamine rush. Well worth checking out as either a player or game designer. You can get the Windows version here (you'll also need WinRAR to decompress it). Mac users are immune to the scourge for now. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
3:34 am	Yeaaahhhhblleeeearrggghh Writing a research paper all in one day to make a 11:59 PM PST conference submission deadline is both exhilarating and nauseating. Like I want to keep writing and hurl at the same time. So apparently that's what my subconscious thinks LJ is. This one was about getting the robot to learn the meanings of ``very'' and ``slightly,'' as in ``I am very slightly nauseous right now.'' Or ``Deciding that you have slightly enough time to get a paper out the door even though you were very sure yesterday you wouldn't have time even if you started then is very bad for you but slightly doable.'' (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
4:56 pm	Still Alive For a while now I've been thinking of posting some reviews of things that have rocked my world recently, only I haven't ever been on LJ to post them. Go figure! So if you sprouted a third arm in the past 3 months or so, and only posted it to LJ, I totally don't know about it. Anyway, here's some cool stuff: ( Reviews: Odin Sphere, Battle Lore, Portal, Half-Life 2, Civ IV:BtS ) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 15th, 2007
5:48 pm	The Lion King My sister, Mom, and I saw The Lion King on Broadway, and I was simply blown away. Now, I was fully prepared to loathe sitting through this thing, figuring it would be a straight retelling of a cartoon I didn't particularly care for when I saw it on a date in 9th grade. Instead, it ended up being visually powerful, symbolically deep, and just plain good theater. Instead of donning giant Disneyland character costumes, the actors manipulated second animal selves via wires, while themselves completely visible (covered in appropriate body paint) and acting out the parts as well. At times, the connection between actor and animal was severed or played with: the old king removes his lion head to talk with his son; the comic relief parrot blames the actor that is manipulating him for his mistakes, and attacks him. Subtleties about the costumes and set design added nuances that didn't seem to be present in the original: when Simba sings "I Just Can't Wait To Be King," the costumes become phantasmagorical, pinata-looking things, and you realize that the song is actually meant to be seen as a hopelessly naive dream of youth, which completely fails to understand what adulthood is like. The whole thing ended up coming across as a fairly deep commentary on the life cycle from naive boy to irresponsible young man to father whose own father has passed away. So, a wonderful surprise, and I hope more mega-corporations manage to accidentally fund and support great art. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 24th, 2007
11:02 pm	xkcd report So, hellpossum and llyrwellyn and I went to Cambridge on Sunday, to check out the prophesied coordinates. The girls even brought their bug-hunting gear, just in case there was time after the event. Whatever the event turned out to be. ( What it turned out to be ) In other news, I just got a new piano/keyboard last Sunday, on Wednesday I managed to do an under-the-leg toss while juggling and kept going, and I was jamming and improvising with, like, actual musicians on Thursday night and they liked it. None of which was as exhilarating as running my best section ever on Friday. So, it's been a good week. Too bad I have to start grading this week! (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
9:18 am	Coordinates I'll be heading to Cambridge on Sunday to be part of the fun surrounding this xkcd strip. Even though the guy in the strip says he found nothing there, the date and time is still in our future: it's actually this Sunday at 2:38pm, in a park in North Cambridge. Apparently, there is a jungle gym. From the talk on the xkcd boards, there will also be a bunch of xkcd-reading geeks converging from all over the place. People are buying plane tickets to get to these coordinates. Renting hotel rooms. If you want a ride from the New Haven area on Sunday morning, or will be free to meet in Cambridge in the evening, let me know. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
7:45 pm	Bugs! I went bug catching with hellpossum and llyrwellyn today. This isn't something I've done before, but when I heard about hellpossum's hobby, it just sounded so quirky and cool that I had to try it out. I mean, it's definitely geeky, but it's not geeky in a formulaic Star Wars kind of way, nor is it "nerdy" by Cat and Girl's definition since it's not actively useful. This makes it awesome in my book. I was surprised at the number of huge beasties that were lurking even inside the gardens behind the School of Management. hellpossum caught a bee with a green body that sparkled in the light, just by waving her net randomly through the bushes. I think we still don't know what it is, exactly. Another prize was a dragonfly-sized black wasp with glittering blue wings. I had no idea wasps came in such huge sizes. My catches were modest -- a rather large carpenter bee, a honeybee, and a nocturnal moth who was apparently on an odd sleep schedule. But it was quite nice just to be outside, wondering at the beauty to be found literally in our own back yards. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
10:52 pm	Disintegrate to the Dome for a Bajillion ... with Slivers! Massive combos are both the reason why Magic: the Gathering using constructed decks is awesome and the reason it can be terrible. Awesome, because the decks that pull off crazy combos are like that crazy contraption in the board game Mouse Trap -- fearsome in the way they take a man, a pan, some rubber bands, and a bathtub, and turn these household items into an engine of destruction. Terrible, because like the game "Mouse Trap," you have little control over your destiny when you're on the receiving end of one of these things, and the so-called "game" turns into just a one-sided display of intellectual fireworks. Which the other guy probably just cribbed from some website anyway. But in theory I love these crazy combos, and today's "House of Cards" column on the Wizards Magic site ended with a doozy. ( The combo itself, probably more impressive if you know how normally useless the combo pieces are in draft ) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
1:21 pm	Soon, no more glasses This morning, I just ordered my first pair of contacts in 14 years. They should arrive on the 12th. My current pair of glasses, I think I've worn since high school -- or at least, this same design. I picked them partly because I was a big Beatles fan -- I thought of them as Lennon style glasses. (I think nobody has recently seen me in my blue-tinted sunglasses from that period, though I still have them. Alas, the world looks kind of nauseating all in blue.) I think I also liked how intellectual they made me look. I was pretty much an intellectual snob in high school. Well, that was a while ago now. I don't really feel compelled to emulate John Lennon anymore. Besides, these are now Harry Potter glasses; having not read more than the first book, I'm not even entirely sure what kind of stereotype I'm tapping into, there. And, having some pretty impressive credentials now, the trick is now to not intellectually intimidate or seem standoffish. The intellectual stereotype just isn't very useful to me anymore; other people talk more and say more interesting things when they don't feel like they're being judged. I can't usually see how I look without glasses, because I'm too blind to see my mirror image without them. But scrunching up close last night, I decided to check it out. It was kind of astonishing, how much more expressive I look without them. And maybe more ... seasoned? More subtle? And yet, oddly wide-eyed, though that might have just been just an effect of being nearly blind. You'll see for yourself soon enough. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
10:12 am	BioShock Demo ZOMG. The BioShock demo is way impressive, if you have a recent Windows machine that can handle it. The storytelling is first-rate, the graphics superb, the art direction amazing, and the gameplay both innovative and frightening. A rough sketch: BioShock is a first-person shooter set in an alternate 1960's, in which an Objectivist businessman named Andrew Ryan created a city underneath the sea, Rapture, that would be a haven from governments everywhere. Eventually the citizens of Rapture got to tinkering with their genetic code in order to make themselves truly ubermensch, and many of them went insane as a result -- apparently, many of them during a particular masquerade party in 1959, since many of them are wearing peculiar rabbit masks. Imagine zombie survival horror taking place in art deco architecture with blood-spattered 1950's style advertising everywhere, with on-the-fly genetic modification giving you superpowers, in an undersea city that is slowly being flooded. (If you ever played System Shock 2, it's like that only oozing way more style and with 2007 graphics. You can even hack the hydraulic security systems!) You can get the demo at FilePlanet. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 24th, 2007
6:38 pm	The Death Rattle of the Cheat? Last night, my plush Cheat seemed to have finally given up the ghost. Punched and prodded in the usual manner, it remained silent. Holding it up to his ear, Max discovered it was actually making a quiet death rattle, like the sound of a distant Geiger counter. But by today the death rattle itself had died, and bopping the Cheat on the head produced a disgruntled and familiar "Wah!" So the Cheat is alive and well, but its behavior last night remains mysterious. (13 Comments |Comment on this)