http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/04/29.html#a8104

Stephen Colbert totally owns the President right to his face.

Holy smokes, I honestly thought Colbert was going to be yanked from the stage at times. It’s awesome, and Mr. Colbert has a fan for life in me.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/27/congress.oil/index.html

Right. That’s … hilariousesque. Why not just let Congress make the laws? Every time – EVERY TIME Congress has abdicated their role, and given some power to the executive branch, we’ve gotten screwed. Hello? Fool me three, four, ten times, shoot me in the goddamn head? And by “me” I mean Congress, ’cause I’ve never been fooled by monkey-boy.

This is modified from something I wrote to some good friends of mine. Thoughts on what I want out of the work that I do.

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Museums are interesting things, though. There are good ones, and bad ones. The National Gallery in London? Excellent. Gives you a sense of history, and most importantly, context. Explanations describe this particularly work’s place in history, you get to appreciate its immediate aesthetic value, and the pieces it’s placed next to are often also works by the artist, or works that had some influence on that particular piece, or the movement it belonged to. The Louvre? Excellent. The Tate Modern? Not so much. Not because it was a “modern art” museum, but rather, because the way the exhibits were set up was extremely poor – each piece had no context, and in modern art, fundamentally, context is such a huge portion of *why* something works, or doesn’t work, that without the context, a Pollock is reduced simply to squiggles of paint on a canvas.

The interesting thing about being immersed in thousands of years of art, and finally *getting it* – seeing the progression over time, seeing the phases of certain styles, schools of thought, or even perceptions of what art *was* opened my eyes. I’ve been so concentrated on modern media, such as film and comics, that it’s like comparing the history of say, Boston, as a city, to Rome. Seeing the development of painting over six hundred years, or seeing how the Egyptians and Romans told stories through sculpture, or saw what’s lasted through the ages, and what still provokes an emotional or aesthetic response, even thousands of years later… it changed how I think about art – about expression, and what I *want* out of my career – hell, out of my *life*.

A friend of mine died last year – had an Esctasy-induced heart attack. Stupid waste of a life. But though Kevin (Frostybyte) had been a “hacker” when I knew him, in the years after college, he’d grown into an artist. He created these astonishing LED sculptures that were just … amazing – an amazing combination of engineering and artistic expression. After he died, some of his more current friends had posted various video clips of him, or photos of the things he had made.

I don’t remember the exact phrase that he used in one of the interviews someone had recorded with him, but when asked why he did what he did, he said something to the effect that people don’t look around enough, and appreciate the world around him. The things he made were bright. Blindingly so. His goal was essentially to create things where the light was so bright as to be disorienting – to force the viewer to reassess where they were – to look around, and notice the world around them.

I thought to myself, “I knew Kevin – I knew he was smart. When did he get wise?”

It’s that sort of wisdom – that sort of drive, or vision, or passion that changes the world. Changes how people perceive things, how they understand the world around them. Will Wright does that through games. Kevin did that through his art. Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, David, Da Vinci – they all did this in their time.

I work in games at a fortuitous time. The medium is in great flux, and fundamentally, there have been very few pieces of videogames as “art.” Rez qualifies, I would say. It’s an interactive experience that evokes such a sense of … immersive reaction. It’s not about a story, characters, or anything that one would associate with traditional narrative – instead, it creates a feeling, through the interactivity, that I find almost completely unique to games. Ico, though more character oriented, is like staring at an older painting, and seeing the interplay and symbolism in how the characters are portrayed – the interactivity in Ico is like learning to understand the characters in a great painting through observation.

So, there are a few examples where games manage to evoke something totally unique – but for the most part, people haven’t really figured out that games are really *art*. Like, ART. Not just that they are artistic, or contain artistic qualities. The medium is like a canvas – like a camera, or a paintbrush – the medium is a tool that can convey something to the viewer – but we have a tool that has more potential than any medium has come before, because the potential is there to engage the user in a way that no previous medium ever has.

Do I think I’m the person who’s going to upend the genre? Who will really be a Picasso of our time?

It would be extraordinarily arrogant of me to say so.

But at the same time, I’m not willing to close that door. I’m not willing to settle for less.

So, after getting back from the honeymoon, I’ve been waking up early. Yesterday, at 6am. Today, at 5:10. Not tired, but I’m sure I’m going to crash halfway through the day. I can’t imagine doing this on a regular basis for business (yes, you know who I’m looking at) and remaining sane.

There are worse fates, I suppose, but it’s going to be unpleasant this afternoon when I crash, face down on my desk.

Hrm. Feeling a sense of … disquiet. Spent a good part of the morning, strangely, swapping dishes. Putting old stuff away, taking out the various things we got for the wedding. Got steak knives, and new flatware organizers. New shoes. Merrells to replace the Merrells I completely wore out over the last two or so years.

I weigh the same as I did before the honeymoon, but look & feel a lot better. Traded some fat for leg muscle, due to the hours and hours of walking we did. For all people’s speculation about dieting and exercise, my guess is that if people just walked from place to place, and our jobs didn’t require 8+ hours of daily sedentary-ness, we’d almost entirely eliminate our nation’s obesity problem.

Some of my friends got us a Canon Rebel XT camera for our wedding. Frankly, it’s like learning to drive on a Ferrari, but I’m not complaining. Learning how to drive, slowly. Not killing anyone (or anything) yet. Still taking mostly just average snapshots, but even then, they look much nicer than on my old FinePix 4700.

Back in the USA! W00t! Got in yesterday around 6ish (BART from the airport, then a ride back from BART from my mom). Glad to see the dog, and the house, but no housemates were home. Ended up waking up this morning at like, 6am from the jetlag, but there you go. Legs are also sore as all get out. Not in a bad way, but in a good one. I’m definitely skinnier than I was when I left, but I weigh the same. Guess all the walking converted some fat to muscle. Not a bad trade, though not noticable visually unless I’m wearing shorts.

Otherwise, things are good. We reorganized our dishes today, to use the stuff we got as wedding gifts, instead of the old hodgepodge of stuff we used to have. Neat!

Gotta start writing thank-you cards, return some duplicate stuff, and get some new shoes, since the ones I had are completely toasted from the trip.

Tomorrow, back to the grind, but today, relaxation. Good stuff.

Read a friend’s blog (nehrlich.livejournal.com), and he was talking about about working on his weaknesses. Doing things he knew he was bad at, in order to get better at them. And this isn’t just talk, either – words backed by *action*.

One of the weird things is that this trip has really made me realize that I really like a LOT of things. I like enough stuff that I simply don’t have the time in the day to do them all to any reasonable degree, even if I were unemployed. I want to paint. I want to play music. I want to draw, and write, and exercise, and cook, and do all these things *well*.

Like Eric talks about “natural advantages,” I’m pretty quick at becoming decent at a lot of things. All of the above things, I’m decent at. Better than average at a good number of them. Some things I’ve invested tremendous time in, some I have not. Thing is, all that time invested, and I’m still merely “better than average.” The only thing I think I can make a reasonable argument I’m very, very good at is my current job.

But the thing is, as much as I love the content of the work I do, I want to do *more*. I want to do a number of things, but I want to do them better than I currently do. And there simply isn’t time. So at some point, I have to look at the situation, and figure out how to maximize the time I do have. In some sense, I do have to work on my strengths, because if I work on my weaknesses, I *have* to ignore stuff that I already have a foundation upon which to build.

I don’t need more hobbies. I don’t need more friends, or more space, or more stuff – more than anything else, what I need is more *time*. Or a desire to do less, better. I can’t make myself want to do things less, so it’s just a question of what do I want to focus on, and can I make myself focus on that to a degree where I can ever break out of a sense of mediocrity?

I dunno – I spent years drawing, and it never really went anywhere. I never got to a point where I’d consider myself good at it – in comparison to most people who consider themselves “artists,” I’d even say I’m not good at *all*. Yet, this is something I spent years doing, in every free minute. What it’s left me is that if I need to communicate something visually, I can do a pretty reasonable job at it.

With music, I used to be able to play about six instruments “fluently.” Never in a way that I really felt was inspired, but I could bend them to my will – I could just never find a will that made the music more than just notes. Still, what that’s left me with is that I can pick up a violin, which I haven’t played in probably 18 years, and still get a reasonable tone, and play somewhat in tune, after a few minutes of practice. But to what end?

I don’t know. The skills I have are *perfect* for my job, mind you – as a game designer, having immediate access to a wide variety of skills, and knowing *how* to find out more about a given topic is a genuine strength – one that I think gives me an edge that is difficult to match. That’s not to say I’m a super-genius, or that my work is superior to some of my coworkers. What it means, though, is that I have a set of skills that’s taken my entire life to develop, and that it’s a *rare* set of skills to be as versed in as I am. Which is good. But I dunno – I don’t really know what to do with it, outside my job. I want to do a lot of things, but simply don’t have the time to do it.

and yeah, I know this sounds like I’m an egomanical wanker, but there you go. 😀

Yesterday was Arc de Triomphe, lunch at Bistro Romaine on the Champs-Elyssee, back to the Louvre, then off to a falafel shop in the Marais, and the Place des Vosges. The end first – Place des Vosges was closed, so we didn’t manage to make it there. The falafel place was *AWESOME* – best cheap food I’ve had so far. I had a schwarma pita, and Ei-Nyung had the falafel – both were extraordinary, and will likely be dinner tonight, if they’re open.

The Louvre was great, again, even though we mostly hung out in the Italian painting section that we’d blown through relatively quickly the first time, to get to the Mona Lisa. We’d ended up seeing pretty much everything we’d wanted to see (though we didn’t get to the Venus de Milo), though obviously, not in the great detail one might like.

Bistro Romaine was pretty terrible, IMO – I had a lasagna, which I thought might be different because say, France is closer to Italy – but basically, I’m thinking this must have been a chain of some sort. It was pretty blah, and we had ended up spending 2:30 there, because it took us :45 to get the check. I ended up really frustrated and agitated, because at this point, I had really wanted to get back to the Louvre, but we were stuck sitting at a crap restaurant on the Champs Elyssee – I think that place just isn’t for me – the whole street, that is – it’s just too touristy and craptacular. The rest of the city has been quite wonderful, but that street is just too much.

The Arc was pretty impressive, though – lost of stairs, great view from the top, and just an impressive structure with an impressive surrounding layout. The only thing was that the view wasn’t all that impressive compared to the Eiffel, which we had been at just the night before.

Today was pretty excellent, though. We walked a bit south to a restaurant where we had sandwiches and coffee to start off the day. Then down to walk along the Seine, which was closed to traffic, so you could just walk, bike, or skate along the street. Reminded me a bit of when they close off the big street in Boston on Sundays. Walked around a bit, then caught the Metro from Hotel de Ville to Saint Sulpice, where we walked to the church, looked inside, then headed over to the Jardin des Luxembourg (yes, I’m sure I butchered that), where we sat on chairs by the fountain for a couple hours. Perfect. Just a great, laid-back way to end the vacation, and I could imagine little better to do.

We got up, wandered around, got some crepes, then walked out and ran into a band, made up of a couple horns, a trumpet, a drum kit, trombone, and tuba. They ended up playing some covers of popular songs, such as Paint it Black. They weren’t great, but they were pretty fun to watch.

We headed back to the Metro, where we went to Bastille, to walk to Place des Vosges, where I led us in the wrong direction. Oops. On the way back, it started raining. We were totally unprepared, so we headed back on to the Metro, and came back to the apartment.

It’s been a pretty excellent day, and a great way to end the trip. Looking forward to coming home, but definitely leaving feeling really positive and happy.

So, we’ve been eating at a pretty wide variety of places in Paris. Some street-side stands, some random pastisseries, some nice restaurants, like L’Atelier. Last night, we went to Equinox, on Lindsi’s recommendation. The food here’s good – no question. But it’s not … mindboggling. And a lot of poeple said the food in Paris would be mindboggling, or extraordinary in some fashion that I haven’t seen yet.

And so that sparked a bit of conversation between Ei-Nyung and me last night, and I wonder if maybe we get food that defaults to “excellent” on such a regular basis that the gulf between daily food here, and daily food back home simply isn’t that large?

I mean, sure, a “standard” lunch here is miles apart from the crap Chinese food from the EA cafeteria. If I’m measuring by that yardstick, food here is leagues better than it is at home. But when I think of the sort of “standard” food I consume on a marginally regular basis, I think of things like Aperto, like Geta, the stuff we cook at home, or Angelfish. They’re not (apart from home meals and Geta) “everyday” dinners, but they’re not “only once in a long while” food either.

There’s also the question of ingredients. Yeah, it seems from the *way* that people shop, they tend to use better ingredients in their day to day cooking. The method of food procurement I think forces people to think about and appreciate the food more, since they’ve got to shop for quality on a regular basis. But again, to point out the lack of contrast, we’re constantly surrounded by ingredients of rather extraordinary quality. Some things, like the butter, doesn’t match up because of FDA regulations, but most of the produce and meats, I think the things we have access to through our local stores, and through Joe, are on-par or superior to a lot of the things we’ve seen out here.

I dunno. I’m not sure those are really the right reasons for the lack of blown-away-ness. L’Atelier was extraordinary, no question – but it was also the most expensive lunch I’ve ever had by probably a factor of three or four.

Can you think of a game that’s really rife with symbolism?

Can you think of a game that makes funny, subtle references to other games through symbolism?

That seemed to be something we saw a lot today in various paintings, and I was wondering – there are probably enough long-term gamers that would actually be able to comprehend the short of emotional/visual “shorthand” that one might create by manipulating things we’ve seen in older games.

Would a certain “boss battle” structure evoke a different feeling, if the player understood that it was a reference to say, something in the original Contra that they’d played many years ago?

What would it mean to run across a crate, in a game, that had a big pixellated question mark on it? Could one use that as shorthand to evoke some inherent Mario-ness? What would that even mean?

I don’t even think that we see much of the traditional symbolism that pervades other media in games – it’s rare, at best. Is that because the interactive nature of things isn’t as condusive to really understand symbolism, or is it because we don’t feel that our audience has the capacity to really understand symbolism and reference unless they’re so brutally obvious that they’re on the level of Final Fantasy X?

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