On The Merits Of Typewriters, I'm Still Here.

The posts on this blog have been less and less frequent lately, which I'm not very happy about. It's also starting to get a bit heavy on the social issues. Sure talking about feminism and misogyny and stuff gets me excited but I don't want to do it every damn time I do a blog post, and I don't want to subject you guys to the same old rhetoric. I'd rather tell stories.

Now the reason I haven't been putting up little tidbits and excerpts of stories is that I've gone old-school. For almost the past year I've been using a Smith Corona XD 5700 electric typewriter which I picked up for $10 in Vancouver. It was one of the last generations of typewriters before fully computerised word processors came about. It has a little screen and line-by-line memory, so you can go into the special mode and type a line into the memory and then hit print and it bangs it all out, centered or justified if you like. The memory also enables an erasing feature if you have the proper cartridges, which I don't. I prefer it to a computer for a couple of reasons. You instantly have hard copies of every page. The obnoxious clicky-clack keys and panicked smashing down of the hammer for each character carries a sense of commitment, as does the inability to backspace and revise. You learn to just run with it. Just type everything and worry about deleting crap bits or rearranging words later. It's liberating. There's also the lack of distractions. It's a solitary experience, there's no Facebook button, but it's also much easier to step away and interact with actual human's physically in the room with you. You can turn it off and on and resume exactly where you left off instantly. There are downsides, obviously. There are no cloud-based backups and research must be done on some other device. Afterwards you have to find a stack scanner to digitise all the pages, and hope that the software accurately recognises the characters on the page (it won't) so you can edit on a computer. The cartridges don't last long and are hard to come by.

In the past year I've also started a Facebook page and a Twitter, and connected the Instagram account to both, so it's becoming an interlinked spiderweb of social networking platforms, which is I think how social network marketing is supposed to work? I guess?

Na(tional)No(vel)Wri(ting)Mo(nth) is happening. I'm not participating in that. I don't intend to finish the one I'm currently working on within the next three weeks, and I started it well before November so I guess it doesn't count anyway. Like Movember, you've got to start afresh, right? So I'm currently living in Seattle, a legal resident of the US. In a little bit I'll put up a thing on here about my employment experiences in Vancouver, that might be a bit interesting.

Peace.

Sexuality in Horror and Halloween

As a newcomer to North America I’m still learning about Halloween culture. I spent most of my life in Australia, where the holiday is rarely observed. You might get a single pair of kids dressed up knocking on your door expecting sweet food, and you’ll have to run around the kitchen searching cupboards and drawers for something they might enjoy. Nuts? A block of cheese? An apple? It is certainly not something that most people prepare for. So my understanding of it was founded entirely on film and television shipped over from the States. I understood it to be a time where people dress up with the apparent goal of frightening others. Parents frighten children. Children frighten parents. Older siblings frighten younger siblings. Infants don’t know what’s going on. If children come to your door and curse you with “trick or treat” they’re basically holding the upkeep of your home exterior to ransom. Give us candy or the house gets it, they say, a carton of eggs and roll of toilet paper at the ready.

Thankfully, by the time I came to North America, people have grown up enough not to be such vandalising dicks any more. However I still experienced my own Mean Girls moment when confronted with just how sexual the whole event is. Being actually frightening is almost shameful and it’s unusual for a girl not to dress as “sexy whatever”. I understand that adults want to distance themselves from the childishness that they engaged in as children. And I understand that Seattle is, for whatever reason, a pretty prudish place and Halloween presents a once a year opportunity for girls to dress as slutty as they want without fear of social prejudice.

For me, Halloween is supposed to be, and is for young kids, a time for being spooky. A time for fear. Now I’m going to talk about movies.

We’re all aware of the common trope in slasher films of hypsersexualisation of women. There’s excessive nudity to the point of blatant sexist objectification. You could argue that the primary audience of these films is adolescent males and for that reason the filmmakers add tits to cater to that demographic, which may be true in some cases. However, there’s also the observation that in many slasher films the sexually promiscuous are usually the first to die, presumably as some kind of punishment. This makes sense in films and stories released in a time when sexual promiscuity is heavily scorned by society but I’d like to think that the liberal sensibilities of modern filmmakers have matured to a point where we don’t need to punish people for being sluts. I mean, having a monster whose motivations are unexplained - who is basically acting as a piece of hazardous environment rather than a character, like a wild animal - mindlessly attack whoever is the first to take their clothes off sounds a lot like the absurd rape-victim-blaming attitudes held by folks who apparently never left the dark ages. I’d like to stay away from that discussion because I believe it’s already been done, and I just hope that if horror genre continues to kill sluts first it will do so for reasons other than attempting to curtail society to dress more conservatively and have less sex.

Note that above I’m talking about slasher films. The type of film that Cabin In The Woods sends up. Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, etc. I don’t strictly consider these films horror, they are a distinct genre or a subgenre of that. Actual, scary horror films sometimes also use sexuality though usually to enhance the discomforting effect. Rather than dismissing sexuality in horror as simply tacked on objectification, or some kind of social engineering I believe that sexual themes absolutely enhance the horrific experience. It’s (unfortunately) normal in society for humans to be uncomfortable with some aspects of their own sexuality and this discomfort can be exploited by crafty storytellers. Alien was loaded with imagery and themes suggesting bodily invasion, rape, and slimy penises, and this compounded to unsettle male and female viewers alike. I think part of the reason it was so effective was that it wasn't blatant, but just suggested. The idea of an enemy binding itself to your face, smothering you, shoving its appendage down your throat and into your belly, depositing a seed which then grows within you against your will, was allowed to slither about beneath the surface of our consciousness while we watched some space-miners get killed.

I’m also reminded of Hellraiser which was more explicitly about sexuality, specifically BDSM. For many, restraint or even pain during sex is a very alien idea. The acts themselves may even contain an element of fear. Bondage is something that necessarily requires a certain level of trust to be enjoyed, but when that trust is absent it becomes threatening and frightening - perhaps still sexy to some but scary nevertheless.

This is why, for my future Halloween costumes, I will be incorporating themes of bondage and restraint and those other aspects of sexuality that most people view as uncomfortable, combining the almost requisite sluttiness with discomfort and fear.

A Dark Room, interactive narrative, metaphors

A buddy introduced me to an online game called A Dark Room, which basically killed my entire day - I just sat on my bed playing it. That first sentence was written three hours before this one. I had to stop writing to play the damn game. Finished it. 

The first few minutes of this game are super interesting, arresting, even. You get a stark white screen with a timeline of events described in text, “the room is cold. the fire is dead.” You have a single button: “light fire”.

“the fire is burning.”

Things continue in this text-based, minimalist control fashion for a while, with no instruction on how to play the game or even what sort of game it is. There are occasional random events if you wait long enough. The fire will die down, you hear a scratching sound behind a wall. You’re soon introduced to a new character called “builder”. You stoke the fire to warm her up. Before long the game balloons into a survival, resource collection type thing, with combat and exploration.

During the first part of the game I wasn’t sure how much of a “game” it actually was. It seemed more like a linear narrative relying on attentive prompts by the player to direct and advance the story. Would such a thing still be considered a game? Temporarily forgetting about my “every game is a race” argument from Race Design Theory, what differentiates a game from any other narrative text is the capacity for interaction. David Cage and his company Quantic Dream attempt to produce games that blur the line between games and movies, however they are unequivocally video games. The player is given choices which affect the action and storyline. Occasionally, during the early ‘training’ stages of QD games, the player is asked to control the player in menial tasks, without any decision-making on any level. If the text were to be made entirely of these interactions from the player it could be argued that it would not longer be a game at all, however this is pointless and irrelevant, as this text would basically be reduced to a movie that pauses itself and requires the viewer to continuously perform some simple and menial action to unpause and ‘advance’ the plot. That would be silly.

Consider also choose-your-own-adventure books, in which the reader (or player) does have some degree of influence over the story. They might contain multiple endings, or multiple paths to the same ending. If this sort of narrative were presented on a computer screen it might be labeled (or mislabeled) a video game. The prevalence of ereaders ie. Kindle, nook, with the capacity for in text hyperlinks further blurs the line between computers and books, between video games and novels. Admittedly the CYOA genre (if it is indeed a genre, otherwise, medium) has declined in popularity seemingly in time with the public acceptance of video game culture. Despite the fact that video games have existed in some primitive form or another since the 50s (debatable), one could say that these types of books were a precursor, at least in the popular sphere, to modern video games.

As were tabletop role playing games, and board games before them. TTRPGs generally follow a common structure involving one Game Master directing the action based on some prewritten script. Again, I ask where the boundary of the video game definition lies - what is the minimum amount of digitisation needed? There are online platforms for existing typically offline games, such as online casinos or scrabble clones played via Facebook. Are we supposed to call these video games or digital versions of traditional games? I don’t believe that there is a difference.

A significant portion of modern video games fall under the category of simulations of offline games (i.e. the FIFA series, aforementioned scrabble and online casinos,) while a wider category includes simulations of other offline activities (i.e. flight simulators, tactical combat, auto racing,) and all of these are merely approximations of their real-world counterparts. As technology increases they will obviously grow more and more accurate - I guess asymptotically. As they do so, performing given actions in the game will become more procedurally similar to performing them in the real world. Digital virtual cockpits will more and more resemble actual cockpits. Regardless of this, though, at any level of sophistication and accuracy these simulations will always remain such. They will exist solely as metaphors in the same way that their primitive predecessors did. By these predecessors I am talking about this:

Very early video games such as Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! are (by today’s standards) too far from real life to be considered accurate in any sense. Some might argue that to call Punch Out! a boxing simulator would be an insult to the sport of boxing. Nevertheless, it is in some way a simplified, primitive version of a hypothetical ‘perfect’ boxing simulator (perhaps utilising some futuristic The Matrix-style virtual reality) and therefore acts as a metaphor for boxing in the same capacity as the perfect simulator would.

The next point I would like to make concerns the fundamental structure of early video games, and, by extension, modern ones. Punch Out! is not that far removed from other games of its era, for instance Space Invaders. If one were to compare player inputs (control button sequences, timing, etc) from both games they might be indistinguishable - the only real difference between the games is their graphical presentation. In one a man moves around a boxing ring, executing specific attacks at specific times while evading opponents attacks. In the other a spaceship moves around a 2-dimensional space, performing the same (or at least comparable) timed attack and evasion maneuvers. Rather than presenting these games graphically as they are, let us imagine a text-based version. Obviously it would have to be slowed down since we can’t read as quickly as we can interpret images. It might look something like this:

Opponent moves left 2 spaces.

Opponent moves forward 1 space.

Opponent attacks.

Player takes 1 damage.

Note that this reads similarly to a TTRPG GM’s narration. The antithesis to this point revolves around complexity: Modern games of the same type still follow the same structural pattern, albeit with slightly more complexity. Space combat games now successfully utilise 3-dimensional movement rather than two. Boxing simulators now use a wide range of moves. The ways in which games handle dealing and receiving damage varies in complexity - compare different health systems across various popular modern shooters.

Obviously not every video game in existence, when reduced to this data-centric form, will be indistinguishable. Most puzzle games, for example, do not have enemies. Perhaps in the future someone, maybe myself or maybe not, will construct a list of categories of games which when described this way will be incompatible with each other - a list of fundamental genres.

5 out of 6 for A Dark Room. A strong first product by Doublespeak Games and a thoughtful reminder that games don’t need to be flashy to be great or interesting.

Race examples, analysed

All competitive races can be analysed in terms of these components. A 42 kilometre marathon is much the same, all that differs is the challenge (42km as opposed to 100m). a typical horse race is again similar, except with differing restrictions as well as challenge. Jockeys will be disqualified for attempting to complete the race on foot. An interesting alternative is the La Mans 24 Hours – an other similar 'endurance' motor races. This race has competitors attempt to cover as much distance as possible within the given 24 hour time period, it therefore sees the roles of challenge and medium reversed from those of a typical motor race, such as the Formula One Grand Prix. Where a Grand Prix's challenge is distance and medium is time, as in a 100m sprint, the challenge of Le Mans is time, and the medium is distance. In other words, racers must traverse the 24 hours while achieving the greatest distance possible relative to other competitors. The restrictions in both races are similar. Ultimately, the challenge of a race is fixed while the medium is not. In scientific terms, the challenge represents the independent variable while the medium represents the dependent variable -the thing that is measured.

The challenge:time format of race design can also be observed in some eating contests, where competitors attempt to consume as much as possible within a given time. Also compare a surfing heat, (or skateboarding, BMX, wakeboarding, as well as a multitude of other “extreme sports”). In these events competitors are given a limited time to perform as many tricks as possible, or as well as possible, and receive points for the overall quality of their heat. Note that these events are not judged by average speed, as conventional races are. Extreme sporting heats are instead judged by average quality (quality over time). This is a similar format to that used in competitive dancing as well as singing contests. A surfing heat is scored by points over the heat period. Due to the sport's reliance on nature and high degree of luck with regard to desirable waves appearing within the heat, a contestant may find themselves forced to sit on their board waiting for an appropriate wave, effectively wasting time. This is equivalent to a sprinter standing still. The competitor is reducing their available challenge space, resulting in a worse medium result. This means that their average score – measured in time/distance or points/time – must be higher for the remainder of their run/heat in order to successfully compete with those opponents who did not waste time. Although races are usually thought of as a contest for the highest velocity, they are not generally scored as such. Velocity is measured by distance/time, whereas races are typically scored by time/distance. Inverting this equation results in the winner being he with the lowest score, which is precisely how conventional races are scored. In these cases the challenge is again time, however the medium is points from tricks or quality. Each competitor must reach the end of their time limit (their heat) while amassing as many points as possible. If teams in the Le Mans 24 Hours are awarded one point for every meter the car travels, the challenge-medium relationship would be identical to that of a surfing heat, in the end. Of course, the means to achieving those points – the restrictions – are different. These heats also follow the time trial format where each competitor performs separately. Only one competitor has access to the surf (or racetrack in the case of motor racing qualifying time trials) at a time. This is primarily to avoid competitors interfering with one another.

Consider a race in which contestants must consume a given quantity of hot togs in a short a time as possible. There is no need for this race to be organised as a time trial since each competitor has access to his own pile of food and cannot interfere with other competitors. There is also no need for a time trial format in the 100m sprint, as each competitor is confined to his own lane and cannot legally interfere with others because of this separation I would class both the eating contest and the 100m sprint as time trials, although the term is now less relevant. Each competitor is segregated from others within their own sub-challenge-space. That is, each sprinter must traverse the distance of their own lane, and each eater must consume their own bowl of hot dogs. These are in contrast to races where competitors share the challenge-space, such as the Tour De France, or Grand Prix. In these events the other competitors become a part of the challenge; they become obstacles to be negotiated in a similar way to hurdles.

The next competition to be analysed is a boxing match. Fighters must score the most points within a given time frame, so the challenge of boxing is time, while the medium is points (or knockout). The idea that boxing and surfing heats may be discussed as races may be met with some opposition, however they both involve some contest of speed: measured in points over time. These events are races precisely as much as the Le Mans 24 Hours can be considered a race.

All events discussed so far have used time as either medium or challenge, and therefore have been some contest of speed. However a more abstract notion of speed can be imagined, using some other measure instead of time, for example, turns. Vegas rules solitaire, otherwise known as patience, removes time from the contest, allowing the player to deliberate and carefully consider each move. This places the pressure on efficiency of turns, rather than of time. Solitaire contains a challenge of putting all cards away in the required order and manner, and the medium of turns. Many tabletop and board games share the medium of turns. The goal to complete the objective in the least number of turns is similar to the format of a 100m sprint.

Solitaire's most defining feature as a race, and as suggested in the name, is the lack of opponents. Because of this it is one of the few games to be scored absolutely, rather than relatively. As may be becoming apparent, the components of challenge, medium, and restrictions apply to what are commonly considered to be games, rather than races. It is here that I would argue that they are the same – that every game is a race.

Take the game of Chess. The great difficulty in chess strategy arises only because your opponent and his pieces exist as part of the challenge-space. Their moves are calculated in order to inhibit your ability to reach your goal – checkmate. They can do this by directly inhibiting your attack (i.e. playing defensively - removing attacking pieces from the game, having their king “run” from attacking pieces), or by forcing you to postpone your attack in favour of defence (playing aggressively).

Tournament Poker is an interesting game under this analysis. Ignoring bluffing and betting (that is, within a single hand) the medium of poker – the thing that is measured and compared between players – is hand strength. However when betting is included, and when the entire game is looked at as a whole, the medium is net money. The challenge-space again involves other players as obstacles, but these players also comprise the actual challenge-space. The single challenge of tournament poker is to be the last remaining player.

Pho Hong restaurant review

Pho Hong: the small Vietnamese restaurant tucked in between Asian grocers and other foodsellers of varying cultural origins on the stretch of Fraser street between 43rd and 49th. My housemates and I thought it might be a nice place for a beer, or rather, the most likely place to sell beer. In my experience the Vietnamese enjoy drinking the liquid, and this venue was open until 10pm - later than any of its neighbors.
"PHO HONG. VIETNAMESE CUISINE - BEEF NOODLE SOUP. LICENSED" it says out the front. A sign on the door says "cash only."
Promising.

We walk in and it's pretty empty. One guy sitting at a table for two. A couple somewhere. A waitress approaches us and asks, "three?"
"Three," I say, holding up three fingers, and she directs us to a table for six. We sit.
The waitress places six chopsticks, some napkins, and three cups of tea on the table, then disappears again. We chuckle at the fact that she brought us tea when we have zero intention of ordering meals. We look at the menus, the specials page buried under the plate of glass on the table, the regular menu a sheet of laminated pink paper. On the back, under "Beverages:", down the bottom of the page, Local Beer $4, Import Beer $4.50. Good prices, although the lack of an actual list of local or import beers is dubious. Although we've already eaten dinner I decide to order something small, "COMBO A" for myself and my male housemate to share. The female housemate settles on a pear-shaped ice cream dessert.

Again the waitress appears and begins taking our orders. The housemate to my left goes first.
"I'll have this pear desert, and one of your local beers," she says.
The waitress scribbles something down on her notepad and looks back up at the housemate. She just stares, waiting for something.
"Can you tell me what they are?" the housemate says.
"Budweiser and Canadian," says the waitress.
"I'll have Canadian."
"That's it, ice cream and beer?"
"Yep! Thank you."
The waitress writes that down and then looks back up at the rest of us. She doesn't make eye contact, and her gaze is sort of floating around between me and the other guy.
I guess I'll speak.
"I'll have Combo A to share between us," indicating my other housemate.
She doesn't write anything down, just continues looking at me.
"Combo A? Can I have that? To share?"
"Yes."
"Okay. And a Canadian, too, please."
The four of us are silent and unmoving for a short time, and then the final one of our table speaks, the one I'm sharing with.
"I'll just have the Canadian."
The waitress leaves.

We talk among ourselves in hushed voices about how strange that interaction was. Why didn't she talk? The couple sitting at a table nearby - the only table with more than one occupant - gets up and leaves.
Then we realise that the place is almost totally silent. This was why we'd been so hushed, that natural thing we instinctively do in quiet places - be quiet ourselves. There's no music, despite the speakers around the place. Nobody is speaking. The guy at the table for two is checking his phone. A girl at the far end deep in the place is using a laptop. We're the only people making any noise at all, so we stop, and sit there in silence, looking at each other and around the place, waiting for it to end.

The waitress bring us our beers with glasses, and the pear ice cream, and leaves. We're thankful for something to occupy ourselves. The dessert looks like Salvador Dali's version of the neat and symmetrical thing in the picture-menu. It's deformed, lopsided, misshapen, and when my friend tries to cut into it with her spoon she actually has to cut, sawing with the spoon like a knife. It's solid and there are ice crystals on the surface.
I'm sitting next to a wall, so right by my head is this big floral print on canvas in what looks like a window frame. There are faux-windows everywhere, in fact, the opposite wall is a row of small alcoves with candles inside and wooden slatted window shutters on either side. Red brick walls. The ceiling has some kind of droopy texture - like far too much paint has been slopped on there and started to drip into little mini spiky stalactites as it dries. There's a section of the place with a lattice on the ceiling covered with creeping vines which are probably plastic. I'm getting a real Italian vibe, maybe Spanish. I'm not good with vibes.

After a few minutes of silence one of my tablemates whispers, "why isn't there any music?"
Nobody responds.
Then we hear a short ditty from somewhere in the room, a little microtune lasting about two seconds. It's annoying and strange, like a sound from a crap video game. Is it from the man with the phone? The girl with the laptop? Or some other source? It happens every few minutes.
"I want to leave right now," says one housemate.
"Me too," says the other.

Finally our food arrives.
One skewer of pork and one of chicken, and a spring roll sliced into quarters. We divide this between ourselves according to who wants what, and it tastes disappointing. The meat is tough and flavourless. The spring rolls are the best bit, followed by the steamed rice.
The food is gone quickly for two reasons: there isn't much of it and we are anxious to leave.
The beers are still half-full but that's no matter. We down them.
Let's pay for this and get out of here, we say, and so we wait for a while but the waitress is having a conversation with someone at another table. When she's done she walks past us back to the kitchen, and I hold out my arm waving at her saying, "excuse me, hey, hi," but she doesn't notice and walks right on by.
"Well then," I say, "I guess we pay over there."
So we walk over to the back of the restaurant, where the waitress is doing embroidery or something on one of the tables, and the girl who was on the laptop gets up and operates the cash register. Now she can't find our bill. There's a collection of them spread out on the desk. I don't know why there are more checks than there are patrons. The girl has a Vietnamese conversation with the waitress who's sitting nearby. And eventually they figure out which table we were sitting at.
It comes out to around $30. We pay (cash) and bug out.

One of the strangest dining experiences I've had. So awkward it's surreal.