Anotherblog

Football & Scissor Sisters

Football
I almost forgot: Anna and I had a sudden urge to go and watch some Aussie Rules, so we bought tickets and went to the SCG to watch Sydney being slaughtered by Melbourne. It was a disappointing day out, but it was not the loss that was the most annoying, but rather the obnoxious behavour of a nearby Melbourne supporter. Perhaps I should not attend any more live games, but what I most enjoy from football is when it is a close game. Turnovers and goal-scoring can happen so quickly in aussie rules that the games are often very tense and exciting.

What I particularly dislike, then, is when one team gets so far ahead that the outcome is no longer in question. What I dislike even more are fans who like this situation, and want more of it. People who loudly cheer on a team that is already winning by a lot, and boo the opposition when they are about to score a goal even though it would not make a difference to the game. I understand that the difference between the scores matters later on in the season when teams with identical points have to be ranked. I understand that for some people, supporting their team is more enjoyable that watching a close game. I just don’t like it. And that’s why I probably shouldn’t watch any more AFL live. A pity, really, I otherwise enjoy it. You really get much more perspective on what is happening. Aussie rules is also a game where the events away from the ball (players trying to get leads, for example) are often more important that what is happening at the ball.

I also wander whether this is sour grapes - whether I would have been so annoyed had it been a Sydney supporter, and had Sydney been winning by a large margin. I probably wouldn’t have been quite as annoyed, but I recall watching a live match in Adelaide, and being annoyed by Adelaide supporters cheering them on when they were already leading by lots. I don’t recall whether I was a Crows supporter then, though (as I am now - Crows first, then Swans, then all of the other teams except Port Adelaide, then Port Adelaide).

Scissor Sisters
My sister Jen bought me the quite remarkable Scissor Sisters album, which I have been getting into a bit at work, especially since it and The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” are the only CDs I have there. iPod is still not repaired yet.

Anyway, thanks, Jen! Very excellent album, and “Comfortably Numb” gave me a remarkable feeling somewhere between deep horror and delicious joy.

Falling behind

Falling behind
Despite - or perhaps because of - a weekend of relaxation, I’m further behind in guitar that ever. I’m currently at -5 hours, not including today’s requirement, and since D&D is on tonight, I can’t see the situation improving. I’m considering taking a day off next week to power through the remainder. The trouble: my back hurts ’cause I keep not sitting straight. I start the session with every intention of holding an ideal pose, but after ten minutes I notice that I’m hunched over the guitar, head twisted to the left to look at the fretboard.

However
Otherwise, it was a good weekend. Sunday we watched Memento with Jon & Kate, Kate cooked dinner, and we played a bunch of music. Jon continues to be the only competent musician amongst us, despite my forty hours of recent practice. It would be discouraging, except that I am really enjoying playing at the moment, and I can really feel the improvement, at least in the classical guitar. Which is what I’m practicing most of.

Monday was a games day - played Carcasonne and Lord of the Rings (we won) with Dave & Kyla & Damian & James. I had bought 202 plastic zombies (two packets of zombies for the tile-laying game “Zombies!!!” that I have disparaged in an earlier entry) and was fully intending to do a comprehensive set of rules for my revised game, but only got as far as doing cards for the simultaneous movement bit. Game design is stupidly hard, and it mostly comes down to indecision. For example, I started trying to lay down typical play scenarios, and got stumped with the question: should I allow multiple figures on the same square? In the current game, zombies attack by moving into a player’s square. But only one can be in the player’s square. My first idea was that there could be more than one in the square. But that would require larger squares. So now I’m enamoured of the idea that zombies can attack from adjacent squares, which means that up to eight zombies could attack you. And if they do, of course, you’re almost certainly doomed, unless you have The Lawnmower.

No sweets
I ate too much last week, and am currently on the “no sweets” thing again. I’ve gotten through the sugar cravings, happily, and am now feeling pretty comfortable again. I could probably stay like this for ages, but my whole motivation is based around the eventual reward of getting sweet things at the end of it. I decided to drop a kilo off the “no sugar” limit, with the hope that being a kilo lighter will somehow help my squash and badminton games, which are suffering at the moment from a long run of “not being as good as Ian B. and consequently losing a lot”. So, yeah. Fitter, happier.

Bored yet?
Unfortunately, my obsessions aren’t very interesting after a while. Just ask Anna about the guitar thing.

Asturias/Leyenda

Asturias/Leyenda
I’ve been practicing Albéniz’s Asturias (a.k.a. Leyenda) and the first part is getting pretty smooth now. Enjoyable to play, and enjoyable to listen to, at least for me. Anyway, I’m still keeping up with the two hours a day, concentrating mostly on classical pieces recently. Haven’t made any progress at all with speeding up the scales. There seems to be a bit of a hump after 180bpm - I’ve been doing triplet exercises most days, and still not improving my speed. Oh well. I’ve resolved not to push it too much. This should be - and still is - fun.

More music making
Jon & Kate arrived back from their long overseas trip, and we got together on Sunday night and played lots of music - actually, it was mostly “Back in the USSR”, but there was still much fun and hilarity as Kate and Anna started doing backup-singer moves, inspired by the fact that they were gathered around the microphone stand. We got the song down reasonably well, though of course the burden on the work fell on Jon, and we had to stop when his hands couldn’t hold down barre chords any more. I had the relatively simple task of the bass guitar. Standing there, playing along, bobbing my head and tapping my right foot, I felt the power of rock ‘n roll.

No, really.

Otherwise
No, I haven’t been making progress in the Cars film, and I haven’t yet finished the Hulk review. Ho hum. Recently purchased DVDs: Bad Santa, Yojimbo, Jour De Fete, Dr Strangelove.

D&D

D&D
Played D&D with the lads last night, which means I’m now behind one hour in guitar. But I don’t mind: I’m really looking forward to playing guitar tonight, when what I thought to be an incredibly difficult piece turned out to be not quite as difficult as it sounds. Perfect! An annoying thing about tricky juggling moves is that they rarely look skillful - the audience usually has no idea what just happened, except that it was kinda weird. Slow guitar pieces are the same, or at least they feel that way. Nobody cares about the left hand difficulty; we’re impressed by very fast arpeggios or scales. Well, this piece has very fast arpeggios, and they’re surprisingly easy, especially when I realised I could apply some of the left-hand shapes I’ve been obsessively practicing on the electric guitar. Yes!

Anyway. D&D. I’m rather happy with some of the more recently written Jill’s journals. She’s almost as enjoyable to write for as Lorenzo was.

Squash
Played squash today against Ian, and was thrashed again. However, I felt good about it: I didn’t felt completely outclassed, as sometimes happens. Just made too many mistakes, and most of them were because I’ve stopped trying to win, and am just concentrating on improving my game (which lead to a rather comfortable win in one of the eight games anyway, so there you go).

More badminton on Monday. Lot of lunchtime sports lately. Feels good.

Next month

Next month
Ooh, I just changed my mind. I’ll put off Japanese month, and do a Film Forensics month: one hour of work on a FF every day for a month. That ought to get me a bit of a backlog!

Badminton

Badminton
Played against Eric today - it was meant to be doubles, but a bunch of people cancelled. I always enjoy playing singles against Eric much more than doubles, and today was no exception. He won 3-2, and I was very happy with how the games went. Eric took the first three games while I concentrated on the short game, only going long when Eric stayed near the net, and eventually my drop shots started going in. I won the last two games feeling completely in control of the match.

iPod
Still dead. I’ve tried rebooting it a couple of times, and it sometimes seems as though it’s going to behave - it got through the reboot and showed up on iTunes and was accepting tunes - but as soon as I unplugged it, it died again. Its behaviour has been getting even worse: recently the screen froze in position and stayed that way until the battery ran out. This is an ex-iPod.

Guitar
Another two hours. Twenty-six hours of practice now, and my hands are feeling OK, and I’m beginning to get a feel for some of these classical performance pieces. Much enjoyment again. And the wah pedal on the zoom box is continuing to provide much more amusement that I’d have believed before I started trying it. Wacca-wacca!

The continuation of theme months
I have decided it would be nice to continue this idea of having theme months, though not quite as intense. So May will be Japanese month: one hour a day of kanjitest and Pimsleur; June will be Art month: one hour a day of drawing, painting, or working on Cesura; and July will be juggling month, in which I hope to finally master 5 balls. Maybe. If I’m still enthusiastic, there will also be a games-designing month, a film editing month, a unicycling month, and of course novel and script writing month.

Confession time: I have a strange fascination with selecting text

Confession time: I have a strange fascination with selecting text
Whenever I’m reading on a computer, I feel compelled to select blocks of text. There are a number of different selections that feel satisfying:

Selecting the middle of a big block of text:

Selecting a big diagonal block, generally two lines that overlap only near the middle:

Most of the satisfaction I get, though, comes from blocks of text that aren’t right-justified. I’ll often select a big set that happen to have the same right-justification:

…or a block that is shorter than those around it:

…and quite often, blocks that appeal because of symmetrical aspects:

…or have even steps of longer or shorter lines:

So there you go. Yet another bit of obsessive fiddling I do when doing something else. Anyone else do this? Or make swirly figure-eight shapes with the mouse pointer? Or wobble the keys when they’re about to type something but they don’t know what yet?

Broken iPod

Broken iPod
Bloody iPod broke! I’m not sure whether it was related to the recent use of the car radio dooby-wacka (I doubt it), but it started cutting some songs short, and not playing others at all. I plugged it back into the mac, and it wasn’t showing up in iTunes. Then, it stopped working altogether - currently, all it displays is a folder icon with a little triangle on the bottom right that has an exclamation mark in it. A bit of searching on the web revealed a multitude of possible sins, for which I tried the various solutions, until I came to the last option: the full reboot of the firmware. I tried that one (the mac was, at least, recognising the presence of the iPod, even if it wasn’t showing it as a device) and it would get most of the way through and then fail. So, definitely stuffed. If it won’t reboot the firmware, it’s not just the software that’s the problem.

Wave your hands in the air!
It’s been a rather hair-raising time for Mum & Dad - no sooner had they gotten back from their trip around Australia, than their house caught fire. Specifically, the roof. The irony: they very recently lived in a thatched-roof cottage (they’re in England now) where there were very real worries about roof fires, and in which every room had a big fire extinguisher. They moved out of that place, had been in their current place about three months, and the roof burns off. Electrical fault. Smoke alarms didn’t go off ’cause there weren’t any in the roof cavity. Luckily, they were both awake, and decided on reflection that perhaps they did need some water, and that letting the motherfucker burn wasn’t in their best interests. The fire engine came quickly, and there was very little damage to their stuff. Now they’re living in temp accomodation for the next three months.

Guitar
Bet you’re getting sick of hearing about it now. Well, I’m getting sick of doing it, too - I’ve hit that sullen kind of patch where I’m just doing the two hours of practice and not particularly enjoying it. I can’t help thinking that this is a temporary period, though. Once my skills are greater, it’ll be more enjoyable to play. I know there are plenty of musicians who practice at least two hours a day as a matter of course, and don’t feel like it’s a struggle.

Unfortunately, it’s a little different from novel writing. With the novel, you come out the other side with something tangable. It may not be fun to do, for all of it, but it does feel good to have done it. I’m not getting that with the guitar yet. Perhaps when I’m good enough to record some stuff.

Searching for Sand in Sydney

Searching for Sand in Sydney
Anna and I spent a bit of time last weekend searching around for some big piles of sand. The Cars short film requires some desert scenes, ideally with dunes, and the local beaches just aren’t good enough - the dunes aren’t big enough, and have footprints all over them at all times. Not very desert-like. We went to Cronulla, where Anna recalled there being big sand dunes, back when she was a child. They’re mostly gone now. Some of them are covered in vegetation, the rest have been mined away. There are some dunes that would probably do in a pinch, but they’re all on private land. More research required.

Guitar
Yup, got my guitar practice done. I only played one hour of guitar on Thursday, thanks to D&D, but made the time back on Sunday. I think my left hand will need moisturiser soon, or the calluses forming will get harder and harder and eventually peel off, and then there’ll be trouble.

I bought some more guitar books. Now I have more guitar books than I could possibly need, at least for classical guitar. To celebrate, I played mostly classical guitar on the weekend.

Snare drum
Sunday was also a day of much heavy carrying. Anna had a dream, a dream in which peace reigned throughout the world and there was no want, and also she was playing the snare drum (OK, just the last bit). Anyway, she had a sudden but unstoppable craving, and it is simply not in my nature to refuse to buy a musical instrument*, so I wandered into town and bought her a snare drum, stool, stand, drumsticks, and brushes. The drum place was actually in Surrey Hills, and the transportation home involved a twenty minute walk to central station, then another ten minutes up the hill back home. I felt rather exercised after that.

And now we have drummy goodness. Most enjoyable. I didn’t realise that snare drums aren’t just regular drums - they have a sash of metal coils on the underside that rattle when you hit the drum, producing the characteristic snare sound. Anna played around with the drums a little, and then I played around with them. I can get a little of that rat-a-tat-tat sound, using the bounce of the drumstick to hit several times in rapid succession. But it does seem rather tricky to get sounding good. Lessons may be called for at some point.

* when I’m already intrigued by it anyway.

Patent reward
I mostly purchased tech goodies with the patent reward money. First, a car recharger/FM transmitter thing for the iPod, which was absurdly expensive but sounds rather better than the tape attachment thing I was previously using. Then I got a TV-out converter for the powerbook (and used it to watch a couple of episodes of Full Metal Alchemist, which was rather good), and finished off my splurge with the boxed set of Firefly, which I had been craving to watch again. Ah. Lovely goodies.

Badminton
After missing any lunchtime sport last week, we were keen to get back into it today, so badminton it was. And I got utterly thrashed: 6-0, without any really close games. After the wake-up call of the week before last, Ian started varying his game more, getting in some very good short serves, and varying his placement a lot. I wasn’t winning so much with the short shots - he was getting to them a lot more - and I couldn’t find an alternative that would actually make a difference to the score. I think I have to reconcile myself to a while in exile - work on the shots, don’t care so much about the score, and I’ll improve.

Also, awesomely humid day. Completely soaked in sweat by the end of it.

Zombies!!!
As David C. pointed out, not all players were happy with the “Zombies!!!” game we played on Saturday night. Well, those unhappy players were me. The rules of the game seemed really irritating. You have a big board made of separate tiles, and to move around it, you roll 1d6. If you rolled a couple of 1s in a row, you can spend about twenty minutes (in a five player game) without ever having left the first tile, or being able to meaningfully do anything except screw other players over, which doesn’t really fit into my vision of how these games ought to work. Ostensibly, in your zombie game, you ought to be cooperating, occasionally abandoning the pack when you see an advantage to it, but certainly not actively seeking to be the *only* survivor at the end of the game.

Cards that seem designed only to be irritating:

“A player of your choice misses their next turn.”
“Move a player to the starting point.”
“A player of your choice can’t move this turn.”

Aargh. The game seems to have promise, but really needs an overhaul of the rules. The coolest part of the game is blowing away zombies, and the mechanic for that is fun and simple. I want more of that.

Changes:

- up to four zombies can occupy the same square. The difficulty of a square is equal to the number of zombies in it plus one. If there are more than one players in the same square, the difficulty is reduced by one.
- Zombies & humans would have orientation - the direction they face is important.
- change the game so that zombies are moved algorithmically, instead of by the players. Cards can influence how the zombies move, but by default, their behaviour is simple. For example, if there are humans in sight, any zombies facing those humans should move towards them.
- simultaneous movement, similar to diplomacy or roborally. Each turn the players lay down one of their movement cards: Forward, turn left, turn right, u-turn, backward (which would turn you around), move left (which would turn you left), move right (which would turn you right), or stationary (the players always have these cards).
- The players can pick up extra cards that can take the place of these movement cards - for example, a skateboard would allow you to move forward two (that’s where your current direction becomes important).
- At the end of each turn, the zombies would move. Zombies wouldn’t be revealed until at least one player can see them. Starting positions, numbers, and orientations would be random.
- You would get points for various activities - obviously, points for killing zombies and points for surviving, but also points for being the first to the helipad, points for bringing supplies and weapons to the helipad, and so on.
- Perhaps the whole game is timed - the helicopter takes off after fifty turns, and you’d better be on it!
- The overall game might get points, corresponding to how much stuff the players were able to load onto the helicopter. So you could play a totally cooperative game. Of course, such a game would also require the players to separate early on in order to find the helipad, which could be anywhere…
- You could do a different tile-laying system - you lay down tiles according to line of sight (simplified to straight horizontal or vertical lines) instead of each player doing one a turn. Tile orientation is random, and if it doesn’t make sense, you rotate it until it does.

Anyway, I’m rather keen on buying the game and trying to tweak the rules as above until it becomes a game I enjoy.

Patent Award

Patent Award
At the annual general meeting this morning, I won a patent award jointly with Lawrence C. for “The best patent application”. Hooray! This is not the microphone/video camera patent that I slaved over by myself, but an idea that Lawrence slaved over, and for which I came up with an improvement. My contribution amounted to approximately one hour’s effort. Still, I think my improvement might have been the thing that moved it from “good patent” to “award-winning patent”, so we’re both happy. And I suspect Lawrence would be a bit more miffed at the ratio of work, if his effort hadn’t been so quick and easy too - he did the whole thing in about a week, which is very, very fast for a patent.

More great music
My sheet music library is turning out to be a treasure trove. After the good find yesterday, I went through my collection of classical guitar CDs, noted the tunes that I particularly liked, and hunted through the sheet music. I found three more very excellent tunes, and even better, two that are within reach of my meager playing ability. One (a slower piece) is not even difficult. Last night’s practice consisted of about an hour of classical guitar, half an hour of scales, and half an hour of strumming the acoustic guitar in a vaguely embarassed fashion.

My left-hand fingers have reached an odd state. They are simultaneously numb and tender.

Otherwise
Not had much time for other things, and I’m going to have trouble getting the two hours of guitar done tonight, thanks to roleplaying. I was going to take the guitar into work and play an hour at lunchtime, except that we had the general meeting on then. Bother. Two hours is a lot of time out of each day. I have no idea how I forgot that. I haven’t even had time to procrastinate on things that I would normally be avoiding doing.