A Reading Rainbow

A few months ago I rediscovered books. For the longest time, my commutes to work were usually spent reading the shitty free newspapers that are found on every street corner here, or spent playing some Nintendo DS. But in the last three months I’ve probably read more than I did in the preceding year.

The main readings were inspired from watching a documentary called The God Who Wasn’t There. It wasn’t a terribly well-made film (it was more of an amateur documentary), but it featured interviews with some very educated people who have written on a subject that really interests me: religion and the reasons why it should no longer - or ever should - exist. The books that I’ve been led to read have been The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. Both were very enlightening and don’t tread lightly on the failings and dangers of “faith” in “god” and how stories and fables from two thousand years ago have no place in modern society. It’s probably a sign of how religion has this odd respect in our world that topics like these are considered controversial, while any other belief that’s based on what cannot be proved (say, UFOs) is entirely open for debate.

Anyway, the recent reading binge has taken me to borrow seven books from the library in the past two months. Okay, so I only read three of them to completion (one had pages missing, one was too ‘intellectual’, and the other two I just got today). But it’s almost a reading renaissance for me - I used to read a lot, though mostly fiction, and now I find myself wanting to read more and more on contemporary issues. Maybe it’ll help me reclaim the part of my brain that had turned to mush over the past three or four years.

It finally happened!

After about a decade of various email accounts, yesterday something happened to me that had never happened before. Delivered just to me was a message from Kamal Al Zayyed, Head of Corporate affairs with a reputable bank in United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). Yes, it was basically the Nigerian bank account email, and this was the first time I’d ever received it.

The story goes like this: someone deposited a zillion dollars in Kamal Al Zayyed’s bank account, and now that person has gone missing. Kamal has to get rid of the money or else his country will claim it, so he needs my bank info in order to get me a piece of that zillion dollar pie. Sounds failsafe! Sign me up! Never mind that Kamal’s email address, which he asks me to reply to, is from Hong Kong. China, U.A.E., close enough.

I’m really surprised that it took so long to finally get this email. My junk email usually consists of penis pill sales, hot girls who want to get with me, or illegal software at bargain prices. This is all great, but why did it take so long to get an offer of free money?

The Mystery of Southland Tales

A few days ago I watched Southland Tales with my ladyfriend and my mother. The movie is written and directed by Richard Kelly, who was responsible for the cult favourite Donnie Darko, one of the oddest but intriguing movies of the past decade. Southland Tales is his follow-up, with a cast that includes Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jon Lovitz, Michael Lambert, my pretend girlfriend Mandy Moore, and Sean William Scott. It might be the most strangely cast movies in recent memory, but most do a fairly good job in their roles.

The movie itself, though, is just slightly beyond the line of comprehension. It’s filled with allegories and metaphors and the blatantly obvious, with science fiction and drama and comedy and a musical number; it has so many plotlines and characters and ideas that it tries to pull together in some metaphysical and symbolic ending with religious overtones, which in theory would be a movie I’d love to see. But all these threads in Southland Tales just felt like an unraveled sweater, rather than coming together in a warm and decorative woolen garment of Heathcliff Huxtablissian proportion.

So with a couple of days to think on it, I still can’t put the pieces together, but the movie is still sticking in my mind. Also disappointing was the lack of deleted scenes or a director’s cut on DVD - a little research reveals that the film had about 20 minutes cut (from its final running time of 130 minutes!), and I really want to know if that footage would have helped form a more cohesive story. It’s doubtful - if a 130 minute movie can’t tell a complete story, an extra 20 would probably not help.

Anyhow, I’m sure almost everyone who has seen this movie would dismiss it as a bad one. And I can’t argue with that - my ladyfriend gave up on it after about an hour. But there’s something about it that makes me want to understand it, and maybe that was the goal of the film.

Things that go together naturally.

Grilled cheese sandwiches and dill pickles.
Hot chocolate and Christmas carols.
Rum and Coke.
Rum and Egg nog.
Rum and more rum.
Smelly people and buses.
Downtown Vancouver and the smell of urine.
Vanilla ice cream and apple pie.
Full garbage cans and procrastination.
Halloween and robot costumes.
Inbreeding and NASCAR.
Discount shopping stores and slow, oblivious, rude people.
Ben Affleck and disappointment.
Fire and tube steaks.
Megan Fox and glossy magazines.
Tea and blankets.
Video games and lapses in good hygiene.
Snowfall and nighttime.
Apples and cheddar cheese.
Immediate family and hearty conversation.
Extended family and heavy drinking.
Jay and Silent Bob.
Kirk and Spock.
Americans and God.
Chicken fingers and honey mustard.
Greyhound buses and screaming babies.
Screaming babies and silent inner rage.

What I Do

From time to time I’ll get the question, “so what do you do?” In case you’re not aware, reader, I work as an Interface Artist in the video game industry. Unless you’ve worked for a game developer, that probably gives no indication to what I actually do. Sometimes, when I say I work in video games, there’s an impression that all I do is play games for money, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll try to explain.

Every video game since the beginning of video gaming has had a graphical user interface of some sort. Even Pong, that classic Atari game of “tennis”, had a score displayed on the screen. Since then, user interfaces for games have generally become a lot more complicated - prompts to press buttons, menus to select what type of game you want to play, a choice of characters you wish to use when playing - and with the advances in graphical capabilities, these interfaces have become colourful and animated and usually strive to present all this information in a certain art style.

So, as an Interface Artist, I’m responsible for creating an art style and laying out the button prompts, menu choices, and character selection in a visually appealing way. This means choosing typefaces and giving even the most widely accepted parts of a user interface (buttons, scrollbars, and text areas) decoration so that it “fits” with the game itself.

Take for instance a hockey video game. While one could make the interface in shades of purple with flowers and faeries, that really doesn’t give the “feel” of hockey. When I worked at Electronic Arts, one of the titles I developed an interface for was their NHL hockey game. Below you can see what was chosen by my development overlords at the time as a style that lent itself to the game.

Beyond the menus and buttons (which is commonly referred to as a game’s “front end”), there’s also the information displayed when you’re actually playing a game. Again, if you recall Pong, the score was displayed on-screen while you played. This information is a Heads-Up Display, terminology taken from the military’s use of graphics in targeting systems. We’ve all seen footage of bombs being dropped remotely, with a crosshair and elevation lines floating above a radar image of some poor unsuspecting Muslim shantytown dangerous weapons storage facility - those graphics are the HUD. If we think again of a hockey video game, that game’s HUD would give us information about the score, which player you’re controlling, the penalty being assessed, and so on. Designing the HUD for a game is also one of my responsibilities, and easily one of the most challenging. Generally, designing a HUD has to balance displaying information to the user in an understandable way without distracting from what the user is actually doing; if you’re playing a hockey game, you don’t want the score display to be the focal point of the screen.

The third part of What I Do is also trying to satisfy roughly half a dozen people’s subjective whims. If that sounds jaded, it’s not by accident. The largest problem of choosing typefaces and colours and button styles is that people in senior roles usually have different ideas of what those should look like. It’s a sad and true joke among Interface Designers that EA executives have seen some very aesthetically pleasing and artistic front ends and declared that they don’t like the colour green, or that a typeface looks too squished, or express something else subjective. And usually when the top execs express something they have no business commenting on, the yes men under them will insist the design be changed to appease those above them. When it happens - and while rare, it does happen - it is easily the most deflating thing for an Interface Designer to accommodate. In any case, there are usually five or six senior people on a project who will want to express their likes and dislikes about fonts or colours or shapes, putting me in a position to defend my choices. It is my least favourite part of my job when it’s a constant uphill battle to convince others that what I’ve done is the right choice.

Hopefully that sheds some light on What I Do. There’s more to it than what I’ve described, but I think I’ve hit on the main points.

Random Sunday Thoughts

Why do ‘experts’ from banks and credit unions bother to predict what our economy is going to be like in a year, or two years? Two years ago no one actually predicted the US socializing their banks - under a Republican government, no less. Financial ‘experts’ have lost all credibility if you ask me. Maybe they should just admit no one has a clue what the future holds.

With some much appreciated help from my brother, we finally rid ourselves of our old sofa. While dropping it off in Mission, the highway was lined with nutball Christians anti-abortion protesters on one side and rational humans pro-choicers on the other. I think that might be a harbinger of Armageddon. I’d hate to think what would have happened if someone from either group got their directions wrong and ended up on the opposite side of the street. By the way, when did Mission turn into Arkansas?

I might actually dress up for Halloween this year. Most likely costume choice: Andre Agassi. It should be easy enough.

I enjoy reading magazines, and once or twice a year I’ll end up buying an issue of GQ. On this month’s cover was current Hollywood sexpot, Megan Fox. Occasionally GQ does have some good articles, but the half of the magazine that tells men they need a different coat or blazer or hat or pair of cufflinks for every different social situation makes me gag.

Note to Keira Knightley: you’ve got nothing left to prove by doing period pieces. Please do something contemporary - sure, Domino wasn’t great, but at least it was a change.

Sometime during the summer I started drinking Perrier, usually the lemon or lime variety. Even though it’s cheaper than frozen orange juice, purchasing Perrier makes me feel like a bourgeois asshole. Fill disclosure: I own a pair of Dolce & Gabbana eyeglasses.

Below is the new James Bond theme, from Quantum of Solace, by … Alicia Keys and Jack White? Um. I don’t know what to make of this.