Completed on time, and does what we want it to.

There’s been a few check-ins that have been very aesthetically oriented, focused on refactoring for neatness, or on renaming project files to remove confusing references to sample code we’ve borrowed from. This is for a project that needs to be ready for a certain large-scale art event in Toronto in a few days.

In the past, most of the code I have written is for a some crazy prototype that I need for a demo or a video or a study before a nearby deadline. I’ll either throw this code away, cackling, or spend a long time cleaning it up it for further work after the deadline passes. This cycle: (very pragmatic crunch coding, optimizations/improvements only later) has strongly affected my aesthetic.

Case in point:
I had to write a function that rotated an array representing an image by 90-degree increments. This is just an O(n) loop where I’m just transferring pixel values from one position in the array to another; I have to solve a mapping problem. The 180-degree rotation is the easiest, since you just to reverse the order in the array. The 90 degree and 270 degree rotations are a little harder. I got the 90 degree rotation working, then paused. My TODO list is full of requests from people I’m collaborating with. I would take me at least 5 minutes to test and debug the 270 degree rotation code. So, to rotate by 270 degrees, the function recursively calls itself to rotate by 90 and then 180 degrees. I felt plagued by guilt for a couple seconds over the blasphemy, but the function worked perfectly and the performance hit is negligible since the images are small. Now that’s good software according to me.

You know when a compulsively cool idea occurs to you, and you can’t stop yourself from doing it?

I’m thinking of playing other parts of the world, too.

I “work” in a field where online presence is important. People need to be able to find you and cite you easily. Papers often have…unusual and expressive titles so that they are easy to search. Take my first paper for example: ShadowGuides. We could have had the title Shadow Guides, but that produces less unique results. It brings up Shadow of the Colossus, though which is nice, because that is a beautiful game.

Everyone’s competing for name space, and personal names are no different. Ever since I’ve started googling myself, I’ve been tracking how the other Dustin Freemans are doing out there, over the years. I’m the biggest Dustin Freeman on the internet these days, but it wasn’t always that way. Here’s the ones I’ve gotten to know:
Dustin Freeman from Wichita, Kansas, who has a great picture.
Dustin “Bugger” Freeman, an amateur rapper that apparently died before his time and has a kid out there somewhere.
Dustin Freeman from Florida, who apparently was arrested for massive amounts of cocaine possession.
Dustin Freeman from South Carolina, who got busted for stolen prescription drugs. He might also be the same as Athletic Dustin Freeman from Charleston.
Yet another Dustin Freeman from Florida who was busted for possessing amphetamines. (What is the DEAL with people who get arrested for drug dealing using my name? Maybe I should take it up)
Nanotechnology Dustin Freeman, whose picture always comes up for some reason. (This reminds me of Data Analysis Cosby, har har)
Dustin “DJ Basha” Freeman from Myspace.
Dustin Freeman from Texas, who is hilariously involved in a class action lawsuit against Apple and others about personal information sharing.

I haven’t tried to engage with any of these Dustin Freemans. I have tried to join fan clubs made on Facebook for other Dustin Freemans to cash in on the love, but it hasn’t worked:

This post was precipitated by some fool in California who has started giving out my email address as his own. From the emails I’ve received, I can tell that:
- he rents cars frequently
- he buys girl’s dresses, or approves them or something (I got an email with the subject line “dresses” and a bunch of pictures of models wearing dresses. I replied. It definitely isn’t spam.)
- he works for some company that does shipping “Choice Logistics RMA’s” (I’m currently stuck in a Reply-All trap with these guys)

Stop giving out my email asshole! Get your own!

I another one of my many, many transits across the 401, this time from Kingston to Toronto, I can across this wonderful booklet:

Over The Road, June 2011 issue. A magazine for and by truckers. It is…fantastic. It’s a little secret window in to the trucker world, and the world of semi-amateur self-publishing that is adorable and beautiful like an HBO Drama. “The Best is the Least We Can Do”. Is this referring to the magazine? Owner-operators as a whole? Genius.

There are editorials:

“It’s Time That I Made Time for That”. The content-less-ness of that sentence is ingenious. The style is so consistently bland it makes me giddy. I’ve transcribed it here, where the bolding is mine:

In preparing for this month’s editorial for Over the Road Magazine I decided to do some homework, so I cataloged every month’s writings by date and subject matter that I have written to date.

I love how this conjures up this image of an old trucker sitting at his desk, various trucking-related trophies on that wall, and photos of him after difficult trucking runs (Coquihalla Feb ’86, nearly died twice!)

Time flies and I hoped to discover some pattern of thought I might have followed over the past number of years from my many articles.

Again, the image of the trucker-writer. Perhaps, pausing with a notebook at a rest-stop, in a fluorescent Tim Horton’s around 401 marker 500, pausing and bringing out his notebook with meticulous handwriting, bringing his pen-tip to his tongue to lick it and start the ink flow. Tired large families in all-night moving vans shuffle past him.

[next column]…Day to run to Texas and return from out of the valley with 44,000 pounds of citrus hoping to make it home before New Year’s Eve.

This is genuine beautiful shit, and is just as romanticizable as the golden days of seafaring and pirating.

I should also point out that the URL of the “Over The Road” website is http://www.otrdigital.ca. Its basically a auto-forwarded link to a site that hosts the digital magazine. But everything from the URL to the auto-forwarding to the proxy hosting is adorable.

I’ll keep going…

Apparently there are Father’s Day-oriented Truck Shows:

With the events:
Drive a Big Rid
Circle Check Competition (this is really really my favourite)
The “Chosen Child” (god, what the fuck is this?)

I love the cursive-style tagline: “Where Friends Are Made!” I imagine you don’t run in to other truckers very consistently. Not like you work in the same office.

Now, I don’t want to go on too much (I took way more pictures that I needed to, and the booklet is probably going to go on top of my toilet for further reading), so this is the last photo:

“Trucking is a Partnership Between Owner Operators and the Company”. Who gets to pull off article titles like this? The “President”, I guess, as apparently this is his page.

I loved this little window into a specific world I’ll never be a part of.

The guy’s name was Manfred. He was 70-ish. We met him while taking the Mekong river boat from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang in Laos. His deal was, he’d been living in Los Angeles for the last couple of decades, working as an aircraft mechanic/builder(?). His wife had passed away, and his kids had grown up and were doing their own thing. So, here he was, relatively well-off with nothing to do. Most people his age would probably just buy a nice place, get a good cable subscription, and live off that until death. Not Manfred, ohhhh no…

Here he is drinking a beer with us in Pak Beng, our stopover along the Mekong. I am in the back, looking obnoxiously young and unworldly. Taylor is in the front left. Manfred is obviously the guy who looks at least 3 times the age of everyone else and also rocks sunglasses at night. Despite looking pretty drunk in this picture, he could definitely hold his Beerlao. The other guys were randoms; Dutch or French, I think.

So, what Manfred decides to do is, purchase a bicycle, fly in to Singapore, and then, as he describes it “bike home to the fatherland”. Apparently he had not been back to Germany for a very long time. He planned to take as long as it took for the 10,000+ kilometre trip back. When we got off the boat the next day in Luang Prabang, we donned our unwieldy poorly-packed bags. I can’t remember if he got off there or went farther down the Mekong. We didn’t see him again. Badass.

Here’s the stuff I like, by the places I have lived or traveled through for a long period of time:

Canada

(Impossible to say, one cannot know what is unique about one’s own culture)

Southeast Asia

Amazing and healthy stir-fry.
Slow, meandering walking pace when the time’s right.
Collared shirts with the top few buttons undone.
A major religion (Buddhism) that isn’t dogmatic and intimidating, but rather about self-fulfillment.

United States

Really fast shipping times.
Explicitly stating what you want and acting like you deserve it (borders on assholery, sometimes).
Every minute problem you could have has been productized already and you just need to send someone money.

India

Straight dudes not being afraid of physical contact.
People don’t hold back from expressing enthusiasm.
Indians know how to throw family parties.

UK

Pub culture
At pubs, people order beer in rounds. This is very relaxed and no one worries about having spent more than anyone else.
Amazingly organized transit system; public infrastructure really seems to have its shit together.
Adorable vocabulary (banter, cheeky, cheers, etc.)
Very easy to have conversations with strangers.
British attitude of having your shit together, ready to be a gentleman in any situation.
Pre-cooked but otherwise ready-to-eat meals (i.e. a bag of stirfry) are very common in supermarkets.
I barely saw any urban sprawl: urban and rural space is used very efficiently.

Here’s the stuff I dislike

Canada

(nothing, obviously)
In Ontario and other parts of Canada, liquor laws are oddly strict compared to the rest of the world.
Tax and tip not being included in prices is asinine. This was very obvious when I got back from Britain. You don’t really appreciate how terrible the pay-at-the-end-mental-tip-arithmetic-clusterfuck is until you experience life without it.

United States

They worship the car. In 100 years, you will probably be able to drive your car into your office and your bedroom and only leave it then.
Ratrace spirit. Less of a sense of collective good.
Fox News.

Southeast Asia

General 3rd-world asian population density chaos.

India

Even more 3rd-world asian population density chaos.
Population that can’t handle their booze and/or thinks alcohol is evil.
Somewhat uncomfortable idol worship (i.e. people injuring themselves to try to cure movie stars)
Super-conservative attitudes towards sex.
No cashier ever has change. Ever.

UK

Too many road signs everywhere.
The monarchy.
Bars close incredibly early.
Everything is expensive and coins are more heavy than necessary.

(Do you have anything you’d like to add from your experiences?)

The video shows four rides over identical routes, spanning from February to my last day of work (paper submission day!). I listened to a music mix from a lady friend each day.

Routines cut grooves into the soul. It breaks my mind that so many people have such long, soulless commutes each day. My commute was very nice. I got to propel my body through an interesting area of space. I long ago decided that it will be impossible for me to live anywhere that has a long commute. Impossible.

Commutes and transit are like sex and death in that we don’t often talk about the shitty details, and we just accept that bad parts as part of life. Fuck that.

I really missed the banter.

Also:
Someone needs to tell air berlin about the Uncanny Valley. CGI instead of real people for safety instructions is only cool if your 3D actors move their eyes and emote a little.

Also:
The middle-aged guy next to me as I write this is doing sad bastard MBA studying, with its obvious bullet-point memorize-me heuristics. Ugh. I want a single serving friend.

Also:
This is a graph, from memory, of approximately how many flights I’ve been on, per year. A little bit of this is good, but mostly I spend way too much fucking time in airports

Summer resolution 2011: fuck planes. I’m staying out of them.

So, I’ve discovering couchsurfing, and it’s awesome. If you’ve traveled and you’ve never used couch surfing before, you’re an idiot. I’ve seen more of the places I’ve been, I’ve stayed in proper houses instead of in shitty dorms or expensive hotels, and my first host wouldn’t let me buy food for myself. It’s all awesome.

But traveling alone is getting pretty lonely. These past couple years, I’ve lived a very bye-guys-see-you-later nomadic lifestyle. Most of this has been awesome, but when I come back, the void I left in my absence has often been stitched together or changed and I don’t recognize among friends or lovers where I fit in any more. The one benefit to all this is that I’m becoming nice and worldly and stuff, and have stories to tell that attract new friends and lovers to me. But the places I leave behind change without me.

I’m very expressive linguistically. Traveling through France (since the 23rd of April) has made me feel semantically lonely. It’s the same feeling I had when in India, but not as bad. All my human interactions are reduced to struggled half-guesses and gestures. An old woman on the train from Paris to Nice tried to describe to me the significance of a certain mountain range in the distance. We gave up after a few minutes. By that time in Canada, I would have moved on to subtle lewd jokes about the mountain’s shapes. I miss being able to do that. There’s a lot of little bits of humour or thoughts bottling themselves up inside and not being able to share them, or having someone to tell me something interesting themselves, sucks. The closer (concentrically) my friend groups are in the Toronto, the more the language between ourselves is specialized, to the point that with friends I’ve had for years, we don’t really use sentences or even nouns anymore. Every utterance is a pointer to a portion of a previous conversation and our current conversations are just interesting rearrangements of this iceberg of semantics. We converse with conversations. I really fucking miss that. I saw an improv group in Paris and met a Danish guy there who did longform in English. He talked about how it was frustrating that there weren’t any Danes there who did improv; he always felt like he was going half-speed.

I’m currently in the one and only hotel on my trip. A nice jobby with a big bed. Due to a screw up on my part, I didn’t buy the 96 Euro ticket for the train from Paris to Nice, so I effectively got a free train ride, so I’m splurging. I also had to shave off my 3-month beard, which was going to be a mess:

Sometimes I grow this thing. It gets ginger at the tips, which was surprising and a callback to some recessive genes that express themselves in other parts of my family. I’ve had enough with dealing with it and decided it had to go. Sometimes we do things that really only affect ourselves to feel better. Shaving the beard was more permanent action, but it made me think how an action can have a symbolic purpose for ourselves. Today, I needed something big to do and shaving off a 3-month-old patch of hair served my needs.

The more I know about the world, the more I like Canada. To be honest, Paris was…cute but kind of a mess. Its an incredibly old city. The cities I had seen internationally before were all third-world places in South Asia, and the urban planning was all over the place, and they were crazy dense. Paris almost felt like that – it was strange, and not at all what I expected. It seems that the UK was much cleaner and organized; perhaps because the cities are a little bit younger. Or maybe municipal authorities are more authoritarian. At least it isn’t the creepy clean of Singapore.

Canada is great and I really do miss it. If I ever had to leave it without a defined plan of return, I’d probably get a maple leaf tattooed…somewhere. I know I want to live in a big city, and Toronto is wonderful but it’s very unlikely that my academic career will keep me there; there’s too many researchers that do what I do. I’ve been eyeing Montreal. I could do Vancouver too. Ah, Toronto, it’s always back and forth with you, isn’t it?

I think. I think that I’m looking for some kind of spiritual satisfaction with what I do/where I live. I know I’m pretty sensitive to commute time and I like places I can walk around. I know I like working by myself or with small groups of people on things that are fascinating and mind blowing and then discussing, after the fact, what we’ve done and what it means about life and existence and the quest for significance. And I need to be able to experience things that are new. As long as I’m able to do all that, I’ll be pretty happy.

Improv tends to be better when we bring only a little bit of ourselves to it; when we plan as little in advance as possible. The best, most honest, improv moments are when you stare across the empty void space of the stage into the mutual nothingness of another improvisor doing the same and something from nowhere/somewhere bubbles up and you begin working with it.

We call interesting on-stage accidents “gifts” because they add information and colour that nobody expected or forced onto the art.

Handles/Games and props and theatresports can be fun and stuff, but I find them frustrating because they impose an a priori structure or idea on the scene, even just accidentally.

Case in point, I just got back from seeing a show (in London!) with 2 guys on stage and one music guy on keys on the edge of the stage. It was a cool set, with the performer’s hosting personas blurring into their scene personas, with tangential, sudden transitions between scenes sharing only a common line or idea. The music guy was quite good (he played a little as people came in), even though I feel like he played a little too much during the scenes. I’m not interested in going on and criticizing this show. However, many of these scenes became about the music. Music can be a good accompaniment, or on equal footing with the players in any show. However, some action in the show came to be that way because the idea/feeling expressed by the music guy came in the form of music. At one point, an argument was breaking out between the players, and duly the music increased in intensity as well. The music guy was fantastic in expressing the mood of the scene (in parallel to us choosing to observe the scene on stage, slightly redundant). But because music, as a form of expression, is naturally rhythmic, the arguing actors began dancing. Completely, inorganically, de-railing the interestingness of the argument. Laughs from the audience at the absurdity of an argument turning into a dance. This happened a few times throughout the show, where the improvisors would implicitly or explicitly respond to the music-ness of the music in a fourth-wall-savvy “isn’t this crazy?” way.

I think the problem is that the form of augmentation to the natural minimalism of improv is overwhelming the normal organic generation of ideas, killing the show.

This is why I don’t like props or pre-themed shows, or anything with too much structure. I’m working on a system to augment improv, and I’m trying to do it in a way that lets improvisors express their bubbling ideas better, or in a more interesting way than before, without over-powering the process.

Perhaps the problem is novelty factor. When a thing is new to the players or the audience, the natural take-everything-insanely-seriously part of the improv will latch onto it and deconstruct it. This leaves us with a husk of a show that isn’t about anything other than the implicit and explicit choices about the structure of the improv made by the augmentation designer (i.e. me).

Let’s say I design a system that constantly records the show and lets players bring back old scenes, projected on the stage, and make direct references to them, place them out of content, or reinterpret them.

A good set of improvisors, when first confronted with this system, will use the tools at hand. You’ll see a show about regret, or misinterpretation of memory, or generational repetition, or people re-writing their version of past events, or how you’re in love with your doppelganger, or how you’re fond of the past.

If you have a hammer, then everything looks like a fucking nail. Tell a friend to do an interpretive dance about how they feel today. Tell another friend to do the same, but give them a hammer to hold and I guarantee you the second dance is going to be angrier and some more shit is going to get smashed.

I admire traditional creative tools like the paintbrush or the pencil. They have their pre-imposed difference (“flowy stuff” vs. “sketchy stuff”), but when you pick up a paintbrush or a pencil, usually the first thing you are compelled to make isn’t a work of art that is about painting or sketching.

I want to make a tool that affords new things, but I also want its implications to disappear into the background. It’s kind of hard to compete with the status quo tool, which is “nothing”. So, I’m working hard on the improv paintbrush.

Hopefully, fans, you’ll get to see the results of this pondering some time in June/July.