Iain's Journal

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Best text message I have ever received
30th june. Wembley.
Spinal tap. Thoughts?

Current Mood: YES

More Civ
Another crushing Deity win! Cultural Victory this time, as the Greeks, in 1950. Good resource placement early on let me establish Athens as the premier city of science, and Troy as the city of gold; as soon as I secured production-focused Delphi in a dense forest of oak, that was pretty much game. I met the conditions for an Economic Victory at the end, and was busily crushing the German empire with tanks and artillery so Domination wouldn't have been far off either (although I'd have had to switch away from the Greeks' default namby-pamby Democracy). Your lead tends to grow exponentially in Civ once you're clear by a certain amount, so that isn't an unusual ending. But still pleasing.

Don't worry, I won't keep posting about this, I'm just in a gleeful mood right now at finally getting my head around this game completely. (On the other hand, if you want more Civ stories, try this masterpiece on the Let's Play archive.) It's hard to remember that I was finding it tough going at King difficulty not so long ago.

Insufficient product differentiation
I got Finish dishwasher detergent last time round and it worked pretty well, so I'm happy to stick with the same brand, but I have a hard time figuring out the difference between:

Finish Powerball Quantum
Finish Powerball Max-in-1
Finish Powerball All-in-1

Obviously they're all the most awesome, but one must be even more the most awesome than the rest. Luckily their website has a helpful page that sorts it all out.

I am officially half-decent at Civ
Domination victory at Deity difficulty level! Aw yeah.

I went with the cheesy but effective "Zulu rush" strategy. I don't usually play so aggressively, but I can see why Conan enjoys crushing the jewelled thrones of the world beneath his sandalled feet. It kind of grows on you. I met the Aztecs and the Arabs early on and swamped them with warrior armies; was rebuffed by China and India who by that point had developed archers, but had enough industrial capacity from my captured cities to get ahead in technology and eventually swamp them with knight armies. Knights are ridiculously good, I can see why so many online guides recommend them.

Rather endearingly, the final battle in the game was Immortal Knight Army versus Pythagoras. Don't worry, my guys didn't cut him down while he drew circles in the sand, they just captured him.

Games games games
Been spending a lot of time playing games lately.

Storme got Civilization Revolution for the 360 a while back, and I liked it enough that I bought it for the DS to play on my commute. Depending on your point of view, it's either a bastardised travesty of the real Civ, or a neatly streamlined version more suitable for consoles. Me, I love it.

I quite enjoyed previous versions of Civ, but I was never very good at it; I couldn't be bothered micro-managing dozens of workers, which is pretty much essential at the higher difficulty levels. Revolution ditches the workers, simplifies a bunch of other mechanics, and shrinks the game world, but keeps the overall feel of the game, and for me it really hits a sweet spot. I'm winning pretty comfortably at Emperor level now, which I never managed in any previous Civ game. (Partly because Revolution is easier, most likely, but it's not just that, I'm sure.) Time to give it a try at Deity!

I also just finished Braid on the 360. All the reviewers love this game, and they're all dead right—it's fantastic. It's a platform game with puzzles involving time control: reversing time, slowing it down, even multiple timelines existing in parallel. That may sound a bit complicated, but the game does a fantastic job of introducing each new time effect and slowly ramping up the difficulty. And the puzzles are great; they're all completely logical and ingenious, and as far as I know completely novel. Man, I'd almost forgotten that games could have real puzzles in them.

It also has a story of sorts—kind of a haze of symbolism, if not an actual narrative. You may love this, or you may not, but I don't think you'll hate it. I wasn't particularly taken with the story, but it didn't get in the way of my enjoyment in the slightest. The music is great, so you can always listen to that instead.

Go and play Braid! It's available on the PC, and there's even a Mac version in the works, so there's no excuse.

The great question of our times
Is the new Star Trek movie going to be any good? There is no end of numerological portents but I'm having some trouble figuring out what it all means.

Everyone knows the "even Treks are good, odd Treks are bad" rule, even though it's mostly based on 2, 4, 6 and 5. But what number are we up to now? I've totally lost track. A dozen? More?
But this is a prequel. Does that mean it's 0? (and therefore good!)
But wait, they already announced the sequel! To the prequel! So this is what, -1?
Okay, forget the numbers. It's a prequel, so there's the tragic precedent of Star Wars. Are there any good prequels?
But it's more of a reboot than a prequel, they're saying. Reboots can work: Casino Royale, Battlestar Galactica.
If it's a reboot, and we're therefore discounting all the other material, what you essentially have is the movie remake of a 60s TV show. Those are always bad, right?
Simon Pegg as Scotty!

I think I'm out of petals.

Two things all computers should have

A what are you doing? button. When the computer pauses inexplicably and won't respond, and you don't know whether it's going to wake up again in a second or whether it'll still be frozen minutes later so you might as well reboot it, press this button and it'll tell you what the hell it's doing that's so important.
An undo button that lets you undo the last thing you did, no matter what it was. It should reverse the flow of time and put everything back exactly where it was before you made some stupid mistake, to whatever extent this can be done just by shuffling 1s and 0s around (which is pretty much all that most computers do anyway^*)

* And they claim to be astonishingly good at it, too^**
** But see item 1, above

Strayhorn and Ellington
Having lamented the lack of solo work by Duke Ellington, I figured I ought to buy what there is of it, so I picked up Solos, Duets and Trios from Amazon. It's been lovingly pieced together from fragments recovered from the archives, which means it's padded out with alternate takes and the audio quality ranges from terrible to okay. But if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, I highly recommend it.

I've also been reading up on him on Wikipedia. It's absolutely fascinating reading. He had a very close but very strange relationship with his co-writer Billy Strayhorn; I'd seen his name on the credits of some Ellington songs but had no idea they were such close collaborators. Strayhorn wanted to be a classical pianist, but couldn't because he was black, not to mention gay, and ended up giving a classical edge to Ellington's jazz band instead. He was a friend of Martin Luther King, and a gay rights advocate before the term even existed. Died in '67 after three years of cancer.

The album I bought has a couple of Strayhorn-Ellington piano duets, plus one take of Ellington playing a Strayhorn composition, "Lotus Blossom". It seems to have been recorded on the spur of the moment at the end of a long session—you can actually hear the rest of the band packing up in the background—not long after Strayhorn's death. It's incredibly beautiful. One take.

Sticky pedal
My keyboard pedal has gotten mysteriously sluggish lately. I lift my foot up and there's sometimes a noticeable lag before the sound dies away—maybe a quarter of a second. It feels weird for a simple digital gizmo to start developing analogue eccentricities, but I guess there is at least one moving part in there, so it probably is just gummed up a little.

This is cramping my playing quite a bit, as I tend to use the pedal pretty heavily. But on the other hand, I now know that I could pedal much more and it would sound much worse. That doesn't necessarily prove I don't over-pedal but at least I'm not red-lining it, as it were.

I guess the universe is trying to tell me one or more of the following:

Don't pedal so much!
Get a new cheap pedal (actually just a pad, they only cost like £10)
Get a proper pedal (yikes, £30 or more)
Get a proper keyboard (north of £1000 for something decent... one of these days)
Get some WD40 (£2)

What do you want to be when you grow up?
Did anyone ever ask you that question? I always hated it because I had absolutely no idea what the answer was. Still haven't quite figured it out to this day, but I think I've narrowed it down to something along the lines of:

Astronaut
Scientist (any, possibly in windswept arctic base)
Hotel bar pianist
Civil engineer
Game designer
Fiction writer
Artist
Explorer
Second-hand bookshop owner (craggy and eccentric)
Beatle

Sketch #5
Variations on a little sequence I've been playing with lately—Am, Fmaj7, Dm, Bb7+4. It reminded me of something while I was playing, but I couldn't figure out what it was; listening back, I was clearly thinking of Suicide is Painless.

Prelude in A minor (5.4MB MP3)

Maybe a bit on the long side, but I was enjoying myself. More random thoughts:

No trouble staying in the groove this time, but it would have been nice to have some real modulation in there.
I like the descending triads at 0:36, but once again I'm sure it's stolen from somewhere. Can anyone identify it?
Improv win at 3:04. Wasn't sure where to go next, thought "let's just go down a semitone", and it worked.
Tried a different keyboard sensitivity and piano sound this time, but I don't think it makes a lot of difference. Sounds great in the slow sections, lots of annoying clipped notes in the fast sections. Even if GarageBand can't keep up in real time, you'd think it could sort this stuff out when exporting.

Watchmen, the movie
Not bad. It's not the slavishly accurate shot-by-shot transliteration I feared; it's actually a pretty sensible adaptation, very faithful to the plot overall but with plenty of changes and simplifications. It reminded me a lot of the V for Vendetta movie, which I also enjoyed when I happened to catch it on TV. I'd say the two movies bear almost exactly the same relationship to their source material.

My biggest complaint about the Watchmen movie is the violence: not just that there's too much, but that it's too stylised. The movie spends a lot of time making all the heroes look super cool and badass, which grinds against the tone and themes of the piece as a whole. (As a specific example, what's the point of that big fight in the corridor? It isn't in the book at all.) I got the impression that many people in the audience were confused about whether everyone was supposed to have super-powers or not, since they all seem to have the strength and speed of Spider-Man.

Great acting, great design, great special effects. Dr Manhattan in particular is handled extremely well. Pretty much the only bit of design I didn't like was the two secret lairs, which both looked extremely cheesy; that's a shame, as both were particularly striking in the comic.

Overall, it feels... ponderous. The comic is famously dense, but on the surface level it often moves along quite breezily, with lots of freewheeling conversations and asides. In the movie, the same material is fraught with tension and impact, with ominous sound effects and blaring rock songs (apparently chosen at random) underscoring every tiny event. I don't think it's entirely a function of the length of the movie and the complexity of the story; it's just that the "intensity" knob is turned up to 11 the whole way through. There's no room to breathe, and there's no room for wit (example: the grim fate of Big Figure could have been darkly comic, but is totally overplayed).

I'd love to see something like this done as a TV miniseries. (I said this about Iron Man too.) The two- or three-hour movie somehow feels like the wrong chunk size for comic book stories. Maybe they should be aiming for ninety minutes. Not everything has to be the epic to end all epics.

Whatever happened to the Doomsday Clock?
I'm seeing a lot of comments in reviews and puff pieces about Watchmen along the lines of this one (from the Odeon's blurb):

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, "Watchmen" is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the "Doomsday Clock" - which charts the USA's tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight.

The writer doesn't seem aware that there's a real Doomsday Clock, famously (I thought) featured on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since the 40s. A quick web search not only turns up plenty of background information, but informs me that the clock is at 5 minutes to midnight right now. Okay, that I didn't know. Yikes.

If people generally aren't even aware that the clock exists, I guess it's not really succeeding at its job, of publicising the risk of global catastrophe.

Bağlama news
This page has a lot of detailed information on the different types of bağlama. So I finally know for sure that mine is a cura. How did I find that page? Googling for, er, "electric baglama".

And here is a video of a nice song played by a bağlama quartet. Good closeups of the fingering and the fret layout if you're into that kind of thing. Interesting to see that professional players seem to use their thumb on the low string a lot.

The cura is definitely my current favourite pick-up-and-play instrument. This may not last, but its honeymoon period is already much longer than average. It's small and light and falls conveniently to hand, the strings don't slice your fingers too badly, it has a surprisingly rich sound, it has a good learning curve—you can't go too far wrong with only three sets of strings, but there's plenty of scope to play interesting stuff. I did break out the kamanche the other day, and that's fun too, but boy is it hard work in comparison.

I still have the cura fretted to something approximating 19-TET—which is a revelation; I highly recommend experimenting with it if you have the opportunity—but I'm thinking of switching it back to plain old 12-TET to make it easier to learn chords properly, using this helpful guide as a starting point. I'm using too many lazy open strings right now, but figuring out real chords with 19 frets to the octave involves a lot of counting and head-scratching. Plus a lot of them come out sour because my fret positioning isn't terribly accurate (I just did it by ear and eye, not having a 19-TET tuner handy). Going back down to 12 loses some excitement but gains sanity; I'll also have frets left over, so I can double some of them up to act as a visual reference (like the spots or studs you usually see on guitar fretboards).

...but Ebert likes it, so
The Watchmen film. The advertising puts me off, the fact that it's by the guy who made 300 puts me off. The reviews generally seem to say it's extremely faithful to the original comic book, and that puts me off even though I liked the comic.

So I really liked the Sin City film. I'm reasonably familiar with Frank Miller's work, so it was obvious to me while watching that the brash energy of the film came from Miller, and a lot of the visual composition was probably taken directly from the comic book. I liked the film enough that I considered buying one of the collected comic books, so I picked one up in a bookstore and starting browsing idly through it. This is exactly the same as the film, I thought. I don't need to see exactly the same thing over again.

Based on this experience, I figure that Watchmen is probably turgid retread of the comic, with far too much time and money wasted on painstakingly recreating the exact layout of Dave Gibbons' panels. Unlike Sin City, I've read the comic book a couple of times already. Those panels are already a movie (well, more like a TV miniseries); why do I need the celluloid?

However, Roger Ebert loved it. He's generally pretty generous with the stars, but four star reviews aren't that common, and the amount of praise he heaps on this movie is pretty rare. He ends the review by saying he intends to see it again, in IMAX; did so, and wrote a journal post about it.

Have you come across Ebert? Maybe he's more of a US thing. Ebert is amazing. I don't always agree with him—I'm not sure I even agree with him very often at all—but I want to agree with him, when we disagree I want to think that he's probably right and I'm probably wrong, for at least two reasons. First, he is a fabulous writer. Maybe in my top five. That's including novelists, journalists, essayists, whoever. Ebert's usual medium just happens to be film reviews; he's still a genius. Second, he has an astonishing and infectious passion for life. He had major surgery a while back, spent a long time in a coma, can no longer speak, his old movie buddies seem to be dying off on all sides, the entire world economy is collapsing around his ears for heaven's sake, and he's an inveterate optimist. Oh, plus he has extremely sensible views on politics, evolution, the role and limitations of science, etc etc.

So, Ebert loved it. Dammit. I probably have to see this film after all. Maybe it's really a win-win situation: if I like it, I like it, and if I don't like it, at least I'll have the lesser satisfaction of being able to complain about it, and at least I'll know.

Might as well go the whole hog and see it at the damned IMAX.

Full disclosure: he also liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But on the flip side, he's one of the few reviewers who called bullshit on Benjamin Button.

Hopefully this will still seem like a good idea in September
We just bought tickets for PAX. Anyone else going?

Sketches #3 and #4
Piano again. Same procedure as before—hit record, play a bunch of stuff, select the best bits.

Warm-up in C (2.7MB MP3) ( notes )
Duke Ellington's Satin Doll (2.2MB MP3) ( notes )

Despite my having murdered his tune here, I think Ellington may be my favourite jazz pianist. His playing is superficially simple-sounding, but it's amazingly well-crafted: the melody is clean and precise, the harmony is inventive and interesting, and it all just sounds so effortless. Totally unlike my own style, of course. He was also a pioneering band leader, wrote or co-wrote a string of classic songs, and—well, gee, what a guy. He doesn't seem to have recorded a lot of solo piano, sadly.

Mac and Unix: they will fight eternally
To install a Mac app on my Mac, I just have to download it. Sometimes it's wrapped in a disk image (hate that stupid Apple convention) and that takes a few extra clicks, sometimes that gives you an installer rather than the app itself, but in general it "just works".

To install Unix software on my Linux machine at work I usually just need to type "sudo apt-get whatever" at the console and it just works.

Installing Unix software on the Mac, though, that's the trick...

Hey, maybe it's preinstalled! Unlikely, though, and even if it is it'll be some crazy Apple-modified version, or a really old version.
I could download binaries, if I happen to want one of the approximately zero Unix packages that has OS X binaries.
I could download source and try to compile it (assuming I remembered to install the OS X dev tools), and spend the next two hours banging my head against some ridiculous configuration issue.
There's the Fink package manager, which might have a port of the package I want, but the last time I tried it it installed stuff in slightly crazy places, and it seems to have a bad reputation for frequently shipping broken builds.
There's DarwinPorts which many people seem to prefer. But you have to give them a name and e-mail address before you can even download it! For something that just helps you install free software?!?

I'm boggled and even offended by that last one. I'll probably resign myself to giving them a fake e-mail address eventually, but I might try the install-from-source route first, or maybe try installing RPM and using it directly without a fancy front-end.

Edit: aha, just found MacPorts, which looks a bit saner than Fink and DarwinPorts.

And again: MacPorts is just a new name for DarwinPorts. And it doesn't work. Sigh. I went for the compile-from-source route, and after extensive fiddling with ./configure options it finally seems to be working.

Sketch #2
Because I want to get into the habit of recording stuff, and also learn my way around GarageBand...

Piano ballad in E minor (2.2MB MP3)

I started recording via my MIDI adapter and did my usual improvisation thing. This is my favourite bit from about 20 minutes of material. Some notes on the process:

I knew as I was playing that this was a keeper. Which of course means I was paralysed with fear that I'd cock it up. I'm pretty pleased at how long I managed to keep it going without getting either too repetitive, or drifting too far from the original motif.
Lovely serendipitous chord at 26 seconds in. GB's notation view says it's an E minor with stacked fourths (E-A-D-G).
The central Em-EbMaj7-G thing is nice too, although I've used it before. Pretty sure it comes from a Pink Floyd song but I can't remember which one.
Edit: hmm, the entire motif is actually Em-EbMaj7-Em-Em-EbMaj7-G. At the time I thought to myself "should have played a G there", did so the second time round, and decided that was my theme, but the longer sequence actually works nicely—I should have used the whole thing.
Tempo gets a bit rushed later on. Edit: this coincides with some rather unimaginative and over-frequent chord changes. Clear improvisational panic. It comes back together when the tempo slows down.
The end is fake—I chopped it off at an appropriate point and touched up the last note in GarageBand. I still can't do endings.
Hey, GarageBand's grand piano sound isn't bad at all. Sounds a lot better after you export to MP3 than it does while editing. The reverb is a little heavy-handed, is my only complaint (although I can't be bothered going back to fix it; this is supposed to be a sketch after all).
Edit: huh, the final chord is actually an A. How'd I end up there?