Well, here’s an attempt at week three. After spending some time on the live chat with the good folks at JustHost I’m pretty sure that we’ve managed to get all the DNS lined up and the SSL certificates installed so the Tobias Revell™ Digital Experience© should be fully running. This innovative immersive experience includes this blog and an updated website. Sure, some might argue that it’s basically just a change in typeface and some new pictures and they’d be right. But that meagre and potentially poor aesthetic update cost me two weeks of downtime so go and appreciate it please. Like most digital immersive experiences you can expect heavy branding, a queue and the certain sense that it was hardly worth it.
Meanwhile, over at brand Revell HQ I’ve settled in to working at home more but not in a good way. I notice myself becoming complacent – starting later and ‘leaving’ earlier. Just wondering in to the kitchen and looking for things to distract myself with. It could just be that I need an actual holiday. It’s supposed to be my brother’s wedding at the moment and a piece of my brain has slowed down and gone there instead to have imaginary arguments and imaginarily furiously glare at people in airports. The virus has seen me replace my worst excesses with others; I only just had my first hangover since March after a night over at Anab and Jon’s. I haven’t had any nicotine in I don’t know, twelve weeks? But now I ride upwards of 200km a week and have no one to furiously glare at other than an old, dumb cat.
History will never live up to nostalgia.
I bought the Final Fantasy VII Remake at the beginning of the month. Now I’m going to write something a little controversial: I never really liked the original FFVIII. I know this is pretty much sacrilege in western JRPG fans as for many it was their first love. Me, I liked IX best. It had a monkey-pirate and a cute wizard.
After the bleak, exciting, dark, hilarious, twisted bureaucratic-horror-comedy of Control and the perfectly satisfactory and unremarkable experience of whatever that latest Tomb Raider was called the VII Remake feels dull. It feels like a half-empty afterthought in the Final Fantasy mega-mythos. It relies too much on assuming you’re nostalgic for the original rather than setting up convincing character development or meaningful plot in its own right. And in the end it doesn’t match that nostalgia for the world it created with nostalgia for text-based NPC interactions or simple, joyful turn-based combat. Instead it opts for an infuriating never-ending stream of over-acted cutscenes and a fast, noisy and decadent diarrhoea-Christmas-lights combat system. And it’s confusingly built; the game is sparse compared with XV, the latest single-player release (which was great) but has an equally complex combat and advancement system. So, there’s only a handful of locations and enemies you run between but I still can’t get my head round the system. This means I’m getting close to the end and have yet to hit that Final Fantasy plateau of gameplay: The bit where you’ve mastered the system and controls and are just grinding up on secret enemies, locations and dungeons.
Oh and the cutscenes. Good heavens the cut scenes. The shonky level design I can forgive as quaint but there are so many fucking cutscenes: They are the unavoidable chunks of unidentifiable, limp vegetable that rise to the surface of what is basically a half-remembered flavourless stew from a vague memory of something the developers had at childhood made with whatever they had in the cupboard.
SHORT STUFF
Sorry, I find complaining an ugly habit, it seems to serve the complainer in conveying an air of superiority over the thing being complained about rather than actually improving the condition or wellbeing of either the the complainee, the complainer or the person forced to read it, so I’m sorry. That’s one rambling complaint per week for two straight weeks now which does you, me, nor the good folks of Square Enix any good. What did we learn?
- Well, there’s a significantly higher chance that thermodynamics has resulted in a random assemblage of particles that simulate you and your human experience than you being an actual biological entity. These constructions, known as Boltzmann Brains are theorised to be the dominant form of consciousness. This is a useful and frustrating thought experiment because it’s fundamentally un-disprovable yet supported by conventions of thermodynamics and quantum physics but physicists hate it because it’s annoying and frankly distasteful.
- Matt Webb wrote about The Problems with Big Tech, summarising some arguments against Big Tech monopolies. There’s some good stuff here but but it draws on the macro-grudges people feel about change more than anything else – change in fiscal policies, regulations and public health. Underlying all these is an attitude to social change as an engineering problem. Many folks have written about this, not least in last week’s discussion of proof in maths (the shift toward does it work and away from does it further our understanding?) Gong back to Philip Agre’s brilliant Toward a Critical Technical Practice and so on and so on and so on. A lot of my work (and that of other artsy-minded technical folks) comes back to where the engineering model fails to align with reality. However, Big Tech has the power to just steam roll the model out without care for how it actually integrates with the city, or life or whatever. Big Tech approaches change as an engineering problem, not a state of being and so envisions a a solution and an end to change that is constantly receding.
- Here’s a collaboration between Three Blue One Brown and Minute Physics on Bell’s Theorem or why two polarised lenses equals dark and three equals light and that’s why quantum physics.
That’s it I think. I thought this morning that if I ever did a vlog (which honestly, I’d like to) I’d call it ‘Design Serious’ and talk to people who are very serious about design in a non-serious way. Have a great week and bye!