The new keyboard has provided me with some exciting novelty over the past week’ from the satisfactory clickety-clacking of the keys to the very cool and exciting RGB backlight. There’s a bunch of issues around the Enter key area though. They’ve had to scooch a lot of keys into a small space and have doubled up. I’ve spent the week apologising to everyone for hitting Enter when I intended to hit apostrophe with my little finger. It
‘s very annoying.
Anyway, the body is elastic and I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Do you think there should be a name for the day your iPhone battery turn to shit? You know how when you get it it holds charge for like a week for the first six months and then one day, out of nowhere goes ‘I’m going to go flat now because you looked at Instagram for two minutes.’ It’s not even a gradual decline it’s a sudden and irreversible change, usually caused by a software update and as with many of Apple’s opaque practices, the clinch is in the patronising way it’s done and not explained. One of the many parts of the logic of obsolescence – the assumption that you want, need or desire progress. What if I was perfectly happy with everything, Apple?
Oh my god you know I didn’t get out ahead of this one so yet again there’s not much to say, we’re in catchup mode at the moment (the royal we) and I have no time to procrastinate by reading or writing about intellectual matters.
Short Stuff
Here are the short things. Really, white men like me with nothing to say shouldn’t be allowed the microphone but I own the domain so that’s what’s going on rn.
There are twobooks called ‘Atlas of AI’ now which tells you a lot about how we’re conceptualising or trying to talk about AI. I have one of them and it’s pretty good. I’m sure the other one is too.
Justin Pickard sent me this article on cheating in Zwift a while ago. Racing in Zwift is highly unregulated and unmonitored despite being now official as a result of Covid and bicycle racing has always been riddled with cheating and corruption so that’s both of those worlds smashed together.
Another one from the Pickard post is this incredible fantasy film that is almost entirely done on blue screen. Can’t wait to see it.
Ok, I know. This is another disappointing week for hardcore Revell Reckons. Crystal says I owe you so I gotta get this done. I love you, see you next week.
There was a break in the snow and rain where the sun peeked through and gave us that crispy, saturated and blue light of early spring. It’s the kind of light that old painters spent decades of their lives perfecting but the planet just sort of carelessly throw into conversation ‘That? Oh that’s really nothing. Just a little something I learnt how to do near the poles.’
Thanks for giving me a break last week. It was all a bit much. It’s still all a bit much but I managed to carve out some time to write this and make that ↑. The idea with these sketches is that I’m looking to get faster at repetitive bits by making a library of models and materials I can reuse and template light set ups while experimenting with something new each time. This time I was using a noise texture across all the lights together as one material to generate the effect of them turning on and off in a noise-y way. I sort of intuitively knew how this might work and surprisingly it did. You can think of it like having a black and white generated picture of clouds that’s projected over the scene from above. When it touches anything that’s ‘light’ material it controls how bright they are. Where the picture is black, the lights are off and where it’s white they’re at 100.
I had a bit of an office upgrade this week. I’m in here 16 hours a day so I might as well make it as bearable as possible I got a bigger, higher monitor and have immediately noticed that I’m not stooping over the screen anymore, coiling up my shoulders. The curse of tall people is bad backs. I also got a multi-device mechanical keyboard which is smaller and means I don’t have to have two around for switching between the PC and Mac. I’m a bit wary here of falling into the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole, I have enough geeky hobbies.
Another benefit of this bigger screen is that I can actually keep my notes there ← while writing here. I didn’t realise how much tab switching I was having to do before. So, let’s get into it.
Reality + CGI = Hyperreality?
Not many people realise that most of Parasite is green screen. Almost all of the outdoor scene and even a bunch of the indoor scenes, particularly in the underground parts are all computer graphics. It’s sort of unexpected because the notion of ‘special effects’ lends itself to physically challenging phenomena like explosions, fights, falls and car chases; things that are risky or expensive to do in physical reality but relatively cheap in a computer. The idea that you might make extensive use of computer graphics for the first floor of a building, the end of a street and a tunnel seems a little ludicrous, especially when you consider that Jaques Tati built an entire city block for Playtime.
There’s an interesting tension here between suspension of disbelief and knowing. There’s no shock at the revelation that most of the Marvel franchise is shot on sound stages in front of vast green screen curtains. It’s a deception we’ve willingly bought into; a show or a performance. There’s something in the grit of a cinematic piece like Parasite where there is a feeling of being cheated. I suppose this circles back to my constant questioning of what realism is – it exposes this notion that computer graphics aren’t ‘real,’ that ‘reality’ doens’t need computer graphics and that their role is an aid to hyper-real phenomena; to elevate reality into hyper-real fantasy by compositing CGI onto it.
The other part of this of course is that the CGI in Parasite is exceptionally well accomplished and almost completely unnoticeable. It’s not used for big set piece battles or impossible physics. It’s just used to expand and frame the world, adding depth and form to the scenes. Here the CGI deepens and grounds the setting and the people, making scenes feel heavier or more alive rather than elevating them to a fantastical plane of massive explosions and impossible speed.
Short Stuff
The smallest possible chance of a human being able to do anything is 3 x 1019. If 10 billion humans did the same thing every second for 100 years they’d do it that many times. Therefore 1 : 3 x 1019 is the smallest possible chance. Thanks to Matt Parker’s incredible mathematical analysis of a Minecraft speedrun for this bunch of statistical analysis fun and other.
No thanks for Matt Parker (well, the YouTube algorithms really) for only getting this video about the maths of the black hole in Interstellar to me just under 24 hours after I’d finished recording a lecture about it.
There were other things but… I’m going to save them because I want to keep this brief. I’ve got a really early start this morning and need to get going.
Ok, I love you , you knew that. I don’t need to tell you. Speak to you later, let me know if you want to chat before.
Get you a paragraph that can be targeted by the html for special styling and slip it in on the second edit when you realise the text is all over the place because you forgot first time. This is that paragraph.
It’s almost definitely a short one this week. I’ve been chin-stroking more on this question of the diegetics of Covid-19 and while was listening to this BBC podcast on delusions I came across the idea of parasocial relationships. This is the feeling that you have a social relationship with characters from TV, radio or other media. The notion has been extended in recent years to include celebrities and then social media personalities. In fact, social media lend themselves particularly to parasocial relationships because they encourage perceptions of intimacy that aren’t real or authentic to increase engagement. Parasocial relationships came up in the context of delusions for their relationship with paranoid delusions of being watched or followed, particularly the spate of these delusions that have been informed by reality television.
Now interestingly, the podcast was quick to point out that firstly, almost everyone engages in some form of delusion and it’s only rarely that they become harmful or debilitating: Delusions of grandeur can help us with confidence and self-esteem while paranoid delusions can make us cautious and prevent potential social harm. Parasocial relationships are particularly important to children where they contribute to identity formation and learning, for example.
Of course parasocial relationships have been seized upon by marketing and PR whizzes as a way of hawking stuff through podcasts, vlogs and particularly social media personalities and there’s ongoing study about the long-term effects of this barrage of attention-seeking para-friendships on individuals, particularly when in isolation as many are right now.
Anyway, there’s more to this I feel. Like speculative parasocial relationships where the foundation of that relationship is impossible. Think Roger Rabbit (or the dark, adult alternative, Cool World) or Hatsune Miku.
Short Stuff
Told you it’d be brief this week. I’m really behind with other things, I have some marking to do, a lecture series to write a website to build and then all the admin stuff that comes with this job.
I got a GoPro for Christmas and have been (on the rare occasions where I’m going out), experimenting with it. It’s not as easy to use as they make it seem. You can get passable footage quite quickly but to get something HD film-worthy is hard. I’ve been trying out a bunch of different mounts. This one from the weekend I used a grill mount (you bite on it) which seems to work better since the head is a natural gimbal. There’s also a problem with brightness flickering which I read can be solved by using faster HD cards so I’m going to try that when I next go out, probably hill climbing on Friday.
Sorry, I have a bunch of open tabs for things to read and tell you about but I’m just swamped atm. There’s also a bunch of your names in reminders up there ↗ because I owe you emails or whatever. Love you and speak next week.