Brandon's Blog

7/15/2023

Behind on Music

As with so many services these days, Youtube Music is a sort of devil's bargain to capture an unthinkably high consumer surplus (vis a vis CD buying in the 90s) at the expense of some degree of autonomy. The Now Playing view on CarPlay no longer even shows the album a song comes from; clearly the winds are blowing toward an imposed lack of awareness and interest in any organization of music besides The Algorithm. It's passive-aggressive but not a huge issue by any means.

It has changed the way I consume music, and I can tell The Algorithm is quite aware of it. I have gravitated away from albums, but beyond that I have allowed The Algorithm to dig deep ruts. I am a playlist guy. More than ever, I grind songs over and over, studying them, deeply enjoying them, and then I wander away to something else. I know I've had the "repeat one" pattern to some extent for a long time, but this feels different and more severe. It's "Maroon" by Taylor Swift, then "Circles" by Post Malone, then "Saturday Nights" by Khalid, then "Higher Love" by Steve Winwood.

And The Algorithm is quite happy to follow "Saturday Nights" with Charlie Puth maybe half the time. It sometimes feels like the time I somehow got an 80% feel for the random number pattern of our Bop It game: one song to the next, and a bad transition slowly gets trained out of the balance until it's forgotten. Then the songs are forgotten in turn.

I can't say it's a bad thing overall, but I do feel like the album pattern is something worth being moored to, to some extent. I like sitting down and feeling the coherent trajectory of a self-contained vision for music. The Algorithm feels like walking your way through an Olive Garden menu using the wine pairings. Does "Zombie" by the Cranberries really follow "All for You" by Sister Hazel? I mean, I guess so? But you do have the ever-present counter-issue of albums that just aren't that good. It's a chellange to balance it, but I do think we're better off now than we were before. I wish the artists could say the same.

7/15/2023

Battery Lark

Making lithium ion packs is really a weird craft. The power output of the things is so intimidatingly high that even a brief short can make things glow a bit, and you get that weird air ionizing smell. It seems like it would be easy to avoid shorts, but minor ones seem to want to happen from time to time. Fortunately it's not dangerous to get a brief spark, but it's definitely a scare when something goes crackle-pop. It is pretty neat to be able to assemble something with that much power and capability, though.

1/21/2022

On Encanto

Encanto was not quite what I expected.  Strictly as a Disney movie it came off to me as a bit of a dud: paper-thin characters, no true hook song, and a resolution that was so pro forma it's hard to consider it a twist.  It surprises me that, reportedly, toddlers are running around singing the songs; Lin-Manuel did his normal magic, but there is definitely no "Let It Go" moment in there.

Where is does succeed is as a sort of fantastical critique of fantasy itself: the Disney movie in Encanto was Abuela's struggle as a young mother.  The movie instead focuses on the aftermath of happily ever after, which is a pretty damn dark thing for Disney to put onto the screen.

As the younger characters were quite literally handed their self-actualization as a divine gift and inheritance, they became parodies and corruptions of their fairytale and cinematic counterparts: the princess bride, Hercules/Maui, Quasimodo in the basement, magical manipulators of elements... even the helpful mice in the walls, for goodness' sake.

And at the center is Abuela, who works well enough as the villain of the movie prior to her redemptive turn.  Taking the figurehead role in perpetuating the magic, she became the root and engine of its corruption; the "ever after" became more important than the "happily".  She occupies the inherent conservativity of prosperity: don't rock the boat, don't stretch the seams.

In an era of reboots and re-imaginings taking the place of greenfield world-building, Encanto reads to me as a cry for help from a gilded cage: how can we portray nuance, inequity, class struggle, and all the other stuff we're supposed to shove into these movies when everything has to be so damn perfect at the end?

In the end, everybody learned a lot but nobody really sacrificed anything.  Where Abuelo died for the family in the proto-plot, the only casualty of the main thread was Casita, who died to... show the family that the house wasn't the important part, except they needed to revive the house to revive the family and thus revive the magic?

The real clever twist would have been a step back from this lack of real stakes and take this as a commentary on the ultimate corruptibility of human nature: Morgoth gave way to Sauron, but the story ultimately repeated.  Can Mirabel avoid the temptation to become the tragic conservative?  There isn't as much of a movie in that, but it would be a better story.

11/7/2021

Real Christmas Music

Unlike any other year in my life, I have decided to start listening to Christmas music in earnest this year as early as practicable.  To this end, I am building a "Real Christmas Music" playlist that I am subjecting to rigorous criteria.

Working draft provisos:

Merry Early Christmas, under permissable parameters!

6/25/2020

Digital to Analog Conversion

One fun and also frustrating aspect of robotics and automation is the transition from the cleanly-abstracted digital realm to the analog domain, which is messy, noisy, unreliable, and altogether more real.

You hear the same thing out of engineers looking at a technical drawing: do you really think this 10mm bolt you drew will fit through a 10mm hole? That hole should be 10.25mm plus or minus your manufacturing tolerance. Why?  Because the drill bit is going to wiggle, or the casting is going to shrink a little, or the bolts from that supplier tend to run big, or having to take a mallet to a tight fit will break the part.

Digitally, you look at a 3-D print and say, “well, I’m a layer height above the print and need to move to the right to print another part, how could I possibly have an issue?”  But then the nozzle moves right and knocks the part off the built plate.  Why?  Because there’s a little plastic gunk on the tip of the nozzle, or the lead screw is a little bent right there, or the moon is in the wrong phase.  So you tell the printer to raise up a little when making an open-range travel.

It’s best not to think about computers as analog devices given the extent to which we depend on them.  That software update you’re downloading is traveling along a wire that’s also picking up Mix 96.5 at some college-physics-class level of amplitude.  Your spinning platter hard drive is hurtling at speeds that would rip your car apart, quietly adjusting magnetic fields by just enough to flip from a zero to a one.  Of course, the whole setup is chock full of little checks and double-do’s and decades worth of real-life practice in much more challenging environments than your desk, but it’s also a good bit of magic in there.  And somebody’s promotion relied on making everything run just a little faster than last year.

The digital abstraction is beneficial in that you shouldn’t need to think about these things in daily life.  I plug a corded drill into an outlet next to my phone charger and don’t really need to believe that they’re actually on the same circuit, interacting with each other a bit.  All those stupid FCC disclaimers on everything say that devices must accept interference from other devices, so you design for these oddities: a filtering capacitor here, a protection diode there, a little safety factor on your wire gauge.

It’s only when the abstraction bends and breaks that we realize it’s all just a bunch of analog stacked on top of itself.

6/1/2020

Malaise

Before 2020 turned the knob rightward a few more notches in the past few days, something hit me about the emotional and social side of quarantine. I’m a strong introvert, perhaps with occasional misanthropic tendencies, so being holed up with media to enjoy, good food to eat, games to play, instruments to practice, and paychecks to cash is not exactly my worst-case scenario in the way I know it is for many people.  There’s something nagging about it, though, even if you are one of the fortunate whose world blooms largely inward.

“Let’s just drop by for a minute.”  No.

“No need to eat in the car, we’ll grab a table inside.”  No.

“A haircut sure would feel great right now.”  No.

No, no, no.

Material contentment is a balance between two forces: a relative scarcity of needs against a relative plenty of resources.  Among many others, one’s social position has a hand in both of those forces.  As do one’s character, beliefs, background, perspective, attitude, environment, and so many others.

I occupy the tenuous position of being aware of privilege while disliking it as a mental framework.  It strikes me as a leaky abstraction, a net that simultaneously catches too much while letting the fish swim through. Perhaps it would work better as a differential measurement: not so much a charge as a voltage.  “I am privileged” – or perhaps somehow worse, “I have privilege” – rings unhelpful to me.  Everyone has “privilege” in the sense of having various advantages endowed, bestowed, or cultivated within their lives and experiences.  I have no issue acknowledging that I have more privilege, but that doesn’t change the fact that I wish I didn’t have to ponder with Calculus IV-level effort which way to turn out of my local Home Depot parking lot, or that I could remember to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer without a data center full of network-connected reminder systems to attempt to prevent me from forgetting, or that I could take a one-mile run without my heels splitting in half like a lightning-struck tree.

It’s easy to focus on what we don’t have and just stew over it much longer than we should.  It’s easy to feel disenfranchised, robbed of the blessing of true self-determination by outside forces, but it’s a whole other thing to be disenfranchised.

No, no, no, no, no.

I quite literally can’t imagine being in a position where I’m told by society in words, deeds, or strictures that I am not empowered to determine my path, live my best life, and effectively be the star in a movie for which I also maintain co-writer and -director credits.  It’s clear to me that quarantine malaise is little more than a caricature of the devastating impact of that degree of true disenfranchisement.

I want to believe that most - but certainly not all - disenfranchisement in our country is self-imposed, or perhaps externally-imposed but self-maintained.  It’s not pleasant to be presented with recent evidence and events that contradict that assumption and hope.  In any case, the symptoms present a crisis even if the cause is not fully understood, and the treatment is no less urgent.

9/18/2018

The Robot

The kids came up with a wacky idea to build a robot, which has been a complete blast.

I took a look at the available kits, and they’re undoubtedly impressive. Some are pretty much stylized RC cars, some don’t require building at all, and some try to use apps to enable some basic programming or at least scripting.  Never one to enjoy the shrink-wrapped solution, I stole a few ideas from the marketplace and struck off on my own.

It’s truly striking what Arduino and Raspberry Pi have done to the landscape.  Even as late as my college years, PIC microcontrollers were not as much pricey as difficult to work with, and easier solutions that weren’t ground-up DIY jobs were indeed fairly expensive.  Programming required flashing via a serial port, which was typically adapted to USB on the way to a laptop running very creaky C-based tooling.  Processing power was scarce, and the add-on and adapter scene was thin.

The Arduino-versus-Rpi debate is a difficult one.  An Arduino is a gift-wrapped microcontroller with all the good and bad stuff that comes with that: no general purpose as we know them, friendly but more bare-metal hardware interaction, lots of focused third-party libraries for robotics and automation, and good hardware support for things like generating timed pulsed waves and blinky lights.  Rpi gives you a whole other host of benefits: full Linux support with any programming language you’d like, wifi, storage, rougher but still available electronics integration, and a huge array of compatible devices.  You give up something no matter which way you go, but - depending on what you want to do - there’s almost always at least one good choice.

We went Rpi and haven’t looked back: because of the drivers and capabilities of Linux, I’ve been able to interact with the robot over wifi while it’s powered with an ordinary consumer USB battery pack.  A growing array of microcontroller-based daughter boards fill some of the gaps created by the more computer-like Rpi as opposed to the more task-focused Arduino.  Strikingly, these little boards are sophisticated, relatively (very relatively) user-friendly devices that generally cost between $5 and $15 apiece.  We need one for locomotive motor control, one for power control, and one for 180-degree servo control.  That set, plus a motor/gearbox/wheel kit, some mostly scrap electronic parts for hookup, scrap wood for a chassis, and some spare boxes and packaging for body parts, and we are working toward a workable model.  We built the gearbox ourselves from a boxed set at the kitchen table.  It’s layers of kit-based DIY with a good bit of custom engineering.

I wanted to add talking functionality, something that would have been entirely impossible several years ago.  Now it was as easy as a little USB portable speaker plugged into the Rpi, and a connection to a free (up to 1 MB of text per month) Google service to transcribe voice input and send back MP3s of synthesized speech.  I had it running in about 15 minutes with Python.

I have a clear ambition to make this grow with the kids, meaning I need to be tight enough with my codebase that it can eventually be adapted or expanded by the kids.  I’m not sure if this will ever actually happen, but it’s important to me that it becomes accessible to them if they’re interested.

It’s interesting to see their perspective on things.  Growing up in a moment that perhaps lacks game-changing breakthroughs but is more typified by the complete pedestrianization of what would previously be considered black frigging magic, you never know what will impress them.  They are keenly aware that I am (currently) “making the robot talk” with my computer, and that’s clearly not as impressive as the Alexa voice responding from the ether.  They crave autonomy, something I doubt I would have even thought to covet as a child.  They want it to go and do of its own accord, and they want to speak to it and have it speak back.  They appear somewhat mystified, but surprisingly not frustrated, when I give them the engineer’s assessments of each of their ideas: impossible, too tough for our budget, too tough for my knowledge, doable, easy.

I have purposefully avoided any kind of chassis materials that appear pre-made or purpose-built in any way.  I would prefer to use a Clorox wipe container (the current torso) than something from a kit.  I think they feel the improvisation of it, and I’m frequently fielding materials suggestions: use a Rubbermaid container, use a can of beans, use an old box, use a toilet paper tube.  It’s a fun exercise in craftsmanship and improvisation to view your household trash and sundries as potential parts for a robot. They have impressed me with their creativity, especially in an era that nearly gives up on a device if its charge port becomes loose.

My personal goal is to see a dance of the Hokey Pokey within a month or so.  We’ll see how it goes, and where they want to go with it from there.

4/10/2018

Against the Usage of "Um" in Discussions

I listen to a few podcasts that are critical of the usage of “Well, actually…” and “Turns out…” in internet culture.  With the internet comes a full deck of cite-able sources of various quality and provenance to correct people in an irritating way: “Well, actually the study that said to drink all that water did not say that”, “Turns out salt intake isn’t bad for blood pressure”, etc., etc.

This is valid cultural criticism and should be noted by people.  Much of the time the value of the correction is overshadowed by the irritation it causes, and half the time the “correction” is just as questionable as the original statement.

I would submit that the “Um” prefix is the dirty bomb of such phrases. “Um” does not just telegraph a “get ready to hear something I read that you didn’t”.  “Um” says, “You moron, haven’t you read that…”

Anyone familiar with Hacker News would not be surprised to see me use a link to a discussion on that site to illustrate the point.  It strikes me as a shorthand for the person who says “Time out” and then corrects someone in conversation.  It is both pretentious and superfluous. I struggle to imagine a situation in which the meaning or clarity of a statement is not improved by removing it from the front of the sentence.

7/27/2017

Riften On My Mind

My time with Skyrim appears to be drawing to a close.

Even the writing of that sentence highlights the complexity of my feelings about this fantastic game.  I put quite a bit of time into it, easily the most time I’ve put into a game in the last five years or more, and I enjoyed almost every bit of it.  The nonlinearity and openness were huge wins for me while playing.

In retrospect, though, that great strength of the game (thousands of things to do, many having no bearing on the actual storyline) created a bit of a bitter aftertaste in the sunset period.  The main quest was awful in many areas, with bugs and design issues impacting somewhere around a quarter to a half of the stage gates in the quest.  I actually had to drop into the console and input codes I found on discussion boards in order to get through a pointless cinema sequence at one point.  The plot was somewhere between pointless and incomprehensible, with way too much “dragon language” and gopher quests and time travel and other silly fantasy game tropes.

Even as I complain and retrospect here, I am generating counterarguments that minimize my complaint.  Yes, this was the “main quest,” and yes, it was bad for me in many areas.  But what is a “main quest” in a sandbox game?  Was it a mistake for me to even go through that quest?

Interestingly, my approach to Skyrim was heavily influenced by my two runs through Hitman: Absolution (one on easy, one on hard), which revealed my interest in stealth approaches to games.  In Skyrim, I played a thief who didn’t steal (much), essentially an ethical assassin.

A dragon-slaying main plot was never going to work well for a thief.  There was no going after Alduin the World Eater with a dagger, and my sneaking (even maxed to 100!) was not effective against his preternatural abilities.  Since I had no interest in magic and had invested all my time in sneaking and stabbing and shooting everything, I essentially had to play tank for the main quest and count most of my skill development work as wasted.

Speaking of skill-building, what an experience to work through a big game doing something besides the straightforward hack-and-slash!  The most interesting (and challenging) thing about Skyrim for me was the experience of starting out in this different context.  You know you want to be an assassin type player, and you do what you can in the character rolling to position yourself to get there, but when you start out you’re basically just terrible.  This makes complete sense, but it requires real patience in the early days to stick with it and prepare to reap the rewards later.

You are approaching a challenging game wanting to sneak around, but you can’t sneak.  You need to attack from afar, but your equipment is terrible and you aren’t that effective with a bow.  You would love to get the sneak-and-stab 15x bonus, but you can’t get within 10 feet of someone without them alerting on you.  So you sneak, save frequently and reload when you get slaughtered, and grind it out until you get up to journeyman status.  Then the game really opens up.

Because everything is so open, you can really experience fun rewards if you concentrate on certain areas.  The “perks” skill system has its weaknesses, but tracks such as Sneak are filled with deeply powerful and fun rewards for concentrating effort.

By the end of my time in the game, I was taking out rooms full of people by dropping down on them and doing stab-and-retreat attacks without being noticed.  I could pick any lock, my equipment was fantastic, and I really felt like I had built something to be proud of and to enjoy.

I can still imagine dropping into the game occasionally and playing my character.  I occasionally think about rolling a new one and starting over, but I don’t think I would.  I got it right the first time, and the quest variety is really not that good (perhaps the obvious trade-off that counterbalances the available volume of quests).  Too many “bandit has thing, go into cave, kill five bandits plus one magic-casting bandit, three frost spiders, and a pair of draugrs, open chest, get thing, take shortcut out” quests.  A little bit of that goes a long way.

There was clearly a lot of love put into the Thieves Guild quests and a few of the other major non-main arcs.  They were quite a bit better than the main arc.

All in all, I think Skyrim is a game that should be played precisely how you want to play it.  You can’t let the actual presence of a storyline push you too hard to play it that way, unless you really want to do that.  The tricky thing is feeling a sense of completion in that environment.  Have I “beaten” the game?  Am I “finished”?  There’s certainly more to do, but why would I do it?  It forces you to think deeper into your true motivations for playing, which might or might not have a good answer.

It’s a much more complex way to play and enjoy a game, but I definitely prefer it to the old one-way variety of these role-playing games.

4/26/2017

Hitman: Absolution

I knew something was up with my preference in games when I started enjoying playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  Suddenly I was sneaking around, taking cover, avoiding confrontation, and thinking strategically.  My Deus Ex save game was lost in a misunderstanding between myself and the Steam client, but I will revisit at some point (probably on the Xbox 360, since it was a free game a while back).

Since then, I’ve jumped headfirst into Hitman: Absolution, which I’ve found to be a revelation in terms of how I play and enjoy games.  I played through the whole game on Easy, but in hindsight I realize that my play-through on Easy was sort of a simulated Hard.  I was unforgiving, relentlessly resetting to the last save point if I was spotted.  And I also now realize that I was far too hard on myself in terms of avoiding enemy attention.

The game easily passed my Media Test (do you want to re-watch or re-play from the beginning as soon as you’re done?) and I took the test literally, firing up a new game almost immediately and playing through on Hard.  I’m well past halfway through on Hard, playing a little differently (a little more dirt under the fingernails being tolerable to me when game mechanics are less accommodating by design).

At least at my (gravely limited) natural ability, Hard pushes you to push the system.  On my first play-through I would have looked down my nose at crouching and sneaking when in disguise (looks weird, wouldn’t actually work in person), but on Hard I’ve learned to work the system to my benefit.  The AI is pretty shabby in this game (much is being asked of it, and the general high-quality nature of the rest of the game definitely casts some shade on this weak point), but in its limited way it acknowledges that these types of behaviors are frequently required to get through in more clamped-down modes.  You get the occasional “Dude, stand up, stop sneaking around” AI heckle, but you can generally cruise on by, huddled up to the wall, scaling covers in front of your “peers”, and make it through without consuming your precious blending-in “Instinct” power.

You also learn the finer points of things like disguise: a disguise is only suspicious to those who are also wearing the same outfit.  So - in guard outfit last night - I sneaked past the guard booth into the locker room for lab techs.  Finding a lab tech disguise in a locker, I put that on, sneaked away from the other techs, and backtracked through the guard room without issue.  This is the sort of low-end non-linear thinking that is rewarded in this class of game: you’re not solving Zork puzzles here, but they are pushing you to notice an air vent as you slip past a guard, or perhaps consider grinding up the sleeping pills into the pizza rather than clocking the guy in the head.

The “signature kills” are becoming an obsession of mine.  Every time I choke somebody it feels like a missed opportunity to trick them into urinating onto an electrified fence or ignite a leaky gas pump.

And the game does throw you some bones to keep you out of stealth mode all the time.  I did a ninja run of a certain factory scene on my Easy play-through, deftly distracting and knocking guards unconscious, slipping through narrow passages, climbing through vents, only to discover in my Hard play-through that a sniper rifle was perched next to a wooden tower. On Hard I picked up the rifle, took cover, and cleared my curious opposition out, walking confidently over their remains on a clean path to the plant.  The genius of a game like this is that it’s not overly judgmental: I took a ding on score for doing it that way, but it was cathartic after juggling disguises and crafting movement plans in previous levels.  It doesn’t lose sight that it’s a game, not Mission Impossible, and sometimes you can break some eggs.

Now considering delving back in the Hitman corpus (ha) for previous titles…

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