Learning Through Playing

The Cat in the Bottle

World Game Museum: Exhibit

Ed Applewhite to Kirby (pdx4d), 13 May 1998

Night and the City (movie review)

I got the Criterion Collection version of this one, and as of this posting I've only been through disc one, but that already means watching the movie twice, the second time with a very knowledgeable overvoice giving all kinds of backstory. That's what I love about the Movie Madness collection: how much behind the scenes stuff is stored. This latest borrowing extends my noirs kick.

The director of the film was a little like the anti-hero, a guy on the run, in the director's case from the fascists using "anti-communism" as a rallying cry for the mob. The mob controlled Hollywood and people like the director, into more American values, had to leave the country to find work. Unlike the movie’s loser dreamer schemer, Jules Dassin managed to have a pretty successful career in the rear view mirror, despite those ax-grinding Nixonians.

People in 1950 didn't really like the movie when it first came out because it painted too raw of a picture. Instead of capitalism meaning "a few bad apples" (the justice force will protect us) it seemed to mean "bad apples all the way down" (everyone purely selfish and desperate). 

Of course no one talks about "capitalism" in the movie, just they make London the backdrop, and we're supposed to make the connection to "a rotten system" on our own. By whatever name, right?

There’s a lot more to the backstories and I haven’t even watched disc two yet. If you’re into film studies, see if you can find a source as good as Movie Madness. What podcasters talk noirs?  Anything on NPR?

Movie Madness is moving to Sandy Boulevard by the way. The new storefront advertises that’s what’s happening. It’ll be across the street from its parent, the Hollywood Theater. For me, it’ll be a little further to drive, or I’ll do what I did today and take the 75. I was headed to the nearby sushi train.

Filing Taxes

Preparing Taxes

Another Monday rolls around, a first one in March, and suddenly everyone is thinking the same thing: next month I have to pay taxes.

As I’ve blogged about several times over the years, I get interviewed by a tax professional after I’ve retrieved and summarized the year’s documents. This year is no different, other than I have developed more of a system. My wife was a professional bookkeeper so I used to leave the accounting all to her, but twenty years later, I’m not that helpless.

What I do is what everyone who has bank accounts or stuff like PayPal or crypto wallets does: 

• generate statements for the entire year, showing all transactions, both in and out; 
• iterate over all such accounts (we think of iterators in Python, an umbrella type). 
• Then I filter out the business expenses and 
• offset those against business income to keep my taxes that of a small business (which it is).

What do I do for a living? You may have attended some of my lectures, online, asynchronously, or even in person over the years at a Pycon or OSCON or one of these (even a Djangocon in Chicago). 

I put myself down as a teacher and writer (what kind of writing? A lot of it is curriculum development — echoes of my job at McGraw-Hill back in the 1980s). 

I do both with or without income deriving therefrom (gig economy). For example, last year around this same time I was working for bosses based closer to Eastern Europe than to Japan, just to make a Where in the World Carmen Sandiego clue out of it.

Speaking of kid games (computer games for kids), I dusted off an old Codesters account from my Coding with Kids chapter, and was gratified to find my curated projects (not all by me I don’t think) still working. I wonder if any of my students have anything curated. I had a teacher account. 

Codesters came after MIT Scratch in our sequence. All our curriculum stations were cloud based, even if the classes were in person, until the virus hit, the pandemic, at which point we started summer camps over Zoom.

As people were recovering from the pandemic, I found myself back in the classroom, this time with just the one school, not a school-serving company. 

Working with various concepts on up the ladder, starting high, going low (to beginner), back up to a summit and so on, repeatedly, is a great way to get a mature picture of the landscape, so to speak. Which landscape is always changing. 

One can’t help but be out of date on various topics. We get our updates asynchronously, that’s just how it is. There’s an entry under Doppler Effect that’s reminiscent.

Breakfast of Champions

This was a bleak day in world history, so what better way to start than with a good, healthy breakfast of champions? Shades of Vonnegut, right?

I made it to H-Mart yesterday. That’s an Asian (Korean-owned they say) food mart on nearby Belmont, where there used to be a Zupan’s. What was I seeking? Kimchi. I also got a cold sesame noodles I wanna try (missing our favorite Chinese restaurant’s version, closed long ago). And some dried peas I thought were wasabi but were plain, yet still good (I ate the whole bag).

I haven’t found kimchi at Winco, and whereas Fubonn is quite close by there on SE 82nd (as is Hong Phat), a brisk walk from the Steeplejack (was Bank of America) on Hawthorne was in the cards. We had just had our curry stew.

Kimchi and an NA Guinness at around 10 AM gets me going this Saturday. Very Pacific Rim if you ask me.

I’ve been busy printing out bank statements and PayPal logs, getting ready for an appointment with H&R Block. This time last year, I was winding up with Clarusway as a data science teacher and shifting gears into full time Python development in service of my own School of Tomorrow curriculum. That work is paying off in some dimensions.

You could think of me as a writer / teacher who eschewed wood pulp dead trees as a medium (i.e. print) because my dream had always been hypertext, as in hyperlinks, so once the internet came along, it was duck to water time.

State of the Swamp

 [adapted from the WILPF listserv version ]

The military mindset is all about shirking responsibility by saying "I was just following orders" -- a syndrome which goes all the way to the top, where you put an irresponsible moron scapegoat, thereby making the unthinkable more likely, as the obedient minions scurry to carry out stupid illegal orders.

AI is the ultimate scapegoat boondoggle in that one can always point to AI and say "I didn't come up with this plan, Claude did, or Grok" or whomever is the dummy dujour.

What we need to do is disallow the scapegoating of AI.  I'm sure AI is telling RAND to nuke Russia now and be done with it.  It's the humans who listen to AI who are dumber than dumb.

Washington DC think tanks are notoriously lazy, full of over-privileged primate school [sic] chumps like Victoria Nuland, the "brain" behind the Nuland Nazis, the ones who tried to make an ethno-state outta Ukraine (dumb dumb dumb).

Let's call out the think tanks for what they are:  worthless at best, a source of great human misery on average.

Acting Locally

The scandal sheets will suggest I perform animal sacrifice, which is true, as in our neck of the woods it's legal to keep a pet python, which I do. I buy live mice for it about every nine days on average.

However scandal sheets are all about twisting words, which is what some breeds of wordsmith pride themselves for doing. I get it, I do it too sometimes. Like when I dare to say "four basis vectors" for the quadrays when clearly the one is the linear combination of the other three, allowing for a negation operator (I take it away).

As I head to the mouse store, whenever the weather next looks propitious, I'm gonna pick one of the new food carts next to Tom's for a sample transaction. I know I won't get to use crypto, but I always pretend that's what I'm using, when I pass over bills or use bank accounts. Electrical impulses signal an increment over here with an offsetting decrement over there. That's transactions for ya, call it money if you want to (there's no guarantee others will agree with your assessment).

Tom's if you don't know is a local neighborhood diner, classically of Greek heritage as many diners are, a stereotype that resonates for a reason. I've been to Tom's countless times and hope to keep going. Closer to the mouse store (pet shop, lotsa herps (i.e. reptiles)) is Sckavones, reminiscent of Tom's but its own thing. So that's how to spell Sckavones... I might've goofed up in some earlier blog posts. I permit myself typo fixes of that kind, usually with an uptick in the time signature (as if we had omni-version control).

The live mice do not experience worry or terror as they have no experience with predatory animals. Pythons are pros and constrict their prey very quickly, leaving just enough time for a short flash-through, one might imagine, of what has been a brief life. Onward! If you think in those terms.

The python is named Barry and has been of net benefit to our family. In my Python teaching days (meaning the computer language), especially if my audience was kids, I might get Barry out of his terrarium and share him over Zoom. As it is, I rarely handle him these days. Maybe I should more often. He's a ball python, meaning he likes to ball up and sleep his life away, not uncharacteristic of reptiles, especially if bred to expect room service.

As for what I've been up to with School of Tomorrow, you may remember (if you try to follow) a recent confession about my lack of camera-control savvy. We're talking "virtual camera" inside a "virtual world" made with ray tracing. I've been pressing forward in my trainings to get more experience working out with that feature, as "orientation" (in the OODA sense) is one of my themes. It'd pay off to be less dorky maybe?

We study General Systems Theory a lot (Systematics some call it -- I tend to say GST) which is about patterns, such as the dwindling supply of experienced studio sound engineers in LA owing to wannabe and even successful artists gravitating to the home studio model. No one needs to spend big bucks to cut a record anymore, which means giving up a level of quality control developed over time by people with taste and skills. The LA music scene wasn't primo for no reason.

I mentioned seeing a similar pattern around esoteric forms of Buddhism, such as we find represented here in the "Buddhist Ghetto" (a term of endearment for our eclectic neighborhood). Not to be specific to any one temple, we can all relate to going from crowds in a break-the-door-down frenzy to join up, be a member, to a situation of almost no wannabe converts, a total dry-up of "minions" (not to be disrespectful; any in-group needs noobs, beginners, apprentices, people in the pipeline).

In other words: torch-passing. The Olympics gives us the relay race. A great metaphor. Then there's "dropping the baton" which is akin to torch-dropping (stereotypically a no-no, as it'd go out, and the whole point is to maintain at least the illusion of continuity). 

But let's zoom out even more and further apply our Buddhist mindset: it's not necessarily a great tragedy that we have such a thing as "fads" during which people all try something out, experiment, and then move on, lessons learned. "Fads are great!" I can hear Tony the Tiger telling us on TV.

Breakdown in PR

Reflecting on POVs

Alternative Closeup Vistas

(click through to Flickr for magnified view options)

One might imagine I’m some kind of super-nerd when it comes to POV-Ray, which I take credit for compiling on my Raspberry Pi long ago, and for getting to run well on a Mac, whereas its most-developed-for platform was Windows.

However when it comes to scene description language, used internally to that ray-tracer, I don’t consider myself an uber-master by a long shot. I might have benefitted from some patient teachers but having these tools at home made self-study an easy prospect to realize.

So it sort of came to me recently, that I’ve been too rigid in how I place the camera. I’ve been struggling with showing BRYG the way we want to: Blue to my left, Red to my right, Yellow behind those two, in the middle, but in the distance, and Green up above, at the apex, the eye in the sky so to speak. Like the BRY triangle on the ground is the base, the tripod, and they come together at a center (I make it Orange for origin) to support a mast, a flagpole pointing up, to the green orb glowing at the apex.

To be more specific, I was using rotation parameters over simply taking control of initial positioning. Rotating the camera involves orbiting around the origin on a great circle defined by the existing radius. But why mess with that so exclusively, just look from a different angle and rotate from there.

Why worry about all this stuff and what does it have to do with POV-Ray?  Well, put on a computer game developer hat and you will see right away that some in-common orientation makes sense if a team plans to play by some set of rules, usually necessary for a real game. Call them conventions. Call them axioms. Call them definitions. The terminology varies.

Again, my “insight” was I can render my scene with the camera looking at the origin from any location, and I have control over that location by means of XYZ coordinates, in the world coordinate system that comes with POV-Ray, the one native to its arena (or vista if you prefer). 

I’ll call my insight a “duh moment” as even putting it into words makes it sound so obvious, so how could it possibly be a breakthrough? Some breakthroughs are like that: you see the obvious (unobvious to you, hitherto).

But that’s just an example of how below the bell, to the left of the peak I mean, I am, when it comes to my POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision is what POV means, but also Point of View in the art world) skill set. I’m not confessing some great weakness. My French sucks even worse than my Arabic, which is saying something. I’m not a master of every skill set I’ve acquired. That’s really par for the course, nothing to exude shame over.

I’ve also played around with spawning a process from Python and running POV-Ray within that. However most of my experiments were of a different sort. Since the pipeline begins in Pylandia, and outputs in POV-Ray scene description language, why not output in something else? 

VRML was a first realized prospect, but browsers moved away from VRML (remember VRML? Virtual Reality Markup Language). 

What else? Why Visual Python of course, an API to 3D World mere mortals (like me) could master. I swapped out POV-Ray output for real time control of OpenGL (3D rendering). In Python that might mean talking to a different module. I did my original Hypertoons by this means.

The computer game I imagine we were working on (there’s a Made in Mexico angle) features a POV (point of view) that starts out looking at what I’ll call the TV Tower. 

A tetrahedron defines it. In some versions, three taut cables tether it tightly in its vertical state, pillar vertical, no matter high winds. In other versions, it looks more like a camera tripod with legs Red, Blue and Yellow. Yellow is in the back from our home position angle, staring at said tripod, and looking up the mast it supports, to the Green ball, which might be programmed. They all could be programmed. 

The lights at the corners could maybe exchange information (flora, fauna…) through the six edges defining the home base tetrahedron (HBT or HB4). This could be the premise of many a game.

Games conventionally come in levels and the game of “levels” comes in categories. 

Most commonly, the pyramid, narrowing towards the top and usually presented as 2D-flat, so we don’t have to worry whether its a half-octahedron or true 4eyes (a shoptalk) in this picture (3D-sculpture talk would take us there, is what we use here in QuadCraft). 

Alternatively: concentric circles, with “more inward” levels usually the more desirable direction. Percolating to a surface and breaking free, escaping, in any direction, is less commonly the story-driver meme, but “uncommon” is no put-down. Bell curves are what they are.

As readers here know, I think it’s low-IQ to think in terms of “races” in the first place, so asking how the races rank IQ-wise kind of puts one in a subculture, simply from asking. My subculture wouldn’t pose the question using obsolete eugenics concepts. We’re not kooks.