Posts Tagged ‘musings’
5Here’s what I learned today: Tweens will be eaten up mid-tween by the AS3 garbage collector if it is inside a function that exits before the Tween completes. Here is a link to the lifesaving blog post about this: AS3 Tween Class Randomly Stops During Animation
Here’s also what I learned today: I’m now getting into that fun stage of learning programming where I pretty much know how to write the code to make stuff happen, but I don’t quite know all the subtleties of how the machine actually uses the code. The above was just one of many examples of this, where one minute I am chugging along confidently and the next I am utterly baffled, clueless, and like totally flipping out. They say love is a roller coaster ride. Try learning a computer language.
I was pondering whether to write this post, for fear that it would turn into yet another plaintive whine littering the Internets, but you know what, I think this is important enough to whine about. So here goes:
I just spent this entire evening of 5 hours doing nothing but sifting through the Internets instead of getting things done. (There, didn’t that sound suitably whiny? Anyhow.) Usually when I come home from work, I expect to Get Things Done, and by that I mean draw in my sketchbook or make progress on any of the 5 projects I have going or learn some more AS3 or finish a book. But instead, tonight, I read Google Reader. I read Google Reader’s 1000+ unread entries for 5 hours straight, interspersed with link-swapping via IM and Twitter-monitoring. While Blipping songs. And Wikipedia-surfing. And petting the cat.
Judging by tonight and the frequency with which tonight’s scenario has occurred over the past 3 months, I have pretty much become Web 2.0’s bitch. But now is not the time to feel self conscious about having potentially earned a new stereotypical designation. Now is the time to think carefully about why I do this, why I feel compelled to sacrifice hours of my life at a time to basically what amounts to info-hoarding.
In my forever ongoing education as an artist/graphic designer, I made yet another realization today. I guess I’d known this for quite some time but hadn’t really articulated it. Basically, at some point in the last 5 years, I made the transition from spending the majority of my time experimenting and figuring out how to create what I have in mind, to spending the majority of my time deciding between this option and that.
Before, I would spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to shade correctly, how to create a certain effect in Photoshop, how to draw the human body, etc. Now I spend the majority of my deciding between serif vs. sans-serif, humanist vs. grotesque, red vs. slightly orange, big vs. small, photo A or photo B, javascript or actionscript, etc. etc. The question is no longer “how,” but “why” this one element or style or whatever is better than the alternative.
I think a lot of things came together to abet this transition, among them primarily the huge assortment of free Photoshop tutorials on the fabulous, crazy Internets. Now I don’t have to really learn how to do anything anymore – if I desire a certain effect, I just look up the appropriate page from my vast Delicious bookmarks collection and get the info I need right away to recreate the target look. Likewise, even though I know fairly well how to render a human figure by hand, I never really will need to, because iStockphoto.com has a ridiculously large collection of human vector figures in any imaginable pose, to be had for just a few dollars and a click. The amount of readymade resources in the design world are bafflingly huge. No wonder nowadays I find myself pondering “why” rather than “how.”
Perhaps this is just another difference between how an art-oriented mind vs. a design-oriented mind operates. Art more is about the visual expression of the unfamiliar or original. Design is about the arrangment of elements (implied: preexisting) to make something pleasing. A long time ago, I thought art and design were quite similar in process because they require many of the same visual skills, but now more and more, I’m reevaluating this belief.
However this doesn’t mean the two can’t mesh, as I would always aim for – it merely means that each discipline has a lot to learn from the process of the other. For instance, I wonder if the design process is not limiting itself by focusing too much on picking and choosing between preexisting elements. I know that there are designers out there who go all out and make/experiment with everything from scratch, but that’s not the way it is taught or practiced at a lot of firms, including the one I work at. That is something I would like to take away from the art mindset more.
Sometimes its good to be aware of what you are doing, how you are operating on a day-to-day level, what conventions you’ve fallen into and others that you’ve abandoned. Which is why I write these rambly entries, I guess. =)
My company has a lovely holiday tradition of taking the whole gang (it’s a pretty small company) and their locally-stationed loved ones out for dinner and a show. Dinner is always at Fire+Ice (ahh, the high school memories), the show is the annual traditional song- and dance-filled performance called the Christmas Revels, and my boss’ name is Carol.
This was the first year I have been able to actually go, and Yang was also there. I had never seen a Revels performance before, though I’d been hearing about it extensively, as my company has had a very close relationship with them and designed a lot of stuff for them in the past. (I even got to do a logo comp for the Revels SummersDay festival, back in my internship days.) I was very excited to finally get to see them performing.
Revels is a tradition-inspired song, dance, and story performance company. They are nationally based, but have a pretty big presence in Boston. Their work is largely focused on celebrating the seasons through joyful family-oriented events/shows, and they take cues from a variety of different ethnic traditions. The Christmas Revels in particular seems to be focused on European traditions, which makes sense as it’s Christmas. Every year the Christmas Revels has a different theme, but there are some unifying recurring elements such as a Mummer’s Play and a Lord of the Dance audience-participation dance. Last year was a spectacular Balkan theme, which Carol says was absolutely stunning and soul-stirring but apparently not very well-received because it was too “esoteric.” (Yeah… what??) So this year they really toned it down. The theme/plot was a loose rendition of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, which is essentially a love story, but Revels adapted it to be more of a portrait of a traditional English village celebration of Christmas.
The performance was centered on one of the themes of the book, the dichotomy of tradition/past and innovation/future. Though I found the heavily-accented dialogue hard to understand (costume beards too thick? ^^;) I managed to gather that the light plot was about the arrival of a new harmonium (a symbol of progressive technology at the time) at this little quaint village, and there was an altogether spirited outcry by the townspeople against it replacing the charming old quire and boisterous caroling/mumming tradition. In the end, cherished tradition won over of course, and the children got their parade, and there was much caroling and dancing both joyful and somber.
It was a charming performance through and through, and though I knew close to nothing about English villages and old-school carols, I found myself belting out the lyrics to Donna Nobis Pacem next to a very expertly harmonizing Yang (and, on my other side, co-worker John, who was mumble-singing for all he was worth). Unlike any of the other holiday-season shows I’ve seen in my entire life (and I think I’ve seen a fair share), this one was truly “toned down” in many ways. The costumes were not fabulous by any means, nor where there awesome displays of stage pyrotechnics (there was some snow and dry ice, though), nor dazzling displays of virtuosic skill. There was just good, solid charm, and some beautifully rich singing voices. And, after you walk out of there, you realize you don’t need any of the showy fabulous to really feel fabulous about the season and all it entails.
Additionally, I think the show raises an interesting and forever relevant question: that we should all carefully consider, as the relentless march of time continues, what things we should keep and preserve for posterity. We should question whether new things can rightfully replace the old just by virtue of being the “latest and greatest.” The answer that Revels proposes is a resounding “no.” That there are traditions that bind together and warm hearts, like songs requiring a crowd’s unified voice to sing, and dances that remind us of the rigors and challenges that humanity has overcome, and all that good stuff, that we should definitely keep. And I think, after seeing Christmas Revels, they are right to believe so.
Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice, 2008 world… here’s to hoping 2009 is just as songful, danceful, and joyful for all… if not more.
It is one of the great ironies of my life that when I was a little ‘un, I wanted nothing more than to be able to soar through the skies like a bird. Now that I am grown up and subject to several rounds of air travel per annum, I am less than enthusiastic about the prospect.
It’s not that I have a fear of flying; just a slight distrust of it. What I distrust in particular is the sheer unreality of it. Even as a child I knew flight was not for humans, despite how badly I wanted it. Just like how I also had a feeling that cars were fundamentally incorrect… We just weren’t designed by nature to hurtle forward at 70 mph; we didn’t evolve the reflexes or the senses for it, and we perhaps never will (although technology can likely someday compensate). So despite my complete and unabridged understanding of the rules of probability, the physics of lift, and the strictness of airline employee training regimens, I still writhe in the grasp of plain, simple disbelief at what the hell am I doing 30k feet higher than I am supposed to be right now.
Another aspect I find somewhat unsettling is the portal-like experience of modern travel. It is swift enough that your brain can’t catch up to the new surroundings until much later, and yet not quite instantaneous enough that your brain is shock-startled into all-out readjustment mode. And, as with any portal, there is a sense that, once the portal closes behind you at your destination, it will be tough finding the same one to go back again.
Last but not least, I despise the weightless feeling. This is why I was never a big fan of the beginnings of roller coasters, although I usually found the rest of it to be awesome. So on a plane, I freak out a little inside every time the ride takes a turbulence-induced dip and I am suddenly weightless without my permission. Not cool.
Luckily for me, over the years I have come up with a number of strategies to distract me from being distracted by hurtling forward faster-than-natural at a height greater-than-natural. These are:
- re-reading Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” thinking about the huge supercollider they just built, and in general wondering about bleeding-edge physics and all its barely-discovered oddities… which makes flying seem quite normal in comparison
- reading Good or Time magazines (preferably one after the other) and pondering all the deep shit humanity is wading into… which is good for distracting me from just about anything
- folding paper cranes, knitting, or otherwise doing something twiddly-productive with my fingers
- staring really hard out the window, especially if there are whipped-cream fluffy clouds underneath the aircraft, and humming “A Whole New World” under my breath. Yeah, yeah…. hush.
- admiring Demidec Dan, who practically lives on an airplane
- comparing self to seafaring or landfaring explorers of yore, for which there was thankfully no spooky portal effect, but the trade-off was laborious foot- (or oar-) work and worm-encrusted rock bricks for food and not even complimentary soda to wash it down with. Bad cuisine is pretty distracting, all right
With such a formidable armada of ways to trick myself, I think I’ll be more than fine on the trip back. But still, wouldn’t it just be so much cooler if, as Ben Gibbard sings it:
I wish the world was flat like the old days
And I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes or speed trains or freeways
There’d be no distance that could hold us baaaaack
(guitar hook)
Happy Christmas Eve, everybody!
