Posted by Danny on Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 3:07 pm
I’ve had two distinct golden ages of walking: one was during undergrad, when I explored the trails around Nipissing and North Bay listening to Teaching Company lectures, and the other seems to be right now. I’ve been at my family’s cottage since last autumn and through the winter, with walking being a critical part of my lifestyle: the grocery store is a six kilometre round trip, and is a very boring route, so I’ve taken to adding variety by hiking the trails near Brechin and Lagoon City to get there. This typically entails detours of another four to eight kilometres, often in completely the wrong direction. The bush here is swampy and beautiful, riddled with nicely-maintained ATV roads and a raised, straight strip of land that used to be a railroad line, handily cutting across the wetlands in slow, stately dereliction. The bugs, which can be monstrous during the summer because of all the standing water, haven’t yet appeared, so the walks are essentially perfect.
I’ve semi-intentionally developed some feedback loops which support my daily excursions. I need groceries regularly because of my eating and drinking habit, but I dislike carrying heavy bags down three kilometres of straight country road, so I make light trips every two days or so. The exercise typically leaves me unhungry and buzzing, so I don’t over-shop when I go. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks while I walk, which I try to ration specifically for the purpose, adding to the appeal in general and making the prospect of actually getting up and going out more inviting than it might otherwise be. All of this has grown into a habit that actually makes me cranky and restless when I miss a day, and particularly good books mean I’m incentivized to stay out longer and walk further. My regular routes are now about twelve to fourteen kilometres each day, about a third of which is over roughish terrain. It feels fantastic.
What’s been really exciting lately is the return of hibernating and migratory animals as the weather warms up. A couple days ago, there was an explosion of mating red admiral butterflies that’s still going strong—enough that they regularly crash into me and occasionally land on my jacket while I’m passing through. There are Canada geese with fuzzy babies in adorable profusion: walking along the undeveloped side of the canal system that crenellates Lagoon City like sulci, I saw three families all at once. The region is ravaged by beavers too, one of which swam alongside me at walking pace the other day for several uncanny, contemplative minutes. Blue herons and enormous, motorcycle-engine wild turkeys explode out of the undergrowth along the path regularly: the former lend the rest of the walk a sort of exotic prehistoricism after I watch them very slowly swim through the naked trunks and branches of the drowned trees and diminish unconcernedly into the distance; the latter scare the shit out of me and make me jump around and scream for a while. Yesterday, I saw turtles for the first time here: three the size of compact discs, shaped like perfect skipping stones seeing to play with each other in complex acrobatic tumbles and whirls in the deep, clear, slow-moving stream, and one great saurian thing with a shell more than a foot and a half in diameter, its plated stegosaurus tail lolling behind it, luxuriating in the sunny mud. For a quarter of an hour I stayed about a metre away and watched it breathe while I gradually came to understand that I was sitting in nettles.
I’m very happy.
You come too.
P.S.: As enticement, I’ve discovered something sensational and human-made in the woods that I desperately want to show people, but I’m not telling what it is. Toronto friends, you should make arrangements to visit before the bugs come out.
Posted by Danny on at 12:30 am
My hands are shaking. I’m still coming down from the rush as I write this. I’m very pleased, though it will matter to almost no one. I’m writing about Audiosurf in the middle of 2012.
If you don’t know, Audiosurf was an indie game done good from early 2008 for the PC. It’s essentially a synaesthesia engine: you feed it an mp3, it analyzes its waveform, and then spits out a driving track coherent with the elements of the music. Dramatic swells become hills, rhythm becomes bumps; the intensity of the music is the speed at which you drive your little Tron-esque hovercar down the velvety, translucent highway. The course is populated with “cars”—colourful or grey blocks—that sit in the lanes and drive forwards at a consistent rate. The game (at least, the variant of the game that I play) involves weaving between the cars, collecting coloured ones and avoiding grey ones. The placement of the cars also cares about the elements of the music, so that hitting the right blocks often creates a pleasing, sympathetic percussion that grows almost intuitive. If you know the piece of music well, even on your first run-through you can almost experience prescience.
I played this game for hours and hours across the months following its release and have returned to it regularly, like a favourite album (I have favourite albums to which I surf). For me, the combination of beloved music and multisensory accord easily invokes a sort of flow state which can be unspeakably satisfying. But also, I love Audiosurf for the intense focus it helps me develop when listening to music I’ve never heard before: without the sort of formal, theoretical training and dedication that enables some of my friends perceive essentially linguistic information in music—and thereby listen to it with consistent attention—I find my mind always wanders. Something about the way I play the game helps me concentrate longer, harder, which feels great.
There are several ways to play, including a totally relaxed mode which can’t be lost, and really functions as an interactive visualizer more than a game. If I was perfectly cerebral and true to the sentiment above, I’d probably play this way, but I’m sometimes a competitive jerk and definitely a comfy-chair adrenaline junky, so I play a version that rewards me for the expert collection of “good” blocks and the avoidance of “bad” blocks. Audiosurf uses consistent rules to build its tracks, so anyone riding the same song will be playing on the same track as me, right down to the placement of blocks and the opportunity for scoring, meaning that I am in competition with everyone in the world who likes the same music as I do. Helpfully, these scores are tracked and displayed in-game, allowing me to challenge my friends to particularly pernicious tunes, or fuss over my world-leadership of a particular rendition of a particular song. This can get obsessive, and I have gradually extricated myself from the more addictive, less intrinsically elating aspects of the game. I can now, for example, stop myself from resetting a track after hitting a single “bad” block (which effectively disqualifies me from making the top ten for even lightly contested songs); enjoyment of the music and experience itself is still possible without the tang of competition, or even just self-perfection.
But the thrill is an unguilty pleasure while I’m still a contender, dammit, especially when surfing a piece of music for the first time. It is appealing, after flawlessly conquering a punishing track on the first run and finding myself on the leaderboard, to feel boss. So, here’s the part of this post that essentially no one can be expected to care about; that’s cool. You can go away now. Try the game sometime if you haven’t already—I really like it. Bye!
Read more »
Posted by Danny on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 at 6:21 pm
I did a scale post a while back but have since discovered amazing tools and toys for you (and possibly your students). So here’s an update.
Read more »
Posted by Danny on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at 10:06 pm
With longsuffering patience, Dad once tried to explain to me the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction when I accidentally abbreviated his preferred genre. Good science fiction—hard science fiction—worked rigorously to represent the universe according to our best scientific understanding, and then to build a plot by speculating on ideas currently under investigation at the periphery, feeding educated wonder. For an author of science fiction, the obvious risk is that your work could become dated instantly and unpredictably, but the grail was to produce something of tingling prescience. Soft science fiction, or my ignorant “sci-fi,” my father contemptuously lumped in with space opera and fantasy in general. I was heavily (exclusively) into Guy Gavriel Kay at the time, and I’m sure it was even then a great sadness that I never showed much interest in his enormous, pervasively-read collection.
While he was still alive, I ran out of patience for fantasy and tried some of his recommendations: I found I liked work set in the very near future (I was blown away by Brin’s Earth and was better than lukewarm about Greg Bear’s Darwin series), while I couldn’t stand anything involving easy space travel or anthropomorphic aliens. But, except for my beloved first-year astronomy class, at this time school and Ksenija were nudging me toward classical, historical, and Serious Contemporary Literature—ultimately away from Dad’s library.[1]
After he died, out of a stupid, belated impulse to please him, I tried giving science fiction another go. I bumped my Dawkins- and Sagan-heavy queue with books recommended by friends better versed in the area and sympathetic (resigned) to my specific irritants: I discovered Neal Stephenson (thanks again to Ksenija, incidentally), who is probably my favourite author of fiction at this point; also, attending semi-weekly readings of science fiction short stories in Thothica, expertly curated and read live by Elaine Lorefield, has softened me up nicely. New Year’s Eve, therefore, was probably an ideal time for Liz to give me the collected stories of Ted Chiang.
Read more »
Posted by Danny on Friday, February 24, 2012 at 5:12 pm
As my friends, acquaintances, and an unfortunate proportion of recently-met strangers know, I’m enamoured with the electronic paper display technology found in contemporary, dedicated ebook-reading devices (like the Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Sony Reader, and friends, as opposed to the tablet computers that all these kids are playing with, now). While the technology hasn’t yet advanced to the point where it’s responsive or colourful enough to replace LCD screens in consumer devices, it is my hands-down favourite medium for texts longer than a few paragraphs. It would be magnificent if I could drag my browser from my desktop’s monitor seamlessly onto my 6” reader the way I would if I was cool enough to rock multiple displays, but until that integration happens, I’ve been using dotEPUB as a workaround. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 