May Contain Nuts

Our office just got a penis enlargement spam message.

Through our FAX MACHINE.

I kid you not.  I’m going to see if I can abscond with it at lunch and scan it for the sake of posterity.  And humor.  Mostly humor.

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in .

I debated actually posting this, for reasons that will doubtless become clear later, but I needed to get this off my chest, because it’s important.

I am no longer under the employ of American Multi Cinema, Inc.!

After 4 years, 4 months, and 7 days, I am finally free of AMC Theatres. I spent just over 4 years at the theater in Newport, KY, and transferred to the theater in Spokane, WA for the remainder of my employment, but as of Friday, March 16th 2007, I can kiss the dorky red/navy uniform and the depressing 4 year pin good-bye.

Today (or Monday, anyway) is, to use the cheesy over-sentimented saying, the first day of the rest of my life. Endings and beginnings indeed.

Please send congratulations privately; comments will be disabled on this post, despite the happy occasion, for the reasons previously noted as becoming clear later.

I’ve got new artwork done, but because I’m lazy and need to go to work, it’s not on the Realm’s gallery yet (I’m getting kind of tired of maintaining 3 galleries, but oh wells, the portfolio gallery isn’t for just anything, and HBI is). I do have it in my portfolio gallery, however, so you can check it out here. It’s the two iPod Mini renders. I’m really incredibly proud of them.

Also, in two weeks I will have been at AMC Theatres for 4 years. This depresses me. I got my 4-year pin in the mail today, and while I appreciate the small humorous irony in the pin being in the shape of a projector (1 year is popcorn, 2 year I forget, 3 year is a film reel (which I received with a sympathy card, so that at least made me chuckle)), I really didn’t want to be here this long. I have a potential job offer, but I’m third in line for it and am arguably the least qualified of the three people applying. I’m supposed to hear back by the end of the week, but I’ll give it to the end of next before I start giving up on the idea. If it falls through, something drastic is going to happen, because I’m sick of being stuck here. I’ve actually been encouraged to pick up and take off if this new job doesn’t pan out. I have something I can do where I’m going (and I’m being intentionally vague because I’ve been asked to be), but it will require a second job to pull it off, and AMC has so far been slow beyond the point of heel-dragging in figuring out if I can transfer to a theatre there, so I’ve all but given up on that happening. I’ll get a job at a restaurant if I have to, and the fact that I’ve publicly stated that I will never do that again should indicate how desperate I am for a change of pace and scenery at this point in time. It also will mean probably leaving Osc here, something I hate doing because I know she wants to get out of this house as much as I do, and because it’ll mean being apart for at least a couple of months. Still, I need to do something, because I’m not going to stick around here much longer. I don’t think I can do so and stay sane (or at least, motivated).

Tomorrow should prove to be a thoroughly exhausting and horrible day at work, and I believe I am completely within my rights to blame it all on Universal Studios and their handling of the release of King Kong. Bear with me a moment while I explain this.

King Kong is, according to the information I’ve seen, a 3 hour and 20 minute long film. Add trailers and it begins to approach 4 hours in length without even blinking. This is a movie which opens everywhere Wednesday, December 14, but which will have midnight screenings the night before in many markets, including Cincinnati. I happen to be working at a theatre which will be running just such a midnight screening.

Now, allow me to briefly wax self-important for a moment. You may think that an audience’s enjoyment of the film rests entirely upon the crew that actually created it. In this, you’re rather mistaken, for there’s a final link in the chain from script to screen: the projectionist. In fact, the film industry is quite possibly unique in how much the final impact of a product relies on the actions of someone not even remotely related to the product’s development. You’d really never know that my job is so important given how appallingly little I get paid to do it, but there you go. Anyway, it is the responsibility of myself and everyone else working in the projection booth to ensure that the people who show up to the midnight premiere of King Kong get their $9.50’s worth (the money they blow in concession is no concern of mine, that’s all up to the concessionists). In order to do this, it is customary and pretty much a required practice that the films we show are tech-screened before being shown to the public. In this way, we can identify problems and replace damaged film as quickly as possible. In the case of the midnight show, this enables us to put the best of all prints on screen for our patrons, as replacement parts don’t come the same day we need them.

Now, here’s the important part. The midnight show is at midnight (obviously) at the close of business Tuesday night. That’s tomorrow. This means that we have to have the film ready to run for the public at that time, tech-screened or not (and obviously, we prefer it to be tech screened). This means that we have to have at least 4 hours of lead time to get the film tech-screened. Typically, when a film has a midnight premiere, we get the films a day before that (in this case, Monday) to allow us enough time to assemble them, screen them, and verify their quality. Unfortunately, Universal Studios doesn’t seem to understand this fact.

In fact, Universal Studios seems to be going out of their way to be as much of a pain in the ass as humanly possible. Because of their paranoia about potential theft of the prints, they decided not to send us our five prints Monday. We get them tomorrow, the day of the midnight screening. As if that’s not asinine enough, they did decide to send us one reel of the film Monday… reel 8 (the movie, being 3:20 in length, is at least 10 reels long). A reel we can’t possibly do anything with. If it were the first reel we could have attached it to the trailers. If it were the last reel we could have added lighting cues to the credits. But no. We get reel 8. Bastards.

Now, I must admit, I can sympathize with Universal’s paranoia about film theft (even though I really don’t understand it… it’s not like your average Joe is going to have the assembly tools, the $10,000 35mm projector, and the digital sound processor needed to actually watch the film anyway), but their approach really is just beyond asinine. If they wanted to protect the film from theft (or even piracy), just ship it with one reel missing, like the last reel, and then send it separately. It’s what they’re doing now anyway, just in an order that actually makes some degree of sense. But instead of being intelligent, they’ve decided to totally screw the projectionists over by holding onto the film until the last possible moment, which could potentially have a negative impact on the viewing experience of thousands if not tens of thousands of movie-goers nation-wide. And for as much as I try not to sometimes, I really do give a damn about the experience people have at the movies, because I watch movies too, and it drives me insane when there are problems with the presentation.

So thank you, Universal Studios, for shitting all over the people who actually make it worth people’s time to come see the products that you release. But then, you don’t care, because you’re getting the film rental money regardless of how many refunds we hand out at the theatre for crappy presentation, so really it’s only the theatres that will feel the ill effects of your crappy-ass anti-piracy maneuver. Though I imagine that, for the end-consumer, this really isn’t much different from the boat-load of technical problems software anti-piracy tools have begun instigating, so in this regard the film industry really isn’t all that unique.

So this past week things have fallen into a pretty regular pattern around here. Get up around 2, go to work until quite late at night (at least midnight or later), come home, work on an overdue web project until about 6am, then go to bed. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’ve been doing this since Wednesday, trying to get caught up on the pile of bugs that have accumulated over the past few months. I think I’m finally on the home stretch now, as I’ve really only got bugfixing and administrative tools left, plus a few straggling minor features to deal with.

Hopefully I’ll be able to wrap that up within the next week or so, and then I can turn my full attention to a number of other things I’ve got backlogged right now. Here’s what’s on my list:

• Video for the Eleri / Myst Embassy Adobe Creative Suite competition
• Upgrade DPWR to Invision Power Board 2.1 and Invision Gallery 2.0
• Build some new material in 3DS for my portfolio and demo reel
• Work on an ITT-sponsored student/alumni graphic design / multimedia contest

I’m gonna be busy…

So I’m still behind on my web development contract. The week and a half of sheer insanity followed by three straight days of grueling horror as we premiered Star Wars did not help matters any, and I’m presently trying to retain a grip on sanity, which means my ability to write code that does anything but print “AMC is a demon-spawn” is rather limited. I also, despite all indications otherwise after the premiere, still have a job at AMC, though I do need to cull my hours in order to catch up on web development. I say this because after the premiere (which did not go off without a hitch, despite our best efforts), the three of us who ran the midnight showing were fairly certain we’d get written up for the problems, even though we couldn’t have done anything more to prevent them. Had we been written up, the three of us would have walked, and by all reports, about 4 more people would have followed us off the job. (Un?)fortunately, this was not the case, and everyone is still gainfully employed, but still looking for a reason to leave.

I’m pondering the intelligence of my bank, as they reported that a check I deposited was in my account balance according to the online account access site when in fact $860 of the $960 was still lacking in a magical property known as “funds availablility”, which means my efforts to pay off the Cinema Display have resulted in my account going under the zero limit. Poopy. Fortunately, a recent re-check has indicated that I am no longer overdrawn and that the Apple payment went through without taking me below zero since my check deposit also apparently finished going through today. Yay. I’m thinking about driving to the Apple Store tomorrow after work and dragging a dual 2.3GHz G5 out the door with me, w00t.

I am apparently in a limbo state that RAWA and I have co-deemed “in the running” as far as my application at Cyan is concerned… they’re not quite actually really actively hiring at the moment, but apparently someone was impressed because they do actually send you an email if you suck and they want you to go away, and I’ve yet to get a “go away” email. Woohoo.

After watching the special edition DVDs of A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back (ah for the days when “Episode X” did not connotate instant recognition of what the smeg you were talking about), I have concluded that digital effects are a lot more expensive, in terms of man-hours, than traditional effects. The original New Hope and Empire credits have about a 30 to 40 person crew listed under optical effects, miniatures, and muppetry. The Special Edition add-on credits have a list of about 100 extra people on Lead TD (a term I still need to find the definition of and actually memorize this time) and Animation, plus rotoscoping and matchmoving. That’s a hell of a lot of people. I admit it was probably harder than it should have been since the original trilogy wasn’t shot with ILM’s target thingies all over the set for matchmoving purposes and whatnot, but still… 100 people doing the job that 30 people did fantastically well almost 30 years ago. Go figure.

I’ve been asked if I have any intentions of going into film given how much I tend to talk about it, but really, I talk about it because that’s what I deal with about 35 hours a week, and I see a lot of good and an extraordinary amount of bad movies roll through our doors at AMC Newport. When I talk about film, or storytelling, or digital effects, I’m largely basing my reactions and opinions on what I’ve seen and discussed at work and in school. I really have no burning desire to go into digital film effects at ILM, Weta, Cinesite, or Sony Pictures Imageworks. They do absolutely mind-blowing stuff (usually… I’ve seen bad [and I mean truly visually bad, not just a slip in a matchmove every few dozen scenes] from everybody but Weta, but I’ve only seen LotR from them), but they are largely involved in simply bringing an artistic vision to the screen as best as they can manage. It’s a fairly one-way pipeline in film, and I want to do something that has more two-way-ness in it, which is why I want to make video games. More than that, though, I want to tell stories. Not just telling stories to people, though, but with people. That’s the real fun, I think, which is why I’m eyeing Cyan rather seriously, becase I get the feeling, based on what Rand has said in interviews, that he wants to advance the role of storytelling and interaction in games. This intrigues me, and I’d like to be on-board while he does whatever he’s doing.

Tangentally, I’ve decided that the next time I play Myst, I need to make a mini-game out of it entitled “find the construction errors”, which basically involves pouring over each still and trying to see where things were built or textured badly. As a sort of component, the goal is to try and determine how each object was built just by analysing it visually in the final render. This was brought on by a recent test of my Cinema Display’s visual quality at very low resolutions (namely 640×480), wherein I noticed several oddities on Myst Island, such as the uber-reflective Planetarium rock texture (you can see the dock reflected off the side when you’re standing right beside it) and the mis-aligned Tree Elevator (the tree is three parts: a bottom, the elevator box, and the top [plus the leaf cone], and the elevator part doesn’t line up with the top and bottom). This is largely aimed at learning from other people’s mistakes, not pointing them out simply to make fun of them. The rest of it is just good-natured fun seeing how far CG has come since 1993 in terms of accuracy and what you can do with it if you do it properly. Myst is an inspiration to all us late-blooming “three guys and a garage an internet” CG artists who want to do something fun .

So it’s occured to me that I talk about this (syncing prints) a lot but I don’t ever actually say how we do it… Gobo Fraggle finally called me on it at MYSTcommunity, but since it was in a somewhat off-topic conversation, I decided to post the answer in a more public venue for easy reference at a later date.

Anyway, this requires a little bit of pre-explaination with regards to modern 35mm projector technology. Unlike old-fashioned projectors, ours are not reel-to-reel (think of the home-theatre 8mm and 16mm projectors if you don’t know what reel-to-reel is). With modern-day movies averaging 6 reels in length, and movie multiplexes housing anywhere between 6 and 30 projectors, it becomes largely impractical and annoying to employ enough people to monitor the movies as they play and change the reel over roughly every 15 to 20 minutes. So, what we do is we take all of the reels, and we tape them together. We then take this massive disc of film and lay it on a “platter”, which feeds out from the center like an 8-track tape. This then runs through the projector and feeds back onto a different platter. Our “trees” have 3 platters each, so we can have one running (taking up 2 platters) and one sitting on the third for a later show.

When we sync a print, we’re basically running the same print through multiple projectors at the same time. This requires a number of extra rollers to move the film from one projector to the next, and as I can personally attest, setting up these rollers can at times be a real pain. To get into a bit more detail, we thread the film off of the platter in the theatre where we want to start the sync, run it to the intake on the projector back through the “tree”, and then, since we want to keep going, we skip threading the platter and projector for the moment and move to the sync rollers. We follow the rollers to the next projector we want to add, thread through its intake rollers, out through its “tree”, and on to the next set of rollers. We repeat this process until we’ve threaded all of our sync rollers and end on the platter beside the projector we want to end at. Then, starting at the last projector, we thread each projector, pulling out any slack as we go so we don’t loose tension (tension is important to keeping the film off the ground and running properly… if we loose it, alarms go off and the movie stops to prevent causing damage to the film).

We’re fortunate in that our theatre’s projectors can be automated, so that starting them all simultaneously is handled by the computer; all we do is hit “start” on one of them and they all start. Assuming everything was threaded properly, we don’t snap the film or loose tension. Trust me, when you’ve got that many people waiting to see a movie (and especially one like Star Wars), having film trouble is a bad thing .

This’ll be fun…

I have a 4-11 shift tonight, and then a midnight-8am shift the following day. I know what it’s for, though, and I’m betting we can be done before 8… we’re going to be cleaning projectors and the booth windows so that we can get as crisp of an image as we can, and then we’re going to be adjusting the lens alignment and focus so there’s no ghosting or shadows or blurry images on-screen (the humor in this is that both Pat and I are near-sighted… I need new glasses and Pat doesn’t usually wear his unless he’s driving). I’ll be taking the laptop to work with me so I can continue to try and get caught up on my web development project in the downtime. Whee.

Hate Star Wars… *mutter*

Oh, and as of the 12th, we’d sold 3,227 tickets… our theatre, fully loaded, can hold a little over 3,600.

Here’s something I’ve picked up on over the past number of years working in a guest-centric industry as well as running my own forum and assisting with the upkeep of several others…

People who have a problem will very, very often refuse to actually pay attention to where they are directing their complaints. On forums, I’ve noticed that a large number of the mis-placed tech issue threads are started by people who are more often than not the type to be threatening legal action against the publisher and the developer for producing faulty software (to the best of my knowledge, despite all of the claims and threats that Presto, Ubi, and Cyan have recieved over Exile, Uru, and Revelation, not one has actually followed through on it). They are also the type who will ourtight ignore the directions of other forum members who try – at first politely, and then later rather bluntly – to direct the person to a more useful forum for their problem. Instead, these people will without fail become even MORE angry and threaten to have the whole lot of you banned for being assholes and not answering their question. They will eventually take the problem to a moderator, berate them unnecesarily, and then never be heard from again when the moderator puts their foot down and sets the person straight. The lesson here: angry people don’t like being proved wrong. They do everything in their power to force the world to conform to their wishes, and if all of their own personal efforts fail, they will invariably try to find someone in a position of authority to get them to change the world. However, more often than not (at least in communities where the people in charge have two nurons to rub together), the people in charge will simply roll their eyes, try not to sound too insulted, and smack the moron upside the head with their own stupidity (this works best if you also have posts from other members to back up your claim that the person’s being an ass, which is almost always the case), thus resulting in the idiot being thrown for a loop, trying to figure out why the world is against them.

I’ve also noticed that, in the service industry, people are actually *more* likely to complain to a bottom-rung employee than to a manager. I think there’s a reason for this. If you complain to a manager, and there’s even the slightest possibility that you’re just trying to be an asshole, the manager can and often will ask you to leave. However, a bottom-rung employee doesn’t have the authority to tell you to leave, and can actually be disciplined by the management if they tell a customer to shove off, because then the customer can take that issue to a manager and, if they’re slick enough, get the employee in trouble. However, bottom-rung employees often don’t have the power to do much of anything else to resolve any serious service issue either, so it is my conclusion that angry customers, on the whole, don’t actually want their problem to be fixed, they just want to be able to treat someone else like shit because they’re having a bad time of things.

This is a puzzling behavior, and one which I’m sure speaks volumes about the person’s character and the state of the world these days, but I have to work, and so will leave this for further discussion at a later date.

And on a totally random note, I might have another web dev contract coming up, though this will be a *lot* simpler… just a few static HTML pages with some client-provided text and graphics. w00t for easy money .