Original Light

I posted a poem before, as best as I could remember it, about my youthful disappointment of certain things while getting my Ph.D.

I found the original version while digging through some boxes yesterday:


Looking for Quality
In all the
Right Places:
Institutions of Higher Learning.

We're fooled.
Mediocrity is the rule.
It is great to be bland.

The Ivory Tower,
Symbol of Truth,
Is made of
Painted Stone
And populated by ants.

Looking for Quality,
Role-Models, Truth, Heroes,
We are fooled by the sheen
Of the Ivory Tower.

You can't tell the
Difference, until
  You are
    Right
     Up
       Close.
Stone, Ivory... What does it
Matter? It all
Crumbles sooner or later.

Forget the tower:
It's only reflecting.
Go for the
Original Light.


-- Stephen Hunter Willson

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Experimental Music #7 - Death March

This piece - Death March - was played through in real time.

It's mostly digital synths, layered up, and then recorded to a four-track analog tape recorder.

The thing I like about it is that it doesn't end! Every time it seems like it is about to end, it keeps going! Just like a real software death march! Excellent!

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Acting!

A child shows you how to act:

Surprised:



Sad:



Excited:



Angry:



Incredulous:




© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Experimental Music #6 - On the Virtual Trail

This piece was created in one pass when a manager I worked for at Northrop, Jim Reiss, loaned me a piece of equipment. I don't remember the model number but it was something like TX-601 or TX-106. This began my transition to digital equipment. I had my D-50 but I didn't really consider it that digital, because it had an overall warm sound to it. Technically, getting the D-50 would have been the start of my transition to the digital world.

But anyway, I layered all of my MIDI equipment together into one big stack (which was about four modules total), and then played this live in one pass.

When it was done, I thought, that sounds like "On the Trail" from The Grand Canyon Suite. I listened to my Tomita version of "On the Trail" and I couldn't really find this sound, but in my mind, it is still inspired by that piece, so I have renamed it for posting here as "On the Virtual Trail".


© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Experimental Music #5 - Space Wine

Space Wine.

This one might be good to help you fall asleep.

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Experimental Music #4 - Dance with a Polygon

Dance with a Polygon

This was probably composed in the early 1990s on cheap analog equipment and recorded to a four track cassette tape machine. It's generally inspired by this album:

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Experimental Music #4 - Flight and Landing

The fun of the old analog equipment was all of the filtering you could do. You can do all that in modern digital equipment, of course, but somehow it sounds different, even when the exact analog filters are being modeled. I think the reason for that is that you can give all digital stuff a really hard edge, and so people do, and that's why most modern digital filters sound different from old analog filters - they are used differently.

Here's a tune with lots of slow filters.

Flight and Landing

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Experimental Music #3 - Soaring

This piece, Soaring, if you can stand to listen to it, is interesting for two reasons. One, it has lots of old school analog effects in the music. Secondly, it uses the 'bender' doo-dad which lets you play notes that don't exist on the keyboard.

Also, and this is true for everything in the Experimental Music series, it was performed straight into a four-track tape machine, without any planning. This required a fair amount of concentration. I had to remember everything I had done before. One benefit of that kind of concentration is mercifully short pieces of music.

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Hollywood: DreamWorks Sale—Why the Dream Didn't Work - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com

Hollywood: DreamWorks Sale—Why the Dream Didn't Work - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com:

"But perhaps the primary failure at DreamWorks was simply one of will. Of the three founders, only Katzenberg wanted to actually head a studio; now he is, at DreamWorks Animation. Spielberg's first love has always been directing, and he has spent the last year on sets making 'War of the Worlds' and 'Munich' back to back. And Geffen has always been upfront about his distaste for the movie business. What both men wanted, it seems in retrospect, was the power and freedom of owning a studio, not the burden of running one. And who can blame them? If you were Steven Spielberg, would you want to sit behind a desk, fretting about profit-and-loss statements? Didn't think so."

I had breakfast with Jeffrey Katzenberg on the morning of his last day with Disney. We met at the Penninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. The meeting was set up by Bill Block, an agent and my business partner at the time, and his boss at ICM at the time, Jim Wiatt. Wiatt was friends with Katzenberg from way-back. You could tell because he snatched a newspaper that was sticking out of Katzenberg's back pocket and hit him with it. Most people in Hollywood can't do that.

We talked a long time, by Hollywood standards, about the video game business. Over an hour I think.

Katzenberg said lots of things I won't repeat, but one worth repeating was that, as he was about to leave Disney, people were offering him incredible sums of money to start something. He said something about people offering to drive a Brinks truck up with a billion dollars in it.

And that's what happened. And Dreamworks SKG was founded.

And now it's sold, but Katzenberg gets to hold onto his first love, running an animation studio.

Which is good for us, because he was the powerhouse behind that run of great Disney animated hits, including The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. Pocahontas would have been better if he had stayed around to re-edit the hell out of it, as he is prone to do. So we can look forward to more years of clever and funny and adult-tolerable animated films, with a higher proportion of potty-humor than the Pixar films.

Woot!

Next Generation - Game Boss Shelley Day Jailed

Next Generation - Game Boss Shelley Day Jailed:

"Shelley Day, former boss of games publishers Hulabee and Humongous Entertainment has been sentenced to two years in prison for fraud."

Wow. I really liked her. I only met her once or twice when I worked at Cavedog but she seemed like a terrific person.

Experimental Music #2 - Stomach Gurgling

I notice a few songs in my collection focused on bodily feelings. Here is another one - Stomach Gurgling.

This one is fun in that it uses the doo-dad (Portamento) that runs up and down the keyboard making whoops and what not.

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Put employees first: Sir Richard Branson

Put employees first: Sir Richard Branson:

"Outlining the Virgin management mantra, Sir Richard said happy employees keep customers happy. A lot of happy customers would create a lot of happiness to shareholders as well. Without good people, corporations are worth nothing. And to motivate people, corporations should create a fun environment to work. Employees should feel that it is a crusade, not just another job. "

Some people think that servicing the needs of shareholders, employees, and customers is a balancing act, but Sir Richard says that's wrong. It's more of a dependency graph: happy shareholders need a company with happy customers which are created by happy employees.

I know a company that puts customers first, and it has had 50% turnover in the last couple of years. Amazing.

Experimental Music #1 - Intestinal Disorder

Way back in the depths of time - I'll say around 1984 - 1990 - I had a bunch of analog synthesizer equipment I liked to play with. I made some really bad and/or strange and/or experimental music, depending on your point of view. I prefer to call it experimental, although 'bad' might also be a suitable description.

I offer here my first posting of bad and/or experimental music: 'Intestinal Disorder'.

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Storage

It's strange, but as I look back on my career, I see that it has been influenced more by storage factors than processor factors. This is true going all the way back to NES games where with good compression you could double or triple the content that went into a cartrige.

Now I'm trying to imagine a world with these little microdrives (like in the iPod) in everything. And Wi-Fi connecting them all.

The word of the day will be replication. The idea will be to allow your data (and licensed music, movies, books even) to circulate in your own microdrive eco-system but not migrate to your neighbor's, unless he has a license for the content as well.

It's not immediately obvious to most people but the secret to making all of this work well is to simple make many devices write-only. That's what the iPod is supposed to be - you can store your tunes onto an iPod but you can't get them back off to give to a buddy. (On the other hand, your buddy can bring his iPod to your computer and you can give him a copy of your music. But that's a lot more work than simply having iPods talk to each other and exchange music.)

The thing about the current file sharing world is that it is so easy to share files. The system just needs a little friction so that it is easier to buy the stuff online than to transfer it without a license. And the DRM systems need less friction within a 'local ecosystem' so that once you have licensed some music or a movie or a book, you can listen, look at it, or read it, on any device you want.

I bought the Firefly DVDs because everyone told me to watch them before watching Serenity, the movie spin-off from the short-lived TV series. So I did. $30 from Amazon - pretty good! Now i have this 4 CD set... and quite frankly, I'm happy to loan it to anyone that comes along. I'm not going to be watching it over and over again. Is that illegal? (I hope not!) You can imagine a situation where four families get together and make a DVD club, where they get a DVD and share it. They would have some rule where the family that gets the DVD first rotates in a list. That would save them 75% on DVD costs, but also cut the sales of DVDs 75%, which would be painful for the movie companies. Really popular DVDs would transcend this rule, of course, because each family would want to own their own 'Finding Nemo', as some titles do bear watching over and over and over again by the kids.

And I bought, for $1.99, the first episode of Nightstalker from the iTunes store. I finally watched it and meh. But what I am supposed to do with this big file that I never want to watch again? Delete it, I supposed, but the iTunes store only allows ONE download of a video file. If you want to watch on multiple computers you have to copy it around to different machines yourself. I guess this is to save on bandwidth costs for the iTunes store. But that's kind of lame.

*Sigh*. Digital licensing is complicated.

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Pristine

The Bellevue Galleria 11 (movie theatre) is under new management. As part of their renovation they purchased a $130,000.00 Christie 2 megapixel digital projector.

We watched Chicken Little on it last weekend. It was beautiful. I couldn't see a single pixel and we were somewhat close to the front of the theatre.

These latest projectors are much better than the old 1.3 megapixel projectors, such as the one that the Cinerama had (and which they stopped using about three years ago).

Now, if everyone else in the entire world would upgrade to these babies ...

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

iTunes Video

I'm finally watching the iTunes video I bought. It's the Nightstalker pilot. I can't tell if I'm bored because the video is small or the show just isn't that interesting. I think it is the latter, since I've watched little videos before and remained entertained.

You can blow the picture up to full-screen. It looks a little low-res but not so bad. But since the show is boring I put it in a little window on the side and surfed the Internet instead.

I might be willing to spend $1.99 to keep up on Lost if I missed an episode, but otherwise I think iTunes video earns a 'never mind it' recommendation.

(BTW, the Google spelling checker is AWESOME!)

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

SNESMusic.org ~ Game profile: Jungle Book

SNESMusic.org ~ Game profile: Jungle Book

This site is cool! And probably violates a lot of copyrights!

The site hosts the actual musical performances from Super NES games. They downloaded the ROM data and run an emulator that generates the music. You can get a plug-in for WinAmp and then open their "RSN" files directly and hit play. Very nice. (Actually, you might need to associate "RSN" with WinAmp first.)

The piece I arranged and performed is the title track to The Jungle Book. This version is on SNES but it was also used on the Genesis. It's "The Bare Necessities Rag".

I have another game music credit, except uncredited, which is the two chords for the Adrenium Studios logo. The cool thing about that is that it was performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra. It's played during the logo for all three Adrenium Games console games: Azurik, Samurai Jack, and Lemony Snicket.

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD

Blu-ray to Win Format War, says Forrester Research:

"It will be a long, tedious war but Forrester Research is convinced that the Sony-led Blu-ray format will succeed in replacing DVD as the next-generation disc. The irony, however, is that by the time consumers are ready to switch digital media may be far more important than physical media. More within..."

[Edit January 14, 2006 - Ha! Blu-Ray machines at CES cost over $1,000 while HD-DVD was $500! Blu-Ray is dead.]

I am pro HD-DVD but the Hollywood people don't know anything and Sony can convince them to use Blu-Ray because of PS3 and Sony Picures etc. It holds more storage which sounds good to Hollywood studio types.

Gates said everyone better get this right since it's likely to be the last physical distribution format ever, as streaming downloads begin to take over. That's actually an argument FOR Blu-Ray because it's bigger! If this is the last format, then make it as big as possible!

I have a friend that says DVD is the last format that will matter. We already don't need a bigger disk format. With MPEG-4 a high-def movie can go on the current DVD format. But his real point is that it's all gonna be on-line anyway.

"The home activity of the future will be very digital, we actually call it the digital lifestyle," he said. "Your music, of course, is already moving away from being on a physical media to just being on a hard disk or streamed across the Internet. My daughter, who's 9, asked me as we went into a record store what a record was, and, of course, she's never seen a record, and five years from now people will say what's a CD, why did you have to go to the case and open something up and you couldn't sequence it your own playlist way; that will be a thing of the past."

Gates continued, "Likewise, even for videos that will happen. The format that's under discussion right now, HD versus Blu-ray, that's simply the last physical format we'll ever have. Even videos in the future will either be on a disk in your pocket or over the Internet and therefore far more convenient for you. You can organize things the way you want and it will show up on all these different devices."

Gates is against Blu-Ray because he doesn't like the copy protection scheme - it doesn't allow making copies to laptops etc. very easy. HD-DVD does, and of course locks the copy to the computer, so it can't be further redistributed. (Gates seems to think that you can't even watch a Blu-Ray movie on your laptop - that the PC wouldn't be granted the rights to even read the disc in the first place. Maybe. I dunno.)

(Also - this is really amazing, BTW, and nobody talks about it - whatever is used will use something like MPEG-4 if not the actual MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is about 10 times better than MPEG-2. So these giant disks will hold an additional 10x more video than the current generation. The DivX people aren't kidding when they say "DivX - the MP3 of video!" I've seen DivX video at 1/10th the size of the original MPEG-2 and it looks terrific. So, if Blu-Ray storage is 25 gigabytes, then that would be about the same as a 250 gigabyte DVD because of the vastly superior encoding.)

From: http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/#1.5:

1.5 How much data can you fit on a Blu-ray disc?

A single-layer disc can fit 23.3GB, 25GB or 27GB.
A dual-layer disc can fit 46.6GB, 50GB or 54GB.

To ensure that the Blu-ray Disc format is easily extendable (future-proof) it also includes support for multi-layer discs, which should allow the storage capacity to be increased to 100GB-200GB (25GB per layer) in the future simply by adding more layers to the discs.

1.6 How much video can you record on a Blu-ray disc?

Over 2 hours of high-definition television (HDTV) on a 25GB disc.
About 13 hours of standard-definition television (SDTV) on a 25GB disc.

I read later that Sony is going to use MPEG-2 on Blu-Ray initially.

I don't understand that.

I don't understand $1,000.00 for a Blu-Ray DVD player.

Sony is a half-dead company. This might be the final straw.

Based on Crap: The 10 Worst Ideas to Make Nintendo Games About - Seanbaby.com

Based on Crap: The 10 Worst Ideas to Make Nintendo Games About - Seanbaby.com

I produced #7. At the time, it was one of the best selling NES games our little company, Virgin Mastertronic, later renamed Virgin Games, later renamed Virgin Interactive, had ever made. Ahead of it was the original Spot by Graeme Devine et.al., but Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was a close second.

We had 16 pages of coverage in Nintendo Power. I guess there wasn't much else going on that year at Christmas time.

We had the rights to use Kevin Costner's image, but then Dances With Wolves came out, and that was the end of that. We ended up using his profile.

We had a Robin Hood game already when the Prince of Thieves license became available. I read the script and it was very dark. The sherrif was having sex with his mother and other such type things.

After deleting all the dark bits, I made a game outline, on a single piece of paper, that used the existing game play bits we had, and laid them out in story order. I went on a trip to Salt Lake City to visit Sculptured Software and present the plan. They had 12 weeks to make the game.

They did a great job, actually.

Tommy Tallarico was the lead tester on it, before he started producing music, and then became a famous TV show personality.

All in all, it was a great experience. I'm not surprised in these days of Hollywood cross overs that the game would make a terrible ideas list, but it worked at the time.

Parents fear intelligent-design backlash - Science - MSNBC.com

Parents fear intelligent-design backlash - Science - MSNBC.com:

The plaintiffs are represented by a team put together by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The school district is being represented by the Thomas More Law Center, a public-interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich., that says its mission is to defend the religious freedom of Christians.

More like ... "that says its mission is to defend the religious freedom of Christians by cramming their stupid religious beliefs down the throats of everyone else."



I like what MC Hawking said:

Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve,

straight up fairy stories even children don't believe.

I'm not saying there's no god, that's not for me to say,

all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.