Spectre Collie

Santa in Space

Experimenting with Nomad Sculpt for Christmas 2023

It’s been a while since I’ve devoted some time to playing around with Nomad Sculpt for iPad, and I’d forgotten how much fun it is.

More than any other 3D tool I’ve used, it’s very intuitive, forgiving of mistakes, and seems designed for translating your intention into 3D instead of making you force what’s in your head into “proper” topology and such. Plus it’s got a ton of post-processing effects built in that feel like cheating; it almost seems like I know what I’m doing.

Here’s a model for Christmas 2023: Santa in Space. He’s so excited to deliver gifts to the ISS that he didn’t check whether his sack could survive the explosive decompression.¹ The original intent was to give him a big glass space hemet (with his hat on top, of course), but I found out halfway through that ~~Nomad doesn’t support transparent materials, as far as I’m aware~~.

Edit: Nomad does support transparent materials; they’re just not where I expected them to be (since it’s not where you set all other material properties). You can change them in the top-level material menu when you have an object selected, choose “blending” or “additive,” and set a transparency value. It does everything except auto-fit a globe around a long beard, which is why I haven’t updated the image.

I’d still rank myself as very much an amateur — I have trouble with getting sharp details without its turning into a big, lumpy mess — but I can already tell I’ve improved since the last time I played with the software. I think modeling cartoonish, chubby, white-bearded guys is playing to my strengths, since I always have a model at the ready.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates!

Edit 2: Because it was bugging me, I went back in and gave Space Santa a helmet. (And tweaked a couple of other things like his teeth). Merry Christmas, Space Santa!

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So to speak.

Literacy 2023: Book 17: The Thursday Murder Club

Richard Osman’s cozy crime story about a group of residents of a retirement community solving a “real” murder

Book
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Synopsis
Four residents of a retirement community formed The Thursday Murder Club, where they look over cold case files and try to find some kind of justice for victims of unsolved crimes. When someone close to their community is murdered, they’re compelled to investigate, in unofficial cooperation with the local police.

Pros

Compelling and more quick-moving than you might expect from the premise.
Cleverly structured to stay in sync with the reader — loose ends are tied up, and potential suspects are cleared away, right as they need to be.
Deftly walks the line between “ghoulish fascination with lurid details of murders” and “bringing a sense of justice,” which is one of the problems inherent in the whole idea of a “cozy” murder mystery.
Clear sense of good guys and bad guys, and more significantly, which characters deserve depth and which are left as caricatures.
Gives each of the main characters a history and a depth to their present.
Deeper themes run underneath the murder mystery, asserting the dignity of the elderly as complex human beings in a particular stage of their lives, instead of existing only as “old people.” Goes into the details of their relationships, their fears, and how their current lives overlap their previous ones.

Cons

Aggressively cozy. Obviously, “cozy murder story” is the whole pitch for this book, but it threatens to make everything feel too artificial.
Feels like a bit of a cheat to have a character who’s essentially a super-hero, but with the advantage of adding a Poirot-style character into a story that could’ve easily been just four Miss Marples.
Some of the revelations late in the book seem to come out of nowhere — they’re foreshadowed, but the reader gets no clues to deduce them.
Ends up being more of a “crime story” than “murder mystery,” as you’ve got a vague idea of suspects and red herrings, but not enough clues to solve the mystery yourself.

Verdict
I was prepared to write this one off as “quick but shallow,” but halfway through, I was completely won over. I’d expected it to be just a case of a successful celebrity taking a stab at writing, taking advantage of his name-recognition to launch it into best-seller status. But it’s charming and often moving, a solid read as a murder mystery story, with just enough edge to its characters to make them appealing. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next three books in the series.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Overkill

Two tangentially-related tunes on the theme of going harder than necessary

The other night I was in the grocery store, and I seemingly spontaneously remembered the mighty morphin’ models at the end of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video. And it cheered me up a surprising amount. While I like to think of myself as an intellectual, I suspect that I’m actually more like an infant who’s still struggling with object permanence, and who lights up whenever he sees the face of someone smiling and saying “Yeah yeah yeah.” I was giggling in the bagel aisle.

I’m struck by how The Youths probably can’t fully appreciate what a huge cultural touchstone that video was. Even in a world where Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift all exist, it’s hard to imagine someone being so singularly, globally famous as Michael Jackson. He had the money and fame to do literally whatever he wanted, and he was just batshit enough to do it.

It felt as if everyone in the world was immediately familiar with that morphing sequence, and it’s still the part that I remember immediately. Watching the video again, I’d completely forgotten the whole Amblin-esque beginning, with its unnecessary flight through a suburban neighborhood model, culminating in Macaulay Culkin launching George Wendt across the planet with only the power of his electric guitar. I’d also remembered the rest of the video playing out on a sound stage, instead of having Jackson in the desert dancing with tons of Native Americans, many of whom were on horseback.

For that matter, I remembered a long sequence of Jackson in an alley smashing car windows with the power of a crowbar and his crotch-forward choreography, but had misremembered it as a completely different song. That version of the video was supposedly controversial at the time, but now it seems superfluous and more than a little bit silly, coming across like one of those Musicless Music Videos.¹

Honestly, I’d been thinking that OK Go were pioneers in making ridiculously, excessively overwrought videos for catchy-but-let’s-be-honest-mostly-inoffensive-at-best pop songs, but this was a reminder that it goes way back to the early 1990s.

And while the morphing effect is still pretty solid even by 2023 standards, in my opinion, the thing that’s most effective about the whole video is simply the joy at the end. The smiles may be forced, but the sentiment’s not. I like that the most enduring image of the video is just a multicultural bunch of human beings being goofy and smiling at the camera. It kind of makes the rest seem unnecessary.

Which reminded me of “Overkill” by Colin Hay. Appropriately, the best versions of that song are the ones that remove the saxophone and the rest of the Men at Work, and just have an acoustic guitar and Hay’s amazing voice.

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And I’d forgotten the most genuinely clever part of an otherwise extremely corny video: as director John Landis is talking to the last morphing dancer in front of a stock gray background on a sound stage, he can be overheard asking, “How did you do that?!”

Literacy 2023: Book 16: The Theory of Everything Else

Dan Schreiber’s collection of fringe science, pseudoscience, and other crackpot ideas

Book
The Theory of Everything Else by Dan Schreiber

Synopsis
Schreiber, who’s one of the hosts of the QI-spinoff podcast No Such Thing as a Fish, writes about dozens of accounts of fringe science, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, unexplained coincidences, and other crackpot ideas. He puts particular emphasis on notable or accomplished people who’ve also harbored some beliefs that he affectionately refers to as “batshit.”

Pros

Light and easy reading that feels humorous without being too try-hard, and earnest without losing a sense of skepticism.
Emphasizes that weird ideas aren’t exclusively the product of mentally unwell people, but that many of us have some bizarre beliefs to some degree or another.
Broad and comprehensive; it’s tough to think of a topic that’s not given at least a passing mention.
Mentions the theory that life on Earth sprang from microbes in visiting aliens’ waste, in a chapter titled “The Origin of Feces.”
Schreiber presents himself as less gullible than his “character” in the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, but rather someone who knows all of this stuff is bullshit, but on some level wants to believe it.

Cons

Goes for breadth at the expense of depth. One or two sections go into detail about the subject, but much of the book feels like a lightning round, with some topics only given a paragraph or so each.
Light on cryptids.
Some overlap of material with the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, which is probably inevitable.
Feels a tiny bit commercial, as if the book exists mostly just to launch his recent We Can Be Weirdos podcast.
Has a chapter that mentions the idea of sending plants instead of humans on long-term space missions, gathering observations from them telepathically. Inexcusably refers to them as “astreenauts.”

Verdict
It’s a fun and often interesting read, with a tongue-in-cheek tone that rarely feels condescending or mocking the source material. It often feels like an episode of No Such Thing as a Fish without the other hosts to steer Dan’s tangents back to topic. I think it’s a no-brainer for fans of the podcast, and is also recommended to anyone who thinks this stuff is fascinating, even if (or especially if) they don’t believe it.

Meet Puppets

A quick tourism PSA for the best attraction in Atlanta, the Center for Puppetry Arts

While I was feeling a little down that I won’t be back in Atlanta for Christmas this year, a friend reminded me of The Lost City of Atlanta from Futurama¹, and I started wondering if that episode would have to be updated after a couple decades of the MCU and The Walking Dead bringing more tourists to the area.

And the answer is… I don’t know? Whenever I go back to see the family, I mainly just see my hometown in the suburbs and, if I’ve got the stomach for it, The Varsity. Once I started going back for holidays with my fiancé, I realized that I’ve never known Atlanta all that well. Most of the highlights these days seem like theme park recreations of the city, as if they’ve tried to capture the charm of the South by extracting just the Coca-Cola and biscuits and fried green tomatoes from the more problematic parts of its history.²

But especially around Christmas time, there’s one must-see attraction: The Center for Puppetry Arts. I went a few times when I was a child, and it was frankly a little unremarkable and kind of sad. But after a huge new addition — designed, I found out later, by the Thinkwell Group — it’s undeniably world-class.

There’s an extensive exhibition of the Muppets, both as part of Sesame Street and with highlights in The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, as well as some lesser-known Henson productions. Some fantastic temporary exhibitions have highlighted Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal as well. And there’s an entire other wing that focuses on puppetry around the world, which includes the bots from Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Currently — and I believe it returns every year — there’s an exhibit of the stop-motion figures from the Rankin Bass holiday specials. I think it’s cuude!

So if you happen to live in the area, it’s a no-brainer even if you don’t have kids. And if you’re in the city for DragonCon or similar, I would absolutely 100% recommend a visit. It’s been a few years since I’ve visited, and I’m well over-due.

1
It’s more than just a Delta hub!
2
In other words: all of it.

Half-Life: Alyx is not an immersive life sim

How the Half-Life series has all the ingredients of a perfect VR game and then subverts most of them

Valve released a new Steam Link app for the Quest headsets that lets you play wirelessly connected to a PC running your Steam library. At least with my particular home setup (Quest 2 connected via WiFi to a Windows machine in a different room connected via Ethernet), it runs flawlessly.

This is pretty huge, since it removes one last bit of friction that’s kept me from playing Steam VR games for a very long time. There’s not really enough space to play VR games comfortably in the room with my PC. And the whole process of starting up Steam VR with a physical USB connection was always more than a little clunky, especially compared to the just-pick-it-up-and-turn-it-on nature of the Quest¹.

Now there are only a couple of stumbling blocks left: I never have time to play games anymore, and I’m so bad at them that experiences designed to last a few hours will for me stretch out over months or even years.

On that note: I always imagined I’d write about Half-Life: Alyx once I’d finished the game, or at least gotten farther than the first chapter. But I’m realizing that that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, partly because I rarely get time to play, partly because of the weird time-dilation in video games caused by my ineptitude, and partly because being trapped in confined spaces with zombies is so creepy that I need to frequently take the headset off and take a break.

But Alyx is the absolute gold standard for VR experiences, easily the best one I’ve played at home and likely even better than location-based stuff like The Void. And it’s tonally perfect for the Half-Life series; in particular, the slow build-up to action, as you’re dropped into a mundane moment in a bizarre world. I think of the series so much as clicks and explosions and gunfire and shrieks and expository speeches and electronic music, that I forget how quiet it often is.

There’s a ton of fascinating stuff that happens before you even encounter your first zombie. And I found myself running out of superlatives for the whole design experience by the first time I fired a pistol.

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Ironically, the Quest seems to have gotten some updates since I last used it, and they make it kind of clunky and unwieldy to get into the experience. I especially enjoyed how an app designed to demonstrate hand controls would refuse to start up unless I had the controllers.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Eight Nights

Two tangentially-related tunes celebrating a vague idea of another culture’s holiday

One thing to know about me is that I’m very much a Gentile. But even I know that it’s the middle of Hanukkah in 2023. And I know the basic idea of the miracle of the oil and can illustrate it with this week’s two tunes:

Imagine you’re the HAIM sisters (who have recorded an excellent Hanukkahfied version of “Christmas Wrapping” themselves) and, you’ve only got a “Little of Your Love”.

Just take a lesson from both the Maccabees and The Stylistics and “Make it Last” eight days and nights.

See, it’s easy to be respectful of cultures that aren’t your own. In the immortal words of the Black-Eyed Peas: Mazel Tov! L’Chaim!

Super Mario Bros Wonder: The Conversation

Super Mario Bros Wonder is relentlessly delightful and in constant conversation with the player

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is gloves-down the most delightful experience I’ve had playing a game in years. Even by Mario standards, it’s over-stuffed with surprises and moments that had me laughing out loud just from an unnecessarily over-the-top secret discovery.

There was one addition, though, that seemed out-of-place with the franchise, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Throughout the levels, there are flowers that talk to you as your character passes by, in plain, unaffected English¹. They comment on what’s happening, give clues to things you might have missed, or just give you a bit of encouragement before you’re about to pull off a difficult stunt.

Todd Martens has a nice column in The Los Angeles Times about the game, where he says the flowers serve as a recurring source of encouragement and a reminder of the healing power of play. They serve as kind of a bridge between the game and the player, reminding us to appreciate the joyous details the game keeps throwing at us:

I’ve returned, for instance, throughout my playthrough to an early level featuring a bounty of Piranha Plants, those chomping, polka-dotted, Mario-biting flora that have long been a staple of the series. Only here, they walk, and at one point in the level can break into song. “They’re singing!” exclaims our flower pal, and indeed they are, with a high-pitched, childlike voice. […] It’s an easy, early level, but I revisit it because it never fails to make me smile, and it serves as a reminder that the so-called ordinary is often extraordinary if we’re willing to pay attention.

He’s absolutely right about the Piranha Plants On Parade level, which is a highlight of the entire 40-year series of Mario games, and which warrants a replay any time you’re feeling even a little bit down.

But the Mario games have always been about fun and surprisingly delightful moments. One of the things that sets Wonder apart is that it’s all about discovering those moments, even more than skill. There’s no timer in the standard levels, for one thing. As a result, there’s a sense that they’re more about exploration than just completion.

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Or whatever language you’re playing in, I’m assuming.

Literacy 2023: Book 15: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The first Hercule Poirot mystery is essentially a template for everything we expect from an Agatha Christie murder mystery

Book
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
When Emily Inglethorpe, wealthy owner of a manor house in a small English village, is murdered in a locked room in the middle of the night, retired detective Hercule Poirot is entreated by the victim’s family to help investigate.

Pros

The definition of a classic murder mystery, with a house full of suspects, each with their own private scandals and agendas and intrigue that Poirot has to sort out along with the murder itself.
You’d never guess this was Hercule Poirot’s first appearance, as he seems to be a fully-formed character from the start, already having all of his eccentricities, mannerisms, benign condescension, and tendency to disappear for chapters at a time only to reveal his discoveries at the last minute.
Once the case is solved, Christie goes back through the details to demonstrate how she played fair the entire time. All of the clues are there, even though they’re buried under a mountain of red herrings and subplots.
The most relevant clues are repeatedly mentioned, so as everything was tied together, I almost always thought, “oh yes, I remember that detail.”
Cleverly throws suspicion among its characters, making the reader feel as if they’ve gotten a solid “vibe” about whodunnit even if they can’t provide any real evidence.

Cons

Even if you notice all of the clues, and even if you make the correct deductions from them (e.g. realizing that someone was obviously wearing a disguise), the actual chain of events that Poirot explains is so convoluted that it would’ve been impossible to guess.
Unlike Christie’s later books, this is extremely dated and unmistakably a product of its time.

Verdict
Not my favorite Agatha Christie mystery, but it’s a solid and entertaining story that illustrates just how much she was a master of the genre. As I’ve been reading and re-reading her books this year, I’ve been amazed at how experimental she could be and at how timeless her work could be. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is neither timeless or experimental, but it does feel as if it shows her interests: it seems that an intricately-constructed murder mystery came easy to her, and she just used them as the backdrop to create interesting characters and tell their stories.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: It Was a Very Good Year

Two tangentially-related tunes that came out when I was 21

One of the only things that Bluesky has over Mastodon is that it’s a better home for hashtag games and “what’s your favorite?” style threads. A recent one asked everybody to name a perfect album from when they were 21, presumably for identity theft purposes, but also for fun.

It turns out that a surprising number of pretty great albums came out when I was 21 years old. One of them was Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys. I always think of that one as being one long uninterrupted song, plus “So Whatcha Want,” so it’s kind of hard to pick a stand-out. All of the tracks blend with the interstitials and samples, and I never remember individual titles.

Hard to pick a stand-out, but not impossible: “Stand Together” picks up from Peter Sichel’s comfortable study (“Mmm, it does go well with the fish.” “Delicious again, Peter.”) and builds up energy to carry through the final third of the album. I vividly remember driving through Marin County with this playing as loud as my car’s cheap stereo could handle.

That wasn’t when I was 21, though. I wasn’t cool enough to appreciate the Beastie Boys until Hello Nasty came out. In 1992, I was still heavily invested in my favorite bands from college, including the Indigo Girls. That was the year Rites of Passage came out, and the big hit from that one was “Galileo.”

I always thought they were a little underrated, even though the truth was probably more that they’ve always been exactly as successful as they wanted to be, making folk-pop songs about reincarnation. In any case, it was nice to see them have another song get as much attention as “Closer to Fine” did.

Peace & Love

In honor of Shane MacGowan’s passing, some thoughts about what a huge impact the Pogues had on me

Shane MacGowan died on November 30, and the Pogues were such a huge part of my twenties that I feel like I have to mark the occasion somehow.¹

I discovered the band from Peace & Love when I was in school in Athens, GA. I don’t think I’d been looking for any particular song; I just thought the cover was intriguing, and it took me a minute to realize how it’d been edited. It’s probably the most accessible of their albums, even though it feels a little tame. There’s a lot of the spirit of the band (or at least how I think of it) in “Young Ned of the Hill,” beautifully cursing Oliver Cromwell to rot in hell; and especially “Boat Train,” a barely intelligible account of getting shitfaced drunk.

Which would’ve fit in fine with Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, my favorite in college. It still seems like as close to a mission statement for the Pogues as you’re ever going to see. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was about as far from punk as you could get, but still appreciated getting the opportunity to scream along and howl at the world with a rage I hadn’t earned yet. The remastered and expanded version is especially nice, because it includes an EP² that has “Rainy Night in Soho,” one of the loveliest songs MacGowan ever wrote.³

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It’s overdue, since I probably should’ve written something when Philip Chevron passed in 2013.
2
That was weirdly difficult to find back in Athens in the early 1990s, incidentally
3
The only version that’s easily available now is so over-produced it kind of ruins it, though. It’s worth looking up the original if you’re a fan of the song.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Move Fast and Break Down

Two tangentially-related tunes to listen to while waiting for Silicon Valley to collapse

I don’t know about y’all, but I was already pretty disillusioned with Silicon Valley several years ago, when I was working as an app developer in San Francisco. I was shuffling between BART and MUNI trains with a bunch of hoodie-wearing maniacs pacing back and forth like caged tigers who couldn’t wait one more second to get to their open-office-plan desks and start disrupting shit.

And that was before I really appreciated the incredible magnitude of egomania that was running rampant among the guys making way over my pay grade, who acted like bypassing governmental regulations and selling people stuff they don’t really need were revolutionary ideas.

In fact, neither moving fast nor breaking things were all that novel. Look at Fiona Apple! Maybe no other public figure besides Sonic the Hedgehog understood what it meant to move as Fast As You Can.

Corny dad-level analogies aside, every time I hear a Fiona Apple song, I think “this is brilliant; why don’t I listen to Fiona Apple all the damn time?” And then I listen to a bunch and I remember why. She’s brilliant, but I don’t feel like I have brain chemistry balanced enough to mainline too much of it at once without going into a depressive episode.

I need to break it up with a song like “My Lovin’ (Never Gonna Get It)” by En Vogue, which I try to listen to at least once a month to keep my spirits up. If I go too long without hearing it, the never gonna get it never gonna get it starts to pick away at my brain until it’s satiated. I can’t say I’m that familiar with the rest of their music¹, but this song is a bona fide classic.

(One thing I’ve never understood about this video: they’ve got four of the most beautiful women working in music, with some of the most iconic costumes from the history of music videos, so why the hell do they keep cutting away from them? I understand that at this time, having quick flashes of silhouetted dancers against a solid color background was required by Music Video Law, but they could’ve just done a couple and left more time for the stars. And I tell you what: if I’d gone to the trouble of putting on a tight dress and a wig, and they told me they were going to cut away to some guy dancing in a gimp suit, I would’ve been out the door!)

And now it’s time for a breakdown!

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Although “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” is also excellent