I don’t play MMOs; the majority of my gaming time is consumed by single player titles. Though many such games involve you taking the role of a character, and sometimes you can even design them, without the social aspect it never really feels like the character you control is an avatar, a direct representation of you. Single player character-driven games, especially the more narrative focused ones, are nothing more than puppeteering. You can do what you want with the strings you’re given, but nothing more.
Avatars are about ownership and one does not own John Marston in Red Dead Redemption. You control him in between story segments, but he is exclusively his own person within the narrative. The set-ups, the order of events, the motivations of the characters exist strictly within Rockstar Games’ realm, but the how is what’s up to the player. If between moments of severe tension in the Mexican Revolution you decide to go back to the United States to go look for some treasure and pick some flowers, that experience remains yours. If you capture a bounty alive and during the trip back to the local jail you get randomly attacked by a cougar because you decided to take a short cut through a field and you curse at it for killing your horse and your bounty, you have a unique tale to tell.
John Marston’s story, however, belongs to Rockstar. Everyone that plays it, save those that quit part way through, will have the same narrative and the same outcome. Top down story-telling tends to separate a game’s character from the player. You control Marston at times, but you are not him. It’s a small but important difference because when it comes to solitary game experiences, an avatar, as a representation of the user, is solely the result of a player’s actions. You could switch out John Marston for any other character and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s what you did to get there that counts.
When I came across Jennifer Jupiter Stratford’s portfolio, I was instantly smitten. A whole series following Leslie “Sweater Lady” Hall? A look into the forgotten visions of tomorrow gleaned from video game console? Another series about videogame cosplayers and the overall nerdy spectacle? This picture of a forlorn Tails? To say that this is relevant to my interests would be an understatement.
Add to that a series on inflatable mascots, giant speakers, and a collection with the hopes to understand mysticism and loneliness when faced with the grandness of nature and I am an instant fan. That’s not even mentioning the wonderfully bizarre videos.
I got off the Berlin bus in front of the Brandenburg Gates at half past six in the morning. This was my first time there since I was eleven, in 1991, when unification and the fall of the Berlin Wall was still fresh in the minds of the locals. The sun was just starting to rise and the whole place was deserted save for two lone photographers, probably two wayfarer visitors with no time for sleep, like me, wandering around the gate. When I made my way back to the Brandenburg Gates around the noon hour, after a circular walk around the city, the place was awash with tourists.
The crowds made taking a photo of the monument, on its own, an impossibility. Not even the likes of the Tourist Remover would help in this situation. But that’s a good thing. Unless you are taking generic photos for postcard use, the crowds are part of the experience. This is a tourist attraction and trying your hardest to hide that fact, especially during peak tourist hours, feels a little less than honest. Same goes for removing the mundane city realities of cars, traffic, commuting, and people doing their jobs. If you feel the need to use the Tourist Remover, I think you are missing the point of what you are doing (or are very impatient.) The practical solution is to photograph things that by their nature don’t attract crowds, or, if you’re feeling particularly travel wary, show up at six in the morning.
This is why I like Joel Micah Miller’s “Monumental” series. His photographs revel in that tourist filled reality, showing how it really is to be at those monumental locations.
I also like it for the selfish reason that he photographed many of the same things I have photographed from the very same vantage point I photographed them. It gives my amateur self a good point of comparison for technique in contrast to that of a professional, award winning photographer.
One of the best weblogs to emerge this year was kokogiak’s The Big Picture. I was pleased to see it get the go ahead from legal because it was a risky venture for a major publication (if you don’t believe me, risk your sanity venturing into the comments of any post.) The large scale photos brought a new perspective to world events and brightly highlighted others that were not always reported. Alan Taylor’s curatorial duties have been excellent and as impartial as possible (though douchebags in the comments always disagree.)
The appropriately named The Big Picture proved that we don’t always need to consider users with: VGA displays, 640×480 resolutions, web safe colours, and modems. This isn’t the 1990s anymore. You can now provide photos larger than thumbnails that make the most of today’s display technology (millions of colours! *gasp*) Bigger is better. So with that in mind, here’s my own personal year in review.
I bought a new camera in April, a few months after giving my old one to my sister for Christmas. I bought it, in part, because by then I had decided what I was going to do with the rest of the year and wanted something good to document it.
Driving down Ouellette Ave. you get the sense of being in a metropolis. Buildings tower higher and higher above the street the further north and the closer to the downtown you seem to get. Then Oulette opens up to Riverside and you realize that a wide river divides you from the rest of the skyline and that between where you stand and where the city continues is an international border. You see that where you are is all there is. A city stunted in its growth, infested by a rash of “for lease” and “for sale” signs. This is a city with a 13% vacancy rate. This is Windsor.
Looking back at the city you see decrepit apartment buildings, bland run down office buildings, and two clean and radiant towers rising from the east. The dissonance is striking. The two skyscrapers are modern, slick and bright white. Their blue tinted windows and unblemished pure exteriors shine in the late day sun. They are beacons of promise and prosperity amongst the grey and brown of the old city. They belong to the casino.
At night it’s even more dreary. The walk into downtown is described as a trek into Mordor. The towers rise above the dark wastelands, casting a blood red glow on everything. The powerful neon “Caesar’s” signs on top of the casino are so strong they illuminate buildings in another country, across the river. Waving at the sky are a half dozen spotlights, luring travelers into its trap. That’s all there is in Windsor: gambling and drinking. The city has a suicide rate well above the provincial average.
And for a moment I thought about living there. It would be cheap, I would be free of distractions, and I’d be a river-crossing away from a quality NHL team.
Those that only see this weblog through an RSS reader might not have noticed that I’ve made a few tweaks around here. The second column of links, imported from delicious, has been moved to the bottom of the page. Since there’s only the one core column now, I’ve merged the wordmark, which sat above the second column, with the header image and centered everything. I haven’t changed a single thing in the main body since I was happy with the readability, so that column retains its width and font size. It has more breathing room now.
In the footer, I’ve elaborated on my details and added an extra area of “recommended” links. It is, as they call it, a “blogroll.” I wanted to have something a little more permanent than my delicious bookmarks to point out some sites I’ve enjoyed recently. Those links will change, but not too frequently. All are highly, well, recommended but for entirely distinct and diverse reasons. It is an eclectic bunch.
Anyway, the main reason for these changes is that the single column allows for this:
Brighton sunset
Images float outside of the main column so the extra room allows for some extra large photos. I’m using the camera more often than I’m writing paragraphs, so I figured that I’d let the site reflect that.
As with most days here, this afternoon I headed for the Tube with the intention of going for a long, wandering trek around London. I wasn’t sure where I’d go; I figured I’d decide on the train. I walked down the road past the station to a little bakery around the corner and grabbed a croissant and stuffed it into my camera bag. The blue eyed blonde Polish girl wasn’t working today. I crossed back to the station, pulled out my Oyster card and set it against the sensor. The light went red, the gate didn’t open and “SEEK ASSISTANCE” lit up on the display.
Twenty four pounds (and twenty pence) later I had a renewed weekly travel pass. It’s essential to have this in London if you are aimlessly traveling because you can hop-on, hop-off anywhere without ever having to worry about the fares and how much money you have left on your card or in your pocket. Still, for my simple TTC inspired ways the price is a major sticker shock. Then again, the London Tube is refreshingly free of TTC Union assjacks and it’s worth paying more for that privilege.
On the Jubilee Line, somewhere near Baker Street, I decided that I would get off at London Bridge and venture eastward along the Thames. The farthest I had been along in this direction was the Design Museum a block east of Tower Bridge, where the throngs of tourists start to thin. Many people are quick to point out that galleries and museums in London have free admission but if you want to see anything remotely contemporary or non-institutional–and you’ve already been to the TATE Modern–then you have to pay. This is true for the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Hayward Gallery and the Embankment Gallery (in the Somerset House) and, of course, the Design Museum.
I’m unsure if this is true for the Whitechapel Gallery. I ventured out into urine-smelling Aldgate last weekend to see it only to discover that it’s undergoing renovations and won’t be fully open until 2009. The auditorium was open, showing a film shot in an abattoir, and there were a few scattered locations showing stuff around the neighbourhood but after going to one space on Bell Lane and seeing nothing but a cardboard box, I skipped most of them. Granted, it was a very large cardboard box and the lady there tried to tell me about the artist’s motivations and inspirations for the work but, still, it was a cardboard box. That trip was a complete bust.
The area east of the Design Museum, along the Thames Path, is quite nice and suitably quiet. After you pass the last tourist and the last riverside restaurant and pub you enter a meandering path of riverside walks and silent side streets that takes you through miles of wharf lands. Amongst many others, there’s the Chambers Wharf, the Hope Wharf, the Ivory Wharf, the Canada Wharf, the Lavender Wharf and so on. Some of them sit there, decaying. Most have been converted into residential spaces, studios, pubs or an mixture of all the above. On the other side of the narrow streets upon which they sit are row houses, apartments, manors and all sorts of quiet residences. The traffic here was non existent, the pedestrians few and, refreshingly, no tourists to be seen except yours truly. To experience a city you have to go through these kinds of areas.
After a while I sat down on a bench overlooking the Docklands, the steel and glass skyscraper new city development, across the river. I ate the croissant I bought earlier while I watched planes fly by towards one of the many London airports. The Docklands is the most un-London-like part of the city. It’s overly planned, commercial, full of chain restaurants and retailers and it all has little character because of it. It mostly reminds me of North American cities and makes me homesick, to a small degree, for the small town charms of Toronto.
Several side streets and pathways later I found myself near Surrey Docks and the Greenland Lock, where I was crossing the road as a blue car approached from my left. “Excuse me.” A grey haired woman was sticking her head out of the car’s window as it rolled to a stop in front of me. She spoke with that old English woman accent.
“Excuse me, do you know where I can find the Wibbly Wobbly?”
In a self-conscious-of-my-Canadian-accent manner, I replied that “I have no idea.” She smiled, said “alright” and drove off.
I finished crossing the street and was shortly riverside again. In the corner there, next to the lock, a shirtless fat man was fishing. I continued down the path and, once I was at a point where he was no longer visible, I sat down on a piece of marble street furniture. I stayed there for fifteen minutes, dumbfounded, wondering what the hell the “Wibbly Wobbly” could be. I am, truly, in Britain.
I have a penchant for overly expensive hobbies. When I’m not playing an over-priced game on an expensive console connected to an even more expensive HD television — like right now, with the XBox dead in the water — I like to go out and take pictures. Photography, even if you go digital and remove the film and processing costs, is not a cheap hobby if you want to pursue it seriously. It’s a relatively new interest for me but it is, yes, something I want to pursue seriously. Hence, I bought a new camera. It was an impulse purchase.
Those that are in the know would ask “but didn’t you buy a new camera less than a year ago?” Well, I did. It was the Pentax model previous to this one. It was a fine camera and was a very good introduction to the world of SLR and I took many photos with it, but I gave it to my sister for Christmas. She had more use for it than I did, being a third year photography student and all. After several months, however, I started to miss that camera. Lucky for me, a new model was just around the corner. No, I did not need all the new stuff — the K10D was perfectly good — but something about the new and top-of-the-line appealed to the technodork in me. When I found out that it was released, earlier than I anticipated it, I had to have it. I like being bleeding edge on the pro-sumer front.
There isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two cameras, especially to an amateur that’s still learning. The body is practically identical. The UI is practically identical. The features are mostly the same, except for some additions like better ISO, “Live View” and other more advanced features. I think the sensor is new too, but I’m not sure. Most notably the biggest change is numerical: the K20D has 14.6 Megapixels compared to the K10D’s 10.2.
That is a fucking lot of pixels. The uncompressed RAW files it generates are over 24MB each with a resolution of 4457×3104 at 240dpi. That is a fucking lot of pixels. To better visualize what that means, here is a picture at a 1:1 pixel ratio:
Now here is the picture it is taken from, scaled to fit:
It’s really quite striking. I can’t imagine taking too many photos at that full resolution, but it’s nice that it’s there. Of course, any photos I take as I learn and familiarize myself with the camera will be posted to my flickr feed so if you’re curious about what the camera can do check that out and also look at the fledgling K20D flickr group.
Oh. I should also mention one other reason why I purchased this camera: I quit my job, I am moving out of my apartment and moving to Europe. It’s a minor thing.
2007 was the most documented year in my life. The sheer number of photos taken this year is astounding. Various logs and notes have tallied where I ate my lunches, what games I purchased and what movies I watched. Actually, I tapered off with my OCD note taking half way through the year so the last few months are a void… but next year I’ll do better. Anyway, going through my photo library is very much like traveling through the year all over again, so I have compiled the best and most descriptive (and “only” for some slow months) photos of the year. Low bandwidth users beware!:
Sunday afternoon was the annual Toronto Zombie Walk. I didn’t partake but I was down to take a picture of the quite organized horde of zombies shuffling up Bathurst Street, sticking to the sidewalk and obeying all traffic signals. They might be undead but they aren’t barbarians!
Apart from one kid getting completely freaked out — his parents had to reassure him that it wasn’t real — the actual walk was kind of dull. The real amusement happened away from the main route with the straggler zombies. There’d be guys casually walking down a street talking on their cellphones with their shirts completely covered in blood and girls with putrid makeup on their faces and blood covered stockings boarding streetcars. The looks those people would get were worth the price of admission alone and because they weren’t part of a giant procession many onlookers had no basis to dismiss it as part of an event. I saw plenty of confused and scared people on the streets that day.
I went to see Eastern Promises a few evenings ago (it was good but A History of Violence was better) and the walk to the theatre took me right by the set for The Incredible Hulk. The stretch of Yonge Street between Gerrard and Dundas, a busy area, was closed for evenings and nights for a few days while the film’s final showdown was being filmed in faux-Harlem. You would think that in this day and age of CGI a blockbuster of this sort wouldn’t need to close down such a busy street to do its filming. But no, here they are inconveniencing everyone but the Teamsters, the extras and the cops getting paid extra to sit around doing nothing.
My camera, and its new lens, was with me so I pulled it out, took a few photos and quickly packed it away. I’ve always been a bit self-conscious with the camera — more so with the large and bulky SLR — which is why the photos I’ve taken have been predominantly landscapes or cityscapes that involve few, if any, people. Most were taken in isolation where there was no reason to be self-conscious. It feels different in the city.
Anyway, with it packed away I made my way to the movie just in time for the 9:30 showing. The movie started a little after 9:50. Twenty fucking minutes of trailers and commercials. I thought “oh yeah, this is why I don’t go to the theatre anymore!” The shock was even more pronounced after seeing 31 movies at the film festival where I never had to endure more than two minutes of pre-film bumpers. But twenty minutes? For a film that I paid more to see than at the film festival? I think I’ll save the “cinema experience” for the next film festival.
On the way back I stopped by the south side of the film shoot for a different perspective. After taking a photo or two a group (gaggle?) of women walked by pointing and saying “Paparazzi. Paparazzi.” One of them pulled out a cellphone camera. I looked at them and said that I’m not. “I’m just a guy with a big camera.” They didn’t believe, said “paparazzi” one more time and moved on. If random women are going to be conversing with me on the street then I’m not sure if I should remain self-conscious or if I should wield that camera exclusively.
Amongst the many recent and upcoming architectural works happening around Toronto as part of the “cultural renassiance” (I don’t know about that one), the Royal Ontario Museum’s crystal has remained my favourite. I liked it during the concept (even if it invoked a little bit of the Louvre deja vu), I liked it during construction once it started to jet out over Bloor St., looming behind all the generic high-end retailers of Yorkville, and now that I’ve seen it from the inside I like it more.
After a concert and gala celebration, today (from midnight until the evening) was the free “architectural opening” of the new addition. That is a fancy way of saying “you can come inside and look at the structure, but ignore the fact that none of the exhibits are set up since we’re months behind schedule.” And much like their scheduling, their planning for the day was atrocious. It was a ticketed free event, which meant that you can get in for free so long as you got yourself a ticket in advance. Many people lined up last night, during and after the concert, to get tickets that they would use in the morning.
I was not one of those. After watching game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals, I was in no mood to venture out into that sweltering June humidity. I figured that I’d just take a chance with the morning weather instead.
After breakfast and a rather brisk walk, I was at the back side of the ROM. A hand written sign informed me “TICKETS AT BLOOR ST ENTRANCE”, so I wandered towards Bloor St. only to be greeted by a giant line. I took a spot and asked the lady in front of me if that was the line to get tickets.
“No, this is the line for those that already have tickets.”
OK. I worked my way around the line to Bloor Street and saw that there wasn’t a secondary line. Maybe the tickets were all accounted for? I went back to the end of the line, which was now further down University Avenue. “Excuse me, where do you get ticket?”
“You have to go to the back, I think. This line is for those with tickets”.
I returned to the back of the ROM, past the “TICKETS AT BLOOR ST ENTRANCE” sign and into the rear security entrance. “Where exactly do you get tickets?”
“You have to line up on Bloor Street.”
“But I was just there and they told me that it’s for ticket-holders…”
“It’s the same line.”
Back to the line I went, now ending even further down University Ave, and ignored everything and anything that anyone not wearing a “ROM” shirt said. I put my headphones back on, put the volume up and hummed along to myself Automatic crystal remote control, we come to move your soul
By the time my point in line made it to the Bloor St. corner it was clear that the ROM officials totally underestimated the turnout and that the ticket-holders line was the same as the ticket-getters line, to the dismay of all those that lined up beforehand to get them. I was glad I didn’t bother the night before.
Once inside, the building feels a lot more welcoming than menacing. Some might decry the lack of curves or, even, the lack of 90 degree corners, but I welcome it. Walls and pillars jet out of the floors at odd angles and disappear into the ceiling, illuminated. There are windows and gaps all around through which you can see other levels and sections of the crystal, all full of activity. Once the exhibits are installed this will unify them together in the space. The light and the openness will complement them well. The current spaces in the old building feel too much like the tombs from which the pieces of its collections were taken.
Yet the crystal doesn’t forget about that old building. Inside the crystal there are signs of the old brick architecture, seemingly breaking through the white walls. Doorways and walkways seamlessly take you from one building to the other and in the central hallway it’s as if the crystal is hugging the old facade. It’s ying and yang, but as Andrew Blum writes, Like the city itself, they all connect—far more than they collide or coalesce. This building is a monument to that Toronto, and to its future.
Sure, it has its detractors, as expected, but the mood on the floor was positive. There was a lot of discovery and playfulness and when you consider that it’s going to be host to a large number of dinosaurs and, naturally, kids that’s a good sense to exude.
I’ll be posting more photos in my flickr ROM set over the next couple of days.
With E3 being scaled down next year, I figured it was time to belatedly reminisce about the extravagant and smelly spectacle that it once was. So I’ve uploaded a number of photos from the 2002 show, the one and only time I attended.
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
Robbie Cooper “Alter Ego”
