THEM!

THEM, as some of you might know, is one of those atomic horror films, a classic of that genre from 1952. It's about giant ants.

Well, my ants aren't giant, but I am starting to feel like they're trying to edge me out of my niche. And the darn things seem so resilient. Well. They're only in a small corner of the apartment and I think they're controlled for the time being. If Any of you call me annd hear me screaming 'THEM! THEM! THEM! THEM!' then you'll know what happened.

I went to school yesterday to do some rendering. Got about 300 frames rendered, I believe, which is a good chunk of the 1300 pseduo-magnum-opus. So far, so good. There are a few frames where the thing did something that made me gape in astonishment, but nothing that can't be fixed, I think. The biggest trick, it seem, is the hair. I used particle soft bodies, which means that each vertex in the polygons that make up her hair is controlled by a particle. Particles in Maya are really neat things. You can give them weight, you can apply gravity and air and magnetic fields, you can set goal weights... and if you don't know 100% of what you're doing, they do something inutterably indescribably. PLus, to make this work right I have to do a particle disk cache... which is not portable, because my particle disk cache is something on the order of 5GB. Yes, Five gigabytes. That is a LOT. Especially when my network disk quota is 1GB. So before each rendering session I have to re-generate the particle disk cache on the local computers I'm using. The things I do in the name of ART! =)

So Monday (which is to say, today) is my recovery day from the 36+ hours I was awake previous. I was feeling pretty awake, actually, and no ill effects other than hitting the rack pretty hard; I got up about an hour ago, after waking up from a dream or nightweird (as opposed to a nightmare) of Pennn (from Penn and Teller) as a George Burns/Morgan Freeman-style God. (I say 'nightweird' because there's no way I could bring myself to call that a 'dream.') In lab we watched minority report -- I must have seen that movie four times now.

Regarding the music above: there's something about a German trance-metal band singing in these deep gravelly voices and throwing in a lot of choral Latin from what sounds like the High Mass. Hey, it worked for Karl Orff when he did the Carmina Burana! Okay, maybe not really like Carl Orff. But it still sounds like it would make a good titles score for a movie. Or at least the credits score. Or maybe some sort of funky incidental. That's often how I listen to music, since I work in a really visual medium: as a kind of soundtrack to visual events, though I do enjoy music on it's own. I still think everyone should have their own soundtrack. Laughtracks optional. =)

(Hmm.... now that I typed that and think about it, could smilies be sort of considered to be the laugh track of the written word? I'm going to do something unusual and make a special journal entry for that! Stay tuned!)

Not much on the schedule today, except laundry and general housekeeping. Though I might pick up a flamethrower if THEM start to get dissatisfied with the area they have and start to seek to expand their territory

Smilies as the Internet Laugh Track

In my last entry I noted that I had come to the concept that smilies are the laugh track of the mostly text-based messaging that takes place over the Internet.

Presented for your consideration:

Laugh tracks weren't added to recordings and such until the spoken word became a wildly popular medium. In time they came to serve two purposes: to tell the audience 'This is where you laugh,' and to tell the audience, 'Tt's a joke, son, laugh!' Studies have also apparently shown that people find things funnier if there's a laugh track to point out the funny bits. Part of that, I'm sure, is that people feel stupid if they don't pick up on a joke.

So, let's see where this takes us as far as this simile. Consider that over the past ten-fifteen years the Internet has gotten amazingly popular, and that even in the early days before the Web came about as an abstraction layer on top of the net, that communication was primarily if not completely text-based. Even these days, communication is mainly textual. Even if you talk to people on a visual MUD like Furcadia or Neverwinter Nights or Everquest or any of that lot, you are limited to conveying the vast majority of your ideas via text.

Text-based communication is hard. It conveys no emotion outside of what is within the words, which can cause many problems because we are still a very verbal culture. We need the inflections to words to convey meaning. In addition body language also has a great deal of impact on the meaning of what we say. Our voices and bodies give a lot of cues as to our intent. Perhaps the earliest verbal technique that was found to be hard to get across was sarcasm, but a close second would be depreciating humor. There are certain verbal and bodily cues -- a raising of the eyebrows, a grin or open smile, an open body posture, or something -- that says, "I'm not trying to put you down, I'm just making a joke. It doesn't mean anything."

This is extremely hard to convey online, and it was probably something like this which made the use of smilies -- :-) :) or my preferred =) -- be seen not only as a good idea but almost necessary. People needed to convey subtlities to their words. I imagine that there were quite a few ruffled feathers in the beginning. Well, more to the point, there still are a great many ruffled feathers which you can cause without even really trying. The point is, smilies (for those who use them) can in some small way convey the mood and in some small way imply a "just kidding" attitude.

Like laugh tracks, they point out to a person the places the author thinks are funny, and what the author thinks the person reading should be taking as funny rather than sarcastic or ironic. (Though a whole new class of smilies -- emoticons -- has risen up to convey even more disparate meanings behind the intent of words, and sarcasm and irony are included in this category.) In a very real sense, like laugh tracks, smilies are tellingg the reader what the author considers to be funny; there are probably studies out there that say that something with a smilie hooked on to it is funnier than something without said smilie.

Also like laugh tracks, smilies can lie. As with any communication, the user of a smilie is not forced to use them or not use them. They do not convey the actual body language and tone of the communicator, but rather are used consciously by the person communicating. Certainly, someone can consciously control their own body language and tone, but it takes a conscious effort to not use body language, while it takes a conscious effort to actually use smilies and other emoticons. Obviously, and this has been done many times, a person wishing to convey the impression of a completely different emotional state or intent can use or not use emoticons as they desire.

The use of laugh tracks has often received criticism, of course. It has been derided as being fake at the very least, and at the most (for the conspiracy theorists) as a corporation (media conglomerate) telling the consumer-base what to laugh at. On a more practical level, everyone's sense of humor varies, and what one person might laugh at, another might simply not get, and yet another might find offensive. For these people the laugh track becomes uncomfortable, as on some level we are getting the impression that there's something funny there but we're not in on the joke. We're missing out on something, we lack the same sense of humor as others, and are therefore incomplete. All this, even if we know the laughtrack is digitally generated.

Emoticons haven't been called "corpratist" the same way laughtracks have, mainly because they are completely in the hands of an individual person to use or not use at their discretion. (It is also why advertising using emoticons simply looks and feels wrong on some hard-to-explain level -- it is not a person who is conveying the idea behind the emoticon, but an entity that is not an individual person, and more than likely a marketing committee.) Most net users will agree that the emoticon is a uniquely online convention, though more than a few -- myself included -- have to break the habit of using emoticons when writing real-world correspondence.

Emoticons have established a strong presence in the Internet culture. There's hardly a single person who uses the net who doesn't recognize the basic smilie. They are prevalent and easy to find in common use. Yet ironically they serve the same purpose as laugh tracks do in popular radio and television, media that are often derided by many net-savvy users. Perhaps more to the point, smilies serve the purpose the laugh track initially had, that of simply telling the listener/viewer/reader what the parts are that the author thought were funny.

(Since I'm using my "music" field in these entries to introduce people to music that I like, or at least find interesting: Regarding the music, think of speed trance-metal using hammer dulcimers the way Jimi Hendrix used guitars. Short of setting them on fire, though. Suddenly I have the image of a band of Tolkien elves on stage doing the AC/DC thing, arrayed around (completely acoustic) dulcimers, a 17-piece string orchestra, a harpsichord, a couple of zinks, and a harp. "Look! He's doing his famous Air Rebec!" Instrument names courtesy of Medieval and Renaissance Instruments. And, yes, I do like it!)