OMG!

Yeah…have put in another couple weeks in on the animation engine for the site and heck-in-zee-bop, was it ever worth it!! It is going to be a VERY interesting space, with text narrative, movies, and game-like interaction all sort of holding up the table evenly. And then everything is wrapped in a Web 2.0 forum by Drupal…

This is more raw coding than I have done in quite some time, and I find that I am enjoying it again. Balancing that with all the ‘R-mode’ artsy stuff makes for better life, no doubt about it. And maybe this psychically ambidextrous form of consciousness actually suits the story as well…I keep seeing the comic as an artifact of the cultures/kosmosii that it describes like an interjected time-portal. Which, besides making a little sense, is a great excuse for me to have fun making the thing just about as alien as possible. But there you go…

I have an opening scene where two micro-citizens of Soo’s mother’s womb are staring up at a fetus which is a subjective kilometer wide. They themselves have bodies modeled after the strange fish-thing we are while gestating, because in their time domain the womb-year will take millions of subjective years – so Soo is like a Sky-Goddess floating at the center of their World. The ancient movies of the zygotic contact between egg and sperm serve as a mythic story of genesis.

…and that segues to the real experiences of Soo’s parents…as they explore the possibility of eating food: a radical move indeed! Send you a link to the new home for this Blog at the end of the month…

Drupaling Along

Well, a couple hundred hours of red and blurry eyed coding later, I am 'there'. The basic mechanics of how to host an animation oriented comix-engine inside of Drupal are known to me...within a few remaining wrinkles anyway. I ended up trying a lot of blind alleys -- my lowest point being when I finally learned about the enormously subtle timing issues in javascript, when your data and your page come together at different moments and can't talk to each other at all. I was in a cafe for 8 hours coding and buying my obligatory muffin every hour and a half and my variables would print to the page...but never feed my animation beast. I went home, and fell asleep.

Waking up at one a.m., I decided to abandon the variable-timing problem and just sneak some script over to the 'other side' of the Drupal core with everything declared in a 'literal'. And that failed too. BUT, when I awoke in the morning and clicked over to my page prototype -- it worked. There was some sort of caching issue, and I was back in black.

And yet! -- my travails had just begun. I had been developing my comic with its pieces in absolute coordinates, which was hosing Drupal when it wanted to move things around. For instance, when the reader wants to write a comment about a given piece, they have this moment where they preview what they have written, and at this moment the comic needs to fly down to the bottom of the page. So...I had to shift to relativistic coordinates...and those are cross-browser badlands, nothing ever is consistent between development and posting, and all the cute thought balloons and special effects wander the page fruitlessly.

Wrestled that...90 percent. Will have to determine some kind of standard dos and don'ts for it and it will be 'relatively' well-behaved. Now I just want to stuff easing and bezier equations into the animation controls! (non-linear motion and curves...the only path to organic feeling)

It's a Code

I wanted to post a section of the javascript that I mentioned in the last post because I found it very beautiful and strangely inspiring, almost like 'automatic writing' -- as I mentioned. Of course, if you have never coded this may leave you quite cold:

//Close to an 'end': If timeleft is less than elapsed time

//from last function call

if(ids_sub[k][m+2][7] <= elapsedTicks) {

//These redundant calls are for IE...and everybody else------

//depending on fadestate, opacity set to max or min

element.style.opacity = ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ?

ids_sub[k][m+2][4]/100 : ids_sub[k][m+2][3]/100;

element.style.filter =

'alpha(opacity = ' + (ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ?

ids_sub[k][m+2][4] : ids_sub[k][m+2][3]) + ')';

//------------------------------------------------------------

//Flip fade from transp. to opaque, or versa

ids_sub[k][m+2][6] = ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ? -1 : 1;

//Depending on FadeState, TimeLeft is assigned

//opaque or transparent TimeToFade

ids_sub[k][m+2][7] = ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1 ?

ids_sub[k][m+2][1] : ids_sub[k][m+2][2];

//This block is the main animation of the opacity,

//incrementing time left

} else {

//time left incremented down

ids_sub[k][m+2][7] -= elapsedTicks;

if(ids_sub[k][m+2][6] == 1) {

//Timeleft divided by TimeToFade multiplied by difference

//between opacity max, min

var newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][7]/ids_sub[k][m+2][1])*

((ids_sub[k][m+2][4]-ids_sub[k][m+2][3])/100);

//offset from max. opacity

newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][4]/100) - newOpVal;

} else {

var newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][7]/ids_sub[k][m+2][2])*

((ids_sub[k][m+2][4]-ids_sub[k][m+2][3])/100);

//offset by minimum opacity

newOpVal = (ids_sub[k][m+2][3]/100) + newOpVal;

}

//These redundant calls are for IE...and everybody else----------

element.style.opacity = newOpVal;

element.style.filter = 'alpha(opacity = ' + (newOpVal*100) + ')';

//---------------------------------------------------------------

} //end if then else

For those of you who could possibly get something from this: all the abstract array entries are substitutes for functions that used to use word-like names, but which I wanted to store abstractly so I could just modify a template literal array for each comic page and therefore be able to compose each animation as a small series of parameters (combined with some url's for graphic content of course).

Note: for those of you appalled by the indenting...I had to compress it for the blog formatting, it really is a LOT more clear in the original...had to be or I wouldn't understand it one hour after I wrote it!

Psycho Java

In a lull of client-sponsored agendas, I have been able to focus on writing a javascript app that will present the webcomic. I am mega-pleased with the result! The basic idea is to have a series of animations that represent dialog balloons and subtly shifting environmental details that are triggered by clicked on arrow keys that go from each ‘statement’ into the next. Of course, all of this has the backdrop of the basic piece of art for that day’s ‘episode’, but there is no need for absolute scene-frames or even a particular left-right up-down reading order…which gives me precisely the language/culture-bias free framework that I have been striving for.

While I was working on the prototype I had a sudden insight aimed at the analogy between the perspective of comics – that of a reader looking at frozen time with an inner sense of narrative flow layered over and under – and that of the higher ‘fast’ time realms of the story. A person who experiences a million years for every year of ‘normal’ time (and 11.5 days for every second!) sees the whole world of ‘slow’ consciousness as a kind of frozen, comic subject.

Working on the code was, in itself, full of artistic weirdness and reflection. My way of doing this task is very hard to describe – but its success usually surprises even me. Basically, I stare at a coded primitive of some algorithm that I have cobbled together as an initial guess. I do this for a couple hours. Then, in a very brief flash, without almost any conscious oversight, I type out a thousand lines of code which is usually fully functional without debugging. Occasionally, like all coders, I run into some deeply mysterious malfunction which is inevitably the omission of a comma or the improper capitalization of a variable and I then spend 80 to 90 percent of all my project time chasing down some awful minutia and/or bug in the software environment I am working in. The inspiration, meditation cycle is deeply creative; the debugging is one of the most profoundly yucky tasks ever devised by the human race. Pure torture…a sense of wasted hours and wasted life. But that’s code.

Anyway: everything works – “so all’s well that ends well”. Now I just have to figure out how to turn this script into a unit of input in a Drupal-based blog and away we go Web 2.0 style. Of course, now that I have empowered animation layers, I have to get my moving image chops back on line. Have been practicing using Camtasia (a screen to video capture tool) and MCell (cellular automata) to create some very compelling gnarly chaos movies which will make just the kind of layer detail I need…I cannot wait for y’all to see this stuff. It is wicked strange, and borders on wonderful from time to time. Will link you up when I can get the prototype properly hosted outside my cozy little sandbox.

Mom and Dad

So…that was the ‘gap’ in postings that one is NEVER supposed to do! The Google-bots are going to think that my weekly update schedule is a lie and never index again! I am a virtual pariah; I have abandoned my ‘post’ (hah!)…and all that. Well, by way of explanation, I have spent the last four weeks baby-sitting my IT consultant business and making sure a couple clients didn’t have a data apocalypse. It all worked out, and everyone seems ok for now – so back to my non-paying, utopian transition into full-time artist which will take…the rest of my life?

I started to work on the writing elements for my first web-comic again today and it felt great. Because the website will have only one or two one-page installments a week, it will be the first thing to get off the ground – pretty soon. I am thinking end of April. It would be even sooner, but I need to get back to consulting IT to myself and S’n’K as ‘client’ and get the Drupal site online. I want the whole thing to be Web 2.0 from the get-go, so you guys can tell me in constant feedback what a putz I am…only then do I have a chance of transitioning from being egregiously bad to tolerably bad!

The first ‘episode’ of the web comic is going to be focused on Soo’s journey through the womb. No, really, this is going to be a fun topic. The NewBirth Sindikat has quite a bit to do during the gestation of one of their members…really their inventions and interventions begin before that in planning sessions for new parents, nano-bots that interact with the sperm-egg dance, etc. It is key to remember that there are ‘high fast’ elements in this womb-process who experience the womb-year as a million subjective years…or a billion…

And you will get to meet Soo’s folks, which will add a lot of depth to your understanding of her later in life, when she appears as the protagonist of the for-paper-print series (the web-comic is a free, parallel product that will continue after the print version chapters start coming out bi-monthly). I had fun creating how they look using ‘genetic’ algorithms to morph an image of Soo’s face using factors that push mom in a Chinese-African direction and dad in a Russian one.

Some Basic Goals

I have done a lot of technologically oriented posts recently because that was my ‘flow’ at that particular moment in my overall work-stream and I haven’t really had time to be objective about what kind of questions need to be answered in general about my motivations and intentions for the Novel. Now, I would like to take a brief look at some of the deepest thoughts and intuitions that are ‘drivers’ for the project.

1) I have chosen a ‘deep’ future context because I want to force myself (and my readers) to review what limitations we currently perceive -- which in fact are merely historical accidents -- versus what are, in contrast, truly Immortal themes of consciousness: human, post-human, or Other. The context of S’n’K is sufficiently ‘advanced’ that almost everything we now consider a problem has long since been consigned to the ignorance of the Ancients (us!) who ‘were’ deeply confused. There is no poverty, no war, no State, no money, no involuntary death, no involuntary pregnancy, no dominance of nature by a single species, no dominance of politics by a single gender, etc. There IS still love, friendship, the search for meaning in a very much larger cosmos, the search for a balance between freedom and responsibility, between tradition and innovation, between transcendence and immanence, etc.

2) I have tried to characterize what might be considered the current socio-political ‘Antimonies’ – the perceived irresolvable differences, and allow the milieu of the Novel to shed light on paths that might have lead into non-dualistic forms of life and understanding which go beyond these self-imposed boundaries. For instance, I observe that one of the main upcoming ‘wars’ of words and policy to animate our world-culture is the tension between innovation and preservation. On the one side of the continuum you have the techno-utopians who think that no problem is unsolvable if we would merely accelerate our development of machines and tools aimed at those problems. At the other end we have the eco-utopians who are watching the environmental destruction of our planet and are seeking to slow, or even reverse, certain kinds of technical development in order to give our biological context a chance to recover its ages-long robustness. Both sides are right, and both sides are wrong. I will be trying to depict what I call an innecotive paradigm, where the innovations of intelligent species are seen, literally, as phenomenon of ‘Nature’, and where reverence for diversity and ‘life’ extends to both biological and ‘androidal’ forms…where the ‘rights’ of our legal system are extended to the whole inneco-system – the union of ecosystems with innovations. A very deep topic…more later!

3) One of my most challenging goals is to depict world that is post-materialistic, yet simultaneously extremely competent at the material goal of real-world sustainability. Here the traditional bifurcation of the world into ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘secular’ camps will have become untenable. Although competence in scientific and mathematical reason far beyond our wildest imaginations will be common knowledge even to children, most people will also have training in meditative reflection and mystical poesis. Additionally, I am taking the view that physics will have reached an accord with some aspects of traditional metaphysics (not all certainly!) and that the underlying interconnectedness of consciousness and the universe will be an excepted fact of ‘common’ wisdom. Additionally, some technological change will reflect this new ‘aesthetic’ and actually amplify its development. For instance, though most people believe that mind is fundamentally non-local and therefore biological telepathy a widespread (though not reliable) possibility, the use of the Lens for direct mind-to-mind messaging has created an accelerated and amplified historical context where the dream of merging identities is a daily, ordinary activity. In this spirit, the elimination of the distinction between wealth and average health has created a condition where the pursuit of purely material goals (and the concomitant material philosophy behind such action) is not really the most practical position. It is a time of dreams and play, where creativity is the main currency.

And yet…to accomplish the above we will need to move through some very profound, and sometimes scary transitions and I hope to show this in two ways:

1) It is critical to realize that the Universe has gotten a LOT more complex by the time of S’n’K. There are enormous populations of new forms of sentient life living in whole new ‘utanes’. Therefore, for every comprehensive social statement I have made above, there is somewhere a new position of dissent, and varieties of same, to a degree unimaginably more divers than the dissent we experience today. There are ‘Sindikats’ based on almost every conceivable philosophical premise possible – and these diversities will be embodied by characters and interactions within the Novel.

2) There are several key characters who are deliberately ‘retro’ in their beliefs, and they speak to our current concerns by representing our current world-culture(s) embedded in the larger culture of the Novel. For instance, the technological ‘level’ of the Tribes, where the character Steward comes from, is essentially a stand-in for our 21^st Century position, and as Stew moves forward and struggles with integrating in the wider world he recapitulates our future history (our future’s-past, if you will) in a kind of compressed sequence.

Above all, I want to write a philosophically ambitious work that is still very sensitive to issues of character. This is a value, and not merely a question of technique. I want my readers to fall in love with some very real and compassionate people who confront big, even cosmic, issues -- but in ways that are deeply felt and deeply personal.

Down and Fast - A Lunchtime Conversation

Below is a reiteration of many of the points of the last few posts, but compacted in the form of an email I sent my father and my brother after we had lunch and I struggled, as usual, to get all the necessary conceptual infrastructure laid our for a Down and Fast world-making exercise:

Folks—

Fun conversation yesterday…as usual! Below is a written version of one of the more sophisticated ‘sections’ we ran through, because I believe that it is sound, well-grounded in other people’s work, and definitely deserves a second chance because of the significance of its implications.

1) Because of the gonzo upper density limits of computation now being thrown around it is reasonable to talk about a miniaturized model of a human brain taking up a volume of space approximately 10^-4 on a side. We would not have to understand this brain, it would be a faithful imitation of neuronal connectivity and functionality from a ‘black box’ input/output perspective without a comprehensive theory of mind (which may or may not come later).

2) It is quite likely that this ‘mind’ would run at a much greater rate than our own for two very important reasons: a) it is smaller, so signal transfer time from one section to another is intrinsically shorter and faster in linear proportion; b) the connective infrastructure is likely to be ‘wires’ using electronic or photonic signaling which has a speed roughly 1 million times as fast the speed of nerve conduction (10-100 meters per second vs. significant percentage of speed of light); c) the calculative infrastructure of the ‘neurons’ themselves, that part responsible for taking the inputs and creating outputs, will likely be hosted on Gigaherz (or faster) microprocessors which are more than a million times as fast as the same processes in biological neurons (roughly 1000/s).

3) A fast mind is undesirable and possibly useless without a ‘body’ and an ‘environment’ with similar speed factors in which to plan, act and respond. One obvious solution is to create a host body at the same scale as the mind, i.e. at 10^-4. The laws of physics are friendly to this plan, but not always in the same way for each aspect, which leads us to…

4) Gravity: in a vacuum gravity scales perfectly – it takes exactly one ten-thousandth as long for an object to fall to the floor in this hypothetical micro-world. However…

5) Add air and things become very interesting. Some engineers working on new nano-bot designs have described water as being ‘like jello’ and air being ‘like soup’ at these specs. Forward locomotion stops almost instantly when propulsive inputs are ceased…stop and go…stop and go. Surface area effects of all kinds are enormous. The laws of physics are the same, but which ones are important has shifted significantly.

6) Of particular interest is our old well-known friend ‘surface area to volume ratio’. Insect legs are insanely thin and strong and fleas can jump a subjective/relative ‘kilometer’ into the air. This aspect of micro-engineering does help things move roughly faster as size goes down but the graph is hardly well-behaved and there are many mitigating factors like inner limb friction.

7) All this being said, in S’n’K these problems have all already been mostly solved by extending limb-like action into the ‘klowd’ of micro-webs surrounding each individual and by using the ‘lenz’ to virtually augment where accelerated perception is more important than ‘actual’ physical speed. So…

8) In the Narrative there are completely functional ‘worlds’ where subjective time is 10 thousand to a million times faster than at our current level. One underlying trope here is that internal experience is plastic under these different time domains, that is it can function pretty much the way it does now by adapting subjective time within internal experience to match useful speeds to the requirements of the ‘local’ environment. I mentioned some concerns I have for a general theory of mind relative to this point, especially at hugely accelerated rates (i.e. 10^15) but while that is interesting, there is enormous head-room here – to quote the inimitable physicist Richard Feynman “plenty of room at the bottom”.

But what would this mean in socio-historical terms? Well…I could go on at length, but I have already received more of your attention than I deserve so I will just quickly say that it would be catastrophic – in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ senses of that word. To have any sector of a society with that much ‘time’ advantage would truly be like living with hyper-powerful Aliens – one year of our dialog with them could allow them millennia of response time. Their technical development would strip our projections by factors upon factors of magnitude. This is the primary reason for my belief that the arrival times for various technologies (Futurist-proposed) are probably much too long in most cases. Even electronic human-level-capable computation at ‘normal’ scale brings this sort of scenario into play, but the additional significance of the ‘dense’ micro-variant is that it also has the distinct advantage of enormous populations!

--M