Gameshelf progress

Spent the better part of the evening logging the footage from Sunday. Took maybe four hours, for what will become 10 minutes or less of final product... and that's just to write down what's on the tapes, keyed by timecode. Wheeew. I know the ratio's always going to be pretty big, but I hope there are techniques I can pick up to cut down that time.

Experimented a little just now with various lighting and camera positions, and have a much better, more stable videographic idea for next time. Basically, dedicate one camera to shoot the table from overhead, and another for capturing the players. Film so that, with smart editing and cutting between the two cameras' respective footage, few-to-no final shots contain camera movement. (Sunday's footage is far too chaotic to pull anything like that off.) I'll try another shoot as soon as the cert tape is handed in, which will give me full license to borrow SCAT equipment.

The trick is that it would optimally require a full-time cameraperson, i.e. someone present who basically doesn't get to interact (much) with the game or the players for the entire length of the game, but still has to pay attention to the whole thing. I think it would be harder to find volunteers for that role, but we'll see when it comes time for it. Next next casting call will definitely feature far more lead time than the previous one.

(no subject)

Another link from hrafn: http://theoildrum.blogspot.com/ , a Peak Oil blog. I've only skimmed it so far but the discussion seems thoughtful, wise and interesting.

I do, however, question the sidebar's link to "a good primer on the subject", which leads to a very pessimistic and suspiciously defensive LJ post preceding dozens of heartbreaking comments from kids now convinced that they won't live to see 40. Maybe I'll suggest a link to the wikipedia article instead. (Not that I've read the WP article yet. But it's gotta be better than this.)

(no subject)

I wrote the Oil Drum people. Boy did it take a long time to find their email address... I'm not sure how I feel about the whole [at] [dot] address munging that I suppose is pretty ubiquitous across the Web now. I mean: you can do it if you like, but it probably reduces the number of people who would otherwise send you legitimate email. Well, if you can't be bothered to type in an email address, I guess you didn't have much to say, hm? Oh... don't get like that...

Anyway, "profgoose" (the blog is maintained by three anonymous university profs) wrote me back to agree that the LJ post's tone clashed with the Drum's, and now I see that the site's sidebar now has five primers, organized by "Defcon". The Wikipedia article I suggested is at the top, with 5, while the LJ post is rated 2, and two "learn to use a plow and stock up on ammunition" sites are Defcon 1. Whee!

It's LJ-syndicated at oildrum_feed.

---

I've been using gmail for about a week now. Yes indeed it does have tagging, and the spam filter is pretty good (one false positive (of a list-invite) and three or four false negatives out of several hundred hits, so far). I like the "conversation" views, too, which show my own emails in context with others'. It's more Usenetty. This is a good thing? Yes, it is. I wish more things were like Usenet. I wish LiveJournal was, actually.

---

I stumbled across the "Brights" website. Another candidate for the label I should affix to my worldview. I've known about this use of the word for a while (via randi.org), but I haven't encountered a collection of essays about it before. Interesting (but not surprising) to see some by thinkers I admire like Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett; I didn't know that they've been trying to seed the meme in NYT-level media.

I'm still not thrilled about the word, though. It seems to contain built-in smarter-than-thou arrogance, no matter what its proponents say. They compare it to "gay", but it's not like homosexuals were fighting a stereotype that they thought they were so much happier than everyone else. Confounding this, of course, is the fact that many "brights" probably do consider themselves the intellectual superior of non-"brights"... meh.

Least I ain't chicken.

I'm sure that this is a flameout meme that has already lived its whole life in the PC gamer sphere, but jjohn just turned me on to it: The Ballad of Leeroy Jenkins. (Streaming WMV)

Aside of the obvious funny, this gets a big "Wow, they can do that?" from me. I continuously have no idea what the most modern computer games look like.