rathenyr's blog

It has a strange effect on the brain, I think... The staggering legend from spuds to frozen space capsules as an ending says alot, and almost none of the entirety of the game has coherency. Yet somehow given the movement of the sooted sprite/ball to our control leaves us feeling like we are there, if only to get through to the bittersweet chocolate chip end.
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http://www.simmphonic.com/programming/adventure.htm
...is a link I used to play the Atari 2600 game "Adventure". It took a few tries to get the hang of moving around the dragons, especially the green one, who seemed too fast to avoid while trying to seize upon another key. Then as my title suggests, I found that the spear that matched the color of the first dragon would slay any of them regardless of their speed. Is it possible that when Scott Pehnke "recreated" the game he left out some elements, such as the bat moving items at random?
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Most of us probably were somewhat disappointed by the expansion and yet reduction of the first Choose-Your-Own-Adventure title with a young but open-ended readership and 28 possible endings to a DVD audience of a more specific age group and only 11 ways to anticlimax. The story had drama superimposed at various points during the running and the more playful tone of the characters and action seemed to rehash it as a "fun game" where the book had a more serious tone while still being light on the mood.
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Like a blind and deaf man seeking the bid for the presidency in a desolate land with no other living human person about, our supposed character ENTERs the BUILDING by the whim of an obsessed typist, GETs himself (or herself?) a number of items that can only be remembered -not seen or touched or listed- and leaves to move about in a n-w-w-w-e-s-s-e-w-w-w-w-s-w-w-w-n-n-e-w-s fashion with such small amounts of unrecordable information that Big Brother would be impressed and in fear for his regime.
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Finally saw The Truman Show, and even a few of the extras with cast/crew discussion. Apparently it came out (1998) before Reality TV really hit America in a big way, or before they were using the term (as evidenced by their recollections). It was more dramatic and precise than I had originally imagined, and showed alot of thorough work and preparation on the part of director Peter Weir and the various crewmembers, and especially the new dramatic acting of Jim Carrey and last minute addition of Ed Harris.
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It is interesting to note that the dark age / medieval world we reffered to in our discussion was a place where many things and customs were also kept very close at hand from caring and harvesting of materials, to production, to maintenance, to use, and to repair and modifications. It was true of food, clothing, shelter, and even warfare. The average person spent most of their day just working on basic survival needs, and the things all around his or her immediate world. They built the world themselves out of the natural things at their feet.
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Is narrative everywhere? Is it actually no where? These seem to be the two extremes from which our ongoing debate about narrativity hangs from. And it seems to be a cord of ideas constructed from the fibers bound by the countertwist of personal preference or bias. To get to the "actual machinery" we need to consider our taste and dislike for "our favorite model and make".
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Anand Rao gave us a constant barrage of images and examples, never slowing the pace even for the short discussions, but it was like rain and so now things should grow from it...
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Earlier I noticed a certain connection to Bill Waterson of "Calvin & Hobbes" with the McCay "Little Nemo in Slumberland" in terms of influence coming from that weekly color comic. Now I see how the typical, smaller weekday pages have some roots in "Krazy Kat" including some of the running 'philosophical debates', the minimalist scenery, even the line quality and technique began to remind me of those most enjoyable and thoughtful of strips from sometime in the 80's up until 1995...
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It was nice to see Winsor McCay shown on screen in the flesh, then to see him render drawings before the camera in his distinct style (he showed a great deal of line control with his use of a single pen), and then to see the result of his so many thousands of drawings.
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After pushing with all my mental might thru 8 pages of post-modern pomp, I arrived at an exhaustion point. Actually, several ideas have struck me already, and I especially think that the multistability concept of some images is worth exploring, and perhaps should be re-emphasized in historic-minded circles.

Perhaps art should be moving more in this direction, rather than as one art student explained moving into post modernism's "to please the audience" reason for making new art. Ambiguity, but more than that; in most cases duality.
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Scott McCloud's book, which I remember reading in its entirety years ago, really brought home alot of expansive ideas, inclusive concepts. Even though it was an analysis of sorts, a textbook-subject discourse (allbeit a somewhat personal narrative) and it was not about action and plot and fun per se, I was absorbed at that time. I could feel, like I sometimes do, that I was dragging a small part of myself ever onward through this "page turner", wondering what was next, how it would end, wanting to get more, learn more.
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The simple and familiar forms of Donald Duck and the nephews of Disney iconography present us with simple exposition and fare. Or do they? At once, I read thru the entire of the 30 odd pages of panels and at the very least found it well made for a comic book; I was not slowed down in the least by the details -this is something of its transparency. The style of the drawing seemed typical of american forms of earlier 20th century times, but there was the undeniably rich landscapes and well placed juxtapositions of objects.
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Passage. very simple concept, leaves a lot of ambiguity...

at first i couldn't get it to run properly, then I let it download to its prefered spot, and Ran it rather than Saved.
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