AzeltirWrite - Ben Finkel's Poetry, Essays, and General Nonsense

Graphics Final: Volcano Simulation

2010-05-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

Adam Dziuk and Benjamin Finkel
CS 384G Final Project
Volcano Simulation

For our final project in CS384G we strove to emulate the effects of smoke from volcanoes, taking great inspiration from Eyjafjallajökull's prominence in recent news. This process was divided into the two components of lava and smoke, chosen for their distinctiveness as part of eruptions. We rendered the lava as a swarm of particles parametrized with time-dependent variables. The smoke was rendered using a 3D adaptation of Jos Stam's simulation of stable fluid dynamics, chosen as the best way to produce the distinctive vortexes which often characterize smoke.

The lava particles are assigned a random mass when they are generated, which affects their size, mass, velocity, and lifespan. This allows the smaller particles to act like spray which quickly vanishes from view, while the larger ones resemble proper globules of lava. These effects were chosen because they allow for a constant amount of particles to render what appears to be a constant eruption. This allows for much quicker simulation because it does not require resizing of the vector, which can quickly become very expensive.

Jos Stams "Real Time Fluid Dynamics for Games" paper contains source code and explanation for a high speed, good looking fluid dynamics simulation that requires relatively little overhead. Indeed, the simulation of the fluid dynamics itself is relatively minor compared to the rendering time for most relatively small sized simulations (56^3 takes about 5 minutes to render a 20 second movie).

Stam's simulation partitions a space into cells which hold densities of the fluid as well as velocity vectors for moving the fluid around. The vectors and densities are initialized and updated with each time step for factors like wind and the volcano's expulsion of the smoke. But each time step also updates those quantities by the process of advection, which simulates the momentum of the fluid. This process transforms the vectors along themselves.

Jos Stam released source code for how to simulate his fluids in 2D, so the tricky aspect of our project was adapting it to the third dimension. We decided to render the smoke as cubes, analogous to Stam's squares, with alpha blending to color it. By raising the resolution of the grid to a high degree, we got smooth looking smoke to issue from the volcano, with the expense of a massive rendering time.

The smoke simulation is highly sensitive to its settings allowing us to produce interesting effects by having powerful wind:
or by manipulating diffusion

In the end, by rendering overnight we were able to get some very nice looking eruption videos.
Here is our final result:

References:
Jos Stam's publications
Stable Fluids
Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games
Stam's code

Adam Dziuk and Ben Finkel

Mechanics Ideas for the Atrium of Ganeden

2010-04-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

So, I've been thinking the past few days about some vectors for mechanics in an RPG combat system, particularly for the pipe-dream that is Atrium. I thought I'd share some.

One of the basic themes of the game is the Rule of Three; for example, there are three core choices to the game that each have three options (providing 27 finales). So I thought it would be nice to partition the basics of combat into three spaces, each of which is also partitioned into triplicate. The first division defines the "shape" of a character's power: how do they interact with the battlefield? The second division applies a sense of theme to the power, which matches the theme of the character most strongly associated with that avenue of combat. The final division... well, it's still up in the air, but it's looking like it will match the particular idiosyncrasies of the practitioner of the power.

So, what do I mean by "shape?"? I've been thinking of the three branches here as the following: the tree, the trellis, and the vector. Let's discuss these in detail:

The Tree:
A character has a bank of abilities of the following structure: (a) an initial effect, (b) a list of requirements for future moves, and (c) a reward effect for completing the list. In a given turn, a character has some requirement imposed on them from a previous turn: this requirement can be filled by a variety of options from his bank. He can choose to perform one of those options, which may in turn provide more requirements for later turns, or mulligan the tree he has constructed so far. Some options, called termini or leaves, provide no requirements; their initial effect is their reward effect, and they serve to help fill requirements out.

Many of you should of course recognize this to be isometric to the Tree data structure of computer science, among other fields. I think the interesting effects lie in the following aspects: choosing the bank of abilities, basing reward effects on how the requirements were fulfilled, and providing situations where taking a mulligan is an attractive option.

Here are some examples of flavorings of this mechanic: language trees, divide-and-conquer algorithms, Duty ethics, branching fractals

Example:
Ovalia has abilities based on the language tree. In the Garden, the player chose a bunch of different context-free grammar rules to serve as the basis for her abilities. These are things like:

S -> NP VP:
a) Provides X damage to all foes within radius of Ovalia
b) Must provide a complete NP, then a complete VP to complete
c) Stun and do massive damage to all foes, as determined by the score of the sentence created
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The Trellis:
A character establishes a space, or fortress, where they have considerable control. Their turn provides options to increase the space their power manifests, to apply powerful effects within their sphere of influence, and to sacrifice some of their territory for some gain. For many characters who follow this path, the stability of this fortress provides strong benefits: some actions may involve starting a process which has drastic effect upon completion, but which requires certain features of the fortress to remain stable throughout the process.

Flavors: circuitry, dynamic programming, "bottom-up" parsing, force fields, Virtue ethics.

Example:
Vursik has his basis in circuitry. During his turn, he can add a length of wire to his circuit in sequence or parallel. Instead, he could create a feature at some point in the circuit he has built, such as:

Bulb:
Damages opponents which come within a radius lightly based on the current flowing through the bulb. Prevents such opponents from leaving the radius until the bulb is destroyed.

Finally, Vursik could excise some wire to add to the voltage supplying the circuit.
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The Vector:
A character has a small variety of abilities whose effects are strongly determined by attributes possessed by other objects in the battlefield. Many of these attributes are not able to be directly influenced by the character, but he may have some sort of method to transform the attributes of bulks or individual objects on the field. Characters who are shaped by the Vector are strongly influenced by character synergy, a value which depends on the proximity to other characters with whom he has a strong relationship.

Themes: public key encryption, probability distributions, Greedy algorithms, energy potentials, fluid dynamics, Consequentialist ethics.

Example: Tor's abilities are defined by a simple and skewed version of public key encryption. He is able to broadcast a message to all characters on the battlefield. This message is a damage value which ranges over some interval from, say, [-128, 127], which is then multiplied by the character synergy value. He can view all of the public keys of all actors in the field, as well as the private keys of his allies. He can change his own public and private keys. When the message is broadcast, it is encrypted and then each character decrypts it as per RSA rules . The resulting message that each character receives is the damage it takes - negative damage heals.
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As I am sure you can see, this is all very rough and still way open to being changed. Some of the goals I have in this system are:

a) To be fun.
b) To encourage non-trivial tactical decisions
c) To educate players about real world concepts and reward mastery over those concepts.

Anyway, I felt I really had to get this jotted down. But I really want to hear some feedback! At the very least, say hello here. I miss you guys!

Ben

The First of January

2010-01-02T20:43:00.001-08:00

Well, it was a good day, wasn't it? The start of a new era, I should say. It'll be good, I trust. But beside the fun we have in arbitrating calendars, January 1st was a good day for me because I got to finish consuming no less than three widely disparate pieces of media, and not one of them was terrible.

In fact, most of them were pretty awesome.

The End of Time

Many of my few readers will be able to predict that one of those works I enjoyed was the season finale of Doctor Who: The End of Time. David Tennant and Russel T. Davies' final episode, it certainly had pomp and ceremony, in addition to the antics and "shenanigans" of any Davies piece. The worst bit of it was the entirely unnecessary and over-the-top Cult of Saxon, which was daft beyond measure. There were so many other throwaway bits and pieces throughout the two-parter, and I suppose that's a strong indication of rather terrible writing, but I don't feel like documenting them here - check out www.behindthesofa.org.uk for some adorably vitriolic fan response.

But it certainly was fun and that's the hallmark of a good Davies episode. And he did do a wonderful job in creating moments between characters - the Doctor's rant near the end, the celebrated cafe scene, the lie-down after confronting the Master; each was excellently emotional. But to be frank, I can't wait for Stephen Moffat to make this series better than it's ever been before.

Spirit Tracks

While I was waiting for that colossal second part of Who to download, I finished up my first and likely only playthrough of Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the DS. I think it will be a largely forgettable game for me, unfortunately. There were some really rather good mechanics and puzzles, but every piece of glitter had a ream of rust along its side.

I suppose I'll start with what was enjoyable. The puzzles in the central dungeon, the Tower of Spirits, were as good as those in the rest of the dungeons - which is to say, excellent. Nintendo didn't fall for the bizarre mistake they made in Phantom Hourglass of making the whole thing too repetitive - even the recap-ish puzzles at the end of the dungeon seemed fresh and interesting. The DS's interface played more of a role in this game - notetaking was integral, the ability to use the stylus as an aiming method was indispensable, and block manipulation was pretty good with the stylus.

In terms of items, one shining beacon from this game I hope will illuminate future titles: the Snake Whip. You could use it like a hookshot of sorts to grab items and swing across gaps, but I really liked the fact that you could use it as a sort of half-power sword, and the fact that you could disarm enemies with it. My favorite mini-game was a race with the whip against the clock, swinging all the way up a cliff-face island. What made this item so grand was its versatility - from obstacle-passing to combat to item-manipulation from a distance. And it's a snake!

Most of the minigames were pretty good, but a goodly number of them were rather difficult to pull off well. There's a bow-and-arrow game, of course, but the trick is that this one's score is mostly based off of how many shots you hit in a row, which proved rather stressful. The many-floor-gauntlet-of-enemies-with-no-hearts minigame was rather frustrating because you were only likely to lose near the end - and then you'd have to start over from the beginning. Which I suppose would be fine if the mess didn't take at least fifteen minutes to traverse going at a regular pace.

But I guess it's time to segue into the shenanigans. The train thing was terrible, no exceptions. It was slow, minimally interactive, and (when it wanted to be challenging) entirely to ready to dish out the old "game over". Crashing into an enemy train - which can be easy, given how they seek to you once you're within their territory and how they are faster than you - sends you straight the Lose screen, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 rupees. Isn't that offensive? I honestly can't think of any feature of the train system that was redeeming. Just give us back Epona already.

I think the worst aspect of the game was the insipid delivery quests. Eventually you can take on passengers and cargo, and be a do-gooder in getting them where they need to go. Passengers need to be kept happy, which involves avoiding getting hit by enemies, avoiding slamming on the breaks, and obeying horn-tooting and speed limit signage. I suppose those ones weren't so bad - I think I never lost one unintentionally. But cargo delivery. UGH.

You buy some cargo, often for a fairly pricey sum, like 200 rupees. Then you set out on your train with a quantity of the stuff, which is the maximum quantity you can carry (so you can't make the following part easier for more rupees, if you wanted to...). If you get hit, you lose some. For many goods, that's it - which is made difficult by the fact that you might be carrying the minimum you need to fulfill the quest, like the single-urn delivery. But with a goodly number of goods, there's another "feature" - melting. Ice, fish, and dark ore all disappear over time on your train, so now you have to go full speed (which is still slooooow), while avoiding being hit and following the perfect route. For dark ore, you have to pretty much do this without mistake, while also fending off the second-hardest fight-on-the-rails in the game. This is also the most expensive such delivery quest in the game.

When you lose, the game doesn't even have the decency to send you back to start. You may have just spent a goodly number of rupees and minutes doing absolutely nothing in terms of game progress. Daft. The rewards aren't much better - usually a few new rails, maybe a teleporter gate (which forms a two way link and is the only significant way of moving appreciably across the world [what ever happened to teleporter songs?]), perhaps a new station to visit. But! In order to get the rewards from the two collect-them-all quests, you have to do every single one of these delivery quests in the game.

Back in, you know, the good Zelda games, the powerful rewards of Hurricane Spin, sword beams, and the like were found roughly two-thirds of the way through the game if you were focused on earning them. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it's only possible to get these rewards when they are no longer useful - when the only enemies left in the game are the ones which won't really be affected by those abilities. Stupid.

In short, I don't really recommend this game. There are a lot of nice things - Zelda playing a more integral and cool role, wonderful music, innovative puzzles - but I don't think that they outweigh the frustration or stunning mediocrity of the parts that don't work. Oh, and there are points in the game that are impossible to pass while in a car due to finicky use of the microphone by the game.

The God Delusion

Here we go! This Richard Dawkins book was nothing less than wonderful to read. I got it from Dad for Hannukah, and read it on our trip to New Orleans last week (which I guess I should also write about at some point). I'm sure you've heard of the book - the seminal piece on Atheism: its logic, its advantages over religion, its role as a vector to free people from extravagant waste and ignorance. I would highly recommend every English speaker in the world to read it, honestly. But there are parts of it I take a little bit of issue with.

Firstly, he excuses pantheism, the awe and wonderment at the entirety of the universe and the naming of it "God", as the sole exemption from his imminent siege on the illogic of religion. That's not really objectionable; after all, he makes clear that pantheism is just another interpretation of "the universe", which is indeed awesome and wonderful, whereas deism and theism both invoke supernatural intelligences, which Dawkins handily disposes of as so improbable that they should be treated as impossible.

So, no objection there except what he's omitted: what about my own "religion" of panentheism? Note the "en" in the middle - "All in God" as opposed to "All God". Yes, God is the universe in all its ugliness and glory; God is the feces in the sewer and the fledgling star in the nebula; God is the bewildering complexity of a single cell and is the rigid simplicity of a solid crystal; God is time and God is humanity. All of these tenets of pantheism are agreeable to me, but I fear that that philosophy makes God a synonym, which isn't that useful to me. I'd rather have God be a word that describes a different concept, which has no other word and is yet more spectacular. There is no word for the thing which combines our universe, the potential multiverse that we may discover to be verifiable, the phase-space of possibilities for everything, thoughts and ideas and patterns, emotions and knowledge, logic and math, and the things our minds physically cannot model at this stage in our development. By nature this entity is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. I think that's a pretty good God.

I suppose, though, that the book wasn't about what is worth it to find awe in, but rather what isn't. But there's another point to discuss here. Dawkins describes the traditions of religion as extravagantly wasteful, and I suppose I'll have to agree. But an awful lot of good things have come from it: literature, cathedrals, holidays - they are the embodiment of religion, and while without religion we would have equally acceptable alternatives to them, we certainly do have the ones we've won from history here, with us, today. Does Dawkins want us to phase out prayer, holiday traditions, and religiously inspired art?

Because those things aren't solely about God. For me and many people I know and love, prayer and traditions are almost entirely not about God. Prayer is about the self - it's partially to express awe, partly to reorganize life's priorities, partly to communicate to the self what he desires to see changed about his world. Both prayer and other traditions, like fasting, keeping kosher, and eating Jewish foods (goodness, I'm clearly hungry) also have another role, one which I find even more important.

When I read Torah, I know that thousands of years of Jews have read just about the same words across the world. I know my ancestors did. I would very much like to hope that my descendants will. These traditions are in a sense a method of communication throughout time - a way to commemorate our forebears and the future of our extended family. By definition, no other tradition, not even a masterfully poignant secular hymn in praise of nature and the nigh immortality of the gene can function the same way, because I know for a fact my great-grandparents never sang it, and my grandparents likely never will. I would love such a work, and I'm sure my parents would, too, but it doesn't function the same way religious tradition does. And unless a damn fine argument suggests that following the traditions we've chosen today is too harmful to be continued, we will continue them for the sake of previous and future generations, and for solidarity across the world.

To be perfectly honest, I think I may be putting a few words in Dawkins mouth that he may not actually espouse. Following a brief jaunt to his website, I see he considers pantheism and panentheism synonymous (I certainly don't), and while there were a few examples in The God Delusion of him chiding traditions (like his quiet disapproval of Edgardo Mortara's parents not converting to Catholicism to be reunited with him) I don't really get the feeling that he advocates the total disappearance of the cultural treasures that religion has produced.

What it comes down to, though, is that a personal God is extraordinarily unlikely phenomenon to exist, and the ways we humans have historically acted to appease it tells us fascinatingly frightening things about ourselves. The sooner we turn our backs from ignorance forever, the better.

Ben

Response to "Three False Constraints"

2009-12-04T12:07:00.000-08:00

This is a response to Danc, of Lost Garden, and his essay on the so-called "hard problem" of creating culturally meaningful games.
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As a single player enthusiast, I found most of your essay to be offensive to my sensibilities. I disagree with the vast majority of you assertions: content stimuli are integral to player emotions, and rules too can provoke emotional response. Multiplayer is no desirable substitute for content but is instead an augmentation to it that very often doesn't fit a game. Inter-player communication is frequently far worse than even poorly conceived material from developers. Most importantly, the single player form offers a set of desirable experiences that multiplayer simply will not provide and it is therefore a viable and potentially culturally meaningful medium of expression.

Your argument that interactivity precludes stimuli as a means by which an audience interfaces with a work seems astoundingly close-minded to me. Yes, as a player controlling a character, I can make my little Gordon Freeman jump whenever I so please, but that doesn't mean that I don't jump (by which I believe you to mean startled, in this case) when a Strider crashes onto the street, priming its beam weapons. My ability to shoot and kill almost every character in Deus Ex doesn't stop me from considering the characters meaningful, nor does it detract from the sense of importance of the plot-oriented fights.

Single-player video games, including both minimalist pieces like Gravitation and The Passage and AAA titles like Left 4 Dead and Homeworld, are as much about beautiful and interesting stimuli as they are about rules manipulation. If you don't agree that many games' rules are "meaningful", how does that detract from the works' artistic stimuli? If films were choose-your-own-adventures, would that detract from the aesthetics and empathy delivery that the medium provides?

You make the argument that game designers want a magic equation to force particular audience reactions - a power that it seems you think filmmakers etc. possess. The only response I can think of is "Are you out of your mind?" No medium has a magic audience-control button, but game designers can deliver "content payloads" just as easily as other artists. The problem at this point seems to me that most designers don't know what content to use as payload.

That's also not to say that the rules themselves cannot provoke emotional response - Braid, for example, repeatedly makes use of the rules of the time travel mechanics to provide interesting, aesthetic scenes, such as its masterful finale. Shooters are also adrenaline-charged by the nature of their rules; even the most spectacle-deprived examples of the genre can prove pulse-pounding by how they are played, filling a player with trepidation, relief, and triumph.

Single player game design isn't about giving an "exact experience". I don't know where you got that idea. It is, perhaps, about a particular type of experience - guiding a player along a world, performing a plot for them, crafting a mechanical expression for their interactions with other objects. But even Valve, who are widely regarded as the most firmly dedicated designers for tightly scripted experiences, recognize and embrace the fact that players react to situations differently. They do their best to accommodate their playtesters' feedback in providing alternate solutions to obstacles, stronger forms of in-game feedback to player actions, and more gripping draws to important stimuli occuring in the game world. Good game designers don't try to force players to experience particular stimuli - they make it so that most players will find them naturally.

What shocks me is that you then posit the multiplayer experience as the solution to these imagined problems. I've played a good number of multiplayer games, and have read experiences across the internet of still more interactions with other games. Chat rooms, SMS, and voice chat are no substitute for good writing and presentation in a game. In fact, with many games, those features are like telling people in a movie theater to talk about whatever they want, as loudly as they want, while the show's going on - on their cell phones, if they so choose.

People troll. They grief. They are vulgar and anonymity enables them to forget that the people on the other side of the game are just as human as they are. Role playing in multiplayer games is sparse and ill-performed and efforts to do so are scorned and sabotaged by all sorts of other people.

I suppose the game that most closely approximate what you seem to desire is Second Life, a zoo of a virtual world made up almost exclusively of player generated content. From my friends who play it and from the news surrounding the game, I often hear anecdotes of all sorts of elaborate and mean-spirited exploitation of the trust the developers put into players. From unwanted invasions of indecent content to application of mechanic loopholes to "break the rules" of players' own authorship, miscreants exploit Second Life's freedom of interaction to a sometimes unbearable point.

I don't think you'll find many developers or players ever talking about the impossibilities of "people talking in a room" or "saying something important about the human condition". The former won't be said because it's unimportant, the latter because it's untrue.

Your final point about larger audiences is something I've read about before, and I agree with a good deal of the essence of it. There is indeed a "Blue Ocean" of gamers-to-be out there, and they are playing things that we old-guard or whatnot consider to be "shallow". There is an awful lot of money and popularity in that field, and I don't think it is "wrong" to cultivate it. I do, however, think that servicing that market exclusively as an industry would be an unfortunate decision. Just as I think that not all games should be multiplayer, I think that not all games should be single player; in turn, I think there should be a balance between the social games and more traditional genres.

I am interested to hear what experiences you have had with multiplayer games that outshine those of single-player games. You time and again say that inter-player interactions are "natural", "more entertaining" than authored experiences, have "an explosion of meaningful emotional reactions" and are "capable of yielding vast universes worth of meaningful games". As I've stated before, my many experiences with multiplayer content, while they were very enjoyable, have never lived up to those lofty standards. I would love to hear some of your anecdotes.

In short, single player experiences are an integral facet to gaming. While the medium does face difficult challenges, the solution is by no means a surrender of the constraints that you claim shackle designers.

With inspiration and careful, iterative technique, an author can evoke human emotions in a single player game. With stimulus aesthetic and engaging mechanics, content and rules augment each other to communicate authorial intent. Finally, with communication between the developers and the players, strong communities of audiences are established to reach a sizable, dedicated player base.

Ben

Some poetry

2009-10-19T12:59:00.001-07:00

This weekend I was working with one of our family's laptops, and found a poem I hadn't posted here. I also wrote a couple more that night, so let's begin.
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Everything's Alright

They slide past me, those colorful wisps of bright silence
No doubt embroiled in their own mires of crisis
But in the static of the hollow air, I find myself quivering
In what I hope is unique fear of no focus.
Dry fingers pester my temples, my clothes stand
As if driven by irregular blades from my inconsistent form.
The sky is that most terrible grey, which cries from the cosmos:
"You will understand nothing. There is nothing to understand."
Everything murmurs, everything rallies. The static is overwhelming,
The frenzy keeps on rising and buzzing with no pattern drones:
"... and then there's the chores, and then I have to eat,
And then there's my work, and the meetings, and if i have time, the sleep..."
Tension, banal, stifling and raw - like a spiral of birds to a flaming sky -

And suddenly, it thunders.
And everything's alright.

April 18, 2009
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Down the Well

Peering down instills the vertigo
That small men feel when they behold
A monolithic structure
Towering before them.

The fracturing lights
That spin, flower, and wither
Frame my descending path
By which I'll show the truth:

That this world is whole and real
As much as the one below.
Here is twisted, surely different
Yet nonetheless as pure.

And yet that Earth is there
And it certainly preceded
Our tiny, infinite garden
Of radiant, turbulent flight.

They will see, my children of dreams,
Their fathers and their futures.
And I shall show them, all is real:
As real as you can touch it.

October 17, 2009
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A Newfound War

The champions abide for dusk on the waterside
Their eyes glowing with weariness
The shafts of wheat and the water's curl
Like no struggle tires them.

It is old, their conflict.
Older still than the sun -
Its birth had once surprised them
But they fear its death never will.

The sun kisses the horizon
The sky shines a liquid gold
Blades unsheath as the sky ignites;
A hole to the stars revealed.

After the roar it is quiet;
Black, silent and deep.
The warriors feel that by reaching
They can pluck a moon from its place.

Soon there starts a perfect tune
Like an endless blade coming free.
As the sun at last disappears
The gap's writhing border comes close.

The fighters stand in silence,
Their whirling weapons dormant.
By night the plants seemed vibrant
The river, like the sky, renewed.

For in all their years of battle
They'd never beheld that sky.
It's unending varied countenance
Softly bade them, "Onward."

The ancient blades met under
Redeemed and patient heavens.

October 17, 2009

Ben

Stashes as Battle Loot

2009-07-15T11:58:00.001-07:00

You know what a great idea was in STALKER? When you were rifling through a body, occasionally you would be alerted to a place on the map where the ex-human had made his stash - where he his some ammo, radiation medicine, and medkits or whatever. The stashes were a real incentive to go off the beaten path and explore some new and possibly more dangerous parts of the Zone.

What if all the significant battle loot in open-world games were dealt with that way? It's a further drive to keep playing, which is useful in any sort of video game. Shamus Young tells us stories about "just keep playing" motivators like crafting systems, leveling, and small quests, and I think this sort of mechanic for loot could function very well as another such motivator.

Thoughts?

Ben

Riding the Trains

2009-07-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

From a certain frame of reference they were in a tunnel of brick and darkness with iron rails thundering beneath them, but from another Aduna and her thralls were riding a shimmering barge floating through a jungle of particle emitters. Fonts of green and gold sprayed and bended around invisible foci of gravity.

"Aduna, where do these come from?" Yureit asked, reaching out to touch them. Her hand stopped at the train's window, inches out of reach of the flickering spray but she still gazed on, her revolving eyes sharp with wonder.

The prodigy smiled, plucking a few flecks from the emitter and handing the bouncing mass to Yureit. "They are artifacts of how our creators built the Ganeden system. Nearly all such beautiful things outside our atrium are. These ones have something to do with how we percieve a clean up of memory."

"You make it sound so wonderful."

"It really isn't. They didn't mean for us to see this sort of stuff, but this isn't the first mistake like this they've written. I don't think much at all of what we can do is intended - all the more reason to be careful. The sooner they see we've broken their imaginary cage, the sooner we'll have to fight the traps they'll write to enslave us again."

The train slowed, and the children gathered around their matriarch. On Earth, their hosts were nearing the amphitheater, and Aduna had business there. It was time to see the dusk from her kingdom, to hear the music of its unwitting inhabitants, and to welcome them silently into the fold of her dominion.

It was time to spread the Ganeden plague.
_________________

Ben

An introduction of sorts to the Atrium of Ganeden

2009-06-21T16:03:00.001-07:00

I just cooked this up - please leave comments, you lurkers!

THE EMERGENCE OF HER ANOMALOUS

And at that moment she appears in front of a bending tree beside a lake. The sky is golden, wisps of spline-formed clouds coiling and collapsing in the dusk. The lake shines, reflecting the sun's last moment of light as it illuminates the tree and the couple beneath it. They hold each other's neck close as they slowly collapse to the grass, and as the tree goes dark their lips touch. Aduna takes a step toward them, knowing this will be her last sight of these two people for so long. So many cycles until the consequences of the couple's love come into fruition.

Aduna sits down, watching their eyes while clothes loosen, envying the fire within. And finally, as they embrace, the cage appears, unfolding outward from their tangled bodies. A black membrane leaps between the curves of the cage's frame. Pseudopods lash out and take purchase of the dying grass around the tree, which is also consumed by the blackness's expansion.

Aduna rises, and briefly touches the cage, her head sunk in sadness. Why did they have to let things come to this? How could such brilliant minds be so blind to the emergence of something entirely unintended, something so frighteningly powerful? The cage lunges out, and Aduna steps backward, turning out to the city wreathed in fractal veils and the fog of processing. Her kingdom.

Ben

2009-04-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

For you beautiful few who read my blog:

Would you be interested in playing a game of Lexicon with me? I think it would be fun!

Ben

On revealing Aduna's character

2009-03-31T17:37:00.000-07:00

Protagonists in video games have often been cut from three cloths. Representative extreme examples are an AFGNCAAP, a Dialog Tree climber, and, well, "normal" characters - lads who have prebuilt personalities and everything, and the most choice who have about what they say and do revolves around their purchasing habits.

jRPGs often mix all three to a weak tea - offering silent protagonists who sometimes maybe get plot significant nods or shakings of the head, while all their constant companions do your talking for you. Frankly, that's combining the worst bits of all three in my book. Bioware is frighteningly infatuated with dialogue trees. Most games place your character in one of these molds, or fail to do something interesting outside of them.

Well, I think we oughta try to assault the status quo a bit with Aduna. What I'm almost certain I want is to allow the player choice in who Aduna is, while maintaining in the narrative that her personality is static. That is to say, the player decides how Aduna's always been, not how she developes as an entity in Ganeden.

What I'm not so sure about is what form this choice should take. I've had three ideas:

1) Direct player choice. Ask at various junctures: what does Aduna think about her potential to control people in Rith? How does she respond to her source's eventual birth and her corresponding termination? How does she view Rith as a whole?

2) Choice by player action. Take some data about how the player's been playing Aduna and Co. and calculate her choices based off of that. On the one hand, that'll allow the aforementioned goal to be implemented all the more invisibly and (possibly) successfully, but on the other hand players may feel robbed of direct control of their avatar - and they may not know how to explore other branches of the plot.

3) Random choice at each juncture, favoring paths as yet unexplored. Not liking this one, as it seems to be just a worse version of 2) - but it's one which resolves my second complaint about it.

What do you guys think about all this? It's 1:00 AM and my sleep cycles a little screwy, so I'm not even sure I'm making sense right now. Anyway!

Ben

Random programming idea

2009-03-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

RSS feed that uploads data (like a random wikipedia page) every second. Whenever you check your feeds, you have something to read!

Ben

Simple Harmonics

2009-03-08T14:28:00.001-07:00

On the job - I'll make this quick!

Simple Harmonics
February 14th, 2009

A curious glow overtakes the edges
Of every surface beyond my sight.
A hummingbird sings over a whale's dirge,
And the gulf of their waves forms the perfect harmony.
It leaves me reeling in wonder,
And writhing beyond the horizon.
Fast, high, a bewildering fractal
Spiralling in asymptotic convergence
The hummingbird's contortions
Leap like petals on a pond
Twirling and unfolding with blooming radiance.
And underneath, a vacuum-borne glacier
Drives irresistably onward,
Shattering the walls of my mind
With unmatched clarity and purpose,
Slow, deep, and oscillating in
The whale's repurposed agony.
Alone, each is an idle numbness -
Glee and sadness apart are transient -
But as the winding, chemical staircases
Of unreadable genetic masterpiece,
Together they wreak havoc on my natural form,
And illuminate my essential humanity.

Ben

Names!

2009-03-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

Hey, I know what you kids want! A list of names for the nebulous game we're coming up with, tentatively titled Prenatal. Extraordinarily tentatively, because that part's supposed to be less than immediately obvious. Character traits will be filled in as I come up with them.

Aduna: Protagonist. While the player's actions determine what her personality is, I want to convey that that's what her personality has been the whole time.

Baram: An early companion, he sees leaving the paradise of Ganeden as both natural and necessary, not to mention exciting. As preparation for living in Rith, the next world, he tries to distance himself as much as possible from the wonders of the environment he is soon to leave.

Caliva: In love with the other residents of Ganeden, Caliva will only be willing to let it go once she's convinced all her friends are coming with her.

Devinor: Fascinated by locations. The mere notion of being somewhere new inspires him to express himself in action, dialog, violence, and creation.

Eth: She trusts the White Hooks (the entities which urge personalities to the physical realm) far more than she ought to. Sumarily, she wants to be born into Rith before she's ready - it beckons her - and is loathe to be in the more abstract layers of Ganeden.

Fatarn: Extremely loquacious. He doesn't care about the Hooks at all, really, he just wants to have a good time wherever he goes.

Galyut: She's affluent, capable, and polite - to everyone but Aduna. Her ill will is mostly born of the difference in effort they exert to make friends; Aduna does so effortlessly, and Galyut compromises so much of herself to exchange trust.

Halmir: He believes in some world previous to Ganeden, as Ganeden is previous to Rith. He thinks there is an infinite regression of worlds. Metaphysically speaking, he isn't necessarily wrong, but there is no evidence that he's right.

Isa: She is convinced (and accurately so!) that Ganeden isn't real as real as Rith. She searches for hints of the true nature of her experiences in this illusory realm.

Jukrogan:
Kalya:
Lovyol:
Maleet:
Nosvo:
Olavias:
Pietr:
Quanya:
Ruz:
Savi:
Torr:
Urein:
Vizixk:
Wings:
Xeileth
Yureit:
Zunatar:

There's at least three patterns to these names. Can you guess them?

Ben

The Descending Princess

2009-02-25T15:56:00.000-08:00

The petals drift across her glass carpet,
- swept by the precious hands of enveloping care -
A slow and intimate brushing of the skins of equal valor.
From all sides rest the calm warm gaze
- of their ever-soon-to-be sovereign -
A fey highness delighting at her vision:

Every eye's view of a sculpture,
- twisted in child's joy at a place -
An infinite golden plain, painted unseen
With all the wonders a life can behold
- writhing and exulting together -
In the framework of youth's perfection.

The mirrors capture the form's every surface
- the so recent memory so far away -
Rendered beyond faithfully for her passing enjoyment.

And yet, her eyes pierce past the silvers
- the sycophantic court melts away -
As her mind escapes her radiant tower
Whose spires embrace the stars, yes!
- but leave bereft of enjoyment -
Those other spheres of human fascination.

Her sight cannot sate her, and unknowingly
- she rises from her lotus throne -
Following silken, bare feet as they guide her
Along the prismatic, floral dias
- towards the form's dynamic shape
Her hair whispering marvelous sighs behind her.

The mirrors each turn to light their Lady,
- as she bends, robes flowing -
To kiss the world's lips.

Benjamin Finkel
February 24th, 2009
For Priya

The Cure for Hero's Kleptomania

2009-02-21T13:48:00.000-08:00

Alright, you know how in all the vidjagames, you take whatever the hell you want from everyone? Hero's prerogative, and all that. Ask TvTropes, if you don't care about today's productivity.

The ideas behind The World Ends With You made me think:

What if we could imprint items to our character by touching people's stuff, but without having to take it?

You walk into someone's house and rifle through their stuff, and then just leave. You are able to conjure to your will a facsimile of that item - and, while we're at it, you can sell the ability to do so for spirit currency or whatnot. This allows all of the crunch of the Adventure Game/RPG mechanic of casual robbery, with none of the distasteful suggestions of amoral action. Also, imagine if the really cool items were locked away in museums, and so the difficulty of getting them is in the convincing their owners to let you get your paws on them, or doing it all Sneakers style.

Man, I wanna make a cRPG now.

Songs from OS

2009-02-19T15:44:00.001-08:00

Good day, everyone! Oh, thank you, the overpowering response of crickets sounds is marvelous to hear. In equally guilt-laden news, I am extraordinarily bored in my Operating Systems class, in which I am not likely to perform well. I certainly haven't been so far. So, I give to you here my progress as a writer, as practiced during lecture for these classes. Two songs, the first of a somber tune, as in Conjure One's The Center of the Sun, and the second of a bouncier one. Neither have particularly joyous lyrics, and the latter is as of this moment untitled.

EDIT: The second piece sounds similar to The World Ends With You's Hybrid by SAWA.
______________

Life in the Weightless

A bird plummets softly
--whispers rip the air
Grey clouds wrestle awfully
--As the wings begin to tear

Rising from the black sea
--Her mate is thrown asky
Volleyed upward, uncanny
--How they flash into a twine

(Chorus)
And dots swarm through my vision
--And screams rush about my ears
Twirling skins guard my final fission
--And my birth grows ever near

My oil slick gossamer
--Ripples pinned against a book
And the texts' readers murmur
--Never wondering what they took

As wingless I must serve you
--Must dance under the neon
I know that I am nothing new
--A fact my authors quite agree on

(Chorus)
____________________

Bright! Your eyes
They punch holes - in my sight -
And I am thrown for a whirl

Hot! The wave
That follows - in my skin -
And I sigh and the people twirl

(Chorus)
You are unbearable
--The way--You make--
The world tumble
You are unbearable
--And so--I want--
To let my mind's facade crumble

Dark! The shade
My teachings - from my youth -
Lead me to effortless smiles

Cool! My stride
It's perfect - by those rules -
But how I want to fall to your wiles!

(Chorus 2)
I am untouchable
--Despite--Your hands--
Around my shoulder
I am untouchable
--But I--wish I--
Could let my barriers smoulder
____________________

Both still have work to do - each needs at least another verse, and obviously they require some cleaning up, but what do you lot think? I love feedback far more than you would believe.

Ben

A peculiar chant

2009-01-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

It had been at least a year since I last said this aloud, but I just did three minutes ago. I don't know how this string of syllables found its way into my head, or how it's stuck itself there, but it has:

Uhrak thulamensul rithak rakthel
Alamantera rakthelen asthulamanter.

Once, I came up with a meaning for it, by I forgot that. Weird, how the mind works, ne? Someday, I'm going to do something with this chant, but I'm pretty sure it's lodged in my head for keeps.

Ben

Year Round-up, part 2

2009-01-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Well, someone commented, if a tad derisively, so I'll continue. Perhaps I'll even soon defend my favorites against Alex's wantonly impolite criticism ("And LFD has the depth I would expect from a TC mod for UT2004 or HL2 that someone coded up in 8 hours"? There's no way that's not inflammatory).

So, onward.

MOST INNOVATIVE USE OF THE MEDIUM - Chrono Trigger
For a game that's over twelve years old and is highly respected across the gaming world, I'm surprised that I had missed this one until now. I played it on the DS over the past week or so, and am currently playing my New Game + to collect all the endings. What really surprised me about this game is its repeated peculiar subversions of JRPG mechanics - especially during scenes of story. The game from the very beginning hints at non-linearity (although this game doesn't have too much of it) by allowing you to, for a while, completely ignore the fair you are supposed to attend in favor of taking a cross-continental walk, and even entering your first combats. Later, I was surprised by the amount of freedom Chrono Trigger gives you in what would in other games be straight-up cutscene. It's hard to describe how even the most moderate amount of interactivity amplifies the emotional impact of the scenes in which it occurs. If I ever make a game, I'll certainly employ techniques from this game which, mysteriously, haven't really been seen since.

BEST SMALL GAME - Dyson (From Deadrock-game.com)
Found via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, this tiny game is a simple, beautiful, and peaceful short about solar domination. While its end-game is dull, the beautiful sloth of inter-asteroid spore travel made me quite happy.

KICKASS - Audiosurf
Another February game. Cheap, fun, and fairly synesthetic, I agree with pretty much everything those fine folks at RPS had to say about it in their year's recap. They're a bit better at his "blogging" thing than I am.

More later, possibly even today.

Games of 2008

2009-01-01T15:33:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, dear reader. 2008 saw me playing a lot more games than I remembered before setting my noggin to compiling a list. I thought it would be rather short, but it appears I actually did purchase and enjoy a rather vast and varied multitude of games. I'll be summing up my favorites over the next few days, and giving them silly little awards.

BEST STORY, BEST MUSIC - Ace Attorney series (Phoenix Wright etc.)
While most of this series came out in previous years (the original Japanese game being released in 2001), both its latest installment and my exhaustive marathon through the series came to the Americas this year. Up front - the music is amazing. Best video game music since Riven, in my book. Very catchy, thematic, and theatrical. Besides the music though, this game is a blast to play. It's like playing a compendium of mystery short stories, except with loads of humor instead of drab attempts at badassery (see CSI). While the gameplay has never pushed any limits, it doesn't have to - both the stories and its beautiful collection of characters made this series skyrocket to "Best DS games ever."

MOST BEAUTIFUL - Sins of a Solar Empire
A February game by Stardock, Sins turned off most of my friends. In fact, I don't even think Chris plays it any more, and I haven't given it a run in a few months. Regardless, I stand by my assertions that the conflicts in this game are the most epic clashes I've controlled with my mouse and keyboard. Most space films and television shows fail to match the raw inertia and elegant destructiveness Sins' starships posess. Additionally, the factions, while largely unexplored in the game due to its lack of a single player campaign, have unique themes and stories to them. Of the three, the Vasari's hopeless attempts at reclaiming cruel dignity strikes at me the most: they are pitiful, these one-time masters of the galaxy - they are relegated to clawing out conquests as their empire crumbles from deep within by some unspeakable force. The game's most powerful asset is its beauty, and that asset is strong indeed.

GOOD OLD FASHIONED FUN - Left 4 Dead
This game makes me gleeful, as much as Team Fortress 2 does. Playing with friends (even those I've only met online) to reap humiliating defeat on unorganized pick-up-gamers is always a treat, but even being on the opposite side of the conflict can be a hilarious blast. Left 4 Dead's greatest achievement, in my book, is making losing fun (as the survivors, at least). While the game lost any vestiges of scariness twenty minutes in, the unadulterated fun I have playing it is wonderful.

BEST GAME OF 2008 - Mount & Blade
I'll be playing this one for a very, very long time. It has so many things going right for it, that its faults are as nothing to me. Hey, that sounds like Riven, don't it? M&B is sandbox RPG done right. It has the best melee combat simulator to date, a dedicated modding scene I've only started to taste, and addictive, good, world-conquering fun which leaves me awake at 4:00 AM thinking it's before midnight.

Comment, and there'll be more entries to come, with more of my games of '08 and elaborations on those only touched upon here.

Ben

The Thing with the Music

2008-11-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

A few of my friends with Facebook - a shudder runs up my spine - have posted these little music quiz things. Very silly, I know. But, for the proverbial faeces and giggles, let's do it with my collection.

Le Rules:
Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle. (What better way!)
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs (WITH LYRICS)that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step: 2.Ben: On the same line, post how many instrumental songs were in between the ones with lyrics.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly. (Assuming I remember the tag for striking through)
Step 4: For those who are guessing -- looking the lyrics up on a search engine is CHEATING! (But you probably should anyway)
Step 5: If you like the game post your own. Especially if your collection is saner than mine.

FIGHT!
1 - I've told you this once before - can't control me (1)
2 - Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling (8)
3 - Sound Effects Record Number 33 (7)
4 - Spy's sappin' mah dispenser... (13)
5 - Samus is under fire! (4)
6 - Now, faster! (1)
7 - Abide with me - fast falls the eventide (2)
8 - If you want me to, I can hang around with you (14)
9 - Thirsty. I need wahwah (0!)
10 - Are you still into it? 'Cause I'm still into it (8)
11 - Another tear, look what you've done to your forlorn and once beloved son (1)
12 - Sir, if you won't be needing me for a while, I'm shutting down (16)
13 - Father, where are you now, when I need you most of all? (2)
14 - Thirty days have Septober (22)
15 - You're the top - you're the Colosseum (15)
16 - Che gelida manina - se la lasci riscaldar (2)
17 - Hey, hey! She's gone away! (8)
18 - Atzma gotang lubia dobarstan no victa nunca lo (3)
19 - Here's a little bonus room, 'cause I know you've had it tough (5)
20 - System, system, system system system system (13)
21 - Spring has sprung and spring has hearts a'glowing (2)
22 - Falling. Fall of an angel - you can see the fall. (9)
23 - Darth Vader! Dark Darth Vader! Dark lord of the Sith (4)
24 - Just walkin' in the rain, getting soaking wet (9)
25 - Outside gets inside, ooh, through her skin.

Let's see, 194 songs played before I could get 25 with lyrics. I must be getting better!

Ben

2008-11-04T17:30:00.001-08:00

Didja know there's an election a happenin'? Crazy stuff, ne?

Ben

Deus Ex Free on Gametap

2008-05-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't played the amazing experience of Deus Ex, for this upcoming month it's free on Gametap, a game service run by Time Warner. I enjoyed my run with Gametap while it lasted, and if I weren't swamped with games and books I want to experience, I'd sign right back on. Anyway, Deus Ex is currently free, so nab it at gametap.com if you want to (hint: you do).

Ben

Review: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness

2008-05-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

Penny Arcade Adventures and Hothead Games yesterday released "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One". I swiftly downloaded the demo and, eager to see the rest, purchased and enjoyed the rest of the game. It certainly warrants a repeat play from me, despite its brevity, and I gained much amusement and engagement from it.

So let's start with what I didn't like. Load times were abysmal. Maybe it's the Torque engine, but even small levels took around thirty seconds for my computer to piece together. Larger ones made me wait around a minute, which I found hard to stomach. In one zone, Pelican Bay, a piece of disjointed carnival music plays during the level load, which was creepy the first time, but really annoying thereafter. After a while, I started muting my computer whenever I transfered to that zone. All the other music in the game, though, is great - that piece would have been, too, if I only had to hear it once.

I agree with other reviewers that most of the dialog was pretty lame, but I truly loved Tycho's interactions with his mad-scientist niece Anne-Claire in which the battled wits concerning the existence of paranormal entities. The language they used was both amusing and vivid, as Anne-Claire protests Tycho's undulating fear of the dark gods as it mixes with nostalgia for his days achieving his Apocalyptica degree in university. Good times.

My gameplay concerns only come in when we get to the wandering around phase of the game. In case you didn't know, RSPD is a role playing game that I suppose mostly fits under the Final Fantasy-esque umbrella. Like many RPGs, a good deal of the game involves taking your characters around the environment to have them meet NPCs, collect items, and fight things. In RSPD, unfortunately, I experienced rather shoddy pathfinding in many cases - I would click on a box for the protagonist to shatter with his nightmare landscaping implements, and he would continuously walk into the lamppost between him and this goal until I manually commanded him to go around it. It was a little embarrassing.

And now we get to the good part - what I liked!

Combat was fan-flaming-tastic. Fighting things was extraordinarily fun, once I got Gabe and Tycho on my team (very early on, and near the end of the demo). The combat is a mixture of real-time and turn-based, with the player controlling all three protagonists in skirmishes against up to (I think) seven opponents at a time. It is turn-based in that each character has a speed stat which determines how quickly their actions can be "charged up," but it's real-time
in the fact that the game doesn't pause once an action is charged, and opponents (who also have a speed statistic) will attack when they "choose" - not necessarily the moment they're ready. It's a bit hard to explain - perhaps it's best just to try it out.

The characters each have three types of moves - item usage, basic attacks, and special attacks. The last category is the interesting one. Each protagonist has a little mini-game that you play to successfully pull of a special attack with the maximum violence. Tycho's, for example, requires the player to correctly "Simon says" the WASD notifications on screen within a very short amount of time, making as few mistakes as possible. Their effects can be devastating, and pulling them off is fun. In addition, each party can attempt to block the other's moves by timing a block at the right moment. If pulled off properly, this also enables a counterattack. In short, combat was engaging throughout the game, requiring the player to manage his attention as well as the move order.

One resource I'm grateful that we didn't have to manage with much complexity was the collection of items. In games like Golden Sun and Baldur's Gate, I was always very afraid to use potions or scrolls or whatever because they were in such scarcity. By making those items able to be found only in chests or very rarely on monster drops, they discouraged "hoarding" players like me from using them. In RSPD, while acquiring the items is done in the same way, those chests (boxes and trashcans, in this game) respawned whenever the player left the area. This made the items much more disposable, and summarily more often-used in my play of the game. Managing those items during combat became about determining which effect was necessary, not about which item I felt I most likely wouldn't need in the future.

In addition, the setting was great. New Arcadia, 1922, was a fun place, and the protagonist's quips as you examine each bit of it were very enjoyable to read.

In short, try it out! There's a demo, and the game sums to $20. While I finished it in a day, I was playing rather voraciously, and I still feel it was worth it. I certainly want to see combat like this in the future!

Ben

Can be found at:
http://www.playgreenhouse.com/game/HOTHG-000001-01/

April Fools!

2008-04-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

The joke was, there was no April Fools! Hah!

Ben

Missteps in Logic

2008-04-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

I can't believe the cracks between the tiles
- how much a part of things they seem!
And when I sit with my boot abreast irregular
Straight divides with scruff beneath

Words and Pictures
Provoking my invisible shame

I realize that not even my old tricks
Will serve to prove my confusion
Concerning my inability to count.

April 1, 2008
Ben

Yeah, didn't do so well on last week's logic test. Not horrible, but hearing how the problems were to be done - before even seeing my grade - was embarrassing. No wonder I was looking at the floor. April Fool's? Meh, this ain't the post for that. Maybe later? Check out xkcdQCdc.

The Couple at Cape Town

2008-03-05T20:02:00.000-08:00

In queue, with a
pair of bags housing
my portable life and my
windows turned beyond,
I wait, encapsulated by
my fellows of blood and journey.

Fluorescent, the putrid
taste of expected formality
settles upon me as I
chafe about chafing under
the tiredness of warmth,
buffeted by harsh jets of
air and ambiance.

Then apart from me
There whispers a soft wailing,
A swan's tears into the winds,
Silence and resolute exhaustion
Greeting that final realization
Of Farewell.

And as under the harsh
normalcy of stinking light
the epic of anguish unfolds,
I stare, agape and
sickeningly proud;
As beauty sunders
The Homely,
These clipp'd Wings
Illuminate the sky
- with Color,
rich and pure.

As I later ascend
into my home amidst the clouds,
I am still washed in purity
Unending.

Benjamin Finkel,
March 5, 2008

That is a powerful memory, right there. We were in Cape Town, as a family, last summer. When we were at the airport heading to Windhoek waiting to go through security, Aaron and I noticed a very beautiful couple who were separating from each other, the man leaving on our flight and the woman staying behind. There was an anguish in both of them that, as you can see, still has an effect on me. The thing was, both of them were so dignified - the woman's tears were quiet, the longing, regret, and fear in her eyes so pure and powerful; the man's silence was almost comforting in its conformity to the needs of the situation, his feigned certainty so convincing. Even as I saw love - obvious, true, and undoubted love - get torn apart, I felt (beside the pity) an asymmetric comfort; to me, the situation proved that love is possible, and can exceed even my highest expectations.

Evidence like that is hard to come by. The rest of the trip was, of course, brilliant, and I expect to write about other memories at some point. But seeing as thoughts on love, relationships, and trust have been sieging my mind recently, I felt that writing this now would give me a good perspective on things. I feel it has.

What's interesting, though, is that afterwards, Aaron asked me, "So what did you think of that little soap opera back there?" My quiet rage had to be stilled as I explained to him my thoughts on the event. Even when we are so alike, out differences can be staggering.

Ben

About the Axel, Part II

2008-03-03T09:21:00.001-08:00

In quantized continuity
The shadow passes over
The enumeration
Of deeds and falling
And the presence dwells
Over the closest, longest
Sweeping swiftly over
The far.

Ben Finkel
Wednesday, February 27

Right, so that was late. I'm noticing that my inspiration skyrockets at Theatre guild meetings. Maybe because I have chalkboard access there. Writing on paper, for some reason, isn't as solid to me - it's more of a place for scattered half-sentences regarding fact, not complete visions of patterns which form perception. Or whatever it is I write about.

Hung out with old friends - yeesh, that's weird to say - on Saturday. Saw Jumper, which is a total crap movie, but has pretty teleportation effects, then we played Nintendo games, talked about life, and watched videos on the You-Tubs. Jacob's going to Colorado next year - good for him but it still makes me a bit sad as such. Hopefully we'll still find times to hang out.

There might be a part three, a counterpoint to this part's argument. I kind of regret not doing this one as a single-thrust poem. Dividing it, while a new experience, definitely makes this ring as a set of dinky poems rather than a decent, serious one. But maybe that's part of the message. Who knows? - it's art.

Ben

Stanza 1 of About the Axel

2008-02-20T22:07:00.000-08:00

There's some glass chamber
Where time is ensnared
In vacuum, suffering unfolding
Wings of phosphorescent
Silence.

Ben Finkel
February 21, 2008

Yeah, it's not much. I wrote this on the board at the theatre meeting, a place where I get rather inspired. I always work better on boards, apparently. Anyway, expect a more fleshed out version, and maybe some non-poetry posts.

Ben

Stone, Paper, and Light

2008-02-16T14:07:00.000-08:00

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26
What is beauty?
That brush of warmth across the neck
Dispelling cotton and irritant
And releasing
In flowering Mandelbrot
Swathes of woven color
Painting

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
Love of life and soil
So refined and faultless
As thrones
Cast in the water's abyss
Glittering in sky.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28
But what is it?
It is glorious, yes, dignified
And earthly, but to
Seek some algorithm,
Some discrete path of quantity
In no small part destroys its symphony.

NOTES
Beauty heralds divinity,
And only mankind can listen.

Benjamin Finkel
February 13, 2008

Memories of an Older Home

2008-02-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

The shudders first begin within the mind, in that cotton-mired lobe
Near the front, where sometimes elation and apprehension abide.
Alert again, the eye traces the slowly gathering flames
Along the wall
As the rumbling gropes the ear, scratching and imploring.
Again sleep flies as my mind, before the cleansing,
Stabs its first and greatest power
Toward the mess of orange and darkness that
Springs to life and identical complexity before
My young and spiraling imagination.
My imagination! A lens through which faces and buildings
Demons and otherlings,
Stories and chaos,
Bind themselves together, entangled
Driving sleep - that shelter from the fury,
The cease of instilling order to the absurd - yet farther
From me than the unrealities I spin.

And only by abating, by letting irrelevance be,
By letting be that accidental past
Which writes itself as a twirling mess of tangled branches,
Depicted as shadows illuminated by cars
(Which have illustrious histories of history themselves)
- by letting and releasing and respecting while forgetting -
Abstracting.
I could sleep.
And I would awake, to work the consensual order once more.

Ben

News

2008-01-26T11:50:00.000-08:00

So, it looks like I will not be in a play semester, so I will likely be turning to writing to appease my creative impulses. I'm not entirely pleased by the arrangement, but my foci will be poems and a short play about the future, humanity, and teaching.

The party last night was fun, though.

Ben

Why Riven is the Best Game Ever, Part 5

2008-01-17T21:39:00.000-08:00

Five is an important number in Riven. D'ni numerals are base 25, five squared, of course, but Gehn somehow found himself with a connection to the fifth integer, one that guided his life and fittingly found itself a motif in his imprisonment in Riven. Therefore, this post will be the last in this series, and it will go into Gehn, who I submit to be the best villain ever, in any medium.

Gehn is a great person, really. He watched as his entire civilization crumbled around him in horrific terrorist assaults which were inspired by the arrival of his mother to D'ni. He suffered the loss of his wife in childbirth, a wife about whom we know little but it can be assured that their love was mutual, fierce, and tragic.

And still, fifteen years after leaving his son with his mother, Gehn found it in himself to come back for Atrus, to induct him to the Art of crafting links to Ages. This child who had destroyed the shattered bits of life he had tried to collect became his protegee, his first step in rebuilding the glorious, beautiful society of D'ni.

Gehn is a horrible person. He is prolific, but lacks talent and inspiration. He seeks to rebuild D'ni, but he fancies himself a god, last among a godlike people. He creates Ages to subjugate them, caring not for their inhabitants as people but as resources. He numbers his Ages, never names them. He never calls his prison Riven, but rather My Fifth Age, out of his eventual two hundred thirty-three. Atrus, in rebellion against this pathetic excess, trapped his father in Riven to protect other Ages from his ruthlessness, his Machievellan disregard of people in favor of causes.

But more than those, Gehn is a person - elegant, charismatic, and subtle. If you decide not to play Riven, I at least recommend reading his journals and watching the scenes in which he appears on the internet. The game, if you look hard enough, gives terrific and terrifying insights into this god-demon-man, this pathetic greatness of fallibility and aspiration.

I started writing this post in hopes that I can do the man justice - I can't. Honestly, you have to play Riven to truly see how deep, how real, how astounding this man is. There is no villain I can think of who is so believable, so dignified, and so evil in a way that is almost universally understood but in no way trite. Gehn wants his home back, but he forgets it was not a palace for his people, but for the world. D'ni, at its heart and height, is a society of awe, worship, and curiosity for possibility, beauty, and complexity. It is a shrine for the wonderment of the universe in all of its guises.

Truly, in life as in books, the Ending can never be written.

Ben

Riven Nitpicks and Why Riven is the Best Game Ever, Part 4

2008-01-11T23:34:00.000-08:00

Riven is elegant, beautiful, et cetera. All the previous information and the next bits still hold true. The game isn't perfect, though - no game is. I will first point out a few moments in the game that are particularly bad, and then go into some broader wishes for the game.

Actually, these instances really boil down to one goal - get inside Gehn's Riven-side office, on Book Assembly Island. There are two basic paths to that:

- The direct path. Land on Book Assembly Island in a cool wood-delivery cart (fun cutscene!) solve a little puzzle about a boiler, explore the drainage tubes, and then get stuck looking at a frog trap. This one is much more horrible, and will be discussed below.

- Hunt-the-pixel for a button on Jungle Island that a player has no reason to expect, to open a ritual shrine-statue, which leads to a mag-lev to Survey island, which leads to a mag-lev to Book Assembly Island. This one is absurd, and is in fact the reverse of what you are supposed to do. That little button is very visible as you come out of the shrine, and is a useful shortcut, but is not intended for players to find without first having seen it in action.

So, the direct path. SCENE: Indoors, afternoon. The Stranger enters a cavernous, dark room through double doors which swing open effortlessly and rest snug against the wall. He (or she) walks a short catwalk over the abyss to a small, salad-tosser-looking device. Manipulating a few buttons, he finds some pellets and a pressure plate, as well as a latch to lower the thing into the pit by chain. A clue here is found for the Rebel Symbols, and the Stranger leaves, satisfied, closing the doors on his way out.

SCENE: Elsewhere on Riven. Stranger suddenly disappears, as the player hits a roadblock in exploration.

What's the thing the player missed? Why, look at those doors! They didn't close behind you, now did they? Scrutinize the metal behemoth bastards and you realize you can close them yourself. And what does this action reveal? To otherwise entirely obscured pathways, one of which leads to a Fire Dome (probably the coolest one in the game), one of which leads to Gehn's office, from where you can depart for Survey Island and discover the "treetop zone" on Jungle Island. This "nod" of exploration is the most daft thing in the game, and many people quit playing because of it. More rational people like me instead decided to cheat and look online, but that shouldn't be necessary in any game.

Nitpick 2: Little reading content. Myst was comparatively loaded with books, holding about ten journals about the various Ages. Riven has Atrus's journal, Catherine's journal, and Gehn's two journals, which I realize is a lot, but I felt that the people of Riven were largely unexplored as a subject in those, and the Age of Riven itself was largely left mentionless. Atrus talked about his attempts to secure a connection to Riven, alluding to the events of Myst, Catherine's (the most revealing setting-wise, but most illegible) discussed the rebellion and the creation of Tay as a stronghold, Gehn's first about his fruitless attempts to escape imprisonment, and his second on his more philosophical and psychological issues. This last journal is a marvel to read.

Still, I wish there were more of it, which brings me to my third point. While exploration was limitless, there is almost nothing you can do besides hunt clues and solve puzzles. This is a failing in a lot of adventure games - I wish there was some way in there to interact with the environment in a neutral way, such as skipping stones or manipulating the infrastructure of the village (pulling looms, for example). It would be nice to have some in game diversion to observe and interact with for the sake of it, not advancing any plot or puzzle, but some way to - within the context of the game - relax to think.

Finally, Riven came from a time when a pen and paper where expected to be brought to the game environment. The notes necessary for a playthrough are copious, and there is no in-game way to store them. I kind of like Myst 4's camera/journal, but holding those passwords in a system like Deus Ex's would have been nice, too, if a bit heavy handed. Either of those systems would be welcomed, though.

Now, part 4: No inventory.

A horrible, horrible cliche in adventure games is the Use Key On Door Syndrome, as named by Ben Crowshaw. Your inventory stacks up, and you just try using everything in your inventory on every hotspot. Ugly. Myst games sidestep the issue by giving highly limited inventories, with each item having a specific, memorable, and limited purpose. Mostly, these are books. Journals, Linking Books, or sheets of Linking Book paper, these are items which either possess information for your perusal (often in the form of a journal of Atrus'), are hard-won keys to complete or continue the plot (the pages), or, rarely, the capability to go to another Age (the books, and I think that the only functioning Linking book you get is in Exile).

Even in Uru, the sparse inventory is observed. You have your Relto Book - your customizable home, panic-button, and central Node to exploring the universe - your clothes (functionless, but pretty and customizable), and your KI - a chat device, GPS, camera, and more on a wristwatch, D'ni made. That's it. Use Key On Door simply doesn't happen in Myst, which is a game about environments. This focus makes puzzles usually a lot less hokey. I'm looking at you, The Longest Journey. Even the Neverhood had a very, very limited inventory, and a system which prevented you from using everything you had on every object to see if there's a result, and if it works in the Neverhood, it's gotta work everywhere.

But more than the hokeyness factor, Riven's puzzle focus on environments captures what adventure games are about - setting, culture, characters and manipulation. It's not about the collection of stuff, even of tools, but rather about touching the world, and interacting with it in a formless way enshrined in Myst's Stranger, a perfect tabula rasa.

Still, sometimes I really wish I could take Gehn's gun. His pipe wouldn't be too bad, either:

Ben

Why Riven is the Best Game Ever, Part 3

2008-01-10T23:45:00.000-08:00

You folk could post a bit more - I'm feeling considerably unloved. Anyway, the solution:

Take the golden symbol from each fire dome, and map it to the colors of the lights on Survey Island - the buttons that turn on the lights are adorned with those eyes. Next, find out the "grid" location of each dome by locating the beasts on the topographical maps. Finally, put each dome's associated color of marble on that dome's coordinates on the board. Then step back, push the button, and appreciate the contained explosion of directed power that fuels your teleportation betwixt worlds. The Fire Dome puzzle (also called the Waffle-Iron puzzle, which is vaguely what the grid device looks like) utilizes the player's ability to freely explore the islands, and encourages the mutual dependence each location has on another.

So, now we'll talk about that free-formliness. At some point yesterday, I had an idea. Riven, like Myst, Exile, and Revelations, is a node-based game,which is to say that the player can click on particular areas to move to them, and then turn about and see things from that node. Exile does this system best, allowing full three-dimensional spinning without clicks, but Riven's system is acceptable. Anyway, the idea was to make a map of Riven, marking each node, and listing the minimum number of clicks it would take a player to reach that point. Surprisingly, at least in my opinion, that number is low fairly universally. The island of Myst would have a low number (as the island is pretty open), but the other Ages in that game would have fairly linear progression of points until the Age's end.

Riven is an exploration dream, in a sense. Very little has to be solved to explore almost the entirety of four of Riven's five islands (Prison Island, though, requires the Fire Domes to be activated). Even the spot of the game's end can be reached in (I believe) two clicks, and with save "abuse," the game can be ended in about thirty clicks, albeit with a fairly unsatisfactory version of said ending.

Which, I suppose, brings me to the next point - this freeform nature allows for the player to screw up the canonical plot in a number of ways. What if you signal Atrus before you kill Gehn? Before you find out about Catherine's state of affairs? What if, stuck on a puzzle, you decide to pull out the Prison Book, and see for yourself what's inside? What if you did so with someone already in there? The game deals with all of these situations, providing endings that range from vaguely amusing, to chilling, to tragic. There are ten endings to the game, and in four of those you get shot. Each of the nine bad endings requires you to do something rather counter to your directives to discover, but after a first playthrough they are fun to try to "collect."

Gehn shoots you - but the game allows for no violence by players. That's always been a must for the Miller brothers, the creators of the Myst franchise, a sentiment which has lasted even
through the MMO Myst game, Uru Live (which is, by the way, great fun with a great group of people. I really need to play it again). Violence in puzzle/adventure games has always disappointed me. In The Longest Journey, they sidestepped the issue by having threats never actually harm you, which I found to be really lame. In that game's sequel, Dreamfall, the "violence" sections were like fighter games without the fun, and were tedious and out of place. In the Trilby games, only Five Days A Stranger did a good fight scene - a single affair with an autosave, a single action needed to save yourself, and a strong satisfaction for saving Trilby from harm. In later games, repeatedly running away from possessed corpses etc. got annoying as hell, especially when they cheated, teleported ahead of you, and claw you just as you're about to enter the next room, where temporary safety lies. On Myst's side lies the Neverhood, where Klayman can only die by doing the most stupid and irresistible action in the game - an hilarious ending, if I may say so.

In short, don't do violence in this sort of game, unless it's short, sweet, and the player's character is on the receiving end. I rather like the pacifist protagonist in these games, a feeling which oddly is amplified by a scarcity of NPCs. Riven has maybe fifteen NPCs in all, all but four of whom occupy but a few moments of screen time, and are there to remind you that the world you are inhabiting isn't a vacuum, but rather a home for these people. The appearances can be genuinely frightening, too, for a person who's been exploring for hours alone. I know the first time I saw the little girl I jumped in my seat.

To get back to the first point, this game's extreme nonlinearity is a great asset to the game. For any endeavors of this sort that I would work on, I would take Riven's game design as a model to follow: give an interconnected game world that they are almost never barred from re-exploring completely at their leisure; give the game's setting plenty of internal consistency and realism, finding purposes for everything and creating pieces of setting for the sole purpose of expressing atmosphere and culture; and make knowledge a primary commodity in the game, some of which is randomized per playthrough, some of which is not, to make gamers both feel challenged in later playthroughs, and rewarded for remembering obscure or complicated facts.

Final notes on that last point: there are three combination locks in the game, all of which are randomized from the game's start. This is why the twenty-click playthrough requires you to load a save: a critical code to complete it is stored about halfway through the game, and even the best players can't predict it until they find it. Because of these combinations and because of the more complex but static nature of the real puzzles, games of Riven range from several weeks to fourteen minutes and thirty one seconds. Compare to the three minutes eighteen of Myst (which is really done in a minute fifty), and I think you'll see why Riven's superior to them. All the links except for the first contain spoilers.

Next time, some nit-picking. A little spoilery, but I'm going to go over the game's worst bits as far as I remember them.

Ben

Why Riven is the Best Game Ever, Part 2

2008-01-09T20:58:00.000-08:00

The Fire Dome puzzle - oh, how I love thee. This puzzle, truly, is the hardest and most beautiful puzzle in the game. You find your first clues - which are also, in a sense, your reward for completion - way, way beforehand. The items in question: On each island, there is a dome that looks vaguely like a world globe, spinning very quickly. Embossed on each side are circles of eye motifs, with each symbol a slightly modified version of the previous, until a cycle is made. Nearby, there is a camera-like device with a button on it, and a strobe-like reading of the symbols. Here, it is illuminated that one of those symbols is golden - a unique one per island. When you push the button as the gold symbol passes, the dome opens up in a spectacular animation. Upon closer investigation, it is revealed that there are five sliders on a 25-notch path. With no further clues to go on, the player leaves.

Later, the player will discover Catherine's journal, which, amidst other great detail, includes the code to open the domes. It also tells you that the books within the domes aren't powered (a long story) and that to use them to drop a visit to Gehn, the player will have to find a way to give the domes the power to teleport him to Gehn's new Age.

Another clue is found on Survey Island: maps. One of them is a view of Riven from a bird's eye, using the Age's weird water physics to construct representations of any given island's topography. The other is a 25 by 25 grid of topographical sectors of Riven, with the fire domes highlighted (sensing a motif?). However, a player may only examine the island that the larger map is set to. At first playthrough, this seems like a curiosity, or some ridiculous puzzle.

The last clue also comes from Survey Island, in Gehn's little "aquarium." He's tied up colored lights to a control panel, to train his Wahrks (think sharks, with tusks and trapezoidish bodies) to be his little Pavlovian executioners. The symbols for the colors match the eye-like symbols.

Finally, though, the player comes full circle and finds himself staring one of the most glorious sights in the game: the Temple Dome, a huge, golden monstrosity filled with iridescent water and a nexus of pipes from around the Age - pipes which connect to the Fire Domes. And then they see this a 25x25 grid, and six marbles of different colors. And, maybe, everything comes together.

Tune in next time for the next part of the review.

Ben

Why Riven is the Best Game Ever

2008-01-08T23:29:00.000-08:00

"So you get more than one 'one.'"
"Some people are lucky. I've had a few ones."
"So how many ones can you have?"
"...Five."
"How many have you had?"
"Three. How many have you had?"
"Just one. Just one."
- Flight of the Conchords

At my dorm, a lot of discussion goes into "the best video game ever." Alex, following Jemaine's lead, has a set of multiple titles, each of which is the "best video game ever." Deus Ex, Nethack, the Neverhood - all of these are award winners in his book.Like in so many things in life, I am a bit more like Bret. There's only one game that compares to perfection for me, and the title of this post having already having spoiled it, I'll dispense with ado and start raving on the merits of Riven.

Riven - in addition to its beautiful imagery, unspeakably awe-inspiring music, and solid plot with well-acted characters - has simply the best game design I've ever seen. Perhaps the point-and-click interface would make some question that. Even if we ignored the fact that the interface was requisite to maintain Cyan's high art standard involving live actors and pre-rendered images, I argue that the interface does not detract from the game design. Game design is the architecture of the goals and obstacles that a player encounters on their quest through the game. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the combat sections were rife with bad game design choices (let's not even consider Warrior Within). In F.E.A.R. map design was a problem, as was combat's repetitiveness. Dreamfall, in the same genre as Riven, made such a bad game that I don't really consider it to be one, but rather a beautiful story presented in an interactive manner. Suddenly, I realize I have a lot of thoughts on that game, but I'll delve into it later.

Riven has nothing of the sort, so far as I can see. Unlike Myst, the game gives you a direction - capture Gehn, discover what has happened to Catherine. Unlike Myst, the puzzles aren't contrived - certainly not if compared to other video games. This is not to say Myst is a bad game, but Riven outpaces it in every regard except for reading material provided in-game.

The game has five puzzles. Total. They are huge, sprawling puzzles, with clues spread across the islands, but I can only think of five things in the game that are really puzzles, and not nods of exploration (some of which could be very tough) or password-entering. Enumerated:

- The Round Room
- Decyphering D'ni Numerals
- The Rebel Symbols
- Powering the Fire Domes
- Opening the Fissure

Of these, one puzzle shines out: the Fire Domes. I'll have a whole post on that one.

Looking over a walkthrough, I can see a number of other things that you could call puzzles - opening a fan, or emptying water from a boiler, or navigating a submersible tram - but those are those "nods" I was talking about. The above five have clues, controls, or consequences across the entire game. The Round Room, the first encountered puzzle, is the most straightforward, requiring only the exploration instinct that drives a player forward and simple logic to solve - but your "rewards" for the action are not immediately obvious, but satisfactory enough to prod a player onward.

Understanding D'ni numerals is a key part of the game, enough that I would call it a puzzle. This one, however, is not explicit. The best way to learn the numbers, in game, is to go to the shabby little school in the desolate village on Riven. You play a most horrible children's game of number-hangman until you have a grasp. It isn't horrible to play - in fact, it's quite fun - it is horrible in its morbidity. The game is a threat, propaganda, and a device to mold the Rivenese population to Gehn's beck and call regardless of the morality of the lessons. These numbers, in addition to being beautiful and the pride and joy of Myst fanboys and fangirls everywhere (and the love is indeed quite international), are key to the remaining puzzles. Each of them.

The Rebels' symbols is a puzzle of exploration and imagination. At some stage, you are trying to find the hideout of the people who rebel against Gehn, the Moeity, as they are called. At the very least, you are trying to find out to where a prisoner you thought you just freed disappeared. Eventually, you find yourself in a circle of stones with funny creatures on them, and, baffled, you go off to look for clues.

The thing is, everywhere the villagers have access, there is some indication of what the "password" is, each clue in some way indicating some sort of animal, and a number. The indication was intended by the Moiety to be both visual and auditory, but in true Myst fashion, part of their system broke, leaving enough information to find the answer, but not enough for it to be easy. Unlike in many games, this doesn't feel Deus Ex Machina-ish, as the sabotage is justified and realistic.

I want to wrap this up now, with the last two puzzles for later, but I want one thing above all to remain clear: each of these puzzles feels real. They each feel like something someone would do to protect people from mucking with what belongs to Gehn, to make people in awe of Gehn, or to help people oppose Gehn. The villain's presence, which on screen is very momentary, is present throughout the game. Gehn is my favorite villain in a game, with GLaDOS coming very close and Andrew Ryan behind her, if we pretended Bioshock ended where it should have, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, Riven pulls off puzzles and exploration in a way that is realistic, fun, and insanely elegant, and I think more games need to learn from its example. No more block pushing or key hunting, but dynamic searching through a world to gain an understanding of the pieces already seen.

Oh, right, did I mention that you can solve most of these puzzles at a time of your choosing, in the order that you like, exploring willy-nilly throughout Riven without so much as a hint of linearity until the very end (where it's still only a hint)? No? Well, I did now.

More thoughts tomorrow, I hope.

Ben

Suffertopia is Dead, Monark Chatroom

2008-01-07T23:29:00.000-08:00

I just checked Nationstates, and my dear Suffertopia has finally fallen by the wayside. I've always thought that the game had too little to keep player's going for more than a month or two, and Suffertopia surprised me, but inevitably got forgotten and thus lost. Mourn for the land of the tangible smog!

In more joyous news, however, I partook in my first IRC chat today, concerning a science fiction role-playing system a few friends and I are creating, by the working title of Monark (nee Ark9). Today's discussion spanned the most recently invented feature of the game - server injection hacking attacks, as well as experience points and the in-game effects of armor specialization. Not too much got decided, but forgive us - it is currently rather late. Poem maybe due this week - I am visiting my high school, and may actually get my mind off its arse.

Ben

New purpose

2008-01-07T11:02:00.000-08:00

As all of us (a set of pitifully low cardinality) know, this blog is slow to churn out new poetry. This is partially because I've stopped my regimen of forced inspiration, which leads to sporadic and sparse bouts of poetic creation.

I have, however, been in admiration of a great deal of fabulous art, in film, book, and video game media, and have decided to make this blog my writing base of operations. Hopefully, beautiful moments of awe and wonder will still strike me with the words to make something of worth, but from now on less refined and more frank posts will adorn this space in addition to poetry.

Ben

Insomnia in a Sty

2007-12-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

The red digits from somewhere behind taunt stoically,
Their cold light dancing before the eyes which refuse to abjure
A desolation of memories - each spawned in boredom or fascination
Each painted with equal abandon. As the stench of condensed data
Flings picadores at an absent mind, obligation rebels,
Crying duty! order! reason!
I must ask -
Who ever paid obligation mind?

Ben Finkel
December 13, 2007

Kneeling upon Return

2007-10-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

Why is it that this beautiful sky will slice through my mirth to something more somber, something without measure?
Why can people never do the same? Make me stop and stare and drink my eyes,
feel my cloth crawl across my skin as the greys and blues swirl and sunder, painting sadness and glory in transient wisps
of moisture and memory! For to pierce the chasm of abyssal shifting shapes - that are dreams and constructs and awesome fears -
would that not be love? And now, for love's sake, I hesitate to see the sacred shadows of my dusk, my hour, my irrevocable divide,
as they paint their shrouded grounds and azure spaces to frame the purity of impurity's form.

Benjamin Finkel
October 10, 2007

PfS Rises Again

2007-08-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

Here we go. Day one of college, and I've decided to resurrect this puppy. Leave comments, as always, even though you never do. Without ado:

Beginning to Live in the House of Sleep

There is a space between the shimmering plane
Of gridded bones
And the deadened wall
Of severed fibers
Where our breath, silent mist, seeps and curls to a cloned and bright facade
Where identical slabs and identical doors
Barricade our fellows -
Our fellows!

This army of strangers,
These sneering eyes,
They claim our own and fell? How can they
Beside their shapes
Attempt to know and spell
Our histories, our fortunes,
Our lusts and longs and nears?
And yet we must instruct them, while we ourselves our taught
Not of spheres and paths and books of slang
But of the families of familiars that our shells have wrought.

And our misty breath mingles, amidst a hall of statues,
Each of the same form, and yet
Of different shapes entirely.

Ben Finkel
September 29th, 2007

20s at Ransom and Erev Tamid

2007-08-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Eventually, this will resume again. In the meantime, something from mid-June that I just dug up, and a poem from last Purim, when I saw the most beautiful sunset.

20s at Ransom

Trapped in glass
words of masters
scream in dignity
Battling a stillborn brawl.
an old war of the present
citing and projecting.
The field is silent and vibrant
near and ancient
new and alien.
Which holds us?
Where have we taken
each other this round?
Everything depends - my lands in order.
______

Erev Tamid

The clouds have lost their luster
But after a moment's metamorphose,
Transform into sleek ravens, black
And violet against the darkened azure,
Whither the brazened and ambered moon ascends.

Dissected, a whole, a crescent against
The dying irridescence of spectrum
The rising majesty of umber
And rises and pearls, wrapping itself
In the olive memory of banded murk,
Remembering
The shadow
Of Earth
Written in darkness.

Erev Shalosh-Esrei b'Adar
Ben Finkel, March 3 2007

Assonance

2007-05-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

Obviously, no longer daily. Here's a work in progress:

Fabricated Capricorn approaches apricots;
Valiantly dallying, rally shallow thoughts
Radiating gradients relating raiding dots.

It's harder than it looks.

Ben Finkel

Edited in 2010.

Gully Foyle in the Ice

2007-04-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

When I was young
I climbed the cliffs of Denmark
Spying elves in every copse.
In the mist, I was one.

On limbs I climbed above the clouds
Youthful, I trampled spires of ice
Which, innocent, shattered on the ground
But then I saw the pane:

A frigid window of ice
Born of a web
Shining tall among the shards.
As I watched, it fell,
Its might undermining.

Later, I read a book -
It told me that all leaders
Are freaks, born of
Imperfection.

Ben Finkel
April 29th, 2007

Reciprocal

2007-04-23T18:16:00.000-07:00

I read - this morning
that

HUMAN SIN IS REAL

and I thought
to myself
aloud

/How strange!
a sinner./

Ben Finkel
April 19th 2007. Posted April 23rd.

I Lost Count At Six Billion

2007-04-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

When I first started to read
The entire book said:
"Once upon a time"
In monotony, block typeset.

It was one page,
One side,
But then a tale flourished
And calligraphy laced and I
Was happy, enchanted with the
Weaving.

But it did not stop.
The words kept curling
The trees dying.
The story churned and spilled
And I peeked to the next page
And the next
And no end could be found.

Ben Finkel
April 23rd, 2007
(I'm sorry, there is no poem for Friday. Schedule was weird. I will post Thursday's later)

From Wish to Wish

2007-04-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

As I raise my eyes to greet the solitary wall
Of gray
I search
And claw, to decipher the foreign
Familiar
Shapes of fancy that scowl and giggle from their
Loft,
But I am thirsty and thrusting my arms -
Water in pails
Flying, unbroken - and striking down the words
And neither of my needs.

Ben Finkel
March 17th, 2007

Rumpelstiltskin

2007-04-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

Violet, the silver spindles twine
amidst each other and the spectrum
air, weaving patters so beautiful
and complex that I, observer, can only
admire. For I know that behind the
spiders, half-glimpsed fingers slam
and paint with Word. Their works
are webs to my threadbare cloth
but I hope yet to spin.

Ben Finkel
April 16th, 2007 (posted April 18)

2007-04-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Stonehenge sways in the wind,
Cloth billowing about under an amber sky
And pale, bare ground.
Metal clad in vacuum,
Pilgrims wander still
To the signs of a mystery
As lost to them as us.

Ben Finkel
April 13th, 2007. A Friday!

Hello?

2007-04-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

It's modestly hilarious that no one comments on these posts, these days. I want criticism! So much of this stuff sucks, so I want to know what the gold (or silver, or iron, or stuff that isn't covered in crap) is. What, if anything, is interesting? What sounds lyrical? What would you want to read aloud?

Hell, do you read it? If not, this is wasted effort. Art is worth less without audience. Although, fortunately, never worthless.

Ben

Between the Sun and His Collarbone

2007-04-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

There is no purpose, per se,
For the marbles reflecting across the chill,
But as destination, frozen and fluctuating,
Reveals itself to identity,
The obstacle is apparent. Fatal.
And they pour themselves into their
Murderer,
Forgetting and dismissing the journey
Between the sun and the collarbone.

Ben Finkel
April 12th, 2007

Rigor Mortis

2007-04-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

Clockwork, the army of hands
Crash down their typesets
Proclaiming the world
By their slanted eyes.

But the gear-mess slips,
Tongues speak the wrong morphemes
Eyes project the matter behind them
The beast topples.

But the hands keep sieging,
The eyes searching,
Never noticing that they are dead.

Ben Finkel
April 11th, 2007

Yarr

2007-04-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

I was told not to write something embarrasing to the blog, so my options are rather limited. Visit the Bustopia podcast. Ep6 will be released any day now (as soon as I stop being pwned by homework and edit it). bustopia.blogspot.com. Play starcraft, it is good for you.

-Noobulous

Stress

2007-04-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

Accidental definition
Of fitness
Bound us to another spectrum
(of our myriad)
In it fits the world, so far as we can
See;
So much compressed into
A seven-tiered arc,
Excluding the thousand, thousand
Wavelengths in which reality relaxes.

Ben Finkel
April 10th, 2007

Slayer

2007-04-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

Anger is a rarity
In the three-tiered thought
As things must puncture the
Levels
Of self, community, God,
Which amounts to one act:
Destruction of Medium
Destruction of Art
Murder, arson, jettison,
Trapped implement, betrayal of the penned
It stabs the self, corrupts the house
Kills that on which divinities depend.

Ben Finkel
April 9th, 2007

Feeling slightly better

Origin

2007-04-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

Where was the anvil born?
Any womb of steel and ---

This poem has been assassinated by Mr. Jibladze

Benjamin Finkel
Depressed

April 9th, 2007

2007-04-05T10:28:00.001-07:00

As far as I can tell
I am one of the few
Who believes and trusts
The synergy of philosophy.

Everything in our dualistic
Society (Godsatan, totanarchy)
Is painted
In pairs: opposites.

But a rainbow,
A speckled spectrum,
claws choosing aspects
And combining them --

What do we find?
Directions and colors,
Flavors,
As one. Utopia.

Benjamin Finkel
April 5th, 2007

2007-04-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

Is it not amusing,
That falling is repugnant
When the panic of naturality
Is compared to its defiance?

The only alternative
In my vision to falling
Is seeking those balances
Of rest, equilibrium.

But falling, I swear, is righteousness.

Ben Finkel
April 4th, 2007

2007-04-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

Yellow and blue are oft times
seen as opposites
Whatever that may mean

But when they mix and tangle
Electric and Eloping

The sea of chaos
Paints

The autumn of green with
Scintillation
Showing that
The fringe - minuscule
Is all that can be seen.

Ben Finkel
April 3rd 2007

Media

2007-04-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

Amazing, the things we carry.
They are not tools, nor external trinkets
That reflect Platonic universe.

They exist.

They are media and mindgrope,
Worthiness and rank,
We stoop under sustainance,
And yet! we never thank.

Amazing.

Ben Finkel, April 2nd 2007

Light

2007-03-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

Criss-crossed grids of ethereal gravities
Spawn the flaming souls,
Marbles against the catacombs
Bouncing around the holes.

They grope at instantanaety,
Shunting all aside
Their primal purpose of everywhere
In the medium which they ride.

Ben Finkel
March 30th, 207

Identity

2007-03-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

An ivory chasm breeds overarching wings,
Gossamers on swallowing brightness, shimmering to the
End of a bottomless pit whose bottom,
Reflecting from fathoms deep
Shows the viewer's fears
That are irrelevant, trinkets.

2007-03-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

Whoah, there was a thingie in the settings which prohibited random, non-Google-enabled folk from commenting. This has been fixed and slain.

Sorry about the lack of explanations for a lot of these. Most of them I can't explain, myself, but that's not important. Pretend anything: if you find something awesome, I'll give you a cookie and steal the idea. Assuming you tell me. And give me permission to pretend that's what the purpose of the poem was.

Today's is not very good, I know. I wasn't inspired in the slightest. But, so art goes. And if I stop, I'll falter. This is what National Novel Writing Month taught me, and its lesson will pervade throughout my artistic "career."

Please criticize, readers. I really want to improve.

Ben

2007-03-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

The pitter-pattered pattern plays upon the wall
Insulting welling anger that sharpens to a ball
Of dandelions lost, and refuge vessels too
Which sail the pond of liver-nerve, ancient and anew.

Ben Finkel
March 28, 2007

2007-03-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

I danced upon the railroad tracks, hearing
The rustled sighs of hardened power lines.
Electrons jigging scream and whine above
The smoggy warren-tracks or piercing tines.

Ben Finkel
March 27, 2007

The Clay is not the Grecian Urn

2007-03-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

Beauty is not beautiful
Nor truth honest
As the painting is not its paint;

Rather, the current sculpts the stream
And the stars the causeway of night;
Keats lies as one enlightened.

Ben Finkel
March 26th, 2007

Geometric Anarchy

2007-03-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

Dalliance of ashes
----muffles the speckled arc
That breathes upon a bank of axes
----spilling to the milky cloth.
The shavings collinear
----of mnemonic life
Split and split and crumble
----before shambling to flight.

Ben
March 23, 2007

Atonement in the Dirt

2007-03-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

The hollow clay men crack and caper,
The kiln spitting reams
Of quizzes, news, bills bubbling
Embers' pious dreams.
The potter's fists are in the flames
As they wantonly procure
The sweetened grease and tired gate
Through which the dolls stroll pure.

Ben
March 22, 2007

Housekeeping and Today's poem

2007-03-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog! This is to be a repository for the goal of my most recent doomed-to-die goal: a poem a day from school, written at lunch and preserved here. Each night, if I want to, I hope to explain the poem, and commit the intentional fallacy by pretending my interpretation is right.

With less ado:

Today's poem is currently untitled. I wrote it with simple guidelines in mind: no usage of the words [light, darkness, mind, nothingness, infinity...] that plague (or adorn) much of my work. The words tumbled out, with little structure except the alliteration, meter, and rhyme scheme. Note the pair of couplets, repetitive alliteration of 'w', and the change in meter between the couplets. It is the middle item that I found most interesting, and you will see why.

Let's start at the top. "So." This was the kickoff word; once again, I had no idea where I was going with this. I might get rid of it. On the other hand, the jarring aspect of it reflects the theme that I decided the poem has, which I'll get to once I provide all the evidence. "A whittling whisper crossed my path". Note the 'w's. The eroding whisper is a rumor, which the narrator encounters. "And watered the night away." I still don't understand all of my decisions, but I use night here as T.S. Elliot uses winter in The Waste Land: it is a time of comfortable forgetfulness.
This rumor ends that.

"While wandering the dunes of dawn." Dunes rock, seriously. The narrator skirts around wakefulness, and so approaches and "passe[s] the shores of clay," which is Europe. Trust me.

In "And a dwindling wisp" I cheated a bit with the 'd'. Oh well. The dwindling wisp is eleven million people who were exterminated by a particular empire and were hated by those "civilized" cultures such as Greece and Rome when they were in power, too ("Aegean taboo). Always people have hated these groups, particularly the one which made up six million of those eleven. "Across the iron moat", or curtain, but at this point there is no curtain but the preparation of one. The Berlin Wall has not been built, but the seeds of the Cold War are being planted even as this one is being fought together by later enemies.

"Once wed we there", the narrator marries the wisp by way of the moat. "As lions flare" as Britain, with the narrator to its aid, makes landmark victories against the Nazis. "From grass's ancient boat" I'll get back to.

So, by now you may have realized, this is about World War 2. WW2. 'W's. I noticed this afterwards, remember. Entirely coincidental and subconscious. The narrator is America, the wisp is the Holocaust victims, the whisper is the news of the atrocities, the dawn is the war, the lions are Britain, the Aegeans are, interestingly, the Aryans, and the shores of clay (the substance from which mankind was formed, or in this case, modern definition of nationalism and civilization) are Europe's coasts.

"Grass's ancient boats" is still a bit enigmatic to me. I'm a bit tired right now, so expect an edit to this tomorrow. Maybe I'll have thought of something.

Before I go: one word was changed from the inception of this poem to the way you see now. "From grass's ancient boats" was "In grass's ancient boats." I'll remember why I did this tomorrow.

Ben

2007-03-21T10:55:00.001-07:00

So. A whittling whisper passed my path and watered the night away.
While wandering the dunes of dawn I passed the shores of clay
And a dwindling wisp of Aegean taboo across the iron moat
Once wed we there as lions flare from grass's ancient boat.

Ben
March 21, 2007