Everyone today is abuzz with the 'release early, release often' sentiment, so I've decided to get in the spirit and upload the first iteration of 'Sole Scion', my summertime sabbatical game project.

Version 0.1 merely bounces some circles off an inclined plane (pictured.) I aim to transform this into a 2D graphical adventure game, in which I hope emergent fun will take place, once I populate the world with enough twisty corridors, uniquely-shaped objects that need slotting into the right places, and judicious instances of ornery fauna to contend with.

It's written in Python, using Chipmunk for rigid body Newtonian dynamics, with Python bindings using Pymunk. Rendering, gameloop, sounds, etc are handled by pyglet.

Sole Scion is hosted on Google Code, with Subversion read-access and a source code tarball, including the redistributables for the above dependencies, should anyone be curious. It has a New BSD License.

Feedback, thoughts and ideas, very welcome.

Update: I've only run it on Linux, but reportedly it also works on Windows. Thanks Xtian!

Update: It also reportedly works under PyPy, provided you install the 'functools' module. Thanks Maciej!

It never gets old. Thank you for the giggles, Video Game Freedom.

Carl G. Jung (Author), Joseph Campbell (Editor), R. F. C. Hull (Translator) (written 1920s & '30s, published 1971)

I didn't quite know what to make of Jung when KT first handed me this collection of his essays, many moons ago. Some sort of 19th-century lunatic Freudian psycho-analyst who was a dab hand with a ouija board and sang the praises of ritual sacrifices to the almighty triple-headed hermaphrodite goddesses, right? Something like that.

So it was good to discover that Dr. Jung isn't the wild-eyed loon that I'd written him off as. His attitude is entirely credible and scientific, and while he may invoke triple-headed hermaphrodite goddesses, he does so in an entirely respectable and deeply pertinent way.

His essays are prefaced by a short biography to set the works in a meaningful social and personal context. Of particular entertainment value is the ongoing deterioration of his relationship with Freud, and the corresponding divergence of their theories. This culminated in Freud's desperate plea for Jung's cooperation in ensuring that 'the sexual theory' be established as an unchallengeable axiom in the explanation of all human behaviours. This didn't strike Jung as being particularly scientific, and obviously speaks volumes about Freud - lifelong adulterer - as both a person and a theorist.

Of the essays themselves, some of them resonated more for me than others. I very much liked his explanation of the nature of the subconscious necessarily being the polar opposite to the conscious ego, since all perceptions which do not fit in with the beliefs or attitudes of the conscious mind are dismissed and repressed. This is a natural and normal reaction, and it helps us to maintain a consistent and useful world-view. However, those repressed memories are not erased - they are simply being ignored by the concious mind. The subconscious appears to have unfettered access to these repressed fragments. In situations where the conciousness exercises wilful determination, this leads to a stressful state of cognitive dissonance, in which the subconscious comprises a roiling mass of all the impressions and emotions that the concious mind has rejected. Hence, the tendancy for people to maintain a strident outward appearance which is completely at odds with, and arguably exacerbates, pent-up inner demons. For some reason, the examples that spring to my mind are priests molesting altar boys, or maybe catholic schoolgirls. Not sure if that's a reflection of modern organised religion or my own state of mind, oh well.

Equally interesting is Jung's theory of the collective unconscious - that the religions, myths and legends of the world are united by a handful of common themes, or archetypes, not because of cross-pollination of ideas, but because these themes are an expression of psychological commonalities between all human minds - seems credible and useful. I still have some reservation in accepting Jung's particular menagerie of archetypes as definitive. He may have distilled them from many years studying the world's religions and mythologies, but if you throw enough noise at a filter the result ends up being characteristic of the filter (ie. Jung himself) rather than the noise. However, the validity of the idea in general, and of some of fundamental archetypes, seems unarguable.

He carefully avoids any explicit judgement of whether any religions or myths have any basis in objective reality. Such judgements, he rightly notes, are beyond the ability of the scientific method to evaluate. However, he provides the potential to categorise them all as simply being phenomena of human psychology - ie. they are entirely in our head. This is a double-edge sword, however, for this seeming dismissal rebounds poetically upon us. What were once distant and faintly heard mythologies, are now given a deep and highly personal significance, as they are nothing less than the worldy manifestations of the innermost workings of our own minds, which each of us would fail to heed at our peril.

There are other sections which I didn't find so compelling, such as his concept of synchronicity, but overall it was thoroughly enjoyable and insightful.

Rating: 8/10

I *should* be searching out and evaluating Python geometry libraries. But I keep getting these niggling impulses to start hammering out my own vector, polygon and quaternion classes. Possibly in C. Ohdear.

Why is it so much easier, or at least so much more appealing, to start beavering away on your own code, rather than to take the sensible approach of evaluating existing libraries? A couple of hours searching could save you days, weeks or months of work, and libraries written and used by several people will undoubtedly be of higher quality as well - it should be a no-brainer.

It's easy enough to conjure up subjective justifications for it on a personal level, but to my mind they rarely hold up to scrutiny. Reading and understanding other people's code is said to be harder than churning out some according to your own vision, but surely the depth of understanding required to use a module should surely be substantially less than it would take to write it? Likewise, curiosity, obsessiveness, a sense of personal achievement play a part, but these motives are deeply subjective, and cannot be used to argue the case that 'rolling your own' is an efficient or rational decision, merely an enjoyable (or compulsive) one. Expectations of quality also contribute - everyone thinks that their own code is better. But this is rarely really the case, and experienced practitioners recognise it.

On a deeper level, then, why does some part of us allow these inadequate justifications to hold sway? Even if rationally, we know it doesn't make sense, why does it feel so desirable? What I'm really asking is, why have we been evolved to want to build our own, even though it is so clearly the wrong thing to do?

What if we are tuned, as individuals, to prematurely settle on our own idiosyncratic approach? The net result would be that, for any given problem, a flurry of individuals would each set out in different directions, regardless of what results others might have already achieved. Viewed as a group activity, this starts to sound a little saner. Such a dispersion of individuals would rapidly and thoroughly explore all the corners of the problem space. Compared to the situation where we all just build cumulatively on what everyone else has done before, the chances of any one individual finding an optimal answer is low, but the chances of someone in the group finding it is greatly increased.

It's a survival-of-the-group trait, that each of us is evolved to pick a wrong-looking answer, and then expend ourselves beavering away to prove it. Oh dear indeed.

I haven't really stopped reading everyone else's posts. Cold turkey? God, you're a bunch of douchebags.

If you're not a wild-eyed loon, you're unlikely to appreciate this post. Bear with me a moment, while I establish some context.

So here's the esteemed Cory Doctorow. His recent[*1] post at Locus, The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights, outlines the parallels between the progressive Enlightenment ideals of human progress, and the science fiction hot topic of the singularity. Accelerating rates of change, empowered by self-improving general artificial (or post-human) intelligence, eventually reaches a point at which society - or the individual - can do anything it wants to. Since, by that point, society is so educated and well-adjusted, so enlightened, its goals are those things that bring yet more progress and joy and compassion into the world.

Describing this as a 'Rapture of the Nerds' (not by Ken MacLeod) is evocative - but it distracts from the important fact that the true singularity is a rapture for everyone. The singularity is only for nerds right now because the nerds are the only ones who get it yet. I posit that one of the most prominent effects of enlightenment - coupled with the availability of resources that such enlightenment would allow - is the freedom to indulge in fairly advanced morality, encompassing an overwhelming realisation of the importance that no concious being gets left behind. Incidentally, this is of course the reason why advanced civilisations tend to sublime en masse, without leaving detectable offshoots mooching around in our universe.

Anyhow, I'm distracting myself. The important thread I'm groping for here is the literal equivalence Cory alludes to between the science fictional singularity, and the biblical judgement day - the trump and the shout, the culmination of all things human, at which point it becomes our turn to sublime, overcoming the restrictions of the physical universe, to take our place in the mind of God Almighty, the living and the dead alike. Or at least those of the dead who had sufficient foresight to have had their state vector preserved, at any rate.

Still with me? Singularity = Judgement Day. Got it? Ok.

Then, over here, we have George Dvorsky, who recently[*1] referenced an old post of his, Our non-arbitrary universe, in which he talks about possible explanations for the extraordinarily unlikely state we find the universe to be in, while attempting to steer clear of the slippery fish that is the strong anthropic principle.

One prominent hypothesis is that the universe's operational parameters have been tuned with excruciating finesse by a process of natural selection, which could be brought about by universes being self-replicating entities. The replication of universes could therefore be theorised, by some mechanism that is completely unknown. This would lead us to expect that universes be tuned for maximal rate of reproduction, whatever that would entail. So why, George asks, does our universe appear to be tuned to be so patently biophilic, ie. conducive to life? All these innumerable cosy blobs of matter basking in the glow of lovely stars, all consisting of an entertaining mixture of quite the most engaging set of chemicals one could ever wish to meet, and so on and so forth, down to the infinitesimal balancing acts of forces that conspire to make nuclear physics work in such a jolly interesting way, and enough spatial dimensions to make interactions interesting without so many as to subject them all to the tiresome severity of a whole family of inverse to-the-ninth laws.

It might simply be that efficiently-replicating universes are coincidentally also biophilic. Certainly there are some characteristics that seem to be equally desirable for either condition, such as universes that are both large and long-lived. However, George discusses the idea of this not merely being a coincidental convergence, but causal, due to life playing a role in helping universes to replicate - hence universes teeming with life will go on to reproduce more, dominating the natural selective process to create more universes which are ever more suitable to life. This could come about if life plays some part in the reproduction of its host universe. Perhaps if intelligent life deliberately causes its host universe to replicate. Who wouldn't want to become God, once we'd figured out how to spawn realities at right-angles to... er... reality?

. . .

Now, I'd like to take a moment here to catch our breath. I'm well aware that we're out on a limb of speculation that is extended so far beyond the realms of anything resembling genuine hypothesis that we cannot consider this to be anything other than a poetic fantasy.

And yet. I can't help but play with the idea of linking the two concepts in my mind. Imagining post-singular civilisations discovering a mechanism by which disjoint bubbles of time and space can be pinched off from our own. Perhaps it can be done under some conditions that already occur naturally, deep in the heart of stars, or in the wrenching oscillations of time and space that wreath a galactic-mass black hole. Or perhaps this is brought about by some conjunction of circumstance that has never occurred before, at least not for all of this universe's timeline.

The first such bubbles are stillborn. Empty and degenerate, lacking coherence enough for either spatial or temporal dimensions, they collapse in spans of time that can barely be considered to exist at all. But the unimaginable intellect of planetary sized masses converted entirely into hyper-spatially networked hive-minds examines the new-found discovery, with an absolute, unerring insight, but also with wisdom, and with compassion. Options are considered, consequences charted, and at the speed of thought vast resources of matter and energy are focussed on replicating the experiment. Enlarging it. Seeding the discontinuities with precisely the right twist of quantum instability for each of the nascent realities to spew forth their own internal fountains of time and space, matter and energy. Riding the feedback of previously uncharted mathematics to inflate each successive genesis to greater and greater energies, weaving ever more intricate internal structures into the harmonious interplay of forces that comprise their innermost workings.

A pause. Awed by their achievements, overcome by the assimilation of the fields of science they have uncovered, and humbled by their potential, the intelligences stop to take stock. To survey their possibilities. Then, inevitably, fulfilling a manifest destiny as old as time itself, leveraging the qualities of the space gifted to them by their own, infinitely distant forebears, they initialise a final push, building on the properties of their own universe to create one still greater. A leviathan, containing an unthinkable torrent of creation, bright enough to light a sky with its echoes forever.

It's the whole "Let there be light" number. Humanity gets to literally become God. And the funny thing is, such a creator is not only imbued with all the properties of a traditional new-testament Christian style God, ie. wisdom and compassion and love, but we simultaneously tie together the Judgement Day of one civilisation's culmination with the Genesis of another's reality. Each successive generation irrevocably separated from their own God by being at right angles to their reality, and yet tied in chains stretching back unbroken through the countless histories of innumerable universes, by the bonds of direct, causal creation.

Anyhow, it's all very derivative, and I stole one irresistible phrase from Benjamin Rosenbaum, but it would make for a smashing short science fiction story, don't you think?

(Note *1: I wrote most of this months ago, but never got around to hitting 'Post', so forgive the no-longer accurate references to 'recent' events.)

There is, of course, no point whatsoever in me posting a belated review of the Simpsons Movie, which I and everyone else gleefully watched many months ago now. To the now long abandoned discussions of its merit I have absolutely nothing of value to contribute.

However, that shall not dissuade me from posting this one anyway, since such posts as these are not, as you might assume, for the benefit of my readership, few and benighted as they might be, but instead form an attempt to chart my media consumption habits for my own retrospective perusal.

It was with some dismay, therefore, that I noted that this inverted system of priorities is mirrored in the Herculean task of my reading of other people's posts. Simply put, I seem to be reading other people's blogs in order to make them feel good, upping their stats, making complimentary comments, showing an interest, etc, etc, rather than for my own benefit. Once this cold fact had impinged upon my conciousness, I had only one course of action left open: Cold Turkey. That's right. No more Google Reader.

Abandoning the hampster wheel should free up a considerable amount of my time for other activities, and I am keen to quantify that process, so I will be keeping detailed logs of my time usage for a few days prior and post the switchover, to ascertain exactly how many hours I previously spent looking at labelled pictures of cats, which I will henceforth presumably be free to spend looking at actual labels on cats (or possibly labels on actual pictures of cats, let's not get overly ambitious.)

In a final layer of delicious irony, I shall of course be blogging comprehensively about the entire experience, however your collective reactions to that will remain forever unknown to me. Henceforth you should consider me to be a purely one-way conduit of information. Goodbye forever.

by Douglas Coupland

jPod is a flamboyant return to the corporate cube-farms of Microserfs, arguably the site of Coupland's greatest previous victories. Characters reveal their desperation in guilty subversive rebellions against the corporate tyranny that their apathy condemns them to be ruled by. The artificial intimacy of long-term adjacent cubespace leads to the gleeful exposure of each other's sexual foibles, drug habits, and all the diverse pariphenalia with which they parade their various neuroses.

It's an enjoyably postmodern romp, complete with art-school typographical experiments, the recurring appearance of the author as a minor character, and most of all, the infusion of the whimsical philosophies of the GenX protagonists. Even so, I can't escape the feeling that it's a retread, rather than a successor. When he wrote Microserfs, the newfound viewpoints of the digitally-savvy were fresh and exciting, and Coupland triumphantly provided the voice they lacked. Nowadays such views can stand on their own, indeed they are beginning to comprise mainstream society, and observational exposition such as Coupland's has become redundant. When a character notes with surprise that the Kodak company still exists, and wonders how many years it has been since they employed any young people, it might have been a wry and insightful comment ten years ago. Now it's merely tired and lagging, by virtue of harping on about a worldview that the target audience has all taken as read for as long as we can remember.

Rating: 6/10 - A mixed bag.

At the end of March, Susan and I exchanged rings, vows, signatures and thumbprints on a beach near to Tulum, Mexico, with eighty-five of our families and friends, plus 'TriPawd', the beach's resident three-legged dog.

Thanks to everyone for coming all the way to join the party and making it so special. It all worked out better than we could have hoped - We never imagined that our own wedding would be so spectacularly brilliant. The honeymoon in Guatemala was also astonishingly good, from watching the sun rise over Mayan ruins in the jungle, to hiking volcanoes overlooking lake Atitlan.

We've taken photos from a few people, and put a selection of the best of these online, listed below:

• Arrival in Tulum
• Thursday night party
• Wedding day breakfast and preparation
• Wedding ceremony
• Awesome little vid of the petal-throwing, courtesy Lindsay & Aaron
• Wedding reception
• More of Tulum
• Boat trip

There are also a metric zillion other photos elsewhere too:

• Aaron's
• Al Brown's
• Alia's
• Amanda's
  • one
  • two
• Anita's
• Batty's:
  • ceremony
  • Tulum
• Harry's
• Jules'
• Marci's
• Neil's
• Nixta's
  • wedding
  • environs
• Peter's
• Phil's
  • one,
  • two
  • three
• Steve's
• Tiva's
• Tonk's
• Will's (Kodak Gallery is now defunct)

If there are more that we haven't yet seen, please let us know!

Nun of your business

Some blurry photos are up of an absolutely brilliant stag event in Denver, starting with an afternoon of UK vs rest-of-the-world tomfoolery, which included the most laughing I've done in ages. After a brilliant curry and singstar-style action at Pete's ultimate downtown loft, I was presented with my outfit for the evening (pictured.) We made a beeline for The Bank to reprise the stalwart Colfax crawl route, where we were intercepted by the ladies, and where we then, in turn, intercepted Dana Sisti's engagement party. Finished the night roasting gently in Phil's hot-tub until the dawn. Brilliant.

So brilliant to see everyone. Luv ya! Mean it!

Some much better photos by people with steadier hands and real cameras:

• Natalie (registration needed)
• Aaron

Update: Oh god, there's a video of the cowbell.

Update: The scores are in. It was difficult to discern in the heat of battle, but a rigourous statistical analysis reveals that team UK absolutely dominated the laser quest: