Terminally Incoherent

Some time ago, Freelancer recommended Primer to me somewhere in the comments of this blog. I don’t recall the exact post, but the movie landed on my “to watch” list. I just wanted to say, thanks a lot buddy - you practically broke my brain with this thing. I watched it few weeks ago and I still can’t figure out what in the Holy Fuck happened in that movie. Some movies suffer from plot holes - this one suffers from plot recursion. It is essentially a macro story, that overwrites itself in real time, recursively. Which is not really a bad thing - it is a good thing, but holly shit - it does take you a while to figure it all out.

But let me start from the beginning. Primer is a movie about a time machine. Yes, it is an overplayed cliche that was exploited by Hollywood millions of times. But Primer is not a Hollywood production. It is an indie movie with a a total budget of $7,000. With a budget that tight, you know that the story must be good for the film to make any kind of impact. You know that Primer made an impact, because it has been released on a DVD, it is on IMDB and it has it’s own Wikipedia page that was not taken down by the relevance natzis.

As you may expect, the time travel depicted in Primer does not look spectacular in any way. The time machine is essentially a box. You turn it on, wait 6 hours then crawl into it, wait another six hours. After that time you emerge from the box exactly 6 hours earlier and you get to re-live them. If you are confused, here is a picture I lifted from Wikipedia:

If you still don’t get it, re-read that sentence few times, and do few loops around the picture. It will get clear eventually. The gist is that the machine lets you go 6 hours back in time but only if it has been on for that 6 hours. The protagonists build it in their garage, and then decide to test it. At first their test are innocent - they buy some stocks, bet on a ball game or two and etc. They do it to see if it is even possible to change the future this way. And it turns out that it is. Then something happens in their personal lives, and one of the characters decides to use the machine to fix it. He also discovers that the machine can be stacked (box inside of a box) to travel even further in time. What follows is a logical but jumbled series of events caused by two protagonists using the time machine to independently modify the time line, back stab each other and try to figure out mysterious events caused by their own interferences. The problem is that what we see is the merely the latest “version” of the movie time line. There are things happening on screen that make no sense until you see the characters going “into the box” much later.

What compounds the problem is that at multiple points the protagonists catch onto their own meddling, and change their minds about it creating logical paradoxes. The time line is effectively fractured into at least 8 distinct continuities - if not more - each of which interacts with and modifies the previous. I’m still not sure what exactly happened in the movie but I sure as hell enjoyed the ride. I’m not the only one. Google for primer timeline and you will see just how many people out there are arguing over minutiae details of the plot, trying to piece the story together.

Or you can just look at this visual time line to see how incredibly complex and involved it is. You should be warned that it obviously contains major spoilers so I’m just gonna show you a blurry thumbnail here and you will need to click on it to read it:

click to enlarge; source

If you are one of those people who thinks that movies should be entertaining, and not thought provoking then this movie is not for you. In fact, this blog is probably not for you, cause I love movies that require me to pay attention, think and go online to argue with people about what it meant. Primer will twist your brain into a pretzel, and leave you dazed for days. I’d say it is a lot of value considering the extremely low budget.

I highly recommend it. Watch it with a like minded friend, or a significant other and I guarantee you that for the next 3-4 days you will be revisiting the plot, drawing continuity diagrams and arguing over exactly how many Aarons were coexisting in the movie in total. Or not. But sometimes it may be hard not to.

Over the last 2-3 years I noticed that making students read email is almost as hard as making them do homework assignments on time - if not harder. It’s like pulling teeth. And yet, we sort of rely on this medium to communicate with the students to exchange information, and send out announcements. There are of course LMS which can facilitate communications but in my experience students only log into these things if they need to. For example, there is no way I could post an announcement that a class is canceled the night before, and expect all students to actually read it.

This is why we have email. The assumption is that most people check their emails quite regularly so if I send a broadcast message to all my students (via the LMS for example) about canceling class the next day, they will probably see it that save evening, or at the very latest the next morning. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Whenever I send an email broadcast to my 30 students I usually get 16-18 messages bouncing back to me saying that the user’s inbox is over quota. In MSU land of crazy this basically means that the student haven’t logged in to his account in few weeks, and it basically got filled with SPAM. Once the quota is reached the mail server won’t accept any new messages and will bounce them back to me.

Of course this could mean that college students simply don’t check their .edu inboxes which is not that surprising. But this is not the case either. My younger brother, who is a representative of the very same demographic that I teach these days lives without email. Our mother lives in Poland, and she recently got herself connected to the internet and discovered that she can use email to communicate with us much faster and more efficiently than via snail-mail and much more frequently than via phone calls. Only my brother never read any of her emails, because he only logs into his Yahoo account when he needs to confirm registration for some new service. The only effective way of reaching him was sending an email to his cell phone using Verizon’s Email to SMS gateway. It’s actually quite straightforward - you just send email to yourmobilenumber@vztext.com.

I believe that my students share a very similar attitude towards email. As I said previously, this is especially prevalent amongst technologically inept students. Those with clue seem to be more likely to check their email regularly for some reason. Those without it, shun email. Their major modes of communication are social networks (such as Facebook and MySpace), IM and text messaging.

If we want to communicate with them efficiently, we probably should look into using their preferred media rather than trying to force them to use email which they do not understand, and which they fear.

There is a slight problem here though. While some professors successfully utilized social networks such as Facebook for in-class communication I’m not very keen on doing this. For one, the user base is fractured between different networks - each being it’s own exclusive walled garden. They all have cumbersome, clunky email-like private messaging systems. But of course they don’t offer any easy way to forward, poll, or aggregate your messages and force you to log in, and navigate through their interface to read them. It’s a communication nightmare, and I don’t want to deal with it.

IM is too direct - it’s a point-to-point, real time communication system and doesn’t really work for notifications, and broadcast messages that well.

So we are left with texting. But this medium is also problematic because just as I don’t want to give my mobile number to my students, they sure don’t want to give theirs to me. Still, texting my students with “Class canceled tomorrow” or “Remember to submit Homework 3 by Tuesday” would be the most direct method of communication - and one that guarantees the highest margin of success (and by success here I mean having the student actually reading the damn message).

The logistics of implementing this would be rather straightforward. You could simply set up a moderated listserv for your classes. Students would send a text to the listserv address using the format provided by their carrier. This would probably require some explaining, but there are only like 3-4 viable formats you are likely to encounter out of which two (Verizon and Sprint) are trivial and straightforward. Most popular carrier have SMS to Email and Email to SMS gateways these days. In my area for example, most people use Verizon, AT&T, Sprint or T-Mobile. I haven’t really seen any other carriers around here.

So I listserv would work for most people. A teacher could send a message to the list via his email, and have it broadcast to the group. Any replies would be forwarded back to his email but not to the group. This way we get two way communication between the teacher and students, each using their preferred medium (email for the teacher, text message for the student). Furthermore, students would be unable to spam each other via the list, and the teachers’ mobile phone would be safe from being overwhelmed by torrent of student inquires.

That still doesn’t solve the issue of privacy, since the teacher would be able to see the mobile numbers subscribed students. Then gain since most SMS gateways use emails of the form phonenumber@carrrier.com this would not provide the teacher with a direct 1-1 mapping between a student and a number. So while the teacher would have a list of 30+ mobile numbers, he might only be able to associate a fraction of them to actual student names - and only when those students choose to reply, and identify themselves.

Ideally, I’d prefer to have the list maintained by someone like OIT, and have the reply-to headers mangled (perhaps replaced by a hash of some sort). This way both teacher and student could communicate via the listserv like service without ever seeing their actual mobile numbers. This would be a bit trickier to implement but not out of the realm of possibility.

Ideally it would be an opt-in service which and students would be able to unsubscribe at any time. There would be a guarantee of privacy and reassurance that neither the teacher not any other student will never see their actual phone number. And of course the instructor would have to keep the number of messages down to minimum to take it easy on those without unlimited texting plans. I’d like to average somewhere below 1 message per week.

What do you think? Could it work? Should we build something like this? Would there be institutional support for something like that? Would professors buy into it?

When I reviewed I Am Legend with Will Smith I ranted at length that the ending of the movie was so incredibly bad that it ruined whatever value was there in the movie. If you haven’t read the review, I will simply say that it was pretty much a bizzaro-world ending - an opposite-day ending so to speak. It took the message from Matheson’s original story and reversed it glorifying Robert Neville as a true hero, where the book condemned him as a monster. It was monumental stupidity in a grand Hollywood style - not so much surprising, as disappointing.

Imagine my surprise that I found out that there is an alternate ending to the movie included on the DVD release, and that this ending is much closer to that of Matheson’s! It turns out that the director and the writers actually read the book, and most likely planned to end it on the same note as the original, but then at the last minute they ripped it out and replaced it with that infantile, idiotic bullshit that we saw in the theaters.

Fortunately, some helpful soul posted the alternate ending online can be seen online so that I didn’t have to actually buy the DVD to see it. I already paid $10 to see it at my local theater, and I feel that I overpaid for it anyway. I really don’t want to support playing fast and loose with the source of the adaptation to make the movie shallower, and therefore more accessible to IDIOTS. They tricked me into watching it once - they won’t get my money again.

That said, if you felt cheated like me, this few minute grainy video is worth watching. It is not perfect, but it illustrates what this movie could have been if it was not butchered on the cutting floor. Pay close attention to the moment in which Neville slumps down on the floor and looks at the wall. You can’t see it in this low-res video but on that wall are are the pictures of all his former “patients” who did not survive the treatment. This my friends is the essence of the story - the moment when Neville realizes that he is not a hero, but a butcher. I won’t say they nailed it, but in the context of all the changes they made to the original, it was true to Matheson’s idea in spirit.

This ending also explains few scenes that have been a topic of heated discussions. For example, who moved Fred? After watching the movie I was convinced that Neville had to move the mannequin himself, and then in a fit of hysteria he caught himself into his own trap. I based this interpretation on the fact that at no other point in the movie the infected were never shown to be capable of analytic intelligent thought. That single scene stands out because it suggests that:

1. They moved Fred
2. They set a trap for Neville
3. They set up an ambush for him
4. They were able to domesticate the infected dogs which they used in this scene

All of this didn’t make sense with the original ending. If you think about it, you will realize that the scene was filmed with the assumption that the infected are in fact intelligent, and social creatures as it is revealed in the alternate ending. The scene could not be removed after the ending was changed because it is a pivotal turning point of the movie so it was left in without any obvious alterations. This created a plot hole or discrepancy that bothered many viewers - including me.

Which ending do you prefer? I believe that most people who read Matheson’s story will prefer the alternate ending, since it is closer to the source. That’s a given. But I wonder how those of you who didn’t read it will like it. Do you consider it better? More interesting? More edgy? Would it make the movie better, or would it ruin it for you? Would it confuse you? I think it is simply a better ending, whether you read the book or not but then again, my opinion is probably biased.

This is one of these things that I always need to look up. I know this tip will probably have no relevance for 98.5% of my regular readers, but I wanted to put it here for future reference. Also, since I just spent like 20 minutes googling the solution perhaps this can be of service for people who run into the same issue.

Today was the first time since I last reinstalled Windows when I needed to type something in Polish inside Vim and I realized that my Alt-gr combinations are not working. In other words I could not type letters such as ł, ą, ę, ż, ź, ś, ć, ó and etc.. You’d be surprised how often these come up in an average sentence. Surprisingly enough, I had no such problem on Ubuntu where they worked just fine. Windows version however refused to cooperate.

I did a quick google search for “vim polish characters” and got basically nothing. Then I tried few search queries in Polish and still got little info. Then I realized I was approaching this wrong, and my issue was caused by two factors:

1. Vim was not in a Unicode compliant mode
2. The font I was using (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono) was not Unicode friendly

So I set out to fix this. How do we get Unicode characters to work properly in Vim on Windows? Easy, just paste the following snipped into your _vimrc:

if has("multi_byte")
     set encoding=utf-8
     setglobal fileencoding=utf-8
     set bomb
     set termencoding=iso-8859-15
     set fileencodings=ucs-bom,iso-8859-15,iso-8859-3,utf-8
endif

Explanation can be found in Vim Tip #246. The if statement is a safety precaution since your version of the editor may not be compiled with the multi_byte feature which is required for Unicode to work properly.

Next you need a unicode friendly font. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono did not have the right Glyphs. Neither did Lucida Sans Typwriter. However Lucida Console, Curier New and the Consolas font all worked just fine. I really can’t tell you which fonts will work and which wont. You should probably just type some interesting word like “Gżegżółka” into the editor and just try different fonts until you find the one you like. For example Bitstream Vera Sans looks like this:

On the other hand Consolas font looks like this:

In my case I simply added the following line to _vimrc to change the font to Consolas:

set gfn=Consolas:h10:cANS

I hope that someone will find this helpful. I’m posting it under a Google friendly title in case someone else needs to figure this out they can easily find it here. For those of you who could care less about Polish characters, vim or unicode I apologize. It had to be done. Now we can return to our usual brand of craziness that you came here to read.

Recently I realized that traditionally evil races such as Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and etc. in RPG games rarely have fleshed out social backgrounds, or detailed descriptions of daily lives. It’s as if every member of each respective evil race was a male warrior, whose only desire in life is to wander around in the wilderness hoping to bump into a party of adventurers he could fight. The have no other ambitions, goals, dreams - they do not form families, they do not raise children, hunt or grow crops. All they ever do is raiding human villages, looting, pillaging and raping innocent women (I mean, that’s where you get all these Half-Orcs, no?).

I touched upon this subject before when I talked about my experiences playing Horde character in World of Warcraft. As I said in that post, both Horde and the Alliance are good guys in this game. They are enemies because of their history, and their beliefs. Orcs are not some feral beasts in this game - just tribal people with a war-like culture. As you run around Kalimdor however you will see that war is not all they are about. In several places you can see Orcish kids running around and playing. Somewhere there is a house and inside there is an Orc woman preparing a meal for her husband and son. There is a dude in Crossroads who hires adventurers to search for his lost wife. You quickly get the picture that these green skinned creatures are not some bloodthirsty monsters - they form families, they love, they hate, they play with their kids and etc.

In that aspect WoW portrays Orcs in much more detail and in much kinder light than most RPG’s out there, including the pen and paper ones. Apparently I’m not the only person who noticed this. Go check out David’s post Orcs are not just Orcs at the Verbing Noun blog. He makes some excellent suggestions for fleshing out the traditional antagonist races in your RPG campaigns, and how to subtly subvert your traditional “go kill all the Orcs in the Orc camp” quest into something entirely different. Instead of a simple hack and slash, your company is faced with a moral conundrum.

The PC’s know that if they do nothing Orcs will continue raiding nearby villages. But can a good aligned company justify a preemptive raid on an Orc camp/village full of women, children and elderly non-combatants? How will a lawful good paladin feel about looting Orc war-chief’s body for that +2 Awesome Mace of Awesomeness if his an Orc woman is crying and pleading to take her husbands body and give him a proper burial?

Perhaps if the players stopped, and looked at how the Orcs live they would realize they are not just some barbaric, evil monsters. They are a race with it’s own culture, traditions, oral history, and a deeply rooted morality system which may seem alien to us because it is based on a different alignment.

It is a deliciously insidious idea - to start with a very traditional setup, and then flip it around and make the PC’s realize that perhaps they can’t become heroes without becoming monsters. They can feel the same way Robert Neville felt in Mathesons’ I am Legend (the short story not the movie). Humans will hail them as heroes, and saviors but amongst Orcs and their allies they will be despised and known known as ruthless butchers - a living proof of human cruelty and destructive drive that is causing the conflict between the two races.

In fact, if you think about it this seemingly random, one-off encounter may be spun into a lengthy campaign in which the PC’s must deal with the fallout and repercussions of their reckless raid. For example their legendary cruelty was a catalyst that helps to unite local tribes under one banner and an all out war is about to break out? How can they prevent it? Will they negotiate? Will they try to assassinate the leaders and instigators driving the Orc war machine? Will they be willing to give themselves up and accept punishment for their deeds in the name of peace? It could be interesting stuff.

Thanks to WoW and David’s article I will never look at evil humanoids such as Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds and the like the same way again. I will now always wonder what are their reasons for doing what they do. What are their daily lives like. How are their families structured. What values are important to them. And how can I make the PC’s feel like shit for killing them.

Of course there is the opposite approach. If you don’t want to deal with these moral quandaries, you can simply say that Orcs, Goblins and the like are inhuman, supernatural beasts who do not reproduce, do not form families and exists solely to participate in random encounters.