Weird Circle 3 - The Vendetta

"Out of the past, phantoms of a world gone by speak again their immortal tale: The Vendetta."

This episode, first broadcast on September 12, 1943, doesn't immediately suggest an adaptation of any individual story. I guessed it would be Guy de Maupassant, and he did write a short story titled A Vendetta, but other than Corsica featuring in both, and the fact that a vendetta drives their plots, there seems little in common between them.

Unlike the previous two episodes, this is a purely mundane tale about the destructive power of revenge. The writers chose to start with two framing stories - a Roma (the slur is used) is offering to tell stories for a penny, and when a passerby takes her up on it, she begins a tale with a man and a woman, lovers, and that woman also starts telling a story of the day her mother was burned to death in a fire started by members of the Porte family. Her father was able to save her, and the two of them, the last of the del Piombo family, leave Corsica for Paris, where the bulk of the tale, including that of the star-crossed lovers, takes place. (I do apologize if I got the names wrong - the audio quality was especially poor, and I did have to try and parse Americans attempting to parse Corsican names through a Mid-Atlantic accent)

In the end the framing does make sense, and there is no real point in which its existence becomes an issue (compare The Princess Bride with its frequent interruptions, and imagine someone catching fragments of that on the radio), but it was still a bit risky. The dialog in this one moved between different pairings, rather than sticking predominantly to one driving couple as in their The House and the Brain - to great effect.

The lack of supernatural elements might be disappointing to an audience primed for something more, but I felt that it was nice to show that natural human passion can also lead to horrifying results. From my sampling months ago, I expect this will happen again from time to time.

Weird Circle 2 - The House and the Brain

"We are met in this cave by the restless sea to reveal the horror in Man's mind. Listen to The Weird Circle!"

This episode, first broadcast on September 5, 1943, adapts Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The House and the Brain, first published in 1859. I've not had a chance to be exposed to the original, so I'll focus on the show itself.

The story starts in London, where our protagonists, Paul and Sandra Whitney, a young couple, are attending an art auction run by their friend, Jim. Paul and Sandra tease each other amicably, and we find a typical mid-20th Century dynamic of a rational, practical husband with his emotional, impulsive wife. They are both fascinated with the occult - he more logically, she more passionately, excited about the details of the macabre. This fascination leads them from a sinister portrait Jim shows them, of an evil old "cutthroat", to his now haunted house, built 450 years ago.

The haunting's physical effects are described as entirely factual - and despite later dismissing claims by Mrs. Browning, the housekeeper, that ghosts swarm the place day and night, they both seem to take the possibility seriously, although Sandra absolutely believes it, while Paul is dubious.

This is a strange, occultism-friendly version of London, where later a policeman is very easily convinced that a ghost was responsible for a murder. Indeed, this contrast between Sandra and Paul isn't like Mulder vs Scully - the true believer vs the skeptic - but instead of two somewhat different attitudes towards an admittedly ultra-mundane world. Sandra is also shown as more susceptible to the hypnotic influences of the antagonist, but Paul still does barely fight it off.

The real horror for them isn't that there is a haunting, or that ghosts are around us, but that there is a malign, mesmeric presence able to control all that is living and dead in the house. That there's supernatural evil specifically alarms them - and leads them to the action which defeats it.

As for sound effects, repeated use of Mrs. Browning's cackle, as well as a children's choir singing a song I couldn't identify, are used to express the presence of horror and the supernatural. There's no repeated reuse of water and wind to connect to the framing seaside story.

Overall, I enjoyed this more than their adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, and the dynamics between Sandra and Paul really manage to drive the story along and expose us to this weird London.

I'm looking forward to reading Bulwer-Lytton's original and comparing notes some day.

Weird Circle 1 - The Fall of the House of Usher

"Can the dead return to life? Listen to The Weird Circle!"

This episode, first broadcast on August 29, 1943, adapts Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, first published in 1839. Poe's story is presented from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, and beyond that, as far as developed characters go, there are Roderick and Madeline Usher. There's a slow, subtle, intertextual buildup to the famous conclusion. Additionally, going by Mr. Spike's Bedtime Stories` example (in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), it would take about 45 minutes to read out loud. These might explain why The Weird Circle, a 25-minute radio drama series competing for attention with other radio shows, as well as the variety of concerns that an American listener might have during World War II, chose to make this adaptation very loose.

The characters of both Roderick and Madeline are far more dynamic in this adaptation, and we almost immediately see them in argument. The titular Fall is explicitly predicted by a prophecy tied to the red rains, which are soon described. No time for subtlety here! More characters are added: Dina, Roderick's cousin and fiancée, Talbot, a servant, driver, and occasional comic relief, and Charles Wilson, an outside friend of the family, possibly replacing the narrator in the original, brought in to add his perspective to the central tension of the story, which is more explicitly supernatural here. A doctor makes his own appearance. Almost everything is driven by either dialog or the description of movement, sometimes both. There are no extensive descriptions of scenery and structure, no intertextuality, no stories within stories, all of which make for fine reading, but difficult radio to follow.

As for the sound effects, the wash and rain and wind of the intro and outro were often reused to reflect stormy weather, which I felt lent the whole episode a nice coherence.

Overall, not the most exciting start. I would go with another adaptation of Usher, or with Mr. Spike's full read-through linked above, if you have the time.

Weird Circle - a spooky October project

"In this cave by the restless sea, we are met to call from out the past stories strange and weird. Bell keeper - toll the bell, so all may know we are gathered again, in The Weird Circle" (Typical opening of The Weird Circle radio drama series, accompanied by the sound of wind, waves washing over cliffs, and a tolling bell)

Last year I spent October reading through Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, trying to analyze it through the Sorcerer role-playing game. This year, while I hope to continue my reading tradition privately, my analysis posts here will focus on a different work in a different medium: the radio drama series The Weird Circle. I've mentioned my interest in radio as a medium, and I do listen to old time radio and podcasts on a regular basis, so it's time to share some commentary more broadly.

The Weird Circle is a series of adaptations of supernatural horror stories to radio. Of all the series I've sampled in the past few years, it seemed to have the most varied subject matter. I expect it to vary in quality, as did the sampled episodes.

I've downloaded the episodes from the Internet Archive here. I'll be listening to the first 31 in order, and ideally posting a short review of each every day, schedule permitting. Enjoy!

Perception-oriented graphics

I'm going to try and express an understanding that is forming in my brain as a convergence of several interests I've expressed through the years.

Recently I've mentioned some first impressions from Vision Science: From Photons to Phenomenology. I noted that it seems like its models of visual perception mirror the way a modern graphics pipeline is structured. Reading further in, that impression remains. It's not entirely surprising - I can't imagine the designers and engineers who built up the modern pipeline were ignorant of theories and practices of computer vision, which is one of the three disciplines covered by this book (the other two are psychology and neurophysiology), and, for example, the explanation for the importance of effects like diffuse shading in a computer graphics guide I have read recently, OpenGL SuperBible, mirror those in Vision Science.

Much earlier in the year, I mentioned that I'd gotten into folklore the previous year, and specifically Edward T. Hall's The Hidden Dimension, which discussed how people from different backgrounds perceive and make use of space differently when they interact with each other, as well as how different cultures and genres express spatial information visually.

Even before that, I reflected on a talk I gave years ago about virtual reality and various types of immersion. I expressed an idiosyncratic and limited version of rejecting the immersive fallacy, the notion that the more video games are able to reproduce the sensory impressions that a real experience would provide, the more players will enjoy and be taken in by the game world.

To this let me add something I've not discussed, mostly because I don't have as much personal experience with it yet: physically-based rendering (PBR for short), which is a set of techniques on the graphics side of video games, film, and other visual media, meant to put sensory reproduction to practice by trying to approach a close physical simulation of the interaction of light with various real materials. This encourages moving towards computationally expensive techniques such as ray tracing to generate the visuals, practically expensive techniques such as photogrammetry to extract light interaction information from real materials, and then storing this information and making use of that when rendering, which tends to increase the memory and processing requirements further.

If you happen to be thinking about the next game or digital movie you're going to create, I think it's worth it to take a step back and ask: what is it that rendering is supposed to do for a video game or a movie? Its main task to provide information to a person, a player or viewer, about a virtual world; or possibly to pass along a mood. Perspective 3D rendering of a view of an environment and objects within it is one way of doing this, but it is not necessarily the best. Even in modern games and realistic visualizations, other forms are used. For example, map applications usually provide orthographic projections rather than perspective projections, because that is a better way of providing regional information in graphical form. Even in realistic modern 3d video games, a lot of information is still provided through UI and menus. What are those? Stylistic, non-perspective descriptions of information, laid over the 3D view, instead of being placed within it. And yet, after a bit of a learning curve, they are a very effective way to present information, better than if a perspective rendered substitute were required.

Making use of these non-perspective, non-simulative representations was a recurring problem for me when working on virtual reality applications. Since control of the visual field is given over to the computer, it needs to provide something close to what your own visual field provides, in terms of reactivity and the organization of information, so entirely stylized overlays, like subtitles placed at a constant place in the visual image, which work pretty well when watching a movie on a stationary display, can be jarring and even lead to simulation sickness. This results in solutions such as placing them inside of artificial objects in the environment, which leads to challenges such as making sure that they are not obscured by other elements in the environment.

But it is possible to think about this differently. Instead of starting with the idea of having a three dimensional world built towards being presented through a perspective projection (with at most a parallel orthographic projection for an automap), it should be possible to create a more sophisticated logical framework connecting them, and decide how to turn this into visual data later.

Lateral thinking about how to render still exists in contemporary game design. Take shadows, for example. Shadows require a bit of work to render, over just ignoring them. But as Vision Science explains, shadows are an important tool for the visual system to extract at least two pieces of information from the environment: their detailed spatial structure, and how far away they are from the viewer. However, these two uses of shadows don't have to be rendered the same way, and sometimes it's best not to. If you've played any modern third-person 3D platformer, you would have noticed that yes, there's naturalistic shadowcasting that is consistent with the lighting conditions, but there's also usually a small shadow right under your character, regardless of the direction of light. That's because when light is coming from above, the vertical distance between the object and the shadow gives you very good information as to where the object is in 3D space, and it also tells you where the object will fall if it were dropped. That's essential when you want your in-game avatar to perform complicated jumps, a basic problem of the platformer genre.

Instead of thinking of shadows as a physical effect that must be simulated as realistically as possible to create an immersive scene, you can think of shadows as a way of conveying information to the player. That is a creative choice. An ideal version of what I would call "perception-oriented graphics" would let you make decisions like this for the overall display of the system - whether you want to display a perspective projection of the space or an orthographic overview - as well as for individual objects or phenomena - like the question of whether to use light-reactive or drop-down shadows. Maybe some day I will have the opportunity to work on something like this.

Alienable and inalienable in creative work

For the most part I've kept this blog separate from my current career as a software engineer, as well as from my prior career as an academic. It is separated from them also in being mine - what I write here, to the best of my understanding of my situation, does belong to me, hence that copyright notice at the bottom of the page.

In my paying work, I'm used to creating things that are not my own. In graduate school, even things I wrote that were mine initially, would be assigned, often exclusively, to whoever published them. If I ever wanted to commercialize anything I came up with, however unlikely that would be as a theoretician, it would have to go through a department of my university, with them receiving a significant share of any subsequent revenue. As a software engineer, the code I write as part of my job is "work for hire", meaning that I don't own it - my employer does. There was a brief respite where I created an indie game that was mine and that I sold a handful of copies of, but that was the exception.

This puts me in a position that is different from that of many of the people who create the things I talk about in this blog. Many fiction authors retain control over the work they write, and of how it may be used, and role-playing game designers, especially the indie ones, also are dealing with intellectual property that they own, and their control over it is foundational to their ability to continue making money off of it, and to their prestige as designers. Most of my colleagues and I, on the other hand, are paid money to create something for someone else. Our creation is explicitly alienated from us not just in the basic sense that anything is alienated when we put it outside ourselves as a means to an end, but in the sense that we relinquish control over it pretty much as soon as it leaves our fingers. The practicality is a bit different, as software engineering does require a lot of back-and-forth, return to old code to fix or improve it, et cetera, but in terms of ownership it is one and the same if I go to my own code from six months ago to fix a bug, or to someone else's code - or, more realistically, to code I contributed a bit to six months ago and has been changed further since then.

And yet, as time goes on, something about us grows and isn't given away. It's not just the credit - assuming our names appear somewhere, more often so in academia, less often so in the software industry. It's the very fact that we've created these things, and the understanding we gained when creating them, that cannot be alienated from us. I can't sell or give away the fact that I can program, that I do have ever-increasing understanding of the programming languages and technologies I have used, and of whatever algorithms I came up with. That I have learned and discussed, and gained skills - at most I can be barred from using some or all of that in particular situations, but they can't be torn out of me the way that specific programs I've written were pulled from my grasp.

Qualifications are similar. I have a PhD. That is something that at most could be taken away from someone if fraud was discovered - but that would just mean that the fact that the PhD was achieved was never quite true. For qualifications that need to be renewed, like a legal or medical license, the situation is a bit less stable - but even then, it's not like any of us can sell our qualifications directly. I can't go to the intellectual property market and find someone willing to pay a certain amount of money, accept it, and then suddenly that person has a PhD and I don't, or maybe they have a duplicate of my PhD. We can demand payment for the use of our qualifications, effectively renting them out, but we cannot be cut out of the equation entirely without engaging in something fraudulent.

Nevertheless, there is something nice about having some creations that are alienable but still belong to me. It's easier to let people read a text than explain an understanding.

Ervingiad I - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

After finding the application of his frame analysis model in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy to be very insightful, and subsequently that most of his books were reasonably priced in the second hand market, I went on a bit of an Erving Goffman shopping spree, and got 11 of his works, which I plan on reading in mostly chronological order, then posting some impressions.

First up is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It's an attempt to analyze social interaction through metaphors informed by theater. The main idea is that any personal interaction is a finite, limited exchange of data which is supposed to express much a larger body of information. For example, your twenty minute experience at a clothing store is supposed to inform you that you were served by a professional and got fitting clothes at reasonable prices. Twenty minutes are not enough time for you to really perform research on the person or people helping you, make comparisons with other establishments, or evaluate the quality of what you bought. Instead, you were subjected to 20 minutes of a performance, a presentation, of competence, selection, and purchase, that left you with the impression that this is the information you received. In order to do this, the salesperson, their colleagues, and the entire environment were designed and have practiced to create the performance that gives you this impression, aside from - and possibly instead of - actually learning the competence and providing a good price.

From this starting point, Goffman builds up an elaborate theoretical framework: a team of people works together to manage impressions for an audience in a certain front stage, they have a back stage in which to do work that is necessary for the performance, from which the audience is excluded, and in which team members have conversations which establish that they are a team and united in their oppositional relationship with the audience, although the latter do collaborate sometimes to maintain the performance, especially in front of outsiders to the performance itself. The existence of colleagues - members of other teams who perform similar roles there - and other unusual team and audience members further complicate the model.

I think that frame analysis, which he developed later, streamlined this model, or reconfigured it to not feel as layered and sometimes contradictory as it reads. Nevertheless, even in this early study there are a lot of points that resonate with me. Having been in various situations where I was "performing" in this manner - for example, when working in retail - I can recognize a lot of the elements of his model as lived realities. It's interesting to see the way feeling the need to maintain this performance in front of outsiders might make people who are in other contexts antagonistic collaborate with each other. Also, on a very personal level, I've always struggled with getting into and then maintaining the discretion of staying in the backroom, that is required, beyond technical competence, to be a productive member of a team, and it puts some less than stellar experiences I've had in context.

This relatively short book is very readable. I strongly recommend it if anything here sounded interesting. Aside from more elaboration on these points, and a more thorough presentation of the model, with many examples from field work, other studies, and fiction, he makes frequent references to unpublished research by his University of Chicago colleagues, which might otherwise be hard to gain access to.