Weird Circle 5 - Declared Insane

"Out of the past phantoms of a world gone by speak again the immortal tale: Declared Insane."

This episode, first broadcast on September 26, 1943, again adapts a full novel, this time The Commission in Lunacy (L'interdiction) by Honoré de Balzac, first published in 1839. Skimming the summary suggests that this adaptation covers similar ground to the original, although obviously with much less detail.

I am starting to wonder whether my first impression, that this series is focused on the supernatural, was misguided. Instead, Declared Insane joins The Vendetta and Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as another mundane tale, about power and its relation to justice, and how far decency and integrity could get you in Bourbon Restoration Paris - not as far as the connections and influence, which will provide you with very sincere liars to muster to your cause.

We see this as the conflict unfolds between the estranged wife of the Marquis d'Espard, who wants to seize control of her husband's affairs by committing him to an asylum, and Judge Popinot of the inferior courts, who would preside over the necessary hearing, but is not easily swayed by influence or wealth (a poignant quote: "Such a place for a judge to live... what kind of a judge are you anyway, living here? Huh! You must be an honest one!"), in parallel series of dialogues and described actions that believably lead to a not so satisfying conclusion.

The theme of the mental health system being used as punishment unfortunately lingers to this day. An investigating judge, however, probably reads as unusual to an American audience.

Weird Circle 4 - Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

"The Weird Circle. In this cave by the restless sea we are met to call from out the past stories strange and weird. Phantoms of a world gone by, speak again the immortal tale: Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."

This episode, first broadcast on September 19, 1943, is an adaptation of a full novel by the same title by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1838. Skimming the summary suggests that this is, again, a very loose adaptation.

Another mundane horror like The Vendetta, this compresses many of the real terrors of life at sea into one neat package. Shanghaiing, abuse of power by captains, storms, mental stress, mutiny, and the extremes to which thirst and starvation lead people are all there. Obviously a nautical theme goes well with the show's shoreside frame.

This recording adds some organ music to the outro, as well as a statement about this being part of the Armed Forced Radio and Television Service (now Armed Forces Network), which suggests that this was recorded from an overseas broadcast, or possibly that at this point this was produced for that purpose.

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.