The Telepresent Texan: 2010

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Click the Link, this sucker looks cosmic.

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Darth Vader's borderline? No, I don't think so.

What is Darth Vader's diagnosis?

What some folks miss is Anakin Skywalker never had a pure Jedi education. From the start, Chancellor Palpatine was teaching him, influencing him. People ask how he could all of a sudden turn Sith, but at the risk of being contradicted later by Lucas, I believe he was being taught the principles of the Sith, as he was being educated in the Code of the Jedi.

There are lines in either Episode Two, or Episode Three, where Palpatine goes something like "Remember what I taught you, those with power are loath to part with it.". That sounds to me like he was giving Anakin lessons about power and its uses, a rather Sith thing to be doing. Why can't the secret Sith give his pupil in politics shadow lessons in Sith doctrine ? He wouldn't have to announce it, saying, turn your Sith Textbook to page 108, he could simply give those lessons as pointers for dealing with political situations, or dealing with the real world, as a counterpoint to what the Jedi taught him. Rather than only having a few hours to teach him everything, Palpatine would have over ten years to instruct his pupil in Sith thought, if not actual force techniques.

There was always a parallel path. What Palpatine did over time was force Anakin into the belief that he had no other path to walk than to walk the path of Dark Side, and as he was tunnelled more into that, his behavior became increasingly outside the pale.

Anakin doesn't have to be mentally ill to react like he did. People underestimate the consequences of having a head full of bad ideas, of being under the bad influence of somebody who could be termed a psychopath, a remorseless manipulator.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

'Sex and the City' movie may be too racy for one city - CNN.com

Define Irony.

An expert says that Sex and the City II (A movie I intend to somehow fail to see) will do for Abu Dhabi what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand.

Exceeeeept:

Lord of the Rings was actually shot in New Zealand, which doubled for Middle Earth, whereas this movie is set in what's supposed to be Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, but actually is Morocco!

Curiously enough, Morocco's doubled for a great many dry, dusty Arab countries, especially with movies that deal in controversial issues.

One would think that Morocco should see the benefit of all their hard work at making their country a good location for movies, no?

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

I can't get the site to load properly, but here's why...

...I think Ebert is wrong that Video Games can never be an artform.

My basic belief is that Art is Communication. That's its reason to exist. There is nothing in the annals of artistic history to suggest designed or mass produced objects cannot have aesthetic aspects to them, or artistic value. A car's design, and thus the car itself can be a work of art. A building can be a work of art. After all, that's why Architecture is considered an artform, even though there are engineering aspects to it, practical concerns.

Participation is no barrier to something being an art. Theatre can be participatory, and so can ritual. There can be art to interactions, as in a debate, where words are chosen carefully. Rhetoric is an artform, to be certain.

Interaction does not take something away from being art. I could cite the avante-garde artists out there who have people push buttons or do something else, but let's try this from a more theoretical perspective.

If I were to design a panorama in a computer, in video, or as a wraparound mural, aesthetics and art certainly would come into play. Is the scene bright, dark, lovely, tragic, nasty, gory, or whatever? You couldn't escape from questions both of artistic skill, and artistic merit.

Would it change if I made this panorama into a 3-D computer generated landscape? Certainly not. Issues of perspective, of occlusion, of general ambience would come into play.

Okay, so what if we set a game in here? The game could be story based or non-story based. If you took it down the non-story route, you could make a maze, or make it like one of those games you see online, where moving a certain number of elements together would clear them. Even so, questions of appearance, kinetics, animation, and other matters would require the judgment of those developing the game.

There is no scientific way to create this product, everything depends, like most artistic endeavors do, on the judgment of the artist synchronizing in some way with the experience of the audience.

In other words, you need artists to make a game work. Since game-making mainly serves a recreational purpose in our society, it's not even really a question of whether the audience member's experience of the work is relevant, it's practically the whole point. If the game's experience doesn't move the audience in some way, it's not doing its job, and people are going to lose money on it.

I have no doubt every new artform prompts questions from the practitioners and appreciators of the old as to whether it was really art, but I think video game design has been an art from the start. The question is whether video games themselves have been art, and I think the answer is yes. It's been a developing art, though, and is admittedly a young art.

An art, nonetheless, it is.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Tuesday, February 09, 2010