Three Thoughts On John Carmack's New VR Headsets
John Carmack, the guy who programmed Doom and Quake, is applying his considerable talent towards improving VR headsets. Here, he gives a (highly recommended!) twenty-minute talk on why VR headsets don’t work and why his approach comes closer to working, which I found fascinating for a couple of reasons.
1) John emanates a tendency I’ve noticed in the “good” geek world: accepting and acknowledging problems. Which is to say that if you talk to a certain style of geek about his favorite X, that X does everything perfectly – and anything it doesn’t do is something you’re stupid for wanting. Which is why, despite our abundance of tech, so many problems remain – you have this sort of geek tunnel-vision where they fall in love with a technology, and then they forget that this technology has limits, and rather than working to expand those limits, they start circling the wagons and explaining defensively that this isn’t doable, and besides that’s not what’s important.
Note how John does not do this. If anything, this presentation is full of encoded apologies – it doesn’t do this, but we want it to. It should do this, but the technology’s not there yet. Some people experienced blurriness, and we’re not sure why yet, but we’ll get it. John’s a smart guy, and while he’s clearly loving the tech, he’s much more concerned with making it do what he wants it to ultimately do, as opposed to working within the limitations it imposes.
This is what I consider to be a “good” geek in that competent nerds may love a tech, but they never forget that the tech exists to accomplish a goal. And they never get so wrapped up in the joys of doing Stuff that they forget that Stuff, cool as it is, still isn’t really all that impressive yet. John’s clearly proud of what he’s done, but he has a vision – a 360-degree vision – and he is not removing his eyes from that end goal.
2) The article itself talks about how impenetrable John’s talks are, because he’s a smart guy who uses a lot of big words – which led me to believe that I’d spend twenty minutes hearing some UNIX guy blathering on about device driver conflicts. But aside from one or two words I didn’t know, I found the talk itself surprisingly easy to follow. Carmack’s a good teacher, and this was highly educational about why current VR is so dissatisfying. So am I that smart, or is the PC Gamer guy that dumb, or is PC Gamer purposely making it sound like Carmack is obtuse so their readers will feel brilliant when they don’t have problems following along?
3) John Carmack is about half a second away from bursting into a Gilbert Gottfried impression. At all times.
Just A Reminder
Tomorrow, my crazy friend Angie is going to ride a roller coaster for eight hours for charity. She is offering an Amazon gift certificate. She is paying for her own hotel.
Maybe you should sponsor her.
Conversations Emanating From A Disturbed Mind
Yesterday, Gini smooched our girlfriend Bec, then and broke out in a rash so nasty it required two Benadryl for Gini not to scratch her lips off. Bec apologized.
“It’s okay,” Gini said. “You were using the same Burt’s Bees lip balm as always. I would never in a million years have guessed that would give me a rash.” Then her phone rang, and she went off to talk to a client. By the time she got back, Bec and I had had A Talk.
“We’ve been thinking,” I said. “And you’re underselling yourself. We’re pretty sure you could do it in five hundred, tops.”
“…What?”
“A million years is a long time,” I explained. “That’s, like, twenty thousand of your lifetimes to date. If you’d really thought about it, I’m sure you could knock it out of the park in a few centuries.”
“…knock what?”
“Guessing what would give you a rash. Admittedly, it’s pretty specific, but if you do it full-time…”
“Wait a minute!” Gini said. “I get bored after five minutes of guessing games with you! I don’t want to spend the next million years endlessly guessing what might give me a rash! That’s a horrible fate, wandering around for all eternity having to do nothing but wondering what might give me hives!”
“I’ve taken that into account,” I replied serenely. “I figure it’ll take you two centuries of wandering the Earth, resenting your status, lamenting to a cold and uncaring God the strange and inexplicable task he has bequeathed to you and you alone. After that: three centuries of daily guessing. Tops.”
Soon after that, we got into a debate about whether we were having a debate or an argument. Good times, good times.
In Which I Wish Don Corleone Would Put A Hit Out On Holly Golightly
So this week, Gini and I watched two old movies: Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Godfather. Sadly, all the violence was in the wrong film.
Don’t get me wrong, as Breakfast at Tiffany’s is fascinating from a historical perspective: you can see its proto-hipster DNA in every quirky indie movie made these days. Unfortunately, while for many this is like discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls, for me it’s like uncovering the lair of the Alien Queen.
Yes, Holly, you’re so forcefully odd! You do such whacky things! What a bold character you are, rebelling against the system by attending thrift shops and leading your childish little life! It’s endearing that you’re so purposefully irresponsible that you have to keep annoying the horribly stereotyped Asian because you can’t be bothered to carry your fucking keys! By the time she tossed the cat out into the rain I’m like, “YOU DUMB BIMBO, YOU’RE KILLING YOUR CAT OUT OF PIQUE! I HOPE YOU DIE IN A GREASE FIRE, YOU STUPID CAT MURDERER!”
On the other hand, I now see who Zooey Deschanel writes her royalty checks to. So that’s something.
Watching the Godfather, on the other hand, makes me think of how the horrifically fucked-up 1970s monoculture led to the glamorization of gangsterism. Because let’s be honest: at that time in American cinema, there was no way you could have a major motion picture about just an Italian family. It wouldn’t sell! America only likes looking at white people! So you had entire categories of ethnicity who only got shown in the margins – Italians, Jews, Mexicans, you name it, they only showed up as secondary characters, and often played by a white guy smeared in startlingly bad makeup.
So Coppola was smart: he threaded his Italian heritage into the movie, making The Godfather as much about everyday Italian lifestyle as it was about gangsters. It’s no error that the movie starts off with a long wedding sequence where not much gangstery happens at all – there’s some negotiations and stories, but mostly it’s a lot of random relatives dancing and food and people interacting with each other in a unique way. The movie is entirely about family, but one of the reasons it’s so effective is that family isn’t just held together by the mob, but it’s held together by all the cultural ties that held Italians together at that time. You think it’s an error that there’s actually a cooking lesson in the middle of the movie, on how to make good sauce?
If Hollywood had allowed a lot of stories about Italian families, well, Godfather probably wouldn’t have had its moxie. But because Godfather was notable for not one, but two elements being introduced to the mainstream, suddenly you had the love of tight-knit Italian clans AND the epicness of the mob, both of which became entwined to be interminably romantic. People were like, “Hey, this is actually kind of heartwarming!” not realizing that what they were reacting to was largely the Italian-ness that white producers had conspired to keep off-screen for years.
I wonder: if Hollywood hadn’t been so bleached in those days, had dared to show Italians as families without gangster ties, would Godfather have even made a dent? And if the Godfather hadn’t romanticized the mob, making it seem glamorous and appealing, would we have ever encouraged a culture that now glamorizes crime in the mainstream? In other words, did the enforced Anglo-ness of filmmaking back then lead, in a complex fashion, to the rise of the thug lifestyle?
I’m not attached to any of it, really, but… food for thought. Delicious Italian food.
I'm Depressed. Here's What You Should Do To Comfort Me.
It’s the peak of my Seasonal Affective Disorder, which meant that I spent Saturday night crying hysterically in Gini’s arms, listing all the reasons I didn’t deserve to live, using all my willpower not to go for the knives and cut myself as deep as I could.
It’s not a fun time.
Earlier this week, I posted an entry on FetLife about how hard it was for me to reach out during this period. I got fourteen comments, seven emails, and infinite text messages telling me how much people liked me. That was nice.
All I kept thinking about was the poor bastards who don’t write well, though.
I’m a depressive who chronicles his journey, in part to let other depressives know that they’re not alone. That some days, the black fog settles in and it’s all you can do to stay alive. And as a result, I’ve garnered a relatively large audience who will converge to tell me how wonderful I am whenever I forget.
Then there are those who are genuinely forgotten.
There are people far worse off than I am who post about this sucking void that’s devouring all their happiness, and get no comments at all. They’re struggling, drowning alone in an ocean of sorrow… and on those rare occasions they dare to post, they hear nothing but emptiness. Their bravery in continuing shames mine.
So yes. I’m down right now, and hating myself. If you want to make me feel better, then find someone you haven’t contacted in a while and tell them you love them. Not your girlfriend/boyfriend, not that person you had coffee with yesterday, but that distant friend who you’ve been meaning to call but life has gotten in the way.
They may be lonely. They may need the love a lot more than I do. Reaching out now may be giving them a hand that will get them through a terrible time.
Text, call, email, whatever. But get in touch. Let them know you’re thinking of them, because this depression is bad enough. Loneliness makes it even worse. Surprise someone with a kind thought, because you never know how much they might need it right now.