I’ve decided to get back to my roots and write more. Sometimes I’m so busy moving around from one thing to the next that I have to make a conscious effort to sit down and remember what’s important. Production can be as complicated as you want to make it, but at its core it’s just about figuring out how to translate something already written to an audio-visual medium. I’m not saying that you need to have everything 100% nailed down before you start production; all creative work necessarily evolves during the creation process, especially when it’s a collaborative effort. I just want to reiterate that storytelling is the foundation for video production and other dramatic art-forms from traditional plays to modern TV shows or webcasts. Having the best crew, talent, and gear isn’t worth much without solid writing behind it all. With that attitude, I’m diving back into prose before I move ahead with screenwriting.
I think Graham Greene says it best, “To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the full shorthand of a script.”
I’m going to post a new writing exercise each month. Bring your results to the monthly Writing Circle meeting so we can share our progress.
Writing Exercise #1
(Length: 1 page)
This exercise was suggested by John Gardner.
Describe a barn from the P.O.V. of a man who just lost his son in a war. Don’t mention his son, war, or the man himself.
REMINDER: !!! The October meeting has been postponed to the 12th instead of the 5th. I’m gonna be out of town. Sorry folks. !!!
Pop Quiz: How many female artists can you name? Female musicians? Female authors?
Okay, now here’s a tougher one: how many women can you name that make video games?
In an industry that regularly churns out vapid female characters whose sole purpose is to flash T and A for adolescent, drooling fanboys, women are often excluded from the credit roll as well as the starring role. In a medium that is still struggling to be accepted as having artistic value in the eyes of pop culture(as if pop culture would know anything about that!) where are the Frida Kahlo’s, the Stevie Nicks’s, the Mary Shelley’s of the video game world?
I’m not going to argue which came first, the stereotyped characters or the sexism in the workplace, because it doesn’t matter: they’re mutually reinforcing. A company that encourages sexual harassment towards women, or doesn’t reward both sexes equally in terms of promotions and wages, will drive women away– if they bother to hire them at all. And the numbers bear out this trend in the video game industry. Take a look at those numbers: 77-96% of jobs in the video game industry are taken by men, yet 45% of the people who play games are women.
Why would so many women enjoy playing games, but not making them? Well, here’s an example of the kind of crap behavior that women have to put up with:
Of course this attitude that women are supposed to be sexually available to men at all times has been around for a long time and appears in every form of business, so why am I pointing it out here? Because it’s been around for a long time and appears in every form of business. That’s why. For example, in the late 19th century an author by the name of Ellen Glasgow took her first manuscript to an agent in New York who, after taking her $50, told her she was too pretty to be a novelist and sexually assaulted her. The next man she took her manuscript to told her to stop writing and just have babies instead. She didn’t stop writing. In 1941 her novel In This Our Life won a Pulitzer-prize and was adapted for film the following year.
Even without discrimination it’s almost impossible to attain recognition as a game creator: people have been acculturated to think in terms of brand-names, about some contrived corporate image rather than the product itself or those who made it. When a video game is released the publisher’s name is scrawled in large type on the front of the box. So when you go into a store to buy it you know that Sonic the Hedgehog was produced by Sega, and Super Mario Bros. was produced by Nintendo. But publishers don’t make games. They finance them(no small feat with multi-million dollar budgets being the norm these days) and they ship them out to retailers. Who are the people who spent years of their life making these games? When will the marketing department figure out how to put their names on the boxes? Let me introduce you to just a few of these unsung heroes of their craft.
Sonic the Hedgehog was a character created by Naoto Oshima and brilliantly brought to life by programmer Yuji Naka and level-designer Hirokazu Yasuhara. You might know that Mario was the creation of Shigeru Miyamoto, one of the few game designers inducted into that ridiculously narrow cult of celebrity status, but did you know that Koji Kondo wrote the jazzy theme music for it? He also composed the original theme for the equally successful Legend of Zelda series. Unfortunately both series featured a weak female character who must be rescued by the strong male hero. Many things have changed over the decades: Sega is now developing games for Nintendo among others, and Nintendo’s former in-house development studio Rare(which created the Donkey Kong Country series) is owned by and developing exclusively for Microsoft. But the cliche of strong male characters having to rescue weaker female characters is as popular as ever.
Happily there are a growing number of women who’ve made a name for themselves over the years despite the toxic misogyny of the gaming world.
Anne Westfall was a programmer for civil engineering software before meeting her future husband Jon Freeman. Together with Paul Reiche they founded Free Fall Associates, a game development studio that produced an Atari game called Archon that proved so popular it was eventually ported to over a dozen systems. She also served on the board of directors for the Game Developer’s Conference, only the world’s biggest convention for people working in the industry(E3 is all about marketing whereas the GDC is much more relevant to people who actually create games). There’s an old interview with Anne and Jon if you’re curious.
Breath of Fire III has some of the best jazz tracks of any video game soundtrack and it was composed entirely by two women: Akari Kaida and Yoshino Aoki. When asked in an interview about the unusual style, Kaida-san answered, “I wanted to challenge myself with every song, even though my superiors were telling me to create music similar to the previous titles.” She’s also composed songs for Mega Man, Resident Evil, and Okami.
Jane Jensen created the Gabriel Knight video games and wrote a novel nominated for the Philip K. Dick award before recently starting her own game development studio.
Julie Uhrman founded Ouya, which makes the world’s first linux-based console by the same name. It’s built on the idea of breaking down the barriers between gamers and game developers. It does this by allowing anybody to make their own games and by making both the games and their development affordable.
In the US people spend more money on video games–including the hardware to play them– than they do on movies and music combined. That’s tens of billions of dollars a year. With that much money at stake, publishers tend to primarily back games that are clones of other already successful games. This pattern of focusing solely on sales and excluding everything of social value is consumerism at its best and humanity at its worst. It’s a vicious circle of trendiness that not only stifles originality of any sort, but also acts as an additional barrier to groups of people who have been historically excluded from even having a chance at success.
Gender equity is important not just because it’s unfair to pay women less than men for the same work but because it amounts to a form of censorship: if you’re excluding people from making art, you’re effectively silencing them by preventing their voices from ever being heard. And good art can not only entertain but also express the feelings and philosophy of the artist. Art offers a window into the souls of other people, and into ourselves when we choose to create. Denying women that freedom is like imprisoning them behind shuttered windows. Don’t do that. Don’t be like Bowser. It never ends well. And don’t be like Peach either. You don’t have to wait for some knight in shining plumbing to come rescue you. Princesses can slay dragons all on their own if we just give them a chance.
With any luck we’ll live to see a better world where both economic and personal growth thrive on freedom of expression. And that means, at the very least, not silencing someone simply because of which sex organs they may or may not have.
I learned about some of the ways that GMO’s were threatening the biodiversity of the planet and destabilizing our food supply back in 2000 when I went to my first protests and started networking with activists of all sorts. To be sure, there’s at least as much inconsistency, hypocrisy, abuse, and dysfunction within activist groups as without. In no way am I trying to elevate the moral standing of any particular group. What all of these people had in common– or at least the ones who weren’t poseurs– and what makes them exceptional in our society, is simply their recognition that there are huge problems with the way we live and that because we can not live this way forever, it’s imperative to find other ways to live. I don’t apply the label ‘activist’ to myself, which I think is a fairly pretentious, polarizing term to begin with since it implies that if you aren’t championing some specific cause that you must be inactive, which is both condescending and inaccurate because everyone is changing every day and so is the world around them. All life is affecting all life and the important question is how we relate to each other, not ‘if’ we act because action is inevitable. Something more like ‘social justice advocate’ is a better label if you must have labels since it clearly identifies a purpose that I can identify with: stand up for what’s good and right in the world.
One thing that seems wrong to me is the way biotechnology is being pushed onto people who neither desire nor need it, and that the companies doing the pushing aren’t afraid to do great harm to the world if it means that they can make a quick buck. Hardly seems like the kind of hands you’d want one of the most powerful inventions in the world to fall into. If you’ve ever wondered why people are so worried over genetic modification, you should start with the 2008 documentary “The World According to Monsanto”:
First off, the movie talks about accountability, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Monsanto knew that one of the chemicals it manufactured called polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, was harmful to human health but continued to dump excess waste from its factory into the surrounding community of Snow Creek for decades. They finally lost a related civil lawsuit to the tune of $700 million, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize how many tens of thousands of lives were impacted or destroyed by Monsanto. It’s also important to note that even though people died of cancer that was almost certainly linked to these pollutants, no criminal charges were ever brought against Monsanto.
This isn’t just bad in the way that the tobacco corporations can get away with saying that smoking cigarettes doesn’t ’cause’ cancer because it affects different people differently, even if in the overwhelming majority of cases it does in fact create cancerous conditions including heart and lung disease which is the #1 cause of death in the States, but it’s even worse because in the case of environmental pollution people are not choosing to engage in risky behavior. These people are simply drinking the water or eating food grown within their own communities. If you or I poisoned someone and they died from it we’d be up for murder charges, but corporations can poison people’s food and water for profit with criminal impunity.
When genetically modified, or GM, food was first brought before the Food and Drug Association, or FDA, it was approved as safe on the argument that all they’re doing is inserting DNA, and people already regularly consume DNA. This argument is completely disingenuous because what they’re doing by manipulating DNA is unleashing new lifeforms that the planet has never seen before, and the long-term effects of this on a human that consumes this new organism or on the global ecosystems that become invaded by it are completely unknown.
Did you know that in most FDA rulings, the majority of people deciding if the product is safe have money personally invested in what they’re reviewing? It’s a bit like letting the foxes guard the hen-house(with apologies to real foxes who appear to me to be superior to bureaucrats in every conceivable way). In the case of the approval of GM food, Deputy Commissioner of the FDA Michael Taylor was a former attorney for Monsanto. So the risk of GM food to public health was evaluated by a man whose previous job it was to protect the special interest of Monsanto.
Bovine Growth Hormone, or BGH, is perhaps the most well-known example of a genetically-engineered product created by Monsanto to increase the milk yield from cows. Veterinarian Richard Burroughs was studying the effects of this artificial hormone for the FDA. He was fired when he asked too many questions, and the FDA approved it as safe citing incomplete and manipulated studies. Later private investigations revealed that cows treated with BGH suffered problems with their reproductive and mammary glands, had increased rates of infection resulting in extra amounts of puss and also antibiotics in the end product, and contained elevated levels of the hormone igf-1 which has been correlated to increased breast and prostate cancer risk. When Monsanto sought approval from Canadian government, they attempted to bribe officials resulting in a nationwide ban that was soon followed by most of Europe.
Many of the GMO’s Monsanto produces are engineered to withstand the toxic pesticide Roundup, or glyphosate. The long-term effects of this are unknown, but because these food crops can not be contained they spread to surrounding areas and contaminate all other varieties with their transgenic modifications, destroying untold generations of work by selective breeding, and exposing farmers to lawsuits for intellectual property rights violations because Monsanto ‘owns’ the modified DNA and all derivative works. Industrial agriculture is bankrupting farmers and the planet just so a few people can get rich quick, while monocropping is setting up our food supply for an inevitable collapse. Without a variety of genetic diversity, our crops will not be robust enough to survive in the future.
So we have corrupt government using shoddy science to help prop up greedy corporations. That’s nothing new; it’s been going on for centuries. But what’s the larger picture here? Where is all of this leading? Even if we had a government without glaring conflicts of interest, if we could hold people who make corporate policy decisions accountable for the lives they take, and if we cultivated the kind of real transparency and skepticism that good science flourishes under, could we look forward to a bright future? Probably not.
Monsanto is not alone. There’s no shortage of pollution in today’s world: once you start looking around you’ll notice that so many of the things our culture makes are full of some nasty pollutants. The relevant term is “toxification of the environment” which includes not only the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, but many household products as well. There are studies showing that mothers’ breast milk is now full of toxic pollutants picked up from the environment and passed on to their children, which is particularly disconcerting considering the high degree of both vulnerability and helplessness that comes with being a newborn baby, infant, or toddler. Take dioxins for example, which are being produced by a whole spectrum of industries that have nothing to do with GMO’s. This is one of an uncountable number of ways in which the costs of doing business are externalized to a vulnerable population to turn a profit and so that those in positions of wealth and power can yield more wealth and power.
Almost everything industrialized civilization does degrades the environment, and as ever more powerful technologies are monopolized by the power elite, with the tacit or explicit approval of both capitalist and communist governments, these effects are multiplied. I’m not saying technology is bad– I’m no Luddite– but when the way we live creates an imbalance in the world, i.e. taking from the natural environment while giving nothing back, it creates a serious problem for the longevity of our species. To the extent that technology is not used to right this imbalance it simply makes the problem worse.
The unsustainability of industrial civilization is systemic: you simply can not indefinitely maintain an extractive economy based on the infinite exploitation of finite resources. In other words, because we are utterly and hopelessly dependent upon mining more and more minerals for production, on over-harvesting our forests(increasingly the forests of Asia and South America rather than within US borders), on taking too many fish from the seas, on dumping our by-products of manufacturing wherever we please, and taking everything we want from the world without giving anything back to help the non-human community(or even the human communities which don’t personally lick the boots of the 1%), we are courting self-destruction on a global scale because sooner or later, maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday, we’re going to run out.
I guess my point is this: widespread ecological collapse is already a reality, and if the destruction of life as we know it isn’t going to convince people to change their ways, then what is? I don’t have an answer to that. People are very set in their ways. But what does it mean that we live in a culture which accepts the death of most life as we know it as inevitable? That I can answer with some degree of certainty: it means that people are unwilling or unable to imagine an alternative to the climate of self-destruction that they’ve been brought up in. So if you care at all about your health or the health of others, and especially if you have the insight to realize the inseparability of the two, it becomes important to not only point out the injustices of the world, whether they’re social, environmental, physical or spiritual, but to spend your energy cultivating and considering alternative ways of being.
When the masses of this culture are finally forced to confront the reality of what the dominant culture has done to this planet, as opposed to being pacified by status quo delusions of ‘progress’, they’re going to need alternatives. When we start running out of oil and coal, when we start running out of space to live or clean water to drink, we’re going to need new ways to live. And the damnable promise of hope that our generation has been given is that we’re still early enough in this process of civilized self-destruction to have the luxury of contemplating better ways to live, but we’re in all probability too late to stop the current anthropocentric lifestyle from collapsing in on itself and taking a sizable amount of life on the planet with it.
And for the record I don’t believe in religious prophecies of apocalypse or of returning to some idyllic neolithic or even agrarian lifestyle. To me, the most horrifying thing about the destruction of so much of the world, which is self-evident if you have the time and eyes to look, is that we’re going to live through it and that we’re going to be forced to take part in it: that when our role in history is remembered, we will stand as witnesses to the total deforestation of continents just so that they can be converted into disposable chopsticks or pulped to make toilet paper and copies of celebrity magazines.
We can’t go ‘back’ to living in a world as it was before being radically changed by human hands, but neither can we go ‘forward’ to a world where our lives come at the expense of all other life without being caught in the same ripples of death that are drowning out more and more species every day. Our planet deserves better. People deserve better. You deserve better. If nothing else I am convinced of that. Every time I find myself working to make the world a better place somehow whether it’s by planting a tree, tending a garden, lending an ear to someone in trouble, writing a song, or even reading a challenging book, I am immediately relieved of any depressing thoughts because I can feel that I am a part of something bigger than myself and that my life has meaning because it’s a part of other lives. This relationship is what real community is about: it’s precisely what civilization has taken from us, and it’s precisely what we need to put back.
To a man brave enough to let his heart lead his life, even death will not be the end of his love.
It would be a great dishonor to frame the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. merely in terms of black and white. One who advocates for social justice can not do so with any real sincerity if the search for equality and dignity is confined merely to any specific sector or group and denied to everyone else. That immoral imbalance is precisely the problem he and other civil rights leaders were attempting to abolish. His vision was not just that blacks could be free to live among whites with the same freedoms and opportunities, but that poor people of all colors and in all nations be given the means to lift themselves out of their aggravating poverty.
I grew up here in California during the 90’s and there was always much fanfare over his marching in the streets to end segregation in the South, but when I visited the MLK Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, GA. I was surprised to find that he was also one of the most vocal anti-war speakers in the nation at the time of his death. They certainly hadn’t mentioned this in the white-washed schools that I attended. Nor did they mention that white cops greeted the black protesters with constant verbal harassment, baton beatings, and brutal attack dogs. Obviously the school’s administration wanted children to know the fact that MLK Jr. was a great American. Also obviously they wanted children to know the fact that the United States military and police powers were a force for freedom and good in the world… except that in this case they were neither. And they still aren’t today to the extent that they fuel unnecessary conflict outside our borders and over-broad censorship within.
He called the Vietnam war a “demonic destructive suction tube” that eats up time, money, and lives, while obliterating social welfare programs for the poor. With an increasingly disproportionate population of blacks being drafted, many were becoming militant resisters to their own exploitation. Convinced that this growing bitterness and hatred would only breed more of the same, he was strongly opposed to the use of any violence to achieve social equality. But if he were opposed even to the mere act of a few blacks arming themselves with guns, how could he not first oppose the tens of thousands of Americans being armed with all sorts of weapons, killing men, women, and children, and burning entire villages down on the other side of the world? His commitment to non-violence led him to believe that the war was poisoning the soul of the country and destroying the only hope for a peaceful future. His commitment to Christianity led him to believe that both capitalists and communists deserved to live since they were all equal in the eyes of God– a lesson still perpetually unlearned by any American president past or present.
To advocate for social justice means to root out oppression in all its forms and to address the systemic causes of inequality. In other words, you can not address racism within our borders without looking at the overarching racism that our government also perpetrates outwardly towards people in other countries.
If he were alive today, what would he have to say about the war in Iraq? We still spend more money on war than anything else. Our country is still haunted by racism, within and without.
A year after this powerful speech against state-sponsored violence, he was gunned down outside a motel in Tennessee. The culture of violence is not tolerant of criticism, and predictably responds to any perceived threat with yet more violence. This sad fact is counterbalanced somewhat by the observation that although bullets can take a life, they can not take away our reason for living. The voices of everyone who has tried to create a better world live on in the hearts and minds of those able to listen.
If you need to have access to more than one operating system in a hurry, then Parallels is a decent enough solution. It’s not without its problems though. For example, I’m using a Graphire3 tablet in conjunction with a an iMac running WindowsXP SP3 on Parallels. The tablet was detected as a mouse and completely lost all of its pressure sensitivity! The tablet will only register X/Y positional data, which is pretty useless.
If you have this problem, here’s how you might fix it:
1) Uninstall any drivers you already have associated with the device on your guest OS. This will help to avoid possible conflicts.
2) Under the Parallels “Virtual Machine” menu select “Uninstall Parallels Tools”. These are a set of programs that do some interesting things with connectivity between your VM and your host OS, such as linking your desktops or automatically sharing folders and devices. In our case, we don’t want it to automatically detect and share the Wacom tablet because it doesn’t know the difference between a tablet and a mouse! At this point you should be prompted to restart your VM.
3) After rebooting, plug in your tablet.
4) Under the Parallels “Devices” menu select USB and then find your tablet. It should be listed under its model number. This will connect the device to your guest OS and remove it from your host OS. It should now have a check-mark next to it.
5) Download and install the proper drivers from Wacom.com.
Just wanted to share this in case someone else has the same problem. The thing is that the Parallels Tools software outsmarts itself and instead of treating the tablet like any other device, it thinks it’s just a pointing device so it takes shortcuts to seamlessly integrate it across your VM and host OS and assumes that the only thing a pointing device needs to do is point. Apparently the good people at Parallels have never heard of pressure sensitivity.
You can test if your tablet is working on the following page if you don’t have any familiar graphics programs installed:
Do you like games? How about indie games from truly innovative designers? Well for just $15 you can have 30 unique games and 100% of your donation will go towards the creation of a new nonprofit that’s trying to turn a warehouse in LA into a public venue for the creation of video game art and experimental gameplay.
Cal Poly is hosting a conference for the Associated Schools of Construction in 2013 and I had the pleasure of producing their promotional video. I did all of the video work and editing in about 2 weeks. Check it out!
