autumn tactics

I planned on writing more in March, especially since I was on the road so much, but in the end the advent of a notebook that could compile made little else possible. Probably through stress more than anything, I’ve managed to run myself down to a lot less robust level than usual. I tire easily, waking up is a problem seven days a week, and there’s a constant blunt ache in my body. The weather has improved dramatically in recent weeks, however, and the sunshine and fair temperatures are starting to recharge me (like Superman).

Still, things are a mess all over and my priorities are all out of whack. My photography class starts tomorrow, I need to decide what kind of pictures I’m going to take with me to show since we’re supposed to start with that and self-introductions. I bought a license to FL Studio in February, but I haven’t made much use of it yet since I’ve been sucked into Resident Evil 4 (again), and seasons 10 and 11 of ER. I think that I need a schedule again for off-time, even though I don’t have any exhibitions on the horizon. I’ve let communication with too many important people slide in the name of short-term release. Thankfully, rave season starts in two weeks. A return to reflection, to sound and to quiet, and to good people all around.

So many twisted dreams going on now involving all the people I have issues with. ::sigh:: Work is never-ending and it’s nothing but responsibility I cannot manage without significant pain.

So my business trip to Los Angeles ends as quickly as it began. Fifty-one hours of Pacific Standard Time. It was educational, warm, fully of tasty things to eat, and garnered a few more memories to weave into my sterling silver bachelor’s band.

I got into town at eight-thirty Tuesday morning, seven hours earlier than when I left. Having a good amount of time on my hands before I could check into the hotel, I took a cab to Venice Beach and walked up Santa Monica to enjoy the weather. Along the way I met a pair of recently discharged Japanese office workers from Kyushu, and stopped at Big Dean’s for a ginormous double burger with fries and a pint of Sam Adams at the lovely body clock time of five a.m.

In between meetings I picked my way along the walk of fame and spent a good deal of time in the hotel conferring with coworkers back east. In some ways I think I could get used to living on the road: my room was about three times the size of my apartment and had a pretty decent view of the sunrise and Hollywood Hills.

Oddly enough my good high school friend Adam who I’d seen once in the last twelve years lives about five minutes’ drive from my hotel. We walked the dog, talked about old times, and his fiancee made us some lovely Cuba cuisine.

It was a short trip, but well-balanced and even had a good degree of intrigue and romance. Ah, the two carry-on lifestyle.

Tokyo is a city of endless fascination. The rivers and sandlots, the storage rooms and offices, a sea of billboards and dingy katakana signs. Houses apartments are packed together like a tacklebox, an endless array of multicoloured plaster, concrete, and tile. I could devote a lifetime to exploring it all and never discover a fraction of its secrets. Families and grocery shopping, torrid affairs and love hotels, a panolpy of rust, plastic, sin, and perservance all under the bleary eye of a tired sun.

I board the train to the airporte at Shinjuku and impulsively swallow down an inari and tarako onigiri set with takuan. Wrestling off the cap of my blythe green tea I take a few strained belts. Muscles still coiled from the rushed disarray of morning, I put on m hopelessly broken headphones and try to calm myself down with some Final Fantasy piano concertos. The start of a journey and so much angstful longing for the good old wandering romantic me, I wish I were riding the train in the other direction, back to my ramshackle commuter bicycle. But this is the start, thirty hours of travel and forty-nine in Los Angeles. Four days of a businessman’s solitude.

Hirota-san says that when you’re really buried in a project, you not only lose track of time but reality as well. Riding on a crowded train, or walking through the city, you don’t pay attention to anyone. Your mind is so involved with work that nothing else even exists.

Hoka no hito ga ittemo, imi nai; kankei nai.

Even if other people are around, it means nothing. They are not related to what you’re doing and might as well not exist.

It’s not an intentional thought, or a position of haughtiness. Your reality simply collapses to the minimal set of conditions required to achieve the goal, whatever it is. (Most likely having lost all meaning in the process, you probably couldn’t explain it even if someone asked.) I think this tunnel vision is some kind of instinct, a primitive defense mechanism to conserve energy and prevent one from going insane. If you actually stopped to contemplate about how your mortal coil is all but evaporating out from beneath you, you’d probably literally get sick.

I’ve come out of one of these tunnels now… my entire summer was devoted to an already ridiculously intense project, and I have not a single summer memory aside from the one time I went to Enoshima for a few hours on the first train after pulling an all-nighter. Now, everything is nothing, and even coming close to thinking about it incurs some sort of queer cloister phobic-like panic. All of the unused tickets, the skipped concerts, the people I never called back… Now I’m twitching in withdrawal from that unhealthy work addiction, staying at the office doing almost nothing but feeling reluctant to leave. Almost unconsciously, I filled every single weekend for six straight weeks with multi-day events. Hertzberg on the 27th of September, Toyama the weekend after that, Gentenkaiki this weekend, Natural Smile the following weekend, a photo exhibition at Drop, eight days in Europe, and then Design Festa in the beginning of November. I supposedly have a birthday somewhere in there, but I won’t be near anyone who knows me for it so I don’t really think of it as happening.

Sitting now on a bench cross legged in the massive east wing of Messe and looking out into the vacant dusk sky, it’s pretty much still as Hirota-san says, hito ga ittemo, imi nai. Kankei nai.

Even if we’re together, I’m not there.

Today I’m at the Tokyo Game Show, the first I’ve attended in four years or so. Makuhari Messe is a convention center way the frick out in Chiba, past Tokyo Disneyland and near the end of the Keiyo Line. It takes at least a good forty-five minutes to get to from anywhere in the center of the city, a long, noisy train ride rolling through vast, unbroken stretches of warehouses and danchi (apartment complexes) below an eternally overcast sky. But, it’s a work day.

Seeing what the competition is doing is helpful to a degree; games are on display here a good several months to half-a-year before they are released to market. For me mostly it’s a reference to see how well other companies’ developers are taking advantage of the hardware. My job is to be sensitive to the representation of light and motion in particular. Jagged lines and rough approximations of shadows aggravate me, partly because I know it can be done better, but mostly because these are vivid reminders of the pressures of game development in general, and how many sacrifices in quality are made along the way due to project management blunders and an unskilled staff.

More or less though, it’s the same every year. Implementations of the same interaction systems pile up, most of them chaff. The truly excellent titles still stun, but these are usually the ones that show up at least three or four years in a row, a painstaking exercise in dedication and stamina. Sometimes I’m a little disheartened to think of what it takes, and how little appreciation and understanding there is for the art. But, it’s arrogant to think that most industries aren’t like that. Almost everyone has to work this hard to make an honest living, and that’s what’s really depressing.

Though the particular date often escapes me, summer always brings the terminal feelings associated with my anniversary of living in Japan. Another cycle is spent; I’ve been here five years. I don’t know what is right anymore; I act but with so much less anticipation. I’m so tuned and adept at certain things but so blind to a myriad of others that I used to entertain. It’s like being in a crowded room with hundreds of people talking all at once but over time you unconsciously develop the habit of filtering them out one by one, until it’s as if you’re the only person for miles.

The first place I lived was a weekly mansion in Takaido. I bought a used mint green Ralph Lauren oxford for five hundred yen and I wore it to work the first day after nicking my Adam’s apple shaving in the morning. The photographs I took then were beautiful to me, but now looking at them I can hardly believe that they’re mine. It’s like seeing yourself at a party as a stranger.

I am exhausted, completely exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally– in every way imaginable. A single pint of beer makes the following day almost intolerable. It seems that 85% of my life is muscle memory, and my brain is eternally drugged. I keep thinking to myself, if I just eat a little healthier, if I just change the position I sleep in, or how I hold myself when I walk, it’ll all come together and I’ll feel like I used to, like I barely remember.

I’m learning, but how much and at what cost I can’t keep track of any more.

Too tired to sleep…

[I just noticed that this is post 700. Seven hundred in just a little over five years; though the last nine months the rate has really slowed.]

The summer that never was continues and life passes me as I sit in a puddle of convenience store sandwiches, canned coffee, and unshaved Fridays.

I will be working like this for probably another five weeks. I am stalling on using the GPU to export pixel shader contents directly to memory. Thread safety and frame rates follow me into my dreams where I ask my artists once again, are they _sure_ that the alpha is cleanly feathered in all of the UI textures?

Sample photographs are back from the ST801, and unfortunately it seems that the iris blades will not close, leaving the camera perpetually locked at F1.8. This did cost me a roll of Centuria 400 and I should have checked the mechanics of the camera before taking any pictures. Now I have the task of dismantling the lens in hopes of repairing the aperture control.

I am going to try very, very, hard to get to a highly talked of party at the end of the month, which as my good friend Futoshi says will provide, “some really great photographic material.” It is the weekend before _the_ milestone though, so my hopes of making it are waning.

A significant period off is rumored to occur in the next two months. The thought I could stop working and actually go somewhere seems unreal; I am hesitant to believe and even if it did manifest it would most certainly fall dramatically short of my expectations for the fabled multi week time off game developers supposedly get after a big project. Nevertheless, I am starting to study Italian again…my first instinct was a multi-country crawl through central Europe.

Today I am going out to the east side of town to get some precision tools for the Fujinon lens, and see an exhibition of the Japanese master painters. I also need some honest to goodness epiphany for planning my next collaborative show. We meet today and hopefully will make some significant headway towards a concept we can be invigorated by.

So…tired…natsubate.

I promised myself I’d go to bed as soon as I came home tonight, because tomorrow is going to be another very long day. However, I do so little outside of work, I have to spend a few minutes doing something, just to break it into two pieces, you know? So this post is really nothing more than filler to you, sorry. It means a lot to me though, to be and and say. Hopefully I’ll have a day off this weekend and I can catch up on some production.

One might try to paint a picture with water colors on the blue sky, but it is impossible. And it is also impossible to dry up a great river by the heat of a torch made of hay, or to produce a crackling noise by rubbing together to pieces of well-tanned leather. Like these examples, people should train their minds so that they would not be disturbed by whatever kinds of words they might hear.

They should train their minds and keep them broad as the earth, unlimited as the sky, deep as a big river and soft as well-tanned leather. — from The Way of Purification

Today is July 3rd. I don’t remember when I last wrote, but it seems like yesterday, whatever that means. Releases to client fall like rainy days and it’s a miracle I remember to pay the utility bills.

Tomorrow is America’s Independence Day, 232 years from when a group of influential Anglo-Saxan landowners decided they’d had enough of being controlled by a group of other influential Anglo-Saxans several thousand miles to the northeast across the Atlantic Ocean. Of all the major holidays I’ve had to abandon since forsaking social security and the right to bear arms, the Fourth of July is probably the most derelict. I’m always working late, but there’s no marketing support for it in Japan, so it comes and goes with only a mid-compile passing thought of so many teenage romantic entanglements amidst fireworks.

Tomorrow Chub-Du has a concert, as does a minor band that has shown interest in hiring me for photography (which I have badly managed). However, I’ll make it to neither as the gaming industry is one of the most underdeveloped, taxing, and grossly inefficient wings of software development. This is no cause for alarm, however, as I’ve long since acquiesced to the fact and simply accept is as being inevitable as mortal death.

In any case, I have two independent productions on the board right now, though the first is quite tenuous for lack of definition. If anyone is interested in providing artistic consul, I would be much obliged. You may leave comments or mail me.

Ikuno Oribe said, “If a retainer will just think about what he is to do for the day at hand, he will able to do anything. If it is a single day’s work, one should be able to put up with it. Tomorrow, too, is but a single day.” — Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, seventh chapter

The longer I spend wrapped up in work, the more disheveled I become and the more frustrating the moments of free time are. It’s when I take a step off the merry-go-round that I realize how much time has passed and how many virtual dishes have piled up in my personal life.

How many dozens of rolls of negatives are piled up on my desk?
I haven’t replied to that person in three months?
The friend’s concert I missed was when?
…
Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t put too much stock in our relationship either then.

Every time I wake up on a Saturday at noon and do a quick mental check on how many promises to myself I’ve broken, I feel sick to my stomach and roll back over, pulling the blankets over my head once more.

Why can’t I have the strength to be able to sort through all the perishable parts of living and consume them by value, in turn?

I’ve been slogging towards another milestone at work, the third such hellacious one this year, and less than thirty days since the last. I lay down new features and design revisions to my libraries as fast as countless legions of content creators can swoop down on them, testing little and barely carving out the absolute minimum to make it run. And it comes in an office where the thermometer reads 95 and builds are broken all day long from a trail of bungling and sufficient specification all the way back to 2006.

But, as they say, the show must go on. And it will go on, and I do all that I can in the 80 odd minutes between getting home from work and brushing my teeth for bed. Only an angel keeps me together and my dreams alive with an eyedropper of hope.

Here are some pictures I took with the Holga last year and just managed to get scanned the other day.

It’s two o’clock on Thursday, I’ve been in the States for roughly seventy-six hours so far. I’ve been more agitated by minor things than I really think I should, it’s a little surprising and disappointing, actually. But there’s a lot of Buddhism-inspired analysis that can be applied to that. I have new socks (beer mugs and shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day), and a nice clearance sale oxford from Old Navy. I’ve eaten cheese, drank Coppola wine and Harp Ale, and eaten for sustenance but without much thought.

I’ve been able to meet several of my friends from graduate school, including Elan, Shawn, Ray, and Brenda. It’s been a road of minor, mild successes and learning, but I think that’s really all I could hope for. Although, it really bothers me to be relegated to using a fork for eating salad. I really should have brought some chopsticks with me.

I’ve been up and down on the kigen scale today…small victories including getting my monochrome Visor working with keyboard, small failures including not correctly updating my email or contact information when HotSyncing. Yes, I can blog, yes I can take notes in session (eight megs free and padicty on the fritz). I love trains and the Keisei line. Okada-san and I talked about many things foreign and domestic. No, I did not bring ukon with me, no, I do not plan to get drunk. Yes, I type HTML tags into my entries directly, yes the plane took off an hour late due to malfunctioning weather report software at the Narita control tower (thank you Windows).

I’m performing the dustpan-organizing that always happens when travelling or making a visit to doctor… receipts and bank statements to the trash, blog entries from curled pocket notepad to Visor. Ah, but so fresh, so new, so many old things reoccurring. No, there’s hardly a soul to meet this week, but a wander, some exploration, some photos, a lot of listening, and hard, stingy hotel mattresses.

At least I have Masa’s Eaton vol. 11 mix to see me through it all.

The Merriam-Webster word of the day for the 13th was “sanctimonious”, though I didn’t realize it until just now. This is fitting, however, as it was the topic of last night’s diatribe. As it always is with diatribe nights, morning isn’t quite as dark, especially if something (half) works when I have long since given up expecting it to. For the third night this week, I slept fitfully, and daylight bore the nauseating haze of exhaustion from rest. But, I swore I wouldn’t be late and hurried again, so I got up anyway (calling in sick is really out of the question unless I physically am unable to move). Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have a delicious and fortifying breakfast. And although I didn’t feel much like eating it, I did. Perhaps it’s the reason that I could hold a one hour conversation on display list caching and buffered vertex data.

The boulder has rolled back off of my throat and reverted to its normal resting place over my groin. Now I can eat more spinach, pumpkin, soy, and egg and read about the great lake Baikal and assemble a couple more half-finished ideas before I floss and then retreat to the collapsed scaffolding that protrudes from my monitor to bully my temples.

[I was in a good mood before I started writing this, I swear.]

…

[Ok, I listened to a little Primitive Radio Gods and Oasis, better now.]

float fFar = 1000.0f;

When people ask what it’s been like working in Tokyo, I am at first at a loss of words. Stumbling over what should be said, or what the topical accoutrements of life in a metropolis of twenty million are like, I make apologies for my slackening grip on the English language. But the truth is I can’t really say what it’s like in any language, because there aren’t any words for it. But having been back for a handful of trips and a dozen encounters with faces from the past, I’ve finally generated a stock answer, which sums it all up: humility. Just that: how small I am, and how ineffective at changing anything I can really be. Humility to the point of only an eggshell-thin ego.

Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later that night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

I look at the world. I look at a lot of things and think. I think a lot of things. I see things and think that they disgust me. Sloth disgusts me. Failure disgusts me. People who weakly indulge disgust me. People who turn to fat, processed sugar, alcohol, and perversion disgust me. They disgust me so, and yet, I am one of them. I too, race home from work every day in frustration, frustration for what I didn’t get done, how today was like every other day, how nothing ever changes, and I am powerless to alter that. Frustrated, I race home reckless and selfish, loathing the construction and the cars and the stoplights which I pass in a fury, always one honk or stumbling pedestrian away from a fitful explosion of all this disgust, failure, and rage. And then, just before home, at the point of my “sanctuary”, I think of trash, of the trash my body craves (or is it my soul), the filth of things processed, cheap, and satisfying for all of five minutes. The masturbation of mankind that I need to push the nagging stench of my own failure out of arm’s reach for an hour before I give up on the things I said to myself that I’d absolutely do; to go to bed in exhaustion, oversleep, panic my way to work so my boss doesn’t give me a hard time and I can do it all again for another fourteen hours.

The hypocrisy of my own bigoted standards is as putrid as my outlook. I ride down the street, sweaty, my mind terminally broken to the point of not being able to concentrate on anything, and thinking of a dozen pedestrian things that will drown out any flicker of a noble idea. Then I see the broken souls. The shuffling, inebriated, dregs (foundations) of society that live in a bottle amid stained flannel, searching for the same five minutes of ignorance, hoping that two and two makes five and another shot of cancer-inducing sordid anesthesia to numb out the realization of now.

No, when I go back to the States, it’s all just a facade, and I don’t even try that hard to keep it up anymore. What difference does it make what anyone thinks anyway?

Every day and every night some are born to sweet delight, and every night and every mourn, some to misery are born.