I went road tripping to New Orleans last week, for the yearly Improv Festival held down there.
Side note for the curious: There are only eleven waffle houses between here and there.
The festival was eye opening, with three solid nights of performances, as well as two great upper level technique workshops. The experience solidified two thoughts in my mind.
First, I’m not as good as I thought I was. Problem is, I didn’t think I was that good. The talent at this show was very solid, with packs of New York, Austin, and New Orleans troupes extruding solid, polished shows. It’s pretty intimidating, getting to perform on the same stage. The benefit to watching them, of course, is that you get all kinds of ideas. Not ideas for scenes, but for tricks of timing, edit techniques for stagework, as well as how to properly support teammates. Just seeing other troupes perform is quite helpful. I’d go into details, but, heck, my improv nerd would be showing.
Second, the experience stripped me of some misconceptions I had cultivated. For some reason, I was convinced that a troupe had to field about six to eight people, so that offstage actors could easily edit the onstage action. I believed that if only three or four people were available, recurring characters would become muddled, in the audience’s eyes. However, multiple troupes fielded four or fewer improvisers for a half-hour long set, doing some fantastic work. One group only fielded two people, and one of the show closers was a three person group who nailed everything they tried. No problems with edit or flow for them.
As far as everything else that happened, there were also standard New Orleans hijinks, centered around Burbon street. Some random girl punched me in the arm at a bar, and asked what the hell was wrong with me. Apparently, she was mad at men in general, and wanted to know what was wrong with the gender.
“Oh, we’re all trained at birth to be awful to women.”
“You’re too cerebral. I’m talking about all you MEN thinking with your penises.”
“No, no, that’s just it. We don’t. We act this way because it’s a big conspiracy, passed from father to son for thousands of years. It has nothing to do with penises. That’s just our excuse. I really shouldn’t be telling you about all this …”
She wandered off pretty quickly, with a confused look. I don’t know what she was expecting to happen after punching a random stranger, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t deliver.
Some improvisational scene games require that the perpetrators speak entirely in gibberish. This typically happens during guessing games, when a team of people are trying to get a guesser to repeat clues given by the audience using only gibberish and mime. The role of the gibberish is twofold. First it carries information to the guesser through the inflection and emotional content the actors add to it. Second, it keeps the scene from being completely fucking boring. Seriously, when we don’t gibber, it looks like a mime convention. Disgraceful.
I am not good at gibberish. Whenever I try to come up with language-like babble on the fly, it sounds like a baby having a vowel-movement with some spanish for flavor. It sounds bad, and is hard to impart emotional drive to. This is embarrasing (to me).
So, naturally, I’ve been looking at the problem from a computer science perspective.
Two approaches suggest themselves[1]: real time gibber generation, and pre-cached gibberish.
Real time gibberish generation was my first approach. While coming up with custom tailored gibberish to suit the scene sounds flexible, and appropriate, it doesn’t work for me. I wind up thinking too hard about what gibberish I’m going to use instead of focusing on the scene, objectwork, and what everyone else on stage is doing. Badness.
The other option is to pre-cache your gibberish; to have a pool of pre-prepared gibberish words to call on without having to think too hard. From a CompSci perspective, it’s a great way to meet timing deadlines in a computationally intensive real time application. Yes, I actually think like this.
Fortunately for me, and maybe others, computer scientists have already addressed this problem. For EA’s The Sims, they wanted to make their little sim-people sound like they were talking, without having to worry about it getting repetitive, or boring. So they made something now known as SIMLISH. Simlish is designed to be untranslatable; the words spoken do not really correlate to english words. After ten years of development, this seems to be the world’s premier gibberish.
Wait. I just realised that you might not be on board with me yet. Let me convince you in the traditional internet manner: a youtube video.
I actually like the simlish version of this song a LOT better than the original, and I’ve managed to use some of the language in it to good effect on stage.
So, assuming that you’re convinced, you must be asking yourself, “Self, how can I learn to babble in simlish?”[2] Well, I borrowed a list of Simlish phrases from the internets, and stripped most translation material from it. Simlish
My thinking is that by learning about three minutes of simlish dialog, I’ll be set for whatever medium length scenes come along. Your results may vary.
[1] This sounds far more erudite than[3], “I’ve thought of two methods.”
[2] Nobody is asking themselves this question.
[3] Although it can’t match the phrase, “The text deconstructs itself,” for sheer wankery
I was nearly asleep last night, when R informed me that we had a houseguest. Specifically, one with a tail. Ah, the joys of owning an older home.
So, I had to wake up, and stalk our little mousey visitor with a box, while half alseep. I’m not sure, but I believe I promised that I would buy it a tiny motorcycle, and a helmet, and that we would have magical adventures if it would let itself be captured easily.
The mouse did not belive me, and hid underneath the fridge. I hate not being trusted. We set out a live trap, and I came home from a show to find Mickey in the cage, brought low by his deep seated love of peanut butter. I can relate, I guess.
Mickey lives in forest park now. It’s better that way.
In other news, I’m feeling a deep sense of ennui about life lately. However, it’s quite probable that I’m just being a dork, and I need to slap myself in the face, and stop being weird at people. Ah well. Time to sleep; peace out.
So, most of the TED talks work just fine when served by my dlna server* and played on the Xbox360. But some don’t.
I don’t know why they don’t work, exactly. When checking the details of their codec, they look suspiciously… identical to movies that work just fine. The next step is transcoding them in to a known good format, and standardizing on that. Unfortunately, there are so very many of them.
I’m still trying to find a good way to download all of them. The RSS feed provides links to all of the updated feeds, but it doesn’t always provide a link to the HD downloadable file - the kind of file that looks best on my home entertainment setup. There are so many to grab, too. I might need a better download manager. Or I might want to consider just watching the talks on the TED website. Huh.
I finally brought my webserver back up. A lot has changed since it went down!
AT&T disconnected me from the internet completely, for having the gall to ask about not having to pay for a land line I don’t use. After hassling with them about reconnecting for the better part of a month and a half, I found it easier to buy a new place to live, and get service there.
The new house is nice. I’m rocking it Dogtown-style, about two blocks from Turtle Park. I’m within walking distance of the zoo, which means it only takes about ten minutes to walk over to see the penguins. I can see penguins on a whim.
R is living with me now, and she said ‘yes’, which is great. I’d go into more detail, but that gets sappy, quickly. None of us want that.
The job front is … interesting. iPhone development has not progressed like I thought it would. The house has been a major distraction, by requiring a fair amount of work.
I’m doing corporate gigs and public shows with the local Improv group on a regular basis. This is not because I’m ‘funny’ per se; but that I’m apparently okay with hopping on a stage and doing whatever comes to mind. Strange, I know.
On the rock climbing gym front, I can now climb walls rated 5.9 or under, although my 5.9 attempts aren’t very clean. If anyone wants to try out the rock gym in stl, just let me know. My yearly membership allows me to get a newbie in free, once per month.
That’s enough random thoughts for now. I’ve got to go have lunch with the VEIL alumni, and then hop over to Terre Haute for Homecoming Festivities.
E to the x dy dx, E to the x dx.
Secant, Tangent, Cosine, Sine.
Three point one-four-one-five-nine.
Phi, Pi, square root of three.
Fight ‘em, fight ‘em! R. H. I. T.
