astronomy – Cubilone's Dimension

BLOOD SPACE METASTASIS

Last night was the now famous supermoon eclipse. I woke up early to go outside and have a look. Quickly, like a lot of Greeks, my enthusiasm was quenched because of the cloudy sky. These September nights have been warm but cloudy and rainy. Switching from a Mediterranean climate to a tropical one? Check. At least it’s better than turning into Sahara, I suppose.

To my credit, I didn’t immediately give up, either. I sat there for 40 minutes or so, reading and underlining my morning pages from earlier in 2015. Alas, the clouds won that hopeless staring contest. I went back to bed and thought it would be a good idea taking advantage of waking up that early to take a shot at entering a WILD. Instead, I was welcomed with a bout of the worst sleep paralysis I can recall: when my body fell asleep, my consciousness didn’t, and I had hallucinations of a person walking in the apartment, into my room and around my bed. It was pitch black, so the hallucination was consistent, in that I couldn’t see him/her/it, only hear the footsteps. I had to endure this while unable to move any part of my body apart from my eyelids and their contents. All the while, the blood moon was setting behind the cloud cover. During sleep paralysis, no-one can hear you scream. You can’t scream….

Take a deep breath.

It could have been me who took this .gif. It’s a consoling thought.

Nevertheless, for all its photogenic glory, it has to be said that September 28th 2015 will not be remembered for its supermoon eclipse. It will go down as a small footnote in history that on the day NASA announced they found flowing water on Mars there had been a supermoon lunar eclipse less than twelve hours prior. It is a veritable milestone that would have me leaping for joy—if I was any proper kind of science/sci-fi/astronomy nerd to begin with. Instead, all I can think of, perhaps especially after almost half a year of constantly dealing with water as a human right and the current global state of affairs, is how we should be sorting out our shit on Earth first before starting to even think about colonizing other worlds.

Don’t get me wrong, I too get terribly annoyed when other people generally show this kind of flamboyant lack of interest in the vastness of the Universe and the amazing advances in our apparent knowledge of the world. It’s usually such people who shun video games because they’re capitalist toys and refuse to see how they can work wonderfully to promote education or cultural awareness. Similarly, they show open contempt for science fiction as a genre, no matter how eye-opening, poetic or important it might be. They’re not interested to know that Dune, for example, was one of the first books bar none to speak about ecology and sustainability when it was published 50 years ago. No, it’s science fiction. “We have real problems on Earth. Sci-fi is for comfortable middle-class white nerds”, they say, or seem to imply. My very own father told me off when I tried to explain to him the virtues of The Dispossessed. As I was saying, under normal circumstances I get borderline offended by these reactions; at this very moment, I can sort of see where they’re coming from.

What if Arrakis, Dune, Desert Planet is Mars in the distant future?

A lot of the excitement surrounding the discovery of flowing water on Mars has to do with the fantasy of modernity, the wet dream of boundless progress, the Promethean achievement of humankind founding an extraterrestrial colony. While science fiction wouldn’t have you believe it, especially with the likes of Interstellar framing the popular imagination, we’re far, far from thinking about humanity as a separate entity from our home planet. There’s no reason to believe that without Earth we could survive for any length of time. I don’t think we would want to, either. But we’re obviously not taking care of our planet as one would take care of their home. In fact, we couldn’t do much worse if we were actively trying to destroy it.

Colonising Mars as our last hope for survival after we’ve made Earth unfit for humans and broad swaths of other types of life, too, is not something I’m going to support. We’ve been making our bed, we should be honourable enough to sleep in it too—once and for all, if it comes to that. If we can’t live as part of the great ecosystem, we don’t deserve to survive. I would use the cancer analogy, namely that us out-surviving the Earth would be like cancer cells out-surviving the cancer patient who died because of them, but on second thought the analogy wouldn’t be exactly right, as it’s not really possible to kill the Earth the same way a human can die of cancer. Still, if not kill it, we just might see our Earth wither away into a wasteland where it will take many thousands or millions of years for new forms of life to take advantage of the mess we’ll have left behind—if we don’t end up like Venus, that is.

I know you might say that some ideas born out of past science fiction turned out to be possible. After all, “we” (i.e. well-funded Americans) did go to the Moon (don’t take my word for it though) and that was just four years after Dune was released and a single year after 2001: A Space Odyssey did. Back then, people were saying that we’d definitely have at least a couple of bases up there by the turn of the millennium. But here we are, the turn of the millennium’s already fifteen years behind us and I’m not seeing any bright lights up there. So what happened? Could it be that there are some hard limits to our malignant growth? I would argue that yes, and plenty of them, as much as we like to pretend they don’t matter.

Next to all this, I’m secretly hoping for disclosure of long-standing alien contact, that moment that will change everything, like Naomi Klein says, only for real. Maybe in that scenario we will be taught how to build a viable multi-planetary civilization together with them and cross the stars that way. But on our own? Now? We’d probably destroy the colony the moment they were unable to pay off their debts to Earth, or make them privatise their water company, like many people were quick to joke about with today’s discovery on Twitter and Facebook.

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

But all said and done, I see videos like the one above, where you get to do a to-scale virtual tour of our solar system at the speed of light, and go right back to marvelling at how far we’ve come. Suddenly it hits me how difficult, how amazing it is sending missions to moist rocks or giant chewy-cored balloons so far away from here, redefining what is possible.

What vocabulary would a space-faring civilization like in Stellaris develop to describe the vastness of space?

I want this game very bad. Very very bad.

QUIXOTIC CALENDARS

Have you ever noticed that our calendar has some glaring faults, some design issues that would keep it from ever leaving the drawing room if it were to be made today?

How many times have you stopped to wonder if May or October have 30 or 31 days? I recall always having trouble with that when I was little… Or, how about this: if I ask you what day of the week it’s going to be precisely six months from now (November 22nd 2014), how long would it take you for you to t… – hey, put that phone down, I can see you!

I’m not sure why, but we have been handed down a weird model that might be precise but is neither efficient nor elegant, and as with many inefficient, disingenious or clunky systems – just look around you for ideas -, habit is the only factor preventing us from coming up with a better system; “why fix something which ain’t broken?”, you might ask. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, especially when it comes to practical, physical things, like having a bottle support the fluorescent lamp over the kitchen sink which would otherwise collapse, or using a table fan to cool your lidless desktop computer, but there are some things that, to me, are almost divine in the depth of the meaning they carry, they represent the foundations of human culture. We should therefore strive for optimisation, even if that means a radical restructuring of what we’ve come to know and love.

Here are two ideas for new calendars I came up with while chatting with Daphne and later built upon when I was travelling on the bus back to Sofia. By the way, being with Daphne and travelling in general are both very good for letting my creative juices flow.

The criteria these two calendars must meet are the following:

The year must have 12 months; the number is perfect because it is the lowest common denominator of several other commonly used numbers used in time-keeping, namely 2, 3, 4 and 6. That is to say, if you want to be able to precisely split the year in terms, semesters and quarters – this last one is extra important because of the four seasons – having the year split in 12 is the easiest and most intuitive choice.

So far so good – our calendar already has this feature and other calendars across many cultures and eras seem to have had it also.

Every month must have the same length; that some months have 30, some 31 and one has 28 days feels wrong and messes up the periodicality of the shortest circle, the week.

Every month of the year must start on the same day of the week; doesn’t it feel good when January 1st is a Monday? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if every month of the year started on a Monday, too? This way we could instantly and easily calculate what day of the week any day of the year would be.

Quixotic Calendar I

12 months of 28 (4×7) days each = 336 days + 29/30 days split into four weeks, one placed before each season to mark the equinoxes.

January (28 days)
February (28 days)
March (28 days)
Vernal Equinox Week (7 days)
April (28 days)
May (28 days)
June (28 days)
Summer Solstice Week (7 days)
July (28 days)
August (28 days)
September (28 days)
Autumnal Equinox Week (7 days)
October (28 days)
November (28 days)
December (28 days)
Winter Solstice Week (8 days, 9 days if leap year)

The calendar would be set in such a way that the equinoxes and solstices would be roughly placed at the end of their namesake weeks – it’s impossible to be precise because the exact days are moveable even in the calendar we’re using today. In this way, the Quixotic year could end on the Gregorian Calendar’s December 22nd/23rd (we’d have to go with one and stick with it), with the new year starting on what’s now Christmas Eve. It would be possible to adjust the calendar’s starting day so that New Year’s Day could coincide with what’s today Christmas Day, but that would mean that the equinoxes and solstices would roughly be on Day 4 or 5 of their respective weeks and not at their end, for what that’s worth.

The four spare weeks “outside the calendar” would serve as holiday periods, sets of time for getting together, enjoying nature, all that.

A strength of this calendar is that each month of the year would start on the same day, including the transition weeks, with a standardised form of procession which would make it easy to calculate what day of the week any day of any year would be: the week cycle would move one or two days from one year to the next, depending on if it’s a leap year. So, if in 2014 all of the first days of the month were Fridays, in 2015 it would be Sundays, in 2016, which is the next leap year, it would be Mondays, and in 2017 the two-day jump would make them Wednesdays.

This proposal would also solve the disagreement on when the seasons start once and for all! No more people telling you that spring has come on March 1st!

The calendar’s main problem is that the seasons have all moved forward a single month (under this system, June would squarely belong to spring and March to winter, for example), which could mess up our concepts of the seasons, but if you ask me, this is already being messed up because of climate change, so there’s not much to lose really.

Quixotic Calendar II

12 months of 30 (3×10) days each = 360 days + 5/6 days at the end of the year (similar to the Egyptian Calendar).

The main point of interest of this calendar would be the 10-day week, which would split each month into three neat parts. We would have to find new names for the days of the week; how about the names of the planets plus the sun and moon, like in romance languages, which all together make a nice round ten, but using words for the planets from different languages? It would be similar to a calendrical Calling All Dawns.

Just like in the first calendar presented here, the even months and weeks would help with periodicality. The extra five/six days would fall in at the end of the year, which is a holiday period anyway.

These suggestions don’t take lunar cycles into account but our Gregorian calendar doesn’t fare much better in that respect.

You can have a look at more proposed reforms here.

Winter Solstice 2013

This unusual and artistic image, made using a technique known as “solargraphy” in which a pinhole camera captures the movement of the Sun in the sky over many months, was taken from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope on the plateau of Chajnantor. The plateau is also where ESO, together with international partners, is building the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The solar trails in the image were recorded over half a year and clearly show the quality of the 5000-metre altitude site, high in the Chilean Andes, for astronomical observations.

Caught from Wikipedia.

Θανάσης Παπακωσταντίνου – Νυχτέρι

Ανάμεσα στο Βέγα,
τον Ντενέμπ και τον Αλτάιρ
υπάρχει μία θέση του ουρανού
όπου θα πάω σαν γίνω
σκόνη αστρική,
για ‘κει σας κλείνω ραντεβού…

Και η ώρα πάει 6 το απόγευμα…

Danish Diaries #8: September Equinox

It’s the equinox, the middle of the seasonal change. This time of year, day gives way to night three minutes every day at my latitude, at its annual max. Every night from today til the Winter Solstice will still be longer than the previous one, but getting longer at a slower rate. The slowing will turn into a grinding halt on the Solstice itself, also known as Christmas, when the day will start gaining ground again. And long and cold nights they will be, here in the north. Let’s hope they’ll be hyggelig as well.

So it’s the first day of Autumn, if you’re one that prefers his astronomical seasons to the arbitrary calendrial ones. If you’re like me. A lot of leaves have already put on their jackets for the coming cold (it’s already ~12C every day here). They’re very pretty in their last days of life, their colours saturated with deep, earthly reds. As the days pass, more and more leaves will find their beautiful deaths on the wet streets. It feels wrong drying them, preserving them, when their rightful place in the circle of life is death and non-preservation, becoming food for bacteria and fungi.

This environment is quite perfect for going to lessons and having to preoccupy yourself with creative ideas. Perfect environment for sitting at home when you’re not out walking in the rain listening to music or Spanish lessons, doing your assignment for Media Management and Journalism 3.0 in the Digital Age, on Search Engine Optimization and Croud-Sourcing… What’s better than being at a Great Works of Art class, it pouring outside and you analysing Monteverdi and Vivaldi inside, in the cozy warmth of knowledge, academia and the body heat of art-thirsty colleagues?

Saturn Fly-By

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

This is all real photographs…

Blue Moon

Last December had two full moons. Popularly, a second full moon in a single month is called a blue moon, even if that is not the correct definition (check here for more details). This moon rose on December 31st and set on January 1st. It was a full moon that connected two years. Or should I say, it connected two decades? I find it strangely symbolic that the last day of the year and decade just happened to be a full moon day… It was surreal going out to see the fireworks and having the huge light in the sky illuminating everything.

I will not treat the turn of the decade as time to contemplate change, look back or act as if starting today the world’s going to be different in some sort of way. It is still too early for us to even be able to say what the decade we just left behind us will be remembered for, let alone compare it with the fresh new one that’s just a signle day old. I will thus spare with the retrospective craze about how the past decade changed our lives. All I have to say on that is that every change made during this decade was sort of transitional… We ain’t seen nothing yet (sic).

My refusal to look back in sets of tens does not mean that I do not want to see what last year brought, however. It was certainly a full and interesting year for me. I’d like to take you to a sort of new year’s resolution I wrote last year, “More and Less of 2009”. This year’s “More and Less” will consist of all that I did not manage to do during 2009. I’ll give it a go:

More movies, more games, more languages, more activities, more biking, more photography, more people, more travelling, more new experiences, more love, more animals, more beauty, more cooking, more reading, more knowledge, more stars, more planets, more cleaning, more housekeeping, more real working, more specialisation, more subtitles, more cubimension, more music, more peace, more awareness, more spirituality, more science, more history, more dreams, more thoughts, more tea, more vegetables, more cake, more e-mails, more writing, more art, more friendliness, more phone calls, more letters, more enjoying the moment in the right way.

Less procrastinating, less shyness, less lazyness, less internet idleness, less msn, less stupid spending, less sleeping till the afternoon, less caffeine, less absent-mindedness.

These are my personal wishes for 2009.

Alex: You forgot more sex. And more anime. You forgot less facebook too. Less flies too! Yiek!Enloying the moment in a right way eh?..Dunno if you wishing this to yourself ooor you’re trying to tell me something…

More movies: I guess this is kind of a pass. I’m doing the whole kinimatografiki thing together with Garret, I’ve watched my fair share of movies in the past year… There’s definitely a lot more in my”want to see” list on Flixster, but is there anything out there really for which this can’t be said? I mean… not on my “want to see” list on Flixster, generally speaking…

Honourable mentions: Kubrick Month, District 9, Dogtooth, Some Like It Hot, The Shawshank Redemption, Inglourious Basterds

More games: Hmmm… my overall “games played” meter in 2009 is fairly similar to, if not lower than 2008’s. I did sign up for Game 2.0, which is good, but I feel that I haven’t played enough games that I’ve been aching to play. I’m up to the neck in music games, if that’s any development. I even got more of an acquired taste in strategies!

Honourable mentions: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts&Bolts, Victoria, The Longest Journey, Modern Warfare 2, Peggle Nights, Luxor, StarCraft

More languages: My go at learning Japanese crashed and burned and I’ve made little progress with German…next question!! :/

More activities: That’s a check in many different ways.Theatriki, Kinimatografiki, Fotografiki, being out a lot, I have the distinct impression I’ve been pretty active, thank you!

More biking: um… R.I.P.

More photography: That’s a check as well! Just have a look at my Flickr for the results! :}

More people: Yes, met many new people this year but got to know few. This one’s up in the air as is always has and always will be I guess.

More travelling: Turkey, Peloponnese, Kerkyra, Rodos… Good, but I don’t think it can compare to 2008 in any way, many plans died out or haven’t been realised yet. But there’s much hope for 2010, I’ll tell you that.

More new experiences: Always on the lookout! Many experiences I shall cherish forever.

More love: That’s a tough one. I’ll say check, even though I’m not sure if everything I have in mind is aspects of love or something else entirely.

More animals: Does the army of cats on the watch outside my apartment count? 😛

More beauty: Just like new experiences, always looking for more!

More cooking: FAIL UNLIMITED! 🙁

More reading: Hmmm… I give this one a hearty check. In the past 12 months I read many books that I’ll remember for years to come. Coming in contact with Saramago, Gaarder and Mazower are no small matters.

More knowledge: Yes! I I owe this largely to Despina Catapoti for being the best prof ever and leading me to planes of gnosis I always wanted to visit but I wasn’t aware of. Cultural studies, postmodernism, philosophy were all redefined in my head. I feel like my mind has opened even more.

More stars: I don’t have a telescope… yet… but it’s been a fine astronomical year with many a starry sky and gazing alone or in good company.

More planets: If this is astrology (I don’t remember), I’m now feeling a bit mixed on the issue.

More cleaning/housekeeping: This has reached an all time low… For shame.

More real working: I made my first real money in 2009, which is great. Game 2.0 or my EAA Museum and other uni projects also count and I stand proud!

More specialisation: …hm… nah.

More subtitles: Yes indeed, I did some and I was paid for it. Moar plz.

More cubimension: Another healthy check and it’s getting better!

More music: Not many new bands came into my attention this year, but I’ve been listening to music, yay! 😛 Buying The Incident in Special Edition is something I’m not sure I regret yet.

More peace: No, I wasn’t in peace for much of last year. Good or bad? I cannot tell.

More awareness: Not very successsful, many a time did I let my wandering thoughts cloud my perception of the present. Not a good thing.

More spirituality: I’ve been trying to delve into the secrets of eastern philosophy… Tao and Physics is an excellent book on the subject, but Tao is so deep and mistifying I’m confused and left in awe at the same time. Somewhat healthy.

More science: Web Science Conference?! Hehe, well I’ve been reading some pop science books, if that counts…

More history: Yes yes! Playing Victoria, reading Mazower and looking into alternate histories, listening to Despina talk…

More dreams: After “Counting Sheep”, my take on sleep was briefly something completely different and new. Now I’ve somewhat subconsciously returned to my bad old take of “sleep cuts away from your waking time”… I must make it a point to follow some online lucid dreaming classes.

More thoughts: I’ve been thinking…

More tea: I got this huge bag of tea from Ayvalik (which cops mistook for half a kilo of weed…) and I still haven’t made any of it. Maybe I’m still recovering from the tea overload in Turkey. Or maybe my boiler is kaput. No wait, it is.

More vegetables: uh, I don’t think I’ve been eating any more or any less… I shoud make a habit of making salads a la mama though, they’re downright awesome.

More cake: fail. Or is it?

More e-mails: And all to the same handful of special someones as last year. Pah, no good. 😛

More writing: Judging from my surge of cubimension interest, that’s a positive.

More art: I’ve done my part. That collage for Alex and a lot of digital art tidbits… I know I can do better though.

More friendliness: I think I might be going well with this. Might.

More phone calls: and to whom, I wonder… But you know that I dislike phones!

More letters: I don’t think I wrote a signle one.

More enjoying the moment in the right way: I… think I got that one. Or maybe not. Or maybe both. Or maybe it’s too hard to tell as a rule. Or maybe I’m still trying to do it.

Less procrastinating: No one ever entirely gets away from this one… But it is the goal.

Less shyness: I’ve seen myself be very shy and very not shy. Soooo…

Less lazyness: I think I’m less lazy than usual. Yes.

Less internet idleness: Working on that one but I think I’ve made some progress.

Less MSN: Considerably.

Less stupid spending: …yes, but I still turn out with less money than I calculated. Maybe the definition of stupid has simply jumped around.

Less sleeping till the afternoon: …to which I’ll add: less going to sleep after dawn!

Less caffeine: HAH! Good one!

Less absent-mindedness: Hmmm. Yes.

More sex: Quantity-wise or quality-wise? It makes all the difference in the world.

Less Facebook: I managed to deactivate it. TOTAL SUCCESS!

More anime: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of One Piece. But where’s my Cowboy Bebop?

Less flies: Less flies, I agree. And less cockroaches please!

Japanese for snow

I love anniversaries and birthdays. Their meaning transcends human social constructions: they come in intervals of 365 days, the number of days the earth takes to draw a full circle (or eclipse) around the sun and arrive at the same relative spot in space from which it began. So birthdays, anniversaries and other annual events are good opportunities to look back at how things were when the earth’s position was last the same. Just as the circle comes to its closure (and a new one opens every single day).

This time last year, when the summer seemed close and all, something very important happened: a young white felis catus, a.k.a kitten, came into my life. It was a sunny morning. I was walking down the street close to Mousiko Kafeneio, not at all aware of what was about to happen, when I saw Oliva sitting there holding a kitten. It was grey and white. She told me she got it from a veterinarian right next to the post office. I went to have a look and there they were: two white kittens, the one with splashes of black (or was it black with splashes of white?) Myrsini, the vet, told me that someone’s cat had given birth and they’d brought the kittens to her so that she could give them away. Me and Mario did take both away, not sure yet who and if we’d keep them. My initial thought was actually to keep both kitties but Mario offered to adopt one. We paraded up Ermou street, big new expensive cat toilet in hand and kitties on shoulder all the way to Mario’s place. It didn’t take long for Mario to realise that having a kitten around that generally doesn’t know where the right place to poop is was a bit too much. Eventually Mordread tried to keep the B&W one. He couldn’t keep her either though so he returned her to the vet. I, however, had fallen in love with the white one before we had even stepped out of the vet’s.

I remember once telling Ines that if I ever had a white cat, I’d call her Yuki, which is japanese for snow. I’ll admit that I did sit and think about the white kitty’s name for a while but it didn’t take me more than a few hours to naturally start calling the little bright-coloured storm Yuki. I will never forget our first night together. I prepared a nice little bed for her lining my fruit basket with a red shirt and a dirty pair of jeans and invited her to join me into the world of dreams. Though reluctantly, she stepped into the comfy-looking bowl and eventually called it a night. The next morning I woke up and saw her curled up and sleeping peacefully.

All wasn’t well, however. When I said that kittens don’t know where to poop, I really meant it. Yuki was barely 3 months old when I first got her and she couldn’t properly climb into her toilet so a lot of the time she’d just poo and piss wherever. I remember somehow “feeling” that she’d gotta go and I’d promptly pick her up and put her in the toilet. When she would indeed relieve herself, I felt genuinely happy and satisfied with myself. But the first week had a lot of waking up in the middle of the night because Yuki would have a nice case of diarroea under my bed. It seems that during the first week diarroea was the only thing that would come out of her little feline bottom. Thankfully that soon stopped.

One of the hardest decisions I had to take in September when I had her neutered. I was anxious she’d leave and get ran over or something. Or she may have had litters of kitties every few months. I still question my decision when I think that I’ll never see Yuki-kittens or my cat will never have sex, but I guess this is human thinking in the end.

What I really like about my cat is that she’s genuinely good. And I mean good as in lawful good. She’ll never attack out of spite or hate. On the contrary she loves attacking just for fun or when she wants to play. I also love it when she comes and sits in my lap whenever I’m on the computer. She loves climbing to the highest (and often silliest) spot in the apartment. She’s perfect with strangers. When she was little, I often used to leave her care to friends when I was away from home for whatever reason. She’s also grown used to travelling which is always good. Most funnily of all, my little feline lacks any grace cats are generally known for. As we often say with Alex, Yuki has all the elegance of a happy-go-lucky dog. As they say, pets become like their owners…

In the end, I really love my cat. Even one year later and now she’s no longer a kitten but a proud full grown adult cat, even against all odds and expectations from others and even myself that my lifestyle wouldn’t allow taking care of an animal, I can see us maturing together.

My first day with Yuki was May 6th 2008.

Astronomy in games: does a realistic sky make a difference?

Originally posted as a Destructoid.com cblog.

Wouldn’t you like just sitting back and enjoying the night sky in a game, knowing that what you see is a perfect represenation of the actual night sky? It is true, a pretty night sky captures the eye (as most WoW players can testify) and there is no prettier sky than the only one we earthlings have had the chance to see, give or take a few planets, moons and nebulae.

Today I was having a conversation with two friends of mine (Mario and Housemaster, if you’re reading you know that unlike the guys from d-toid!), one of them also a user of Destructoid. The kick-off for the conversation and the inspiration for this blog post was me complaining that Fallout 3 had a completely messed up night sky. I recalled my first experience with this upon exiting the elementary school close to the beginning of the game. The stars were all tiny grey dots of the same brightness. No constellations of course, nothing. It didn’t even have any significantly brighter stars that could form any shapes. Of course, that’s totally different than anything anyone can see if they look up at night in the real world. To top it off, at some point I had a look at the moon. Its position in the sky was totally wrong compared to its phase, a relationship which can normally be defined with two basic rules: A new moon is close to the sun so it sets a bit after the sun and rises a bit after the sun as well and the full moon rises when the sun sets and sets when the sun rises anew. This was completey screwed up as far as I observed in Fallout 3. As if that wasn’t enough, upon closer inspection the starry sky did not move at all. Instead, the moon was moving against the backdrop of a frozen sky, setting south-east. That is wrong in so many levels I cannot begin to describe. Surely the nukes didn’t stop the earth from rotating? Even if they did, there’s still night and day!

My friends told me that I had not grasped the feeling of the game, that I was looking at the sky when the game was NOT about looking at the sky (which in turn means that anything not directly related to the main focus of the game is perfectly OK to be made with minimal attention paid to it but whatever) and that since Fallout 3 takes place in an imaginary, alternative universe, the creators do not have to realistically depict the sky as it is today in the real world. But… Even though Washington D.C. features in the game complete with existing roads (correct me if I’m wrong) isn’t it safe to assume that the sky is the same as it was hundreds of years ago in-game? We’re not talking about a completely different universe, say Oblivion’s or WoW’s universe, but one pretty close to our own experience and one that derives from it and uses it to make said universe hit us harder emotionally, make us feel that we’re actually on Earth as it would be centuries after a nuclear war. Is creative freedom this powerful when talking about the imaginary based on reality? Why be realistic when it comes to sun movement but not care about the movement of the moon or the sky in general? Would a sun rising at 6PM be OK because it’s Bethesda making a game about something NOT real? At the end of the day, “who cares?” or “Hang on, I’ll call the care police”. That’s what my friends were saying and no doubt many of you.

Truth is I can see where they’re coming from. In this day and age observation of the sky is trivial at best. Erroneous night skies make their apperance everywhere from movies to novels to games… People don’t know better so they don’t really care (developers in turn don’t care either).The sky we see today is fundamentally the same sky people of ancient times wondered at and worshiped and the same sky Copernicus observed and realised that the earth rotates around the sun and it’s not the other way around. Till the 20th century, the sky was an excellent guidepost, the stars always pointing towards the right direction. Even the first foundations of time-keeping were based on the movements of the sky and moon (let alone the sun) and when during the night certain constellations appear. See Orion rise right after sunset and it’s winter alright, follow the direction of Polaris, the current pole star and you’ll be visiting the polar bears. And so forth. Today of course these observations aren’t at all useful for everyday life so the sky remains up there enchanting everyone with its beauty but giving little useful incentive for further exploration of tis workings and secrets.

I won’t lie, less than 2 years ago I was one of many, thinking that the night sky is pretty but difficult to get to know. The movements of the planets, the moon, why the sun rises and sets when it does and what the equinoxes mean eluded me. At least, though, I knew from a very early age that the earth rotates around itself anti-clockwise and that this is what actually makes the starry sky move, as well as the sun and moon, from east to west. And finding out how the rest of this stuff works wasn’t that hard at all. Since then I have been able to spot mistakes almost everywhere.

The final question is: Does it all matter? If both people making the game and playing the game can’t tell the difference, does it matter? I’ll compare the whole thing with having a game take place during a specific time period, say the Middle Ages in England. The game is superb in every way but the buildings aren’t correct or something else isn’t right, say the language spoken or a piece of armour. Few people will notice, but those which are fascinated by history and historical accuracy will promptly spot the mistake and instantly lose a bit of interest/immersion for the game. Maybe it’s not a great analogy because portraying an accurate sky is much easier than certifying the historical accuracy of a certain piece of armour and historical accuracy is much more important sometimes than having a correct decorative backdrop for a game’s universe. Because it is true. In the end, it’s all decoration with few gameplay implications, just like the building or the armour. But can we really justify these “astro-errors that were willingly introduced and indicate a profound lack of attention to easily checkable detail” (sic), using only the argument that nobody cares enough? Well, I care! And I’m certain that especially Fallout 3 must have attracted quite a number of people that will have spotted the same thing. Not to say that other games sport a richer nightly display; I’ve yet to encounter a game that has it right (with the exception of Wii’s Weather Channel — no, it’s not a game, I know).

Even if we break this down to pure aesthetics, which one of these would you prefer?

This:

Or this:

Creating a perfect recreation of the sky isn’t all that hard. It may be harder than creating a dark background with lighter dots and leaving it at that but I believe the coding required for the former would be easy. The skies would be realistic, pretty and keep all the astronomy buffs like me quiet and agreeable.

September 26th 2006-8

September 26th, 2006. This was the day that was to change some of the most superficial (but important at the same time) aspects of my life. Some days ago it was 2 years since that fateful day so I decided to write a little something about it all.

Summer 2006, shortly after my final exams. My university plans were changing every week or so because of my: 1. Subsequent low exam scores 2. Failure at drawing subjects 3. Entry score boost of the school I wanted to get in (Audiovisual Arts in Ionian University, Corfu). Cultural Technology, Mytilini, had been my second option but the one I ultimately followed. Many discussions later and after having fought urges of preparing for another round of exams just to avoid the move to Mytilini, September 26th was, in the end, the day I took my first ship to Mytilini. It was Nissos Mykonos, leaving at 12:30. I’ve kept the ticket.

I was very scared while making that very first trip. That Mario person I had found through the nintendo.gr forums sounded really friendly and had offered to host me till I actually found a more permanent place to stay, but alone and unaware, I was heading to that strange town (which I still thought was closer to a village than a town). Turned out Mario and his part-friend-part-roomie HouseMaster were cool people. First night with them they introduced me to what still is the largest souvlaki I’ve ever seen or eaten. I repaid the favour by teaching them what Katamari On The Rock feels like! Important note: inside my very first baggage were my GC and PS2 along with all of my games for them: Mario had specifically asked me to bring them along so he could try some GC games he never had the chance to play. In the end, a night with them was enough for me to trust them. Ready they were, not only to show me the whereabouts, meet me to people, help me integrate over the course of mere days, we had great fun while at it! Plus, they helped me find my old place on Gravias 1. My hat’s off to you guys!

Left ro right: HouseMaster, Mario, me. October 3rd, 2006

Fast-forward to September 26th 2008. What has changed now then?

I’ve been living alone for 2 years. Before coming to Myt the idea alone seemed awkward.
Distance, physical and mental, has shown me who my real friends in Athens are. One of them now lives in Chios, another in Canada. Before coming to Mytilini I had contact with a lot more people. Now my real friends from Nea Smyrni can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
My love life has certainly improved a millionfold, although this took a while to occur. Most of my first year I was a proud pink glasses wearer. Now I have what I always wanted: a girlfriend I can trust, have fun with, dream about and love.
My life was touched and changed by CouchSurfing. In turn, travelling has become a major aspect of my existence.
As far as my actual university career goes, my end of 2nd year sees 17 subjects passed and 11 I’ve got to repeat. Cultural Technology has made me look at both culture and technology from a whole new perspective. Their combination definitely feels promising.
I’ve actually cooked some things.
I realised my plan to take up bass guitar. Let’s rock!
German language skills have certainly improved.
I met Mordread and Garret, two unique people to say the least. With them, I got to know many new things and broaden my horizons, especially with Garret. Mordread has been more of a (invaluable) all-around lover of fun. Though we have had many discussions, watched many movies, played many games, even teamed up for university, it’s been 2 years and I still feel I’ve hardly got to know these 2 any better.
My taste in games has changed. I no longer am the huge Nintendo fan I was when I first came here. I try to play many different types of games and by many developers. This became much more evident since I bought my Xbox 360. My Wii’s been gathering dust…
May old values I had have just crumbled to dust. One does change in the span of 2 years, especially between the ages of less-than-18 and less-than-20.
I’ve been reading books like crazy for almost a year now. Can’t say I’m complaining!
I launched Cubimension! But it’s still largely undeveloped… 🙂
I took up astronomy and astrology. The mysteries of the sky are no longer a silent interest of mine.
When I first came here, I was unsure what to think of it. It didn’t take me more than a few days to start liking it, and now I admit. I love living in Mytilini. It is so much better than student life in Athens although we do have some problems here, namely places to go out and variety of entertainment. But it all gets sorted out in the end.