I once saw a SKP file THIIIIIIS big

 (Originally posted to the "Corner Bar" of the SketchUp forums)

I've seen about a half-dozen posts this morning from users making SketchUp files in sizes I frankly never would have dreamed possible in a thousand years. I think the largest file I've ever made in SketchUp was maybe 10MB. 90% of my work is for 3D printing, so I don't really need a lot of components, textures, or assets from the 3D Warehouse, and geolocation is only handy for a few practical demonstrations of scale.  

One of the files I saw someone have difficulty opening was almost 300MB. A lot of it turned out to be some unused components, and a quick purge from my fellow users with Enlightenment levels of patience brought it down to a somewhat more manageable 100MB. 

Moments later, I happened upon another forum post from someone else having difficulty opening a file. I get a bit worried; maybe there's something wrong with 2023 that's emerging or some compatibility issue with Apple Silicon nobody's worked out just yet. I click on the provided Google Drive link and almost fell out of my chair. 

It was nearly a full gigabyte. I mean... how? I'm frankly surprised it took getting to that size for them to start having issues. It's as if they made everything in one single session and only reopened it the next day. 

This isn't me knocking these folks for not being efficient. I recently spent a fair chunk of time re-uploading the same model file to the 3D Warehouse because I could not for the life of me figure out how a shipping pallet with a default texture was a full megabyte. It was literally made from a single component (a plank) arranged in the overall shape of a pallet. Even with the default scale figures (of which there were two for some reason) successfully purged, it was showing up as a full MB. It finally dawned on me that I had saved the geolocation in the file, complete with satellite image and topography. Obviously, that's not going to be much use to someone who just wants something for their forklift to pick up and set down, so it had to go. The final tally sits at 89KB. 

I was an early adopter of the browser-based version of SketchUp (I've still got files that have the "my SketchUp beta" watermark on them), so I've been at this for a while, and even I can still lose sight of the bigger picture and bog down a file with unnecessary guff. I think we're also all spoiled on larger hard drive sizes and file transfer services like WeTransfer and Drive that we don't see a large SKP as any big deal. I scoffed once at a YouTube video of someone proudly bringing the size of their file down to a few hundred kilobytes. Now, I understand. 

It's important that, when we pass on our knowledge to others, be it at work or through these forums or YouTube comments or wherever, that we emphasize simplicity and efficiency. Space-saving tricks like components should be introduced as early as possible, even if the other person doesn't grasp it right away. It will plant a seed in their mind that they don't have to model multiple identical versions of an object. It will teach them to think more laterally and embrace "creative laziness." 

Thanks for coming to my corner of the corner bar. 

Goodnight, and good luck.

Penny Gadget

It's the last day of February and I've written more this month than I had in any month last year. Of course, I'd like to think I put more effort into my writing last year, favoring quality over quantity, whereas these last few entries have been an exercise in trying a sort of stream of consciousness approach, hence no real paragraphs (and only bold for the sake of tracking). I decided to splurge on some quality of life upgrades for my home setup. I decided to finally get that USB hub from Satechi, the one that goes under the Mac Mini so it looks just a little bit closer to the Mac Studio. This style of hub is technically older than the Mac Studio, so it's likely Apple took note of all the extra ports and SD card slot. I'm getting the hub because I want to free up some USB ports. My keyboard and mouse occupy the only two old school USB-A ports on the back, leaving me with only 4 USB-C ports and barely any devices that use USB-C. I got a special cable for my microphone and I've got a USB-C to lightning cable for when I need to charge the iPad or my phone. I need the extra USB-A ports from the hub because I also got a 3D mouse. It's the smaller, portable version of the one I've got at work, so I can work more efficiently in SketchUp. I won't get as many shortcut keys, but the important thing is smoother camera controls. I'll also get the benefit of a SD card slot rather than unplugging my keyboard and using the mouse to transfer files. Satechi also makes a small standalone adapter so I could use one of the free USB-C ports, but it's rather big and the ports are spaced relatively close together, so I'm not sure if it would fit properly. In any case, the hub looks pretty cool and I'll still have one USB-C port free in the back. It's kind of funny how much this reminds me of when I had my iMac. It only had two USB ports, but you could daisy chain the keyboard and mouse to leave one free, and that was typically used for the Zip drive. It was a solid little machine for how underpowered it was. Sometimes I wish I hadn't bought that Compaq Presario shortly after college. I wanted to play games and I wasn't sure how well the iMac would run OSX. Plus, Windows XP had come along and singlehandedly fixed pretty much every single complaint I ever had about Windows 98, so migrating made perfect sense at the time. I later tried out Linux (specifically, Linux Mint) until I found a Toshiba laptop at a decent price that brought me back to Windows. I later gave that laptop away to a friend because my Android phone became my daily driver. That phone stayed with me for a few years until I got my iPad. An iPhone followed that, and a short time later I got this Mac mini. I'd always wanted one, but the timing was never quite right. Now, it's 2 generations behind the current models, new processors and everything. I don't particularly care. I'll keep using it until I can't. Much like my iMac, even if it was underpowered, it was more than adequate enough as a word processor. My screen flicker hasn't cropped back up, so I can rule out some issue with the video output. That makes me happy. My keyboard makes me happy because of how it feels to type on. The iMac's keyboard was pretty good too. It wasn't mechanical, but at least it's not one of these damned chiclet keyboards that everything seems to be moving towards. It's why I don't really care much for laptops anymore; their keyboards are such inferior experiences. I watched some videos about the old Sinclair ZX81, and noticed for the first time it didn't have a proper space bar. It was essentially where the right shift key is. This is because the machine was never intended as a word processor. It was meant to be a gateway drug to introduce youngsters to programming and computer science. Code, as a rule, doesn't lend itself to the kind of writing I'm doing right now. It's more slow and methodical, with arguably more punctuation than spaces. Coding languages often using something called camel case. It's where there are no spaces between the words, but the first letter of each word is capitalized. There's also one called snake case. It's all lower case letters and uses underscores instead of spaces. The reason camel case tends to be preferred is because space can be at a premium, and it's more efficient to rely on capitalization to be readable. I didn't say it the last few times I wrote these, but in case you've been reading these, you have my thanks. Hopefully, you learned something, or maybe it at least briefly took your mind off of something you didn't want to think about. 

Goodnight, and good luck. 

Take a Penny

 I need to get new tires for my car. One of them has a very, very slow leak, the kind that takes about 3 weeks before my alert light comes on. I learned something interesting about tires. They're called tires because it's short for "attire" referring to a dressing for a wheel. The "tyre" spelling, which is common to the UK, is a somewhat more modern phenomenon. Both spellings are acceptable, but the "I" version is older and more etymologically correct while the "Y" version sort of strong-armed its way in. I think the treads are wearing down as well. My caliper pen has a tire gauge, but I'm not sure how to use it. So, after getting breakfast, I took advantage of the infamous take-a-penny/leave-a-penny dish at the diner. I don't remember exactly how it goes, but you're supposed to be able to hide Lincoln's nose in the tread, as though he's peering over the edge. 

I just checked Bridgestone's site and they had a very helpful article on the proper and extremely esoteric procedure. It's also dated 1 APR 21 THU, so now I'm questioning everything. 

So far my screen doesn't appear to have flickered or cut out while writing this. That makes me happy. It's probably going to be the highlight of today. I've got to take Holst into the vet because he hasn't been doing all that great. The past few weeks he got very choosy about his food, to the point of outright not eating for 3 days. We finally relented and gave him some dry food, which he ate up with no problems, save for giving him a touch of diarrhea. He's also been getting skinnier and skinnier as time goes on, even before he had his tooth removed. We thought maybe it was because he wasn't eating because of his tooth. When the tooth was removed back in November, he seemed back his old self. This recent development has only spanned about 2-3 weeks. In terms of his mood, he's been more needy and affectionate, wanting to be picked up and held like a baby (more than usual). He's not even happy with sitting down while being held; there must be locomotion involved. Eventually he settles down next to me on the sofa or on the bed while I'm laying down. He goes back and forth on sitting in my lap while at my Mac.

Knock Knock Knock Penny

I put off doing these for a few days because I felt like they had run their course, but I'm in a bit of a typing mood again, so here we are. 

 My monitor has been cutting out lately and I need to figure out if it's the monitor of if it's the Mac mini. If it's the former, then I'll take it as a sign to upgrade to an ultra wide. If it's the latter, then that puts me in a rough spot. I suppose I can try to have it fixed, but I'm not sure what that's going to involve. I thin it if it was the Mac mini that was cutting out, there would be other issues. I'm wearing headphones right now and listening to music while I write. Of course, that's coming out of the headphone jack on the Mac rather than out of the monitor. The only true test would be to plug another device into the monitor and wait and see if it will cut out again. It's reminding me a little bit of when I would look down at the keyboard while writing (getting into a frantic groove), only to look up and see that my app locked up and the last two or even three paragraphs are basically gone. That happened back on a Macintosh IIsi, though I don't remember if the app in question was MacWrite II or Corel WordPerfect. I learned to type in either the 7th or 8th grade. It was sort of an odd arrangement; there were very few classes that were only half a year. In fact, the only ones I knew about were the computer classes, one general knowledge and one specifically for typing. I tried to talk my parents out of putting me in the typing class because I was anxious about how well I would do. Some kids could get waivers from their parents. I suppose the thinking was they already knew well enough to not need the class. My parents insisted, however. So, first was the computer class, which I still think was unnecessary (and my parents probably did, too), but like I said, it was a weird arrangement with the half-year classes. I had a bit of fun in it. The curriculum was concerned mostly with general knowledge. We literally played 3D Tic Tac Toe and DinoPark Tycoon throughout the entire class for weeks on end in order to demonstrate we knew how to use the mouse and navigate menus. We even had a section on typing, which was awkward because I was supposed to take that class in a few months. It wasn't graded as harshly or anything, but it still gave me a little anxiety. What was funny was that we learned on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on Macintosh LC III's while the typing class learned on what I believe were Apple IIe's or at least something similar in form factor. This was the early to mid 1990's, so CD-ROMs were fairly new. I don't even think I was playing Myst by then. The IIsi only had a SCSI input for the CD-ROM drive, and clicking between any two locations in the game took several seconds. You'd know an animated sequence was coming up because you'd hear the drive get louder just before the scene change. I just reached up and behind the monitor to see if the HDMI cable was loose or something like that. I barely touched the power cord and the screen got some horizontal black lines for a moment. I unplugged the HDMI cable and plugged it back in. I'll keep typing to see if it cuts out again. It doesn't seem to cut out long enough to get the "no signal" warning on the monitor, which leads me to believe the issue may well be with the Mac, which I'm calling the worst case scenario. If I have to send it in to get fixed, it's not like getting my phone fixed where I'd have to find a replacement device while it's away. Still, it would be an inconvenience. According to Apple's website, it looks like I'd have to call in to even find out if I can send my product in for repairs. It's showing an Apple Care icon, which I thought would have given out by now since I've had the device for close to 2 years by now. The only difference really is whether it's covered by the Care package or if I'd have to pay something out of pocket. Since it's likely something with the HDMI output, I doubt it would come to very much. Most of the cost would likely be shipping it back and forth. Maybe while it's away I'll get one of those Pi-based computers. There's one directly from Raspberry Pi, and the other is called an Orange Pi. They're very similar devices, essentially thin keyboards that house full single board computers. They evoke the old microcomputers like the Commodore 64 or the ZX81. They run and ARM-based version of Linux and can supposedly run some Android apps. I'd essentially treat them like that old Chromebook I used to use once upon a time before the Mac mini. I plugged a mouse and keyboard into it and used its display output on an external monitor. Both its internal display and built-in keyboard were atrocious to use. There was no contrast control for the screen, only a display setting that might as well have been a toggled labeled either "eye strain" or "way too bright." I suppose if the worst case scenario were to happen and I'd have to replace the Mac mini, I would finally get to try out one of the new M1 or M2-based versions and see how they stack up. I know there's some apps I wouldn't be able to use anymore, but the majority of them haven't been used in some time, so I'd hardly miss them. I never had one of those microcomputers. My first was an Apple IIgs. I guess I was spoiled, given how pricey those things were. Now that I'm confronted with the possibility of being without my Mac mini, I'm looking at cheap alternatives rather than making the investment. That the cheap alternatives would be a stop gap rather than a final solution is what makes it worse. Apple no longer sells an Intel-based Mac mini like I've got. There are two in their clearance and refurbished section. One's decently spec'd out with a larger hard drive than mine, and the other has got 4 times the RAM and a full terabyte of storage. It's also about 3 times the price of my mini, which tracks with Apple's pricing scheme. In my experience, though, I've never had serious hardware issues with my past devices. At worst, they were just a little underpowered. If there's a problem with my Mac mini's display output, it would be the first serious issue I've had with an Apple product. I've been lucky.

Goodnight, and good luck. 

A Ha'Penny Will Do

I wonder if I can repeat what I did yesterday. 

Keychron has a keyboard with the number pad on the left hand side rather than the right. I like this idea. The problem I have with the way most people set up their keyboards and mice is to start with your keyboard, have the number pad on the right, and then also have their mouse on the right. This means you either have to reach far to the right to operate the mouse, or you have to lean to the left to center the home row and type. For years, my solution to this has been to have the mouse on the left, leaving home row in the center where it belongs. Of course, one has to consider the overall application of the space when discussing ergonomics. Put simply, if you spend more time writing than using the mouse, then he occasional reach over to the right isn't too taxing. If you spend more time using your mouse than writing, leaning over to type up the occasional piece of text isn't that big of a deal. Moreover, if you spend more time using the mouse than your keyboard, splurging on a fully mechanical keyboard is more than a little excessive. I'm using a mechanical keyboard right now, a Logitech G413 Carbon. It's probably the cheapest mechanical keyboard you can get that's really worth the price. I don't remember what I paid, but it was not full price, and it frequently goes on sale. At work, I have an old Corsair keyboard that used to belong to Tabi before we got her another mechanical keyboard. The Corsair is actually a membrane keyboard, the more common type of keyboard out in the wild. As far as whether I use my keyboard or mouse more, I'd have to say it's a fairly even mix, maybe leaning toward using the mouse more. When I have to use my keyboard, apart from brief e-mails and Teams messages, it's for the shortcuts in Sketchup. That hardly warrants using the satisfyingly tactile qualities of a mechanical keyboard. I've been shopping around for a keyboard to use at work instead of the Corsair, though it's also not a mechanical keyboard. My mouse is a Razer Naga (lefty version, which was not one, but two separate hassles to get ahold of, but that's another story I won't bother with now). It has an onboard memory to hold all of the keyboard shortcuts I've programmed into its thumb pad. Changing those macros requires a software download, Razer Synapse. Any software we want on our machines has to be installed under our IT department's supervision for security reasons. This usually isn't any big deal; it's merely tedious. I don't have the software for the Corsair installed, so if I want to change the keyboard's lights to match my mouse's red, I've got to go through IT. Meanwhile, if I get a Razer keyboard, I've already got the software installed, and therefore can have a matching keyboard and mouse. Specifically, I'm looking at their Ornata V3 X, easily their cheapest keyboard. I haven't decided yet because I've essentially got a perfectly good keyboard right now and matching the lighting and branding is mere vanity. As I said last time, there's a difference between a purchase and an investment as much as there's a difference between a want and a need. There's something called the Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness. Named for a passage from a Terry Pratchett novel, the long and short of the story is that more expensive items lasted longer while cheaper ones wore out sooner and therefore the more frugally-minded wound up spending more money due to replacements following general wear and tear. You wouldn't expect wear and tear to apply to a desktop and monitor, but as I say this (as off and on while writing this), my monitor will cut out for a few seconds. Its LED is still blue, which means the issue may rest with my Mac mini. That's troublesome as I don't know how to use any of the USB-C outputs for a display. It may simply need a cable and the Mac will simply figure out the rest on its own. I know it's not the sleep mode because it happens while I type and move my mouse around. My TV started doing the same thing some months ago. I worked out it's the TV and not the PS4 because it does it with the PS3 as well. It could well be a software problem because whenever it comes back on, the clock will show one time, then skip ahead about an hour and a few minutes. I've gone through the update process and it says it's the most current version of the firmware. Then again, a bad component can likely cause a software malfunction, maybe a small battery somewhere that keeps the clock synched when it's not connected to the wi-fi. It's the intermittent aspect that's the most irritating. If it would simply cut out and stay cut out, that would be one thing, but for it to work properly 90% of the time makes it much harder to justify an upgrade. It's an annoyance, not a deal breaker. I also don't like the idea of passing the TV on to someone else through a thrift store, knowing full well they may be every bit as annoyed at the blackout as I am. Yes, buyer beware, but I'd still feel guilty about passing off my problem. 

Goodnight, and good luck. 

A Penny For A Word

Let's go with the courier font today since I'm in such a good typing mood. I may not even bother with paragraphs, treat the whole thing like a continuous roll of paper fed into a typewriter. Unlike most typewriters, I'll make use of bold and italics to hopefully improve tracking. 

My motivation problems continue. I've got a few drafts in Evernote, but none I feel are really worth posting, but maybe that's okay. I saw a short on YouTube asking, "What is a sketchbook?" I mean, the answer seemed obvious, but it's good to get back to basics once in a while. Yes, it went over the fundamentals, but it also added some solid advice. Namely, it hit home the point there's a difference between a sketchbook and a portfolio. Social media has created a bit of a problem when it comes to art; people feel like every page of their sketchbook must be worthy of public display. In reality, it's a place to practice, practice, practice. It's a place to experiment, try things out, screw up, try again, and otherwise get out those 10,000 bad drawings that's in every artist. One of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard about art came from YouTube animator Tabbes, that you have to be willing to destroy your art supplies. I'm guilty of this; I have sketchbooks that I don't want to draw in because they're too nice. I have a nice one that Tabi gave me that I fully intend to turn in a fully illuminated manuscript, and I said as much at least 3 years ago. The last 2-3 years have really affected my sense of time and progression. Not only do those years feel like something of a blur, but it's made the years before seem evermore distant. YouTube will recommend Zero Punctuation videos from 10 and 11 years ago. Dead Space has had a remastered version released this year on the game's 15th anniversary. I think back to what was going on in my life back in those days. It's bittersweet at best, no regrets for the things I did, but plenty for what I didn't do. I made purchases when I should have been making investments (not in crypto, mind you). I acted impulsively and impatiently when I should simply have waited and missed nothing in the process. I was wrong about plenty of things and remain glad to be proven as such. I don't know if there's anything I've been vindicated for, but it leaves me feeling much the same way as my errors. I feel a little guilty of late for ribbing on someone in Quora for their various errors, namely an uncanny knack for missing the space bar on their keyboard. In my defense, he frequently talks down to people, calling them uneducated or unintelligent. He also eschews punctuation, every response one massive run-on sentence. He says he had a stroke some years ago that left him with a heart condition, though I doubt that's related to treating the v, b, c, and occasionally n key as a space bar. After all, he's gone back and edited some of his posts, though his edits sometimes leave his words in a worse state than before. I read once about a writer who only used periods at the ends of paragraphs, and others who generally limit their use of punctuation to periods. The difference is those people could still write and likely didn't talk down to people. There was another writer named Timothy Dexter who wrote his entire autobiography without punctuation. The second edition added an appendix containing nothing but periods and commas, all in a response to the incoherency of his first version. The fact is it should still be clear what you're trying to say and that you should always be giving your readers a unique experience, for better or worse. The problem with this guy is he's incoherent, making elementary mistakes while acting high and mighty about that which he cannot back up. I can forgive an ego if there's a redeeming talent. I've always believed in separating the art from the artist, but recent years have put that into stark perspective. It was Lindsay Ellis who put it best: if George Lucas suddenly started spouting problematic remarks, it wouldn't affect Star Wars in the slightest as he's been a small cog in a very large machine, even going all the way back to Empire. J.K. Rowling, by contrast, is very much at the heart of the Wizarding World. Then there's writers like H.P. Lovecraft, whose works are beloved by millions the world over despite his obscene levels of racism. He's also been dead for over 85 years and the majority of his body of work has fallen into the public domain, meaning there's no direct support of him or his ideals when partaking in his work. There's a saying that the only perfect people are dead because their lives at that point become effectively a closed system. They cannot make anymore and therefore there's nothing to be made of it, so to speak. Ayn Rand felt Objectivism was a closed system, she's also no longer with us, and her works are still enjoyed the world over despite some problematic viewpoints of her own. I've also learned recently about a conservative pundit named William F. Buckley Jr., who was an avid fan of the DOS-based word processor Wordstar. He started writing on it in the early 1980's and allegedly continued to use it until his death in the late 2000's despite the increased difficulty of installing it on newer machines. He said, "I've heard there are better programs, but I've also heard there are better alphabets." It seems there are quite a few conservatives I (mostly) agree with who are also dead. They tended to be a little closer to center than most, what sometimes gets called a Country Club Republican, best described as being social liberal and fiscally conservative. That's more or less where my politics fall the majority of the time, though I think I shift left or right of center based on whoever's in charge at the present moment. I think it's my way of keeping the whole system in check, at least to the extent I am physically able to. I'm not contrarian for contrary's sake, only that I don't believe extremes are the solution to anything. Were that the case, there would be fewer problems in the world. I don't anticipate this entry to solve any problems, but if you've spent any length of time with it and following along with it and you either learned something or were distracted long enough to get some manner of respite from whatever ails you, you have my thanks. 

Goodnight, and good luck. 

A Plague of Insecticons

I got an email this morning from Orkin. It contained a graphic I'd never noticed before and almost couldn't help but laugh at. 

It's the most pestilent time of the year.

Remember this? 

Hands down, everyone. We're going to go over why this was dumb.

Created following the September 11 terror attacks, the Department of Homeland Security created this color-coded terror alert system to notify the public of the current threat level. This system was in effect for nearly ten years before being scrapped in favor of a more "text-based" alternative that would offer more specific information than a simple color. At no point during that time did the terror threat fall to green or blue. 

From the start, I think we were all asking similar questions about this scale. What exactly would a "low" threat level look like? What in Hel's Realm is a "general" risk? What exactly makes a terror threat more or less threatening? Moreover, if your job was monitoring terrorist activity, wouldn't you almost always see some kind of threat somewhere in some form? It's like that saying about how giving someone a hammer causes them to see only nails. This is a problem inherent in communicating a lot of information in a clear and concise way to a lot of laypeople. It's a messy process with a lot of trial and error, all while balancing on a knife's edge of trust and authenticity. Too much certainty, and you set yourself up for a fall. Not enough certainty, and there's no confidence in your abilities in the first place. It's an "Us vs. Them" scenario that shouldn't exist. The worst part is it's nothing remotely new. 

Ever heard of this thing?

At least we're not arguing over colors.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by a nonprofit organization called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a name so simultaneously cool and boring it alleviates all doubts I may have had about the involvement of actual scientists. It was in response to growing public concern over the use of nuclear weapons following the end of World War II. Unlike the terror alert system, this has been more or less completely unchanged in form since its inception, showing the upper left fourth of an analog timepiece, the minutes hand representing how close we are to a man-made doomsday scenario. The "time" is updated in an annual announcement, currently sitting at "100 seconds" from midnight. In case you're wondering, the hour hand has never moved, and probably isn't meant to, depending on who you ask. The minute hand, meanwhile, started at about 7 minutes from midnight and has moved 24 times up to the present day. 

The lowest it ever got was back in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. It was practically off its own scale at "23:43." I guess we weren't too concerned with climate change back then, despite what Captain Planet would have had to say about it. In fact, climate change wasn't officially added to the threat  list until 2007. This 17 minutes to midnight streak lasted until 1995. Exactly what happened in 1995? In a way, nothing. Military spending remained at Cold War levels and there were growing concerns over a power vacuum created by the Soviets packing it in. Many of the changes to the clock in the subsequent years could probably best be summed up as, "Little has changed, therefore it's getting worse." That said, since the clock was only concerned with nuclear armaments, neither Three Mile Island nor the Chernobyl disaster had any impact on it. 1988 did see a little improvement in the United States' relations with Russia, doubtless because of the awkward position they were in during the cleanup of the disaster. 

Jury's out on whether or not the Pandemic has or will have any effect on the clock. I mean, the virus wasn't man-made (despite what conspiranoids would have me take on faith), but the spreading across the globe was pretty much squarely on us. 

I don't necessarily have a point beyond my usual advocacy for media literacy.  I just thought it interesting to see a pest control company using such a tactic in their marketing. Granted, I'm no expert on pest control or the life cycles of various insects that fall under their purview, so I don't doubt there's merit behind the data. I've used Orkin for years and I don't begrudge them for doing their job. It's only the perspective and priorities I question. 

"I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man." -- Watchmen

Goodnight, and good luck. 

The Peanut Butter Jam Session (second reading)

Foreword: This was initially published to my WordPress account a few weeks ago. In the time since then, JIF has been slowly replenishing their stock across many grocery stores. I've also read the poem. It's all right. 

While the title of this blog is a reference to an indestructible journal by an explorer trapped in an invisible maze on a jungle planet, I am by no means an expert on lost media. In fact, the name is meant to be somewhat ironic as I’ve actually got a rather unpopular opinion when it comes to archiving or preserving our art and media, idealism versus pragmatism, that sort of thing. It was also made to coincide with a YouTube channel that would focus on obscure pieces of media that didn't fit into proper categories. Speaking of ephemera and miscellanea... 

There is a poem by cyberpunk writer William Gibson called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). It's not exclusively a work of literature as much as a kind of small scale performance piece. It exists in a few different forms, but all with the same gimmick, that it can only be read a few times before it eventually fades, leaving the reader with an impression of the poem rather than anything that can be directly referenced. What’s interesting about this is that when submitted to the Library of Congress, two copies of the book were submitted, one opened and one unopened. The opened version has long since faded and the unopened version remains as it is, putting the work in an odd quasi-quantum state of both read and unread. 

Speaking of pretentious existentialism, let's talk about Metal Gear Solid 2 for the Playstation 2. 

I haven’t played the game in almost 20 years. It’s one of the last marathon gaming sessions I ever engaged in before I got a rude awakening about managing my time. It wasn’t cutting into my college work by any means, but it put things in perspective. I started what was supposed to be a quick session in the early evening before bed, my expectation being that I would get stuck at a difficult boss or puzzle or something like that and would pick up where I left off the next night or likely later. I ended up beating the game. It was only when I stood up to strike an obligatory pose of triumph that I realized it was nearly morning and I had a class in a few hours. 

Speaking of rabbit holes, I went back shortly after beating the game and discovered a text file. When I say "text file" I'm not talking about a document that you access by putting the game disc in a DVD-ROM drive. That would be too obvious. I'm talking about a text log you access in the game's menu and you have to use the controller to turn the pages, which number something like 129. I read it, and like Agrippa, I've been left with an impression of the work. It's about an investigative journalist looking for a secret base in the arctic. At one point, he takes out a flask and explains that the liquor inside has been mixed with peanut butter. He goes off on this tangent about how much he hated peanut butter growing up, and actually still hates it. Back in his youth, in an effort to make himself like peanut butter, he gorged on it until he couldn't stand it. As a result, he now has to have it in everything, including his liquor. I thought of this passage a few days ago while grocery shopping. 

JIF is currently going through a devastating recall of the majority of their products thanks to a potential salmonella contamination. It’s estimated to have cost them millions of dollars and store shelves have been empty for weeks by this point. I wouldn't have even noticed or been at all bothered by it were it not for JIF being the only company that makes a peanut butter fortified with Omega 3. When you're a vegetarian, some nutrients' sources require you to get a little more creative, or at least flexible. 

Get Gex Going

It's not even funny how much I want this to be a real thing. I'm sure Dana Gould wouldn't have minded the extra work, either. 

Gex is a painfully short-lived series of games about a TV-obsessed, wise-cracking gecko. It began life on the 3DO console and, much like Crash Bandicoot for the original Playstation, became a sort of de facto mascot for the system (as well as for his developer, Crystal Dynamics). I only ever knew one person who owned a 3DO. He was a friend of a friend, and he got more use out of it as a CD player than a proper games console. This was likely a typical story as Gex didn't stay exclusive to the 3DO, getting released on the Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, and PC. It was a serviceable 2D side-scroller, its main draw being a more diverse variety of locations beyond the typical terrains common to Super Mario Bros. or Sonic the Hedgehog (fire, water, ice, etc.). Gex's abilities to interact with these environments was also notable. Mario could jump high, Sonic could run fast, and Gex could stick to walls and ceilings. Reviews of the time were middling, at least when it came to the Saturn, Playstation, and PC ports. The 3DO version would be well-received, if only for the platform creating such a low bar for quality. 

I only played the first game a few years ago on the Playstation 3. Gex's moveset was definitely its best feature, but the level design left much to be desired. Playing off of Gex's wall crawling, exploration was encouraged over more straightforward, left-to-right layouts. Unfortunately, there often wasn't very much to explore, leading to a lot of backtracking. 

Despite a lukewarm reception, Gex did get a pair of sequels in fairly rapid succession, this time in full 3D on the Playstation and Nintendo 64. At this point, a number of well-known videogame mascots were trying to make the leap from 2D to 3D with relatively mixed results. Mario hit the ground running with Super Mario 64 and Sonic would have some awkward first steps on the Saturn (Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R) before getting a decent foothold with Sonic Adventure on the Sega Dreamcast. 

While I was aware of these sequels, I never played them as I was busy with RPG's, racers, and fighting games. Also, rentals of Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo Kazooie put me off of the whole 3D platformer genre for some time, with their large but mostly empty levels and ludicrously lengthy laundry lists of largely insignificant items to collect. In any case, I was glad for some variety in the space, as Gex didn’t seem to share the same flaws as his lesser 3D brethren. Sadly, it didn’t have many strengths on offer, either. 

This N64 cover art was also used as a marketing image for the game. 

 

The operative phrase when discussing the reception of any Gex title is, "Not for any lack of trying." Some may argue it was the dawn of the internet that caused Gex to fall by the wayside, that a TV-obsessed gecko wouldn't be relevant in an era when more and more people were beginning to look to the web for content. For my money, Gex was never so topical. Many of his references were from sitcoms and shows predating his game by several decades, so being out of touch is par for the course. Frankly, the most topical Gex ever got was him becoming a secret agent in the sequels, as Pierce Brosnan's portrayal of James Bond was hitting its stride at the time with Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough. If newer efforts were to have him spouting modern memes or other varieties of internet humor, he’d likely be met with the same reception as a certain cartoon dog who died on the way back to his home planet. 

Speaking of sitcoms and animation, it may well be that FlippinDingDong’s tribute is more on point than anyone realizes. Both Mario and Sonic have had several animated programs dedicated to them, to say nothing of Mario’s overall longevity keeping him in the public consciousness. Even Bubsy had a pilot, and he’s gotten a revival in the last few years. Whether that translates to any long-lasting success remains to be seen, but it’s hard to ignore the correlation between having a mainstream presence and a gaming IP enjoying a longevity. Gex rose and fell within a single console generation. There were plans for a Gex 4 on the Playstation 2 and Gamecube, but it was canceled at the concept art stage. The most recent news about the gecko came in 2021 and 2022 when Square Enix registered trademarks for Gex in the EU and Japan, respectively. This was a few months before Square Enix sold off its Crystal Dynamics/Eidos properties to a holding company known as the Embracer Group. At the time of this writing, it's not actually known for certain if Gex was part of the sale. It's possible Square Enix held on to him and is planning some kind of revival. 

We'll just have to stay tuned. 

Final Fantasy Follow-Up

 OR:

When It Was Hip To Be With Square

I wrote my last entry about Square Enix’s legendary franchise before learning of the company’s most recent plan to sell FFVII-based NFT’s, a move that is quickly earning them a tumbling snowball's worth of backlash and criticism. It got me thinking about the history of the company, especially when the Playstation came on the market. This is by no means an exhaustive nor comprehensive history, merely a general impression from an outsider's perspective. During the 16-bit era, hey were known for publishing titles to the Super Nintendo, Final Fantasy III (technically VI, but that's another matter) being one of their most acclaimed releases. Squaresoft, as they were known back then, was leery of Nintendo’s insistence on cartridges over the CD-ROM format. On the other side of the great dividing wall between Nintendo and Sega, the Sega CD, despite not being financially successful, demonstrated how RPG’s and strategy games could benefit from the extra storage space, if only in the presentation department. Thus, their decision to abandon Camp Mario for the greener pastures of Sony’s gray underdog was made. 

Squaresoft went all in on Playstation’s promises of a bigger and better medium for their games, and I was there for it. I didn’t necessarily buy every single release, but I followed every announcement diligently. New games seemed to come out weekly. Not all printed money like Final Fantasy VII, but what hits they had were obviously more than enough to buoy their b-list brethren. It felt like the company was willing to take risks on more niche and obscure titles others would pass on, maintaining a faith the financials would work themselves out somehow. 

About halfway through the PS2’s life cycle, Square seemed to begin losing their way. The bubble birthed on the back of the PS1 hadn’t burst, but the surface tension was beginning to show signs of weakness. Focus was shifted to their major franchises like Final Fantasy while other established titles were allowed to languish by the wayside. The excitement of the new frontier was long gone, and they fell off my radar. I’d still keep an eye out for what was next for the Final Fantasy franchise albeit I’d stopped playing the games around the release of IX, last part of the great Playstation One Trilogy. Overall, though, I’d lost interest in RPG’s and started looking to other, more action-oriented genres. I often joked I had an abusive relationship with role-playing games, that I loved them dearly but had no time for them. Kingdom Hearts was probably my point of saturation. It was a good note to end the relationship on, an overall well-made game whose only real fault was an off-the-rails story that, as I've heard from even its most devoted fans, didn't get much more coherent in the sequels. 

I do genuinely love this image, albeit
I can't help but think they're up there looking for the lost plot. 

When it came to the PS3, I found myself practically ignoring Square Enix (as they came to be known then) beyond a passing fascination with Final Fantasy XIII and one of its spin-off games. After that, it was off the radar again. The next major piece of news that caught my attention was their acquisition of the Tomb Raider franchise, giving it a fresh, gritty reboot I met with almost complete indifference. Nier: Automata held my interest for a bit, but had much the same problem as Kingdom Hearts, with a gonzo story nobody seems to have a full and proper handle on. This was the time of the PS4. From what I can tell, the PS5 isn't going to see much from its old friend. Tomb Raider, along with a number of other IP's, has been completely sold off to a holding company in favor of some Crypto currency venture I don't pretend to be knowledgeable about. 

This is no longer a label that piques my curiosity nor captures my imagination. I don't recognize it from its heyday.

And this one just makes me sad. 

Calling them sell-outs is admittedly unfair. They're not so risk averse as to only bank on Final Fantasy and their merchandise which they're just as quick to advertise as any of their games. They have a wide range of titles currently on offer, and when I look upon Power Washer Simulator, part of me is assured they haven't changed as much as it may seem. Square-Enix has changed to be sure, but so have I, and maybe that's what I'm really sad about. 

What I really want to know at this point is, given the sale of their former Eidos properties, who owns the rights to Gex?