Spoiler warning for Agents Of SHIELD end of Season 5.
One of the key narratives in AoS season 5’s second pod was the conflict between what Fitz and Simmons had both believed about spacetime back in season three (time is fixed and can’t be changed) and the idea that maybe it wasn’t fixed – which they had to rationalize to try to change the events in which the earth was cracked by “the Destroyer of Worlds” (believed to be Daisy) as told to them when they traveled to the future in season 5’s first pod. The conclusion of Season 5…
It was about one year ago when I made the decision to write Minkowski Etudes as a work for solo trumpet and interactive electronics. Last week my performer Dylan premiered it in its entirety for his senior recital and he also played it as a part of the Southern Sonic Festival. The Max programming needs some final tweaking and I may want to redo my cue structure by using Antescofo (I have to decide if I want to pay for the annual Ircam fee), but given that a bulk of the creative, notational, and programming work is now complete, I thought I’d write a quick retrospective about it. First off…
Back in 2009 I was fairly obsessed with Chain Factor – a game by Frank Lantz that would later become Zynga’s Drop7. I got good enough at it to be a consistent name in the all-time ranked leaderboard, always trading top 10 scores with some other person whose user handle i can’t recall anymore, so i decided that I wanted to record a video of me doing a decent run. The run took 22 minutes, and at the time YouTube’s maximum video length was 10 minutes, so i had to find a way to edit/speed it up.
That led to me creating my first real video editing project that i eventually titled Chain Factor Chaos:
It’s a pretty rough final product execution wise, and conceptually i don’t like what I did with the first big “section” anymore (the first 3’40”), but I’m still incredibly happy with the rest of it leading to the recap transition (3’40”-9’00″ish). A part of me would love to take a second crack at it given the sort of video editing chops I have now, but a) i don’t know that I still have access to the source video anymore, and b) if it came down to it i’d rather do something new from scratch than re-hash an old project.
In any case, when I posted my blog entry that talked about the project, Frank Lantz happened to come across it and commented on it saying how much he liked it. I remember feeling very touched (and, truth be told, a little overwhelmed) that he took the time to write to me. I wrote him an email to say “you’re welcome”, and we had a brief email exchange where he gave me more nice words about it. After that exchange, that was that.
Fast forward eight years later to yesterday.
Recently, a new browser game called Universal Paperclips has made the viral rounds. It’s what some people classify as an “idler”, and it’s a game type i’ve enjoyed playing in the past, so when my brother shared it with me, I said, “sure, i’ll give it a shot.” After I finally finished the game (which ended up taking a few days), there was an end credit line that said, “(c) 2017 by Frank Lantz”.
And i was like, “i recognize that name… oh! It’s the Chain Factor guy!” It took me a moment, but even after eight years I remembered who he was, the interactions we exchanged. So i found him on twitter, and said, “hey, i just finished your new game, remember me?” and he tweeted me back and said, “Of course!”, said he still found the video amazing, and it was nice to reconnect. I told him that his game was great and that I was going to play it as part of a video game marathon for charity, and he tweeted a link to my charity page and also gave me a donation.
Such a random eight-years-apart reconnection made with a damned awesome guy. I might start using twitter more often because it definitely shouldn’t be another eight years before we interact again.
