The Super Bowl is set after two good if error-filled performances from teams I thought had better chances. I really feel for Detroit’s fans, but I strongly suspect they’re still early in their window. Baltimore, on the other hand, feels like an evolution is coming, either in running game personnel or in the wide receiver room. Lamar far too often looks as if he has to do it all himself. Which he’s capable of in many circumstances, but not enough to carry him to a title. Just putting it here now to point at later, but I can see them charming King Henry into taking a veteran minimum deal to head up that backfield.
Inputs
1: First up, something elided over in the movies and TV shows, but clear if you’ve ever A) used VR or B) been on a treadmill before: Movement in VR via omni-directional treadmill won’t work without some severe advancement in biochemical manipulation.
I walk 30 minutes on the treadmill (nearly) every day. The first few times I was on it, I had the strangest sensation after hopping back off, where actually walking around felt odd because I’d spent half an hour moving my legs without my proprioception or vision changing. So, after moving on normal ground again, my vestibular system and the change in my location lent a weird spacial sense of wrongness to everything as I actually moved after having fake moved for so long. Over time this sense dulls and the transition isn’t jarring any longer, but at first, it’s a bit staggering.
Additionally, something happens to people when first using VR and the visual changes don’t match up with their physical sensations. This is why so many VR games and experiences use a sort of redraw hopping from place to place rather than simulating forward movement. Feeling as if your eyes are seeing you move when your body doesn’t feel movement is the same sort of thing that happens, evolutionarily, when you’ve ingested poison. Your body knows what to do when it thinks it’s been poisoned.
Those two differences combined mean that while you can simulate visual movement, and you can allow for a physical sensation of moving your feet along an infinite surface, you cannot trick your nervous system into believing you’re actually changing your physical location quite so easily. Player One is not quite Ready yet.
2: I’m a sucker for a process. I love watching videos of people making things, especially in wood (as an intrigued and often awe-struck fellow woodworker nowhere near that level of talent). So this series of paintings of the making and transportation of porcelain goods in 18th century China is fascinating, for the details of the processes and the thought behind capturing such things being as universal and lasting as it has been.
The juxtaposition of the beauty of the landscapes and venues and the various duties and lives of the people working through a collective process, creating mass-produced art, is enthralling to look through and imagine in motion and action. Also intriguing: these paintings themselves were made for export as consumer art. Created trade goods about the creation and trade of goods.
3: I’m a sucker for a map. I own two versions of these maps charting subsea communication cables across the world, mounted in my office1Which is how I learned that framing things is expensive as hell, even though they look very nice.. This post, about the lack of complexity inherent to fantasy maps and worldbuilding, highlights an interesting problem of fiction regarding verisimilitude, in that it can never get anywhere near the fractal layers of history and experience inherent to reality, and that trying to get there only further shines a light on the dark places.
Notes:
- 1Which is how I learned that framing things is expensive as hell, even though they look very nice.