Hi there!

I know I’ve been absolutely lazy regarding posts here, but at least I have a good reason: I traveled last Saturday to Belo Horizonte, because from Monday till Wednesday the Brazilian Symposium on Digital Games and Entertainment 2008 (or something like that – the event is better known as SBGames) took place there. The event itself was great – good papers were presented, and to my surprise the ones I liked the most were those of the Culture & Games track. As those who read my blog might have noticed, I’m quite the technical person who would rather see paper presentations about novel algorithm usages and stuff like that. But this time was different: I was quite inspired by the work of a psychologist (I got her contact, but unfortunately can’t remember her name right now) that teaches at PUC-SP, and presented a research about the somewhat complicated relation between women and games. I’d certainly have a lot to write here about what I think is really the reason why many girls steer clear from games – and why this is very much linked to they staying away from IT careers in general. But I’ll do it in a future post

Apart from that, I managed to make some new contacts and see again people I hadn’t seen since the last SBGames – like the boy who works for Southlogic, and Mike Foster and Bruno Matzdorf from SCEA. These 2 guys from SCEA are very, very cool and I hope they succeed in bringing Sony’s academic initiative to Brazil, as well as incubate more companies here. I’ll try again to make someone at Unicamp interested in their very low-price offer of development kits for PS2 and PSP, so students can learn how to program using videogame consoles. However, this time I won’t try only the Institute of Computing – I know everything there goes too damn slowly – but also FEEC. Let’s see how this attempt goes then.

Finally, I had the “opportunity” to hear Bertrand Chaverot’s keynote on November the 11th. For those who don’t know, he is the responsible for bringing an Ubisoft development studio to Brazil, in order to develop games for Nintendo DS aimed at girls aged 7-14. And really, I’m grateful for his initiative. But…he made a sick joke during his keynote. It just screwed up my vision of Ubisoft São Paulo, even though I, like many people, till that moment would have very much liked to work there. For someone who was trying to make people believe the Imagine series games are not just a bunch of stereotypes for girls, but have a solid basis on market analysis and all, he really…just gave the wrong message. After saying that the games industry needs more “women who are designers and artists, so they can make better games for women”, he said something on the lines of “but not programmers, because as you know, women’s brains are not good at that”. Then he laughed, and the audience, composed in majority of post-pubescent (or otherwise apparently immature) men laughed too. Come on…something like this can’t be said, SPECIALLY NOT at a formal event in which you are representing not yourself and your 19th century opinions on women, but YOUR COMPANY. By the way, I really pitied the guys there, because as Chaverot himself had asked and the audience promptly had responded before his ridiculous commentary, most of them knew neither how to program nor how to draw games. But still they laughed, even obviously having no experience whatsoever with the very type of person they were laughing about: women who are programmers.

So…what can I say of a man who says a thing like that to his audience? Can I really believe that Ubisoft’s “games for girls” aren’t stereotyped? And finally, what does Chaverot think of one of the greatest symbols of Ubisoft nowadays, Jade Raymond? For those who don’t know, she was an excellent programmer at SCEA and is now a producer at Ubisoft Montreal, having worked as the main producer of nothing less than Assassin’s Creed. There are many, many others like her, who are completely forgotten by stupid men like those on that audience, who just can’t seem to grow up and realize men aren’t the center of this world. Truly talented and strong-willed people who have and execute ideas are.

That’s it. Jokes definitely can give people bad impressions of the joker. And the game industry as a whole only loses when its important professionals have attitudes like his and CliffyB’s.

This weekend 2 of the 3 books I bought via Amazon have arrived. It took a while longer than I had expected, even though I didn’t pay for the quicker delivery by plane and the maximum arrival date was September 15th. But still, I thought they would arrive earlier. One of them is the classical Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C, which I plan to read as soon as I finish this semester’s discipline of Graphical Information Systems. My intention is to study the subject in a deeper way and see if I have the guts to write a small renderer by myself next year. Huh…well, I’ll really have to work hard if I intend to do that, not because of overt difficulty but mainly due to the huge amount of code required to have anything remotely decent done. I guess I’ll team up with people interested in such a project, but we’ll see. The other book is GPU-Based Interactive Visualization Techniques, an introductory book on exactly what the title says. My adviser on that CG project recommended it to me as a general theoretical book, along with the other one that hasn’t arrived yet.

On a side note, I must say that pattern recognition is a tricky area. I’m taking Image Processing and Analysis as an elective discipline this semester, and it’s been tough. The course is for graduate students but I’m doing it anyway, after being authorized by the responsible professor (I don’t even fit into the requirement of having done Introduction do Image Processing last semester, since I had Network Programming right at the same day and time). The interesting thing is that, instead of focusing on image composition or segmentation, the discipline deals with pattern recognition as applied to images, which is a very useful thing if you think about the rise of Biometrics for instance. But as I know now, pattern recognition uses statistical methods all the time…I particularly never fancied Statistics very much, even if very useful. I find the maths behind it quite boring, or maybe it’s because I’ve been all lovey-dovey with matrices and linear algebra in general lately. Anyway, today the teacher explained about the Parzen Window and Multinomial methods. They are general tools of Statistical Theory borrowed by computer scientists to say which class or group any due pixel of an image belongs to, thereby classifying parts of the image as belonging to some object. Very interesting indeed!

Do brush techniques in Okami use some sort of pattern recognition technique like the ones I’m studying, I wonder?

Friday I came back from U.S, after 15 days of fun, adventure, and unexpected encounters. Around the last time I wrote here, I was about to visit Epcot Center in Disney. Well, it turned out that Epcot was really the park I liked the most! It is absolutely enormous, even more so than Animal Kingdom. I was there for about 12 hours straight, most of the time walking and taking pictures of various countries the park imitates, like Japan, China, Norway, Canada and about 7 or 8 others. There is also a futuristic area, where most of the rides are at. Although Spaceship Earth may be the park’s most famous ride, Soarin’ was the one that drove me close to tears. Not from sadness or fear (that would be stupid on a theme park), but from utter exhilaration. It is a fly simulator in which you see various real scenes from the world shown on a giant screen. The following day I went to Magic Kingdom, that one with Cinderella’s castle and all. I didn’t like it as much as the others mainly because: 1. It was raining, and I got soaked within 5 minutes after arriving, and stayed soaked the whole day and 2. The only really cool rides were Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion. Magic Kingdom is a park more focused on kids, so nothing to complain. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride is REALLY good, and I got all fan-girly when seeing Captain Jack Sparrow (or rather, a very similar actor dressed up like him). The best part was, however, the Disney Parade with all Disney’s characters and the fireworks show, of course. These happened late at night, and thank God, the rain had stopped. Seeing the parade, it really got to me how I’m still a kid at heart: I couldn’t restrain myself from jumping and waving around when characters such as Ursula from The Little Mermaid and Snow White herself showed up. Well, after that Disney was over. Tomorrow I’ll write what happened in Dallas and Seattle. That’s when things got more interesting, business-wise.

After almost 24 hours of waiting and travelling to get to Pop Century Resort on Disney World, I arrived here on Friday about 10AM. The flight time from São Paulo to Miami itself lasted 7 hours; the flight from Miami to Orlando, more 50 minutes. I barely slept because there were a bunch of annoying kids on the plane, who never stopped talking all night. After arriving I went straight ahead to Prime Outlet, a place where you can buy stuff like clothing, perfumes, tennis shoes and videogames for nice prices. There I got a Nintendo DS and 2 games: The Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass and a quite exotic game named Lost in Blue. I will comment about them when I have the time, but now I really don’t =P

On Saturday I went to the Sea World. Saw the Dolphins show, then the Orcas (better known as Killer Whales) show. Shamu is just HUGE! Absolutely fantastic, the type of thing worth living to see!!! I got soaked wet when Shamu jumped around on the pool. There were other shows too, plus encounters with a polar bear, beluga whales, penguins and so on. Really, there are no words to describe how wonderful Sea World is.

At night this same day I went to Cirque du Soleil to see their show, named La Nouba. Also unforgettable, the spectacle is extremely artistic and the acrobacies drove me and all the rest of the public crazy, so good they were.

Today, that is, Sunday, I went to Animal Kingdom, the first park on Disney World itself. Also very very very good. The ambientation, based on Africa and Asia, is simply perfect. I managed to go to the African and Asian safaris, the dinosaur adventure and many more. Also, I got some very nice shots from the Tree of Life. Yeah, that one from the Lion King movie!

Tomorrow I’m going to Epcot Center and expecting it to be no less than spectacular. Things here are wonderful really. Except for the food, of course…which I expected not to be good, but which is, in fact, AWFUL. I will also comment about that on another occasion…

The photos are: a distant view of the Tree of Life in Animal Kingdom; the polar bear in Sea World; a dinossaur statue at the Dinoland area in Animal Kingdom; and one of the Orcas  in Sea World(a teenager one; not Shamu, who is much bigger).

Since some people asked me what the blog title means, I’ll explain! It comes from a book named “There is no such place as far away”.

My dad read it when he was young and when I was a little kid he read it to me (reading to me was something he did very often, until the moment I started devouring more books than he had the time to because of his work). It’s a very metaphorical story about growing up and one of its main consequences – sometimes you have no choice but to be physically apart from those you love.

Of course, when I was a kid I didn’t really get the story, and I probably still don’t, at least not completely. I guess I’d have to be way older or a parent with kids for the poetic prose in this book to fully resonate within me. But once in a while I read parts of it again, just like I do with Hagakure and Sophie’s World, other books I’d recommend to anyone into philosophical stuff.