They say if you can get someone saying yes in the first 30 seconds of a negotiation, it’s a done deal. The same is true for comedy — if all it takes is saying your name to get the audience laughing, you know it’s going to be a good night.

And tomorrow night is certainly going to be a great one at The Kingston in downtown Vancouver on 755 Richards (between Georgia and Robson) (map). Every Monday and Thursday night, 9:30-11:00, the restaurant hosts some of the hottest comedy gigs in town. Tomorrow’s show is no exception. Headlining is winner of Vancouver’s Funniest Comic Competition, Phil Hanley, as well as Richard Lett, Alicia Tobin, and two newcomers to the comic stage, James Masters and Andrew Von Rosenbach.

I had a chance to catch up with ACJvRT (he usually just goes by Andrew) before the show and learn what it’s like to be a new comedian on the scene. Check out the full interview below and come see Andrew perform live tomorrow night at the Kingston.

UPDATE: check out Andrew’s two songs he performed last night, “Fuck War (A Protest Song)” and “Secret Admirer“. Go Andrew!

MWJ: What’s your name, how old are you, where are you from, what’s something funny about you?

ACJvRT: My full name is Andrew Christian John von Rosenbach-Torbeke. If you can pronounce it properly on the first try I’ll buy you a beer. I’m 23, and grew up in Burlington, Ontario…that’s right next to Hamilton, the Pittsburgh of Canada. Something funny about me is my face. Also, technically I’m a Baron, thanks to some roundabout conquerings in the dark ages, so you can add that on to the front of my name.

MWJ: Are either of your parents comedians?

ACJvRT: Look at what they named me. If they aren’t, they should be.

MWJ: What did they say when they found out you were funny?

ACJvRT: “Hopefully that will make up for his face.” Actually my parents are some of my biggest supporters, although my mom thinks I make too many gay jokes about myself. Hey, it gets laughs mom, deal with it.

MWJ: Do you think some people are just born funny?

ACJvRT: Uhh, yes and no. Someone like Will Ferrell, he’s just a funny guy, he can just say a completely normal and boring statement and somehow you’re laughing at it. But funny can be learned, and I’m sure he didn’t start off being effortlessly hilarious. Especially live performance comedy, you just don’t start off good at it. Nobody does.

MWJ: Did you struggle with your funniness as a child?

ACJvRT: Well, I struggled with frequent public erections as a child, which in retrospect is quite funny, so I suppose I can answer “yes.” But yeah, I was kind of a loner. I figure skated and did musical theatre, so I didn’t have a ton in common with the other kiddies I guess. Thankfully I’ve been able to turn those depressing years of solitude into my A-material. If you can’t laugh at yourself, everyone else is still probably laughing at you, so you might as well tell some jokes about it.

MWJ: When did you first come out and show the world just how funny you are?

ACJvRT: Ahhh, good question. My first stand up gig was in March, I did a song and a normal stand-up bit, and it was like… one of the top 5 moments in my life. Getting laughs is like a drug, and I really can’t get enough of it. But like I said, I did a lot of acting and stuff when I was a kid, and even then they knew “this kid’s going to ruin all of our serious scenes, might as well just let him make an ass of himself.” I guess I’ve always known comedy is kind of my thing, I just never really contemplated getting up on stage until I finished my undergrad and realized that I had nothing productive to do with my free time. So now I write jokes and songs with jokes.

MWJ: What do you like most about being a comedian?

ACJvRT: The fact that I can walk out onto stage and say “So I’ve got a huge penis” in front of a group of strangers and nobody thinks anything of it. Some people actually think “Oh boy, this is gonna be good, I hope he takes this premise and just RUNS WITH IT.” Also getting one (1) free beer on the nights when I get booked for shows. That’s probably the biggest perk of being a comedian. Seriously though, it’s THE LAUGHS! I’m a whore for approval, I just like people liking me. I like making people I don’t know laugh, I know I’m gonna get the pity laughs from my friends because hey, you better laugh, douchebags! But yeah, it’s a pretty big rush to know that people who don’t HAVE to laugh at my jokes still laugh at them. I know that’s basically the entire premise of stand-up comedy, but still, it’s 100% why I do it, and it hasn’t gotten old yet.

MWJ: Who has to put up with all your bad jokes? Does (s)he still think you’re funny?

ACJvRT: My girlfriend has to put up with them the most, but my at-home humour is very different from my on-stage humour. My at home humour revolves a lot more around baby talk, doing stupid dance moves in the living room and dry humping my girlfriend while she’s trying to fold the laundry. Also, she’s Japanese, and she taught me all the bad words in Japanese so I shout them out a lot and use them as nicknames for her. It’s funny to ME, dammit! (But I love her very much)

MWJ: Give us a lyric or two to tide us over until we get to hear you belt it out tomorrow night.

ACJvRT: “You bring the rice cooker, I’ll bring the grilled cheese/ And I’ll bring home the bacon, as long as you bring your collection of pirated DVDs”. That’s a line from a new one i’m still working on, it’s about a special brand of interracial love known as the “vancouver special” (asian woman, caucasian man). I’m not playing that one tomorrow though, it just popped into my head because of question 8. It’s funnier when I sing it, I promise.

MWJ: Anything else you’d like to say?

ACJvRT: Well, first, thanks to Matt for the interview, this is cyber awesome! Thanks to Johnny Scoop for helping me while I’m starting out and booking me for the show tomorrow night. Mondays and Thursdays at the Kingston Bar and Grill on Richards, come out and support Vancouver’s stand up scene! Thanks to whoever reads this, and all my friends and family who support me. And my girlfriend, who told me if I didn’t mention her she would “chop my penis off”.

And lastly, hey you - yes, YOU! Ever find yourself bored of doing the same stuff over and over, bars/clubs/movies/stalking celebrities? Look up some comedy or live performance gigs around town and come on out! It’s generally way cheaper than conventional forms of entertainment, and I promise if you’ve never been out to a comedy show, you’ll love it. support local comedy!

I am four months away from being among the first Masters of Digital Media.

Between now and graduation I am working with five other students to develop 12 experimental games. You can read more about my experiences learning the ropes of art, code and design over at my new blog address at mwjenkins.com/blog.

When my Flash skills get good enough I will turn this main page into some sort of splash and possibly portfolio piece that will show the games and other things I’ve worked on while at the MDM.

For now, enjoy the new blog, including an updated look and feel (and updated backend — thank you WordPress), and a more focused look at the business of game development.mwj

Houdini is the most expensive 3d animation software out there, but the big selling point is that it allows users to solve visual problems in a procedural way. This sort of proceduralism works like so: first, you take a standard primitive object, like a basic pyramid or a sphere. Then you select an effect, say the colour red, and apply it to the sphere. After this, perhaps you take a certain bumpy texture and apply it, or a certain set of commands that morph the sphere into a different shape.

Each of these effects are called nodes, and the beauty of them is that they can be re-applied to a different shape to generate a different object. Or we can follow the advice of one of the crew from Houdini, and think of proceduralism as cooking. If we think of this style of creation as making a soup, the object that you apply everything to is like the stock or base, and each node you add is a different ingredient.

This is a video of Reactable, a musical instrument of sorts that uses proceduralism to generate very interesting sounds. Each individual sphere is acting as a node, which alters some aspect of the sound, such as its pitch or frequency, to create a wide array of sounds.

This idea of using proceduralism to generate visual and audio creations is a very powerful one, and I think we will see more of it as crowd-sourcing and user-generated content becomes more popular. As one of the Houdini guys pointed out, re-arranging nodes is a form of programming, a visual way to design complex code.

One last example of the power of proceduralism can be seen in an advertisement for Guinness, designed with Houdini. The ad, which can be found here, depicts the de-evolution of three Guinness drinkers, from their current frat boy selves back to baby reptiles in the primordial ooze. About a quarter of the way in, we see the British countryside go from fully populated to an empty green as we traverse back through thousands of years in about four seconds. The challenge here was how to recreate history, so that the population seemed to occur according to some plan.

The solution described to us by the Houdini representatives was elegant and simple. First, the creators of the ad established all of the old church sites that were formed when humans began living in the particular area used for the ad. The churches were drawn into the picture. Then, using proceduralism, the areas around these churches were populated in a semi-random way with only a few different buildings (nodes), with the properties of each varied only slightly to create a number of different looking buildings. Finally, the entire process was played in reverse, and the effect is a believable recreation of how civilization may have formed.

These techniques no doubt will be used to generate all sorts of believable landscapes, from individual blades of grass right up to buildings and mountains and rivers. But more than that, proceduralism and nodes makes powerful tools available to people who have little background in programming, by representing the coding process in a bite-sized, visual way, and take us one step closer to the 3D, user-generated web.

Second Life is a great big open playground, where you can build a lot of different things and add scripts that make them do a lot of different things. Anything that citizens make in Second Life belongs to them, and they can resell their items at any price using Linden dollars which can be exchanged for real money. But you know all that already.

What I’m interested is where Second Life falls short in its claim to be heralding in a new paradigm for cyberspace. In particular, there are at least four areas that need significant work before virtual worlds like Second Life can be part of Web 3.0.

1. Peer to Peer networking: I put this first because all the other changes I’d make require far too much computing power for a single server to handle. Put simply, the old paradigm is client-server based–everybody logs on to a central server which holds the guts of the virtual world, doling out information as it deems necessary. Peer to peer networking uses bit-torrent technology to make everyone a server. This fundamentally changes the way we think about infrastructure: whereas before more people meant more money spent on central computing power, with peer to peer more people actually means that you have more power to play with. This has been done before, for example World of Warcraft uses bit torrent to distribute their patches and the SETI program uses distributed computing to find aliens. The big issue here is trust–how do we allow only the right people to turn our extra computing power into server space?
2. True 3D Modeling (and physics): 3D Studio Max allows beautiful models to be built and exquisite physics to be applied to them. It does this using an insane number of polygons and lots of math. Second Life tries to lessen the load with shortcuts like treating circles as squares. The full power of 3DS Max needs to be harnessed and used in virtual worlds, but only after the computing power is there.
3. Object Oriented, persistent Scripting: Scripting in Second Life is frustrating because everything is linear and data storage is tentative at best. In order to allow objects to do the things that they can do in single-user environments, a fully-loaded API must be developed which gives programmers even more free reign than they had before.
4. Make it matter: This last one is far more philosophical than the rest, and hinges around the way in which World of Warcraft sharpens the minds of its players.
   There, everyone has at least some goals in common–stay alive long enough to make money/gain xp/gain equipment or whatever else you want to do. In Second Life, there is no such unity of purpose. Of course, that is the way they built it. But aside from being able to push other avatars around, interaction between players is limited only to what can be programmed, which gives player-to-player interaction something of an arbitrary feel. I’d solve this by introducing death, or not being able to fly, or some limiting factor that makes the environment matter that much more. C.S. Lewis once wrote a book called The Great Divorce in which he expressed a very poignant view about hell. Hell, he said, is not a place where you are punished and forced into certain modes of behaviour–no, hell is a place where everyone can do whatever they want. What this amounts to, as the protagonist finds out, is an endless wasteland of mansions, castles, monuments to greatness, all built by people obsessed with themselves. Not having any need, they are pushed out further and further from each other, surrounding themselves with their own creations and drowning out their solitude with their own newest invention. My experience with Second Life has often been similar: I fly around beautiful cities, speeding past stunning buildings, vehicles and clothing, but rarely do I run into another human being. This is the dark side of user-generated content, and Web 3.0 must take this into consideration and ensure that players are tied together in ways to prevent it from becoming just another beautiful wasteland.
]]> http://mwjenkins.com/2007/10/4-changes-id-make-to-second-life/feed/ http://mwjenkins.com/2007/08/nytimes-on-theodicy/ http://mwjenkins.com/2007/08/nytimes-on-theodicy/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:23:24 +0000 mwj miscgamesmindphilosophytechnology http://mwjenkins.com/2007/08/nytimes-on-theodicy/ It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
– NYTimes, Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
]]> http://mwjenkins.com/2007/08/nytimes-on-theodicy/feed/ http://mwjenkins.com/2007/05/kierkegaard-on-education/ http://mwjenkins.com/2007/05/kierkegaard-on-education/#comments Thu, 10 May 2007 19:19:22 +0000 mwj quoteeducationexistentialismphilosophy http://mwjenkins.com/2007/05/kierkegaard-on-education/ What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.
– Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
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