email excerpts from november

It's hard not to want to sleep so much more these days. It's 5 here and of course already dark dark dark. The birds have been flying around and around from roof to roof, a greater gathering of wings. Meanwhile a christmas market has sprung up at Alexander Platz. I can see the little wooden shacks through a space between two buildings and the crescent curve of a ferris wheel above another. I'm glad there will be lights there since sometimes the days barely seem to get light at all. And even then, by the time I get out of class it is dusk.

Today in uni we had a workshop where we talked about game sound. It was mostly a review of the history of computer games and how sound effects and music has been integrated. It was pretty interesting, if only because I know so little about the computer game world and never had a playstation or gameboy or something similar. It was cool to consider the way people went about inventing games and how they developed in parallel to computers. The fact that games for computer have been around almost as long as computers themselves says a lot about the way we think about using new mediums. Like the original space shooter game that took a whole room of machines to run. And now we have little silver bullet boxes that blip and light and bleep and flicker.
It started me reading about the games that people are trying to develop nowadays, trying to lift the genre out of the bloody gutter of the first-person shooter. Thinking about how we interact with/through these machines never ceases to confound me.

Pink Umbrella and Me

Berlin was a cold shudder today. Wind and sudden precipitation transforming the way home from my university into a great northern scene, images of Russian winter wisped before my eyes as I walked in a dimmed world. The falling snow filtered city sounds to a white noise giving the feeling of singular isolation. In the semi-stillness the soft patsch patsch of snowdrops on a pink umbrella accompanied my steps.

Pink umbrella and I treaded onward, slanting against the force of stinging wind. My hands reddened around its ice clear handle.

Snow muted the faces that passed, the black coats, the snow spotted girls and indiscernible bundles of scarves and woolen hats. It iced the steel girders of the station, frosted glass storefronts and washed out the cobblestones and curbs.

In the gray tundra from train to apartment the oil slicks on the tram tracks were the only colorful things we passed.

The man met in the elevator and I rustled our dripping umbrellas in warmhearted camaraderie, ruffling their wings—she a great patterned bird of paradise shedding the wetness of a tropical storm.