About Last Night

The real pity is that I'm not live-blogging Siggraph. The way to do it, of course, is to have my laptop with me, and take periodic breaks thoughout the day to send some entries out. This blogging-that-night business strikes me as very 20th century. OTOH, last year I was staying at a Motel 6 in San Diego, and could not get internet access from there (they actually rig it so that you can't use phone lines to dial in, I found out later). So I wrote it all out, and published it a few days later when I got back to L.A.

Therefore this is at least being published closer to real time. Who knows?--next time I go to an event like this I may have WiFi, and be able to live-blog the action.

Professor Fractal works at a college in Georgia, and they have a party every year. I was at their event last year in San Diego, and it was there that I finally got to see the good professor. This year they had their event at the top of the Hyatt tower in downtown L.A. I drove in just for this.

I forgot to mapquest the Hyatt, but I figured it was on Hill street, not far from the convention center. How bad could it be? I got off the 110 at the west end of downtown, which is closest to the Staples center (our new mega-ampitheater for sports and music) and the convention center. It's also not too far from skid row. As I got off the freeway, just before the high rises began I saw a row of motels there: low-cost alternatives to staying in the pricey hotels that dot the nicer part of downtown. But why would you stay downtown if you didn't have to? I thought. Don't people realize that the real culture in L.A., the action, is not downtown at all? We never come here unless there's some reason.

And then, driving along eighth or whatever, I saw people. Human beings. Walking around downtown Los Angeles on a Tuesday night. Whaaaaaa . . . . ? All became clear, however, when I saw the red ribbons hanging down from their necks and I realized they were Siggraph attendees. Wow. For a moment I thought downtown had developed a night life; I wasn't prepared to have the world come to an end.

The lovely thing about the Hyatt tower is that it's a large circular room with 360 degrees of view. When I got to the top I tried to get my bearings, but it was harder than I had imagined, since a lot of the buildings I see from the freeway aren't as visible when you're among them: the tops with the logos were too high to see, or they blocked the view of each other. But I figured out which was was West, of course: it's away from the tall buildings—the architecture slopes downward toward the water.

And when I was there I got a chance to ask Prof. Fractal's lovely young student what the current technical challenges are in computer graphics. From having seen the Electronic Theater, I got the feeling that fur is still cutting edge, even after Monsters and the Shrek movies. After all, the Pixar short featured two different kinds of fur. Long hair appears to be very tough as well. And the new badass project seems to be cloth.

"Cloth is still really hard," she told me.

"So the current Harry Potter movie is something of an achievement?" I ask, thinking of how the dementors—and their robes—were highlighted in the HP segment of the Electronic Theatre.

"Oh, yes. They did a nice job."

Apparently, the other type of project considered cutting-edge is to create large crowds of people who all appear to move independently of one another (without having to write programs that dictate what each and every tiny little virtual extra is going to do). Think the Lord of the Rings battle sequences, or the crowd scene in Shrek II. Apparently, if done badly, these scenes can look like there are detectable patterns in the behavior of the crowds—and one can see the hidden hand of the programmer. This is bad.

I still have lots of things I want to ask my friends, but it can wait another day. I'm taking the day off to catch up on some things around the house, and I'll be hitting the exhibits tomorrow. I'm not going to see papers presented, since I wouldn't understand the math/CS therein anyway.

And one more word on Professor Fractal: I spent a couple of minutes listening to his students praise him and talk about what a nice guy he is. They knew I'd known him since high school, and I said I couldn't contradict them—but I know his family,and they are all nice.

"Even so," one of his students pointed out, "some people come from nice families and they are still bastards."

"Fair enough," I replied. "So we may be back to genetics, and nurture vs. nature."

Another student related that when he was deciding where to do his graduate work he had several options, and mentioned to those advising him that he'd like to work with Professor Fractal. "You absolutely can't go wrong with him," he was told.

So he's doing good work, sending bright young people out into the world to make interesting patterns and pretty pictures.

And I remembered when he himself was an undergraduate, and wasn't accepted into the math program at UCLA for some arbitrary reason. A mutual friend fretted on what a crime this was: "he's going to have to go into computer science. And he just won't make the kind of contribution in computer science that he might have in math."

The things that strike us as most fucked-up about the world when we're young sometimes seem to be the things that redeem us—or they unfold like a blooming flower as we move into middle-age.

We talked about that, too—the forty-something elephant in the room—once the youngsters had gone away and it was all just us, former students of Santa Monica High: I'm the only one who doesn't show much sign of aging, so perhaps it's easier on me than on the others. I tried to show them that I have two grey hairs, but I got, "oh, please."

"It's like a second adolescence, though, isn't it?" I asked. "Except that this one is bittersweet, because we're closer to death and we know it."

I got the look, then: wow; we'd forgotten how weird you are.

"I'm just waiting for you to look like you're older than twenty," ventured Scanman.

"Thank you," I responded.

And I came home. Washed my face, looked in the mirror, saw all the fine lines around my eyes. Oh, come on, I thought. It's there. You just have to look close.

I'm a lucky girl with lucky friends. No doubt about that.