Brightest Young Things

All words: Justin Rodermond

editor's note: devote at least 20 minutes to exploring the world of Ulillillia- a site cataloging the dreams, fears, animation, and scientific inquiries of Nick Smith in effort to express the inner-workings of his truly unique mind.

I recommend these posts for those of you unfamiliar with Ulillillia

• About My History in General/Major Issues

• Nick's Dream Journal
  

• My Long List of Weird Bizzarre and Past Fears

• Mind games: a rendering of the video game Nick loses himself to during long daydreams.

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When Libby asked me to interview Ulillillia my excitement was rivaled by the realization that it was a fairly daunting task.  He's made available his thoughtful musings for generally every subject he cares to comment on.  He's exhaustingly thorough and his precision is top notch.

But he's been busy lately, and updates to his site have been infrequent these days.  He's been coding a new side-scroller called Platform Masters and slowly conquering Final Fantasy 12.  Last year he published his first book, "The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters," clearing the way for these other projects.  Check out the Platform Masters game development on his youtube channel,

So I took this opportunity to get some updates on his book, website, games, theories, and future goals.  I had hoped to do a phone interview but he only gave it a 5% chance of occurring, so I opted for the email interview, which was a near certainty at 98%.  I recommend cranking a FF music sampler while reading this exclusive update 

Nick, what's the most interesting story you've read in Scientific American lately?
It's been a bit since I last encountered any story of any high level interest - no high favorites (compatibility from 100 to below 400) since the one about "the future of physics" with the LHC.  The most recent favorite was the one involving the use of neutrinos to study the cosmos (May 2010 issue).  I haven't encountered any articles considered an extreme favorite, but that in itself is extremely rare for almost anything (400 for compatibility or motive is extremely rare to begin with).

You recently published an updated version of The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters.  What percentages of the story were thought of during (a) conscious waking thought, (b) dreams at night, (c) during your mind game, (d) other unknown categories of thought (what are they)?
About 85% of my book was thought of during my waking times, 8% from my dreams at night, 5% from my mind game, and the other 2% toward actual real-life events I've encountered (the party in scene 3 is one example).  This is about as close as I can get.  I don't have an actual tally of this so it's hard to say with greater precision.  Each value has 2 percentage points for the margin of error which is quite substantial.

What is your personal favorite part of the book, or favorite accomplishment with having finished it?
Scene 14 easily stands out.  This scene covers Knuckles' history and how he got to be as powerful as he is.  Scene 15 is the second favorite.  Scene 8 is the third best favorite.  The middle part of scene 20, starting after the waitress leaves and before the time jump is my fourth favorite - the cars part has the highest compatibility spike in the entire book, but it's short lasting.  Scene 23 is fifth best.  On the reverse side, scene 9 is my least liked followed by scenes 7, 24, 3 (excluding the house part at the end), then a tie between 11 and 12.

I've spent hours browsing your website. Do you notice the stats on how many humans visit your website and how long they stay?
I really don't watch or check the site traffic stats much.  I think it's been since late 2008 that I last checked them....

If you were allowed to allocate a billion dollars to any project, what would it be? A new project?  An existing project?  Why?
Scientific research would be a obvious must for me.  I'd put 50% of it toward clean energy (no fossil fuels like coal or oil), and 30% toward raw knowledge.  The other 20% would go to infrastructure repairs and replacements, particularly on parts that are in the worst of shape.  Major bridges, roadways, railways, etc. would be the main focus point, but only if they provide a more efficient way around an obstacle such as a mountain or a large river.

What do your parents think of your internet fame and appreciation?
Classified.

Do you see yourself writing more books?
Not in the near future, but it's likely.  Working on and finishing Platform Masters, a 2D platformer game, is my highest priority project.  I have had some brief planning set for future projects, however.

Nick: "This is what I looked like on September 19, 2008 during a vacation. Duluth is in the background."

You've mentioned on your site that the length of time it takes to update the site discourages you from updating sometimes.  Any plans to build a new site sometime in the future?
What I could use to speed up the update (probably making it doable within a day for 3 months' worth) would be a way to scan my handwritten documents and make them into editable text.  Plain text is fine.  I'd still need to do the headlines and set the ratings bars for the dream journal and color coding for the headlines and daily entries, but that's only about 10 to 20 minutes total (which is almost nothing on the roughly 80 to 90 hours it took to do the 10 1/2 months' worth I had).  Still, it's roughly twice as fast, potentially as much as 3 times faster than the current method.  Heavy involvement with Platform Masters is also having a strong effect on the duration between updates recently.  The +60 base motive is unusually high and when I get the level creator up and going, I'm expecting this to nearly double to +120 where updates would be even longer.  Of course, PM isn't the only thing affecting it.  I'm still involved with Final Fantasy 12 at this moment (August 22, 2010), though it's quite intermittent.

Have you ever been to a video game conference such as the E3 Expo?  How high is your motive on making a journey to one of those conferences?
No.  The nearest one to me is probably 550 miles away in Minneapolis, if they do host it there.  With no known cities with a population greater than 100,000 within about 300 miles from me, it's extremely unlikely something like that will ever come close to me.  Aside from the travel, of which is of high interest to me, my motivation for going to one is otherwise neutral.  Since I otherwise hardly know anything about it, the law of new neutrality is having a strong effect since it's causing a lot of neutral affectors causing the end result to be very close to neutral.  It is above neutral though, based on the few things I know about (travel aside).

Can you give us an updated screenshot on your music playcounts?
There's several new songs present, a new one with nearly 50,000 plays (one streak got nearly 20,000 of those).  If only the songs with the 5-figure play counts were added up for total play, that's 526,149 plays, more than a half million.  Counting those with 4-figure plays as well makes it 750,698.  This does not include extras from "intro and 2 loops" type declarations where the play count is doubled for that song.  This would add about 137,000 more to this as a rough estimate giving a grand total of almost a million.  That doesn't include the plays from when I had to clear the library from a format and reinstall (since I didn't know how to backup the media library data - my record of 132,500 consecutive plays is not present because of this).

Do note that some of these are abandoned though - those with "GB" in them are the active ones.  "GB" stands for "GameBridge", which is the TV tuner I had at the time when I recorded it from a TV tuner instead of the older microphone-to-the-speaker method.  I no longer have the GameBridge, thus "GB" now refers to "greatest of the best" - it's the best possible quality I can get without directly buying it from a shop, provided such a thing even exists for video game music (and not as an MP3 or the such).  I own the game at least and the song isn't a perfect replication either (there's still a slight amount of static present).  The new screenshot is available here.

What is your opinion of the Rygar video game theme or the Metroid title music, both of which are personal favorites of mine?
I never heard of Rygar so this would obviously have neutral compatibility due to the law of new neutrality.  I've only played the original Metroid on the NES and Super Metroid on the SNES - neither theme songs are liked nor disliked.

Nick: "My 'domain.' This photo is over 2 years old and no longer applies."

Why do you think you'd enjoy driving a truck for a living?
The travel.  I've had a strong interest in travel and seeing the world for well over a decade.  Travel and vacations, however, are extremely rare for me (read:  "8.1 years since the last vacation" from the time around September of 2008, and it's going on 2 years right now without one and still counting (yep, about 60 million seconds at the moment)).  I define a vacation as being away from home for more than 36 hours.  This even includes my own home town.  This isn't a very strict definition either - it's just that vacations are extremely rare for me.

You rated teaching math even higher than driving a big rig...why don't you teach math?  I've already learned a ton of math tricks from your site, you seem to be a good math teacher.
Several reason:  no teacher's license (or whatever the name of the license is called), my sleep-wake cycle which seems hard fixed to 25 2/3 hours, no transportation (driving for me is about as dangerous as driving drunk due primarily to mind drifts).  I calculate sizes, angles, distances, probability, even more unusual things like calculating colors (for fog, transparency, etc., and also converting to and from the HSV and RGB systems).  I solve equations, draw using calculations, do pretty much everything using numbers.  I do have weak points though with math - knowing what variables in a formula mean, especially the Greek symbols and other "strange-looking" ones.  You might be familiar with how to calculate the distance between 2 points on a graph, right:  "sqrt((X1-X2)^2 + (Y1-Y2)^2)".  It's much easier to write it as "sqrt((XPositionA-XPositionB)^2 + (YPositionA-YPositionB)^2) as it's much easier to know what each variable means.  Why this isn't done, I don't know, but it often leads me to confusion when it comes to seeing formulas on Wikipedia.

Do you have a favorite artist? director? etc?  Why do you like them?
I have no favorite artist or director simply because I otherwise don't know any.  I sort of have a favorite musician though, the one who created the music for Final Fantasy until FF10 where this is different.  The name is confusing to read, but it starts with an "N" for the first name and a "U" for the last name.  It's a Japanese name. (ed- he means Nobuo Uematsu)

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If you haven't picked up the new book, check it out:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-legend-of-the-10-elemental-masters/11927096

Previously in Interview:

• 2/6: BYT Interviews: Theophilus London
• 1/20: Asghar Farhadi talks "A Separation."
• 11/4: Interview: Photographer Caitlin Teal Price
• 10/26: Crashing the Party with Steve Almond
• 10/25: INTERVIEW: Star Slinger
• 10/24: About As Close To A Warhol Interview As You're Ever Going To Get
• 10/20: Interview: Sheree Rose of SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
• 10/4: Bob Edwards at National Book Festival
• 10/3: BYT interviews: Theophilus London
• 9/30: Interview: Clicks & Whistles