Midterm: Earwigs and Oriental Produce in the Year 2078

The idea from this actually comes from fairly classical sources. I was holed up in the apartment, huddled over a pot of Japanese nabemono, trying to warm myself with the steam rising off the boiling daikon and lamenting the passing of summer in general when that classic Basho verse came leaping into my head:

身にしみて大根からし秋の風

Indeed, these daikon that would soon be warming my belly were themselves a timeless symbol of the fall harvest. I was also reminded of the little monk-in-training in Basho's subsequent (and much more evocative) verse:

鞍壷に小坊主のせて大根引

To me, this little blue-headed rascal has always given me images of the selfsame boy, riding a daikon like a rocketship--or like Kubrick's Strangelove straddling his beloved bomb.

From there is was no small jump to a distopian future in which the frequently incosistent systems of English nomenclature applied to oriental produce in the world's supermarkets wreaked havok on civilian earwig populations. That, in a nutshell, is basically where the idea for this game comes from.

The application was built entirely in Flash Lite 2.0. My process involved several trips to Chinatown, where I would peruse the produce, thinking about their warp and contour, trying not to bruise them in the fondling. Then I would return home and attempt to reproduce my feelings about my encounters with the myriad tubers and vegetables Mott Street. Once I had satisfactory renderings of produce, I would load them into Flash and animate them with Actionscript.

Moving the earwig according to its velocity and angle required me to use some strange operators called "sine" and "cosine" that I had not encountered since the spring of my second year in middle school. It's strange how something you thought would never be necessary in life can come back to haunt you like a bamboo root in the year 2078.

Like real earwigs in nature, the earwig in my game has 5 lives. Also, it crawls in your ear while you sleep and uses its pincher to sever important synapses and neurons and vessels.