I bundled up in the gym lobby, girding myself against the sub-freezing temperatures outside; five below, centigrade, when I walked in and undoubtedly colder now. As I stepped outside, and rounded the corner, beginning my long ambulatory trek home, I did my usual sky-survey.

I’m a little bit of an amateur astronomer; I don’t have a telescope, but I really enjoy the natural beauty of a full, unpolluted starfield. Reykjavik, like any other city, is wretchedly polluted with excess lighting, but these days we’re getting decent views of the Venusian-Lunar conjunctions. Orion’s low in the south and Ursa Major high in the north.

Today, as I looked over towards Ursa Major and then towards Polaris, I noticed a little something strange. There was this weird contrail stretching out from the northeast sky, cutting just north of the Dipper, and continuing on towards the northwest. It was a fairly diffuse contrail, but it could believably be lit by the moon or the city’s light. Then it started shifting.

Northern Lights!

I stopped dead in my tracks and watched the nascent aurora gently shimmer in the sky. There were streetlights everywhere, so I ran down the ice-slick sidewalk into a big - and unlit - gravel parking lot nearby. I had a great open view. A diffuse band, maybe a degree or so of of arc in width, but stretching all the way from northeast to northwest along the sky. It was hardly bright, which is why I’d initially thought it was some unusual kind of contrail. But, staring straight at it, the subtle rippling of the aurora belied its true nature.

This initial display was probably pretty unremarkable for the locals; few people seemed to be stopping or even taking notice of the celestial waltz happening above. I ended up quickly walking farther along my route, as halfway down it there was a long, nearly light-free path between bunch of darkened houses, with a broad and unobstructed view of the heavens.

Once I reached that spot, I stood there for a good twenty minutes. The lights had gotten more active; the iridescent curtaining was clearly visible. As I watched, a ripple - several degrees of arc in width - silently passed overhead. Sublime. The band slowly faded.

As I got farther towards home, I looked up again and was astonished to see an even more remarkable formation. The northwestern band had reappeared and seemingly split, fanning out into up to five bright, writhing green tendrils. Like a giant bird’s foot undulating in the sky.

In the end, I stumbled home, nose icicular, after a full hour of intermittent walking - a trip that normally takes twenty minutes or so.

Regardless of where you sit on the Games As Art bench, it’s hard not to appreciate the craft Gregory Weir puts into his flash titles. He recently won an award for December’s I Fell In Love With The Majesty of Colors. It’s one of those sublime games that reaches a new strata of emotional impact, similar to the way I felt about Raph’s seagull game when I first played it. If you haven’t tried Majesty of Colors yet, go for it, right now. It only takes a few minutes to play through once.

What’s notable now is that he’s just released Bars of Black and White, an interesting twist on the ubiquitous “room escape” subgenre of the puzzle/adventures. It doesn’t have quite the immediacy, flow or oomph that Colors does, but it’s admirable all the same. The theme feels a little bit like the mid-90s adventure game Normality, albeit far more serious and dystopian. The internal monologue really speaks to me, though; it’s strikingly reminiscent of a character I’m working on for one of my projects.

Definitely give Bars a play-through.

Via Raph’s Blog comes this interesting article in the Boston Globe: How The City Hurts Your Brain.

Its conclusions are striking, but without actually reading the (uncited) paper referenced by the above-linked article, I’d approach the article with caution. It was only a few months ago that the folks at F13.net got a first-hand lesson in the pitfalls of peering through a journalist’s filters, and it’s the frequent pop-science article that leaves the educated shaking their eggheads.

Thus disclaimed, I find it interesting that purely anecdotally, the idea that crowded, noisy urban environments wear us down by neurological overstimulation makes perfect sense. I’ve voiced very similar thoughts, in a somewhat less-formal manner, whenever I get into a comparative discussion of the many places I’ve lived. Given that Icelanders’ favorite question is “How do you like Iceland?”, the topic is brought up not infrequently.

My two former residences that stand most indicted are, of course, Los Angeles and the City of New York. I’ve never hidden my distaste for LA; it only takes a wee bit of crawling through this very site’s archives to find invective leveled against it. When you boil down all the comments on its social scene, traffic, layout, attitudes, housing and other issues, you find that the problem’s pulsating heart lies in the fact that Los Angeles is a multi-hundred-square-kilometer concrete cancer festering on the side of California. Go to Google Maps and look at it from space; even at the distant scale linked, there’s a notable pallidity to the landscape.

It doesn’t hurt that, as a desert, Southern California is naturally antiviridian.

New York’s case is closer to the Newbury Street example than the naturalist slant found in the article. Whenever I visit the City, and especially Manhattan proper, there’s a palpable pulse in the streets themselves, a neverending crush of ideas, words, people, things. While invigorating for a few hours or days - though that may, of course, be partially attributable to nostalgia - remaining there longer leads inevitably to the anxiety, tension and irritability spoken of by the study. As much as I may admire what New York stands for, its pace is impossibly hostile.

On the inverse, examine Iceland and San Francisco. In San-Fran, I lived close enough to Golden Gate Park that, after a light drizzle, I could open my windows and welcome in a wonderful arboreal scent that instantly refreshed my apartment. The ocean lay a ten-minute streetcar ride away, while the hothouse of downtown was similarly accessible in thirty. Here in Iceland, I can see the literal edge of civilization from my rear porch and escape humanity entirely with a simple forty-five minute drive into the moonscapes and glaciers of the interior.

Oddly, an orbital survey of San Francisco looks objectively similar to LA, although the latter’s sheer area is still unmatched. What you do, see, though, is a greater proliferation of intra-city green space, and in far less concentrated lumps. It makes a difference, I suppose.