The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
A little story about the title of this post: I took LING 3002, Phonetics I, this semester. It wasn’t necessarily my cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad class. There was a lot of data and practical application involved, and I’m at the point where I’ve been thinking about the phonetics of British English thanks to Xenoblade. I can even develop analyses that provide the right results without giving any of the right answers! In particular, we had one assignment involving “Homeric infixation” where I (at least, I think I did) provided a more-or-less correct analysis based on consonant and vowel clusters rather than stress patterns. So here’s to my continuing edumacation!
If you look at my archive, there’s a pretty sharp decline in the frequency of my posts over time. At the very beginning, mid-2010, I was doing 20-30 posts per month. That was my last year of high school, and around the time when I’d stopped working at the local convenience store to focus on school. My first semester of university was more or less the same, but then second semester it was down to 10-15 posts per month. Around the same throughout the summer. I’ve practically disappeared this semester, though - I’ve got about 30 posts total from September through to the end of December. The reason for this is pretty obvious - university. I still haven’t really figured out a proper balance to get the most out of my work and my play, and “work” time is still being inflated by procrastination. The work gets done, and my grades haven’t gone down, either. But I’ve been getting more and more distant as I supposedly spend all of my time “working” and then have no dedicated relaxation periods or time for socializing.
I’m not happy about that, but there’s a pretty obvious pattern - work gets done a lot faster when I’m motivated to do it. When it came to lab work, programming assignments, and studying for my intro to cognitive science class - I was there at all times and totally focused. But it was a challenge with my other classes. That’s probably bad. I’d say being able to do things you don’t enjoy and just generally be dedicated is good. On the other hand, I’m probably going to wind up doing more work that I enjoy as time goes on, not less. Either way, I’m planning to work on it.
So while I’ve been stumbling in every other area of my life, school is going pretty well. Working at the Language and Brain Lab has been fantastic, and I’m working on a short write-up of what I’ve learned. I think you’ll be allowed to see that when it’s ready. Along with some promo photos of me looking snazzy! Aside from that, the seemingly disparate areas of my degree have started to connect in important ways. I’m starting to feel fairly competent in a number of domains - cognitive science as a whole, linguistics, and programming too (though maybe not computer science, I’m definitely lacking when it comes to algorithms).
In reference to an article I read earlier this year, it feels like I’m getting an education, not just a degree. For all the people I knew in high school who agonized over where they wanted to go and would be willing to fork over ridiculous sums of money to go to a “better school”, you’d think the degree is all that matters. But if they don’t capitalize on the opportunities available, the way I’m doing at Carleton, no amount of money will help. While I had a brief crisis when I first read that article in April this year, I think it says a lot about how I’ve changed over the year that it now makes me feel better. Including books for two semesters and everything else, I’m probably totalling $7,000 per year of university. Four years for the degree, and I’m really not sure I could get the equivalent elsewhere.
The only catch to all of this is that I’m probably failing horribly at a number of promises I once made. I said that I would live for the people in my life and find meaning in them, yet I’m mostly focused on myself. I promised I’d always be there for the people I care about, but now I expect them to come to me. I’ve said a lot of things I probably thought were trivial at the time, but I’ve now forgotten them so thoroughly I can only say I’m likely not staying true to my word. This kind of follows on from spending too much time “working,” but that doesn’t make it alright.
I’ve upset people occasionally, sometimes severely so, but I think what’s worse is all the things I didn’t do. I don’t know if that’s going to change in the future. That’s probably what’s really important here. But I have no guarantees. So while it doesn’t really mean anything, know that I am truly sorry. I sincerely wish I’d been better in a dozen ways, and that I had taken the time to reach out instead of withdrawing. I’m no longer sure that doing too little is better than doing too much. For the people who still read all of this, you know who you are. To the people who cared enough to start reading, but decided to stop - I’m sorry about that, too.
So here’s to 2011. I learned a lot, and I played a lot of Final Fantasy. Looking forward to 2012 and the downfall of Kefka.
[or at least, a more severe case of TMI than this tumblr already has]
I have this thing about keeping track of what I’ve seen/read/played/listened to. It helps to find new things I might like, too - Last.fm is a prime example. It keeps track of music I play, then puts together a list of similar stuff. For my own benefit, I’ve started using a site that does similar recommendations for anime and manga, and another for books in general. Conveniently, this also lets me share this information with anyone who cares to know what I’m interested in. And if you don’t, that’s ok too! You don’t have to keep track of every book I’ve ever read. But maybe you’d like to know what books I haven’t read and might like to read, so now you can do that. Then you’ll be able to shower me with gifts that won’t make me say “oh, you didn’t have to get me anything!”
I’m linking to them on my main tumblr page now, but I’ll put some links below as well. I guess there’s sort of a creepy aspect to having all this information available, but I’m not terribly worried. I figure that if someone arrives at my tumblr from any of my other profiles, they’re volunteering to sift through far more information about me than they really need. We probably already have some interests in common anyway, and this lets me share more information about that thing. So let’s talk about Dune, or the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, or whatever article I read the other day through Read It Later. Seriously! I’d much rather talk about my favourite nerdy stuff than my latest assignments or whatever else.
Also, I’m considering changing the layout of my tumblr page to ideally give a better first impression. I’m pretty sure no more than two or three people every actually see it, and one of those people is me when I want to access my tagged posts. So uh… Yeah. If you didn’t know, my main tumblr page has a tag cloud on the left side! Which is useful if you don’t share all of my interests.
This year, my brother and I are with my dad for Christmas. My mom went home to spend Christmas with her family, but before she left we did half-a-Christmas. So my gifts from her, my grandparents, and one or two “from Santa”:
Oh, and I picked out the Game of Thrones board game as a gift for my brother and we’ve had a lot of fun with it. Enough that I’d consider it partially a gift for me, which is the good thing about doing your own gift shopping. If you’ve got a group of people willing to sit down and play a really political game for 3+ hours, I’d definitely recommend it. Imagine Risk if there were no dice rolls, and manipulating people is a far better strategy than outright destroying them. You tell them you’ll guard their back as long as it suits you, and when it doesn’t…. well.
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For our second Christmas, which was on the proper date, I mainly got more books, but physical ones this time:
My personal gift to my brother was Penny Arcade: Gamers vs Evil, another double-gift. We played it before going to bed, and I had fun with it. I can’t say how it compares to other deckbuilding games, but turns are very quick once you get used to it and the cards interact with each other in some pretty interesting ways. For example, I won the last game we played using the Carl hero, from the Automata strips. His ability makes the most expensive types of cards - Boss Loot - cheaper by one. There’s another card, Broodax In Disguise (not for the faint of heart - it’s an alien wearing a person’s body), that has a value of 1 when you play it, OR a value of 3 if you intend to put those points towards buying Boss Loot.
Whenever I failed to have enough to buy a Boss Loot, I bought more Broodax. Eventually, I got hands that - out of six cards - three of them are Broodax in Disguise.
Needless to say, I acquired a good chunk of phat lootz, which won me the game.
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Honourable mention goes to a couple of gifts I could only get shipped to the US, so my aunt brought them to my mother while she was visiting. So when she gets home, I’ll get two gifts that you may find very strange: a shell replacement for my DS Lite (a few hours of tinkering, which may ruin the machine!) and a bundle of empty cases for PSP games. Anyway, I’m weird like that. Both of those things were pretty cheap, and I’ll be happy to have them. I can replace the sticker-covered cases from PSP games I bought used, and if all goes well, be the owner of a non-broken red and black DS. Woo.
(also, does anyone still say woot? I have the strangest desire to start saying it, just because)
vael:
I’m moving my sites off of American servers. No, it doesn’t really stop the possibility of this being enacted against my sites - and in fact, I don’t even serve content that I don’t have the rights to - but I will not support a country that enacts such things.
I understand we want to control…
The best part is what Lifehacker posted earlier today: you could still access the blocked sites through their IP addresses. In other words: LOLOLOL.
It’s like if they said “we don’t want to encourage people to smoke, so we’ll hide the cigarettes behind a screen. But you can still buy them if you really want.” Which is something they’ve done here in Canada, actually. Surprisingly enough, people who want to smoke still buy cigarettes! Who could have predicted that! Granted, I know there are people who are too lazy/stupid to navigate to websites that way (would a bookmark to a site’s IP address still work?). However, those are the people who are just waiting for a decent legal alternative to illegal downloading. The actual pirates, who will pirate any way necessary, will keep doing it even if you try to hide the stash.
So yeah, gotta love ineffectual politics. Oddly enough, Canada is doing alright as far as the internet goes these days - the CRTC changed its mind about usage-based billing. Now, this doesn’t sound all that exciting at first. But here’s an illustrative example:
I don’t remember what the offered speeds were for TekSavvy back then, but I assume they were terrible. But hey, would you look at that, the bandwidth caps went up by twelve hundred percent, making the independent ISP better in every way than the company they source their service from. Thanks, free market! Actual competition sometimes is good for consumers like the capitalists always said it would be!
Anyway, I think this is the exception to the rule when it comes to technology-related politics in North America. Politicians/the lobbying groups giving them ideas are perpetually behind the times, or at least too busy looking out for their own interests. If everything were right with the world, people that clueless/horrifyingly selfish would have no place making decisions for other people.
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As far as school goes, I’ve somehow made it into the final stretch without noticing. There’s less than three weeks of actual class left, and a month from now I’ll be finishing my last exam. I’ve got three-ish final projects due Nov 30th-Dec 2nd, but nothing between now and then. This means there will be no consequences for failure to work during the next two weeks. Delayed punishment is a notoriously difficult thing to feel bad about.
To combat this, I’ve drawn up an actual calendar on a piece of paper and put it at the front of my binder. I can see when my huge assignments are due, and see the divine punishment coming from a mile away. It helps to actually visualize the time I have left, instead of seeing a purely goal-based list of due dates. To that end, before Monday, my acceptable level of absolute failure will be completing two philosophy mini-papers (half a page of writing, unknown amounts of reading beforehand) and either some synopses or a mock research proposal for my research methods class.
I’m actually not being as hard on myself as it sounds, because I’m smarter than that, but I have to be honest too. I’ve been totally useless the past few weekends, and relatively unaccomplished during the weekdays in between (and for a while preceding them, too). Thus far, I’m pretty sure I’ve done well enough to scrape by with >90% in most of my classes - intro to systems programming is a bit iffy, since I’m doing great on the assignments (and, I think, the second test) but less well on the first test. I’m not reading my textbooks as religiously as I did last year, and in some ways it shows (not getting 100% on my multiple choice PSYC 2001 midterms, for example). But if I really push on these last assignments, it’ll be fine. I’m keeping my scholarship, too, even if I’d like to do a lot better than the 80% required for that.
Anyway, I’ll see how it goes. Apparently I forgot to sign into IM today, even though I’ve been home for hours. Oops. I’ll be sitting down to work for real over the next few weeks, though, so expect less availability. On top of that, I’ve got two separate birthday parties to attend this weekend, and I’m probably leaving one a bit early to go see Unexpect live. Whether or not I can survive all of that and still manage to get work done, I have no idea. I’ll be working sooner rather than later, just in case. And hey, if I can actually power through my work instead of pissing away my time, I’ll come out well ahead of schedule. So things are looking alright so far. And I’m eagerly awaiting December 15th-21st, when I’ll have nothing to do but write a couple of papers…
[title inspired by the least important line in Streetlight Manifesto’s ‘A Better Place, A Better Time’. The rest of the song is incredibly beautiful to me, too, but for entirely different reasons. Do me a favour and read the lyrics, alright? Whether or not you can connect the dots, I think you’ll get something out of it.]
I read something in my psych textbook last year that’s really stuck with me. It was a single-line comment, something a good student knows they won’t be tested on, along the lines of “people with anxiety disorders often feel more in control of their lives when they worry about things.” I can guarantee that if I ask the people I know who’ve taken that exact same course, and read the exact same textbook, most of them wouldn’t even remember that part. What I can also tell you is that it’s more like a subtle reassurance than some sort of powerful feeling of controlling your own destiny. And that it takes a hell of a long time to think about the worst things that might happen, and debate how I should react or whether it’s worth the risk. It doesn’t feel good to take three hours working out a 30 second conversation; but think about what might have happened otherwise! I have to keep doing it, making mental conversation trees, guessing at people’s reactions, because to do otherwise is to give up the illusion of control, and risk facing problems I might not be prepared for.
As you can probably guess, spontaneity isn’t one of my strengths. Makes me a terrible role player, too.
The unfortunate problem is that I habitually use most of my downtime to think about these sorts of things. Worse still is the fact that trying to fall asleep is essentially infinite time to worry about things. Lifehacker posted an article this summer about dedicating time to worry - and not doing it during the rest of the day. It’s easier said than done, especially when you have a lot to do (and worry about), and when you’ve spent years replacing sleep with worrying. But it’s definitely something I need to work on, because it’s a big part of why I have trouble with people. Even though I know it’s true, I kind of have to remind myself that nobody is going to remember that time I said something dumb (even if I remember it forever), or expect me to be perfectly eloquent all the time (even if I regret not saying X for days afterwards, and why didn’t I think of that at the time!?). It’s a lot harder to carry on a conversation when I’m trying to keep all those things in mind. And it’s not like I often manage to map things out and predict how someone is going to react. It’s just a reassuring habit I fell into years ago.
From the outside, you probably can’t tell how hard it is to break out of this pattern. It’s incredibly powerful, and incredibly pervasive. The associations get so strong that relapse is completely inevitable. Years of an almost ritualistic reliance on a seemingly harmless activity don’t go away overnight. Maybe you don’t want to see the harm it causes, or you can’t quite connect the dots. Either way, it sometimes seems a lot easier just to work around it rather than try to change.
I’ll do it, though. I’m tired of being paralyzed as I hover over the send button, wondering whether I could improve the message (text, IM, e-mail) that I’ve been writing for 5-50 minutes. I’m tired of being tired, because I tried to go to bed early, but instead stayed up for two hours worrying, then woke up in the middle of the night and worried for another hour before falling back asleep. Tired of psyching myself out to the point where I can’t even talk to people, or talk in the presence of people when it comes to class discussion. It might take me six months, or it might take me two and a half years. But I’m tired of not being able to explain this to people, leaving them guessing as to what the problem actually is. I can take care of that problem now, while I work on the rest.
geni:
I understand that they can’t have both the new and old looks forever because they’re not willing to maintain the older style, but modern doesn’t mean “no colors”. Here, have a look:
External imageFrom left to right: archive, report, and delete email. The report button could have been red, the…
http://userstyles.org/styles/56063/gmail-easy-access-colored-buttons
here you go boys and girls
It doesn’t solve the problem of their default design being a bit dumb, and if you’ve used Gmail prior to the change you probably don’t need help knowing which buttons are which, but I agree that they could use a bit of colour.
Lifehacker’s got some more scripts in this post, though I have no interest in the others, myself.
Also, time for a Systems Programming midterm, woo! gcc -E is for the preprocessor stages, gcc -S is for assembly, gcc -c is for object code… The activation record for a function contains its portion of the function call stack, and the return address for the calling function…
Had a “wonderful” experience this morning of trying to overcome my anxiety enough to speak up in my philosophy of mind class. Something I’ve done before, actually, although I’d never participated as significantly in the class discussion. For whatever reason, just the thought of raising my hand and presenting an argument was enough to leave me shaking due to anxiety. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sitting next to anyone I knew, though pretty much everybody was present (something about essays being assigned raises attendance dramatically). Maybe it was because I was doing more than just asking clarification questions after waiting to see if anyone else would (this might actually be it, because it didn’t bother me when I raised my hand at the start of class to say it was nice to finally read a more cognitive science-y paper). Or maybe it’s something else I haven’t though of yet. I still did it, though, because not only had I done the reading for the first time in weeks, it was like a checklist of all the things I’ve been learning about in other classes. Applications of Ungerleider and Mishkin’s cross-lesion studies to the multiple realizability problem? Hell yeah! Let’s get some actual evidence for our philosophical arguments, please and thank you.
And yet, I spent most of the lecture alternately shivering anxiously, in anticipation perhaps, and then being frozen in fear after I’d finished talking and opened the floor to responses from the prof and the rest of the class. It’s not a public speaking thing, either, because I had the exact same feelings last night as I debated whether to talk to someone I’ve known for years. Figuratively shaking in my boots (what sort of savage wears shoes indoors? Come on, America) as I went to go knock on the door, though there was some potential for disaster there. Then barely able to express myself, even though I’d already spent more than a month thinking about what I wanted to say, on a pretty regular basis. There’s nothing for me to be afraid of, really, and yet it’s there anyway.
But I manage! I’m doing pretty alright, lots better than I was anyway. Went to see Repo: The Genetic Opera with a couple of people, and against all odds I enjoyed it a lot. However, I’m not going to recommend that you watch it, unless there’s a shadowcast performing alongside. Have you heard of that? I hadn’t, but here it is in a nutshell: they take a movie, mainly Rocky Horror Picture Show and Repo, and then they have people who act out the scenes in front of it. So you take something that would (probably) suck and not be at all interesting to watch by yourself, and suddenly it’s amazing. It’s one of those “the whole is greater than the parts” kinds of thing. The next show isn’t until February, but I’m probably going to force some people to go see it with me… Hopefully they don’t hate it.
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On an unrelated note, as for why I haven’t been all that talkative lately, school’s pretty busy right now. I’ve got a midterm thursday and another friday, both of which I’ve barely studied for so far. Hopefully it’ll be ok! One’s a multiple choice exam for my research methods class, which will probably be super easy. The other is in systems programming, and I may not survive. If I do (and against my better judgement), I’m going to go out for the cognitive science social event (the one and only, unless you count D&D) and maybe make a token effort at drinking. Meanwhile, assuming there are no hardware disasters (and I can’t guarantee that), we’re ready to run a few practice tests for the project I’m interning on! After that, it’s time to start running participants and collecting data, which is pretty exciting actually. We took some press photos for the lab, to use for all the “look what sorts of cool research students are doing here!” things. I think I’ll be allowed to post those, and they turned out fairly well actually. I clean up nice, guys.
Oh, and apparently, interning is a word. Who knew!
I got some free headphones with my new phone, and they weren’t bad as far as free headphones go. Better sound quality than the piece of crap $15 Skullcandy earbuds I bought a year ago, and they had a button that would play/pause anything playing on my phone. Neat! So I stopped using the crappy, uncomfortable, terrible sound quality Skullcandy headphones, which I only bought out of desperation because I couldn’t find my usual $10 Sony ones.
Last week, the left earbud stopped working unless you tweaked the cord in a specific way. Fine, I can live with this, I’ve got to power through an assignment anyway. Nope! A few hours later, the other earbud gives out too. Well, shit. Now I have to listen to dumb people while I’m trying to concentrate. But, ok, I’ll just stay on campus really late and there won’t be anyone around to bug me. Fine, it all works out, I get my old headphones back and stuff. Sucks, but it’ll do.
But everyone who uses earbuds seems to go on about how they “used those white iPod headphones for years and they worked fine!” So when my dad had to replace his iPhone after dropping it (screen shattered, bits of broken glass in his hand, etc.), I snagged the headphones that came with it. They worked just fine listening to music in iTunes, and were slightly less uncomfortable than the Skullcandy pair, and all was well.
Then I tried to use the headphones with my phone. My Android phone. And it sounds like ass. Like someone is sitting on my ears, specifically. Also, like the audio was playing in slow motion. Then being filtered through tinfoil.
Still sounds fine playing music through iTunes. This is what they call a conspiracy, folks. And I have no idea what it means to be “like an Apple product,” because a certain mysterious internet vigilante (who is in hiding) never finished their simile. Maybe it means to be spiteful and refuse to work well with others? The world may never know.
[I bet you thought you missed me until you read this]
[title courtesy of this XKCD shirt I’ve always liked, but known it would be stupid to actually wear. Also, I wrote this post… nearly two weeks ago, and since I’ve started talking about it with a few close friends it’s gotten a lot better. I’m only just posting it now because I know the rest of the people who will read it are exactly the people I haven’t spoken to enough, and I’m not sure how you’re all going to react. No pity, alright?]
Now that classes have started again and I’m starting to see people I never spoke to last year, I’ve realized something strange. Without noticing it, I’ve developed pretty severe social anxiety. To the point where going to meet up with a bunch of linguistics students was physically difficult for me. Thinking about it hours in advance made me sick to my stomach - that was my first big hint. When I got there, I couldn’t even think of things to say, or was always ten minutes behind the current conversation. It was pretty brutal.
Then I got to thinking about how little things have changed between Brittany and I now that she’s moved in at my mom’s - we see each other physically about as often as we used to speak by text/IM (both of which we’ve mostly stopped doing) when she lived in PEI. And I realized that I’ve been a bit off around her, too, never really knowing what to say and dreading the thought of starting a conversation. And it’s sad to think that one of my closest friends is now my roommate (half the time), and we never hang out, and I say it’s because I don’t want to intrude when I’m really just afraid. And worse is the fact that I’m sitting in the basement, trying to force myself to study, but I wind up being unable to concentrate because I’m just miserable and lonely. And I could just walk upstairs and say “hey, what’s up?” But I don’t. It’s been almost three months, and I haven’t done that once. It’s baffling, honestly, but only when you really think about it. As you can see, it’s taken me this long to notice, so there’s some positive self-deception for you. I’m slightly curious about whether I’m the last person to realize this, and whether I’ve always been like this, but I haven’t had the guts to ask.
It gets worse, though, because then I think about it some more and realize it’s been a couple of years since I started a casual conversation like that at all. Including over IM. Only two or three years if we’re talking zero conversations whatsoever, but then, an epiphany - I’ve been like this since I first got on MSN in 8th grade. With few exceptions, I’ve always waited for other people to start the conversation or only ever started to talk to them when I had something specific to talk about - a funny webcomic, comment about a new game, whatever. Vael and I talk a lot over IM, but nine times out of ten, he starts the conversation, and the rest of the time I have something to show him or ask him about.
[Errata: Vael says he counted and it’s roughly 50/50. But I was mainly thinking about a sort of “hey, what’s up” kind of thing that just leads naturally into a conversation. Plus, a lot of the time you don’t actually have anything to talk to someone about yet, so you don’t have much else to say.]
So suddenly it’s come to light that I’ve never been comfortable starting a casual conversation. You can see how that might be a problem when it comes to getting to know people. It seems like I’ve made most of my friends by accident, considering the number of new friends I made during high school (just Vael) and the number I’ve made since moving to Ottawa (one, a few more depending on how much you lower your criteria for “friends”). Not to mention the piss-poor job I’ve done of keeping the friends I’d already made. And the others I’ve driven away trying to “help” them with all of their problems, because I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about… Or worse, the people I got to know simply because they needed someone to talk to about stuff like that.
I’m working on it, though. Friday before last, I invited someone over for supper just for the sake of having some company. And I’ve felt a lot better since then, because it was a lot like hanging out with people once upon a time. And I’m not deliberately avoiding sitting near people I kind of know in class, though I’d still feel weird going and sitting down next to them. And thinking about just how deep the problems run has made me realize just how little I need to do in order to improve on my previous behaviour. So how’s that for low expectations! Spoke to a human being today, I’m so proud of myself. But, seriously, this is where psych 101 comes in and I realize I’ve had this avoidance learning thing going on for years. And I don’t intend to keep it up. Which is why I’m writing this, instead of posting sad song lyrics, or about how I’ll be FOREVER ALONE T.T, or how much I identify with Socially Awkward Penguin.
I’m not looking for pity, and I’m not going to say “this is just how I am” or look for ways to cope with the symptoms (without actually dealing with the real problem). But hey, I have a cell phone and unlimited texting. If you don’t know it/aren’t in Canada, when my IM status doesn’t say I’m busy, feel free to say hello. I’m not ignoring you, and I don’t hate you either. I just don’t know where to start most of the time. But don’t do it too much! I can’t keep relying on other people to start conversations. I’ll be around, anyway. Plus, if you’ve read this far, I can only assume you’re either very interested in my life, or can’t think of anything more exciting to be doing. To both of those kinds of people, you may as well just say hello - I’ve got tons of contact info on facebook if you’ve got me there, or you can scroll down my ugly tumblr page and find a few options.
I said I’d stop posting music because of Last.fm, but I’m still seriously debating whether or not to post a lot of what I’ve got floating around in my drafts. So, in the mean time, have a post about a fairly popular band. Lunar Sanctum by Kamelot, from their 1999 album The Fourth Legacy.
I really love the chorus, and the lyrics are great as well:
there’s a place where I want to hide
with a view to a shallow moon
there’s a star in my cosmic mind
that reminds me of you
Full song’s lyrics here, through Dark Lyrics as per my tradition.
And hey, actually listen to this one! If you’ve never heard of Kamelot, actually stop and listen for a few minutes. I know how many followers I have, and I see my audio posts only getting three plays!
Speaking of limited interests, if you keep hoping for wonderful Final Fantasy related stuff from me, sorry ‘bout that. I’m carrying FF VI and my DS with me, but never playing it. And if you don’t like philosophy/don’t wish you were majoring in cognitive science, I’m very, very sorry. You’re about to get pretty much a week worth of posts from me on the subject. As in, a many page long essay, but split up for somewhat easier reading.
I’m going to enjoy it, and I’ll feel like a smarty pants posting it, but you might see it them as pretentious pants. Like I said, very, very sorry. But sometimes I just can’t contain my excitement, and you know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve read a few textbooks, so now I definitely know better than everyone else! Time to ramble on and illuminate the world! Except I’m going to write somewhat well and it’ll be good, I hope. Ideally, you should understand without needing prior knowledge.
Now, it’s back to work with me. Got a Python script to finish, a bit of light reading to do. Maybe I ought to work on the computers assignment, philosophy essay, and midterm I have next week. But, to be honest, things are more or less under control. Which is a really nice feeling.
I used to use Last.fm, and found it great for getting recommendations, but at some point it stopped scrobbling so I gave up on it for a few years. I found out a week ago that when you install scrobbler and create a new account, it reads your existing iTunes library playcounts, so I did that as fast as I possibly could. Now I’ve got this nice little profile that tells you all the music I listen to, including what I am listening to right this second, and I don’t have to keep posting individual songs.
Anyway, this is just a quick post while something else I wrote is being proofread by a handful of people. You’ll see that before too long. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, maybe too much (time it takes to find two dozen research papers to read: a few hours, time it takes to read each paper: 1-2 hours, and get back to me in a week), but I’m getting back into School Mode. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be starting to run participants for a few experiments at the Language and Brain Lab, so I get to be an assistant for that! Exciting stuff.
Five years ago (minus a month and 9 days) I was sitting in front of our “big screen” 36" CRT TV with my launch day PS3 and a copy of Insomniac’s first Resistance game. I ran around, shot aliens in the face, and I probably had fun doing it. I think I tried to run around and find all the hidden documents for a little while, and even ventured online for a couple hours of multiplayer. Too long ago to remember much more though.
Roughly three years ago, Resistance 2 came out, and I liked it well enough too. Convinced a few friends to buy it so we could play co-op online… but I never played it with them. Oops. I didn’t really mind the changes from the first game (regenerating health, no weapon wheel), but I was really getting into the story. What’s up with the Cloven? What are the Chimera? I was under the impression that there were more backstory documents in the multiplayer, so I really wanted to get those, but my interest waned pretty quickly.
A month ago now, Resistance 3 came out, and I knew I didn’t really care. But hey, I’m already two games in, I have to know what comes next, right? So I bought it a couple weeks ago. Played my way up to chapter 17 (of 20) over the course of ~8 hours or so. And I didn’t enjoy it in the slightest. As far as the gameplay goes, the best ideas it has are to bring back health packs and the weapon wheel. There’s nothing to see here, folks. You’ve got scripted sequences where it seems like you might die, but you obviously won’t. You’ve got arena areas with just the right amount of ammo and health to get you through safely. You’ve got some “quirky” weapons like the one that freezes dudes, and the one that mutates dudes, but the end result is that the other dudes die and you don’t.
I kept going, looking for the fun, hoping it might be right around the corner. But there was no fun to be found anywhere in my $60 game. Trade-in value for the game is down to $25, but of course that’s in-store credit. I usually think of trading in a game along the same lines as throwing it out, and I was that frustrated with the game that I almost considered it. But not for half of what I paid for it, and conditional on the fact that I want to spend that money on another game. So I’ll just keep it, and set it aside in the Hall of Shame section of my shelf.
The thing is, I’m not sure if Resistance 3 is just an ok game, or whether I’m bored with shooters in general. Or maybe it’s not even shooters - maybe I’m just done with “Hollywood games.” I want Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, where you can actually fail the platforming sequences. I want Demon’s Souls, where rocks fall down and kill you, instead of falling around you to create the illusion of action. I want to be legitimately afraid because my character is weak and the enemies are strong, because a dark room with some scary noises isn’t going to cut it. I want a narrative that gives me just enough information to get engaged, but always has bigger mysteries to solve. I want characters that are worth caring about. And I don’t need every game to have all of these things - one or two of them, done well enough, can carry a whole game.
But I’m done throwing away sixty bucks on games with nothing to offer. I’ve got better things to do with my time and money. I can’t see any shooters coming out any time soon that I have any interest in buying, and I’m going to think a bit harder before I jump on something like the new Assassin’s Creed or FF XIII-2. In the mean time, stuff like Serious Sam: The Random Encounter is far more interesting to me than all of the big releases coming out this year.
It’s not totally clear how this is going to work on non-backwards compatible PS3s, because they haven’t been totally specific about the details yet. Really, all I’ve found so far is that they’re starting with five games, for $10 each, which is probably at least 50% cheaper than getting them on eBay. I probably paid at least $20 for the copies I bought of, uh, every single one of these games in the past. Some (Grim Grimoire, God Hand, Maximo) I’ve sold in the intervening years because I knew I’d never play them, but don’t let that stop you from picking them up.
Ring of Red is probably the one you’ve never heard of, so here’s a gameplay video. The next five minutes of that shows you the combat - outside of the battles, it’s a strategy RPG. I really enjoy the game conceptually, though I generally fail at actually playing it.
Also, Kingdom Hearts 3D is probably going to be the game that sells me a 3DS. First, because I’m kind of a whore for Square-Enix - I kiiiiind of buy just about every game they release, and when I bought a PSP, I did it so I could play 6 Squeenix games and 2 others. Second, because I played The World Ends With You before school, during lunch, and after school every day for many months.
The demo for KH 3D at the Tokyo Game Show had Neku popping in to demand that Sora team up with him to play the Reaper’s Game.
There goes $200, basically.
I also can’t help but want a PS Vita. I mean, I have a PSP now, I know what that’s like. And the Vita does that, but it will play my PS2 games, and possibly PS3 games? And I can share that stuff between the console and the handheld and switch between them. And it’ll have the Facebooks and stuff. The moral of the story is, that’s some sexy technology for $250. I don’t know when there will be games I want to play on the system, but I still want it.
No, I can’t afford any of this. I shouldn’t have bought Resistance 3… but I did. I shouldn’t have spent $35 on Deus Ex. In fact, I shouldn’t have bought a PSP, since that’s easily like $300-400 I’ve spent over the last six months, not to mention ~150 hours of playtime over the summer. And twice that for my brother, at least.
But I DON’T regret pre-ordering Dark Souls - which comes out tomorrow! And I won’t play it until Christmas! It’s going to be great. Definitely getting my money’s worth out of it.
S'been two weeks since I last posted something, and I’m really sorry ‘bout that. See, this whole time I’ve been planning a big post, but I haven’t been willing to sit down and work on it and wound up deciding it was too much reading for too little benefit. I’ll try to salvage it sometime soon, with as little text as I can get away with. Realistically, sharing my introspective monologues doesn’t benefit anyone other than me, and I figure if I’m going to be selfish, I may as well be quick about it.
Instead, I’ve got a Lifehacker post about Facebook that links into my post from a few weeks ago about Google collecting your information. Basically, some people found out that Facebook will track your browsing information and stuff, attached to your Facebook account, even after you’ve logged out. To deal with it, you have a few options: a list to load into AdBlock Plus, a Chrome extension just for Facebook, or a more radical option - the Disconnect extension for Chrome and Firefox.This has the added benefit of disconnecting you from more than just Facebook - it’ll hide you from Google, Twitter, and everyone else. When it turns off certain captcha services, Gmail, and other useful stuff, you can just toggle it off I think.
So there you go. Now you can opt-out, if you want. Seems fair to me.
edit: Oh and my Final Fantasy Thing was posted! I laughed really hard when this line came up, it’s the perfect hilarious SNES villain line. FF VII and VIII went all serious, but V (at least, the FF V Advance translation) has just completely absurd moments like this. You’ve got a villain who is, no joke, a tree that got really angry and decided to destwoy evewyfing.
“I turned myself into a tiny splinter, waiting for just this moment!”
So, I told myself I wouldn’t pull “Condescending Second-Year Science Kid” in my PSYC1001 class. BUT. Butbutbutbutbut.
The first-years on WebCT are so annoying.
“You know guys, it’s not high school anymore! We have to step up our game!”
Step up your game? He gave you 20 pages of reading, sweetie. Come on.
If my PSYC 1001 course is any indication: Wait for the deluge of messages from people asking for notes. “My computer got a virus and crashed so I like lost everything”, or “I got super sick for the last six weeks and since the midterm is coming up…” or “Somebody stole my laptop!” Sometimes they just post on the message boards, but other times they take the slightly more subtle route and just send a message to everyone in the class roster. Often, they’ll post on someone else’s topic and say “can I get the notes too plz”, or not include any way to actually send them the notes.
It’s awesome because I know the names of a few people who were too dumb to keep checking my website even after I sent it to them once. And some of them are in my classes this year. Good luck out there, you trooper, you. Glad I could give you notes for three of our five classes. Hope you know how to write an essay by now.
Sarah Saturday by The Bouncing Souls, from their album The Gold Record. It came up on shuffle while I was driving to work the other day, and it was great. Really enjoy listening to these guys.
Lyrics here, if you care!
Ars Technica wrote a great piece you should really read about game developers leaving the AAA industry to make it on their own. Inside, they mentioned a game called Card Hunter, which is being funded by the co-founder of Irrational Games - the guys who made System Shock 2 and Bioshock. I looked it up, and found out it’s being worked on by other people you might have heard of. Farbs makes some pretty cool games, and I actually bought into the Captain Forever series when the first game was in beta. On a slightly more famous note, does the name Richard Garfield ring any bells?
There’s no definite release date yet, but it seems pretty fascinating. They’ve got a couple of developer diaries talking about deck building in the game: one here, and another here. I pretty much like everything about this game, but the deck building is particularly interesting. Rather than adding specific cards, you equip items, which give you a specific “suite” of cards. Should make for some good strategy.
I guess I probably shouldn’t post about a game that isn’t out yet. But I’m eagerly awaiting its release, and I think some of you might be interested too. After all, you probably played Magic years ago. Remember the good times? Yeah, me too. Card Hunter will probably have more good times! Play it with me when it comes out!
Classes start again tomorrow, so I thought I’d post my class schedule. I’ve already posted about which classes I’m taking, so available/busy information should be good enough. This is a public link, indexed for Google searches (required in order to have a public calendar, sadly), but I guess I can give you - specifically, you, because you’re my favourite reader - the private link if you absolutely must know where I am and what I’m doing at all times.
If we ever want to organize group MMO playing or anything like that, Google Calendar is a good tool for it. It handles multiple calendars pretty well, and you just have to look for an open spot between everybody’s schedules.
First of all, this XKCD comic will make you just as good as I am at helping you figure out how to do things I have no idea how to do, like wrapping text in Photoshop. Second of all, the article this post’s title links to will actually make you better than I am (well, until I start consulting that chart) at correcting wireless internet problems.
Although you might want to download the .pdf version, available below the “Related Articles” section, so you can consult it when your internet isn’t working.
Work It Out by Beat Crusaders, from their album Popdod.
I think it speaks for itself.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and have mentioned far too many times to my friends, I got an Android phone recently. It’s working beautifully, by the way - CyanogenMod 7 is far better than the version of Android 1.5 that came with the phone, and LauncherPro is a whole lot faster than CM’s default launcher ADW. Despite the pretty weak hardware, things run pretty well, though I can’t play many games beyond Game Dev Story. But do I really need anything else…?
As I was setting up my new phone, I gleefully entered contact info to Google’s servers - allowing me to get everything back if I flash a new ROM, or even buy a new phone - I realized just how much data I was handing over. Am I ok with letting Google know who my friends and family are? For that matter, are my friends and family ok with it? Should I enter their addresses for my own convenience, or would that be a breach of their privacy? Would I start getting ads in Gmail for flights to New Brunswick around Christmas time to visit family, and to PEI in the spring to visit friends? I’m already telling Google which contacts send me e-mails important enough to notify me about. When I’m busy because of class or meetings, and for that matter, where they are. Between my phone’s GPS and cell phone tower information, they can categorize the places I spend most of my time as “Home.” When I post to Facebook from my phone, it’s probably going to say “Posted from Facebook Mobile near Carleton University.”
A few days later, Lifehacker linked to an article declaring that “Google wants to own your online identity.” Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Google, declared that Google+ was built primarily as an “identity service,” and that they planned to build further services based on that information. The article quotes some guy who summed the situation up pretty well: who did Google build this for - you, or them? And maybe it’s worth asking that same question about everything else they do. After all, they certainly don’t make money by providing an awesome alternative to calendar software, or Google Analytics, or a web browser, or their Public DNS service. No, as the GigaOM article reminds us, Google makes money through advertising. And advertising gets easier and easier the more information they can get about their potential customers.
And yet, this doesn’t really bother me. So long as they sell advertisements, but keep the data to themselves, I don’t really mind. Unless you’re a supar haxxor, nothing you do on the internet is ever completely hidden. Your ISP logs everything, if they’re ever inclined to take a look at your internet usage. Any web-based e-mail service you use will have access to your data that way, and every site you visit probably leaves three cookies in your browser’s cache. If Google collects that data from me and makes some money off of it, that’s more or less a fair trade for the services they offer. What would I do otherwise? Keep track of four different e-mail inboxes in Thunderbird? Use Rainlendar or a Thunderbird extension to manage my calendar, but be restricted to accessing it on one computer? Fact is, Google’s products are a whole lot better than similar software you might otherwise pay for, and somebody has to pay the engineers who create them.
I guess some people might prefer to pay with money rather than personal information. I’m not that worried about my imagined sense of privacy, though. The day hackers do to Google what they did to Sony, I’ll start worrying.
(Although, 1.5 games might be more accurate, since I’m about to finished the second I’ve just finished the second - of three - worlds in FF V, and after that, FF VI - see my previous post from May)
Sorry for the lack of real updates recently! Here’s part of the reason why: I’ve spent the last couple of weeks playing through FF VIII. Final play time was just short of 70 hours. Couldn’t be bothered to level up the characters outside my main party, or track down a couple of Level 7 Boss Cards, but other than that I did everything there was to do. Except play a no-level game and maximize my base stats using Devour/Boost items, but that’s for craz… dedicated fans. Yeah.
Anyway! I’m not 100% sure what I should say about it, seeing as the game is a dozen years old by now. I can say that I didn’t care in the slightest about Squall and Rinoa’s relationship - sorry, was there development there? Because it seemed like someone just flipped a switch, and off they went. The thing about the orphanage and the memory erosion of the GFs was pretty silly, but whatever. And what the hell is up with NORG…?
I admit, though, I have to really look for things to dislike about the game. I definitely had a lot of fun playing it, and the section with Squall commanding Balamb Garden into battle was awesome. Even though I selected “prepare for attack” first, since the game hinted you should ambush them, and later scolded me for not attacking first. But yeah, I never really appreciated the direction of these action-movie-esque scenes (being chased by the robot in Dollet, the fight between Gardens, or the reactor sequences in FF VII) as a kid, but now I’m impressed that the game manages to create a real sense of tension in jaded ole me. Not to mention things like Quistis’s declaration that “Seifer’s sentence was carried out in Galbadia,” and following Sephiroth’s trail through Shinra - the music and everything else just come together for an intense feeling of dread and foreboding.
I especially liked the way the game’s systems feed back into each other. If you’ve played Persona 3 and 4, much as I love the games, the social link stuff is more or less totally separated from the dungeon crawling stuff. But in FF VIII, everything has a useful purpose. I originally thought that Triple Triad would be dumb or a waste of time, but then I found out what you could get from the rare cards, and so I set out to collect them. The Cactus Thorns you collected a hundred of from hunting Cactuars turn into Hundred Thorns, which can teach some ability called “Return Damage” or be converted into other stuff. Point is, the game rewards you in a lot of ways, and that’s a smart decision. Also, super twinkable, delivering ultimate min/max joy. Final boss casts Meteor? Good thing I only take 20 damage from each hit!
Oh, I do want to mention the weird as hell part of the ending that comes right after you beat the final boss. It goes on for way too long, and it’s just… weird. If you’re ok with spoilers, watch the first 5 minutes of this video. I think they’re trying to make you think Squall was erased from existence? Not really sure whose bright idea that was.
To tell you the truth, I actually almost finished FF VIII when I was a kid (roughly age 7). I’d made my way to the fourth disc, and then… my dad saved over my file when he was playing later that night. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO MEEEEEEEEEEE?! I swore revenge, and retaliated by ripping up some of his old socks with scissors. And never touched FF VIII again, until now. Do you think I secretly have bonus nostalgia for the game, even though I’d forgotten everything about the game except the section with the robot in Dollet? It was like I was playing the game for the first time, but maybe somewhere in my mind I knew I’d been there before. Liek wif Squall and da GFs amirite? But yeah, now I’ve actually finished the game, and it only took me 70 hours to undo the effects of his save file confusion.
Thanks, Dad.
I know I’m two days late to the party, but who doesn’t like comics from The Oatmeal? Certainly not bears.
Geez, how hard is it to just get rid of people?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to become what I want without erasing my past and getting people to let go, I just want to be myself.
Your past will always be a part of you, no matter how much you try to deny…
Oh, no, you certainly shouldn’t hold onto the past or grieve over things you can’t change - but neither should you deny that what you’ve done in the past has anything to do with you now. You have to accept it, because you can’t change it. Whether you want “the good times” back, or wish you’d done things differently, it’s just two sides of the same coin. Either way, you haven’t made peace with your past. It’s a foundation for the future - what kind of a house has no foundation? You can’t just rip it all out when you decide you don’t like it.
You won’t make the same mistakes again? Well, that’s why your past is important. It’s what made you who you are. If you’ve decided to change, that’s because of your past, and that decision couldn’t exist independent of what you did and how you felt about the results. I don’t believe people should be held responsible for things that they’ve done in the distant past, as long as they aren’t still doing those same things. What’s done is done, so there’s no point in hiding it or denying it.
I mean, what I’m getting at is, if you were to “erase your past” as you said, then you’d be erasing all of the things that you’ve learned from it. The present and future matter the most, absolutely, but they’re inexplicably inextricably bound to what has come before. Dissatisfaction with the past -> change in the present -> better future. You’re not clinging desperately to the past, you’re bringing it along with you into the future. I think it’s better to go hand in hand, rather than kicking and screaming.
I certainly don’t want to get involved where I’m not wanted, but I used to have plenty of friends who didn’t know me, either. It’s kind of why I started writing about myself here, because I was tired of hiding everything. The people who never really cared will drift away if you let them, but if someone is particularly tenacious, I’d say it’s best just to be honest about it. If they know that you totally do not want them in your life, and continue to insist, that’s harder to deal with. But you’ll never make any progress if you just wait for them to figure it out on their own.
…Because they probably never will.
Geez, how hard is it to just get rid of people?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to become what I want without erasing my past and getting people to let go, I just want to be myself.
Your past will always be a part of you, no matter how much you try to deny it. You can kick people out of your present life, and you can become a different person from who you used to be. But who you were is just as important as who you’re going to be.
Last summer, when we moved to Ottawa, my mom decided that we should all have our own cell phones. My dad already had his own, so she got a 3-year contract family plan for herself, my brother, and I. Her phone, the main line, cost $35/month + $20/month for countrywide My5 call/text. The other two lines were each $30/month. Total: $115/month. We got the most basic crap phones you could get, because hey, we never needed fancy cell phones before. I started itching for an upgrade after a few months, but the reality was that all I needed to do was making one call per month and send text messages, so anything would do.
BUT THEN DISASTER STRUCK. About a month ago, after being crushed and scratched by 30 kg (66 lb) bags of concrete mix, my phone’s signal quality went down drastically. To the point where I would have no signal anywhere in my house, for days at a time. My mom and brother had identical phones, and when placed beside each other, I would have no signal and they would have a perfect one. This was the excuse I was waiting for! The phone either needed to be repaired/replaced, or I’d get an upgrade. However, I can’t afford a data plan, so I needed to see if I could upgrade the phone without paying for wireless data. When Lifehacker posted about Geekaphone, a site that would suggest the perfect phone for your needs, I made a list and set off for the phone store.
I asked after a handful of phones, and the only way I avoid a data plan would be to buy the phone off-contract for $400+, with the phones at the top of my list being $600. If I got a data plan, I’d get the “with a 2-year contract” price. However, I needed to pay a $35 administration fee for changing phones (offset by a $50 mail-in rebate), and a $120 “early upgrade fee” for not waiting out the contract. But again, this requires me to sign up for a $30/month data plan. I certainly can’t afford a $600 phone, and I definitely can’t afford to spend $700 on a data plan over the next two years. Well, I probably could in the long term, but with no income during the school year, it might be tough. And so, I resigned myself to finding out my options for an out-of-warranty replacement.
Returning home, we dialed up our wireless provider and made our way to a customer service agent. It would cost $20 to replace my phone with an identical model, but for $40 I could get a Samsung A886 (meh), and for $80 I could get a Sony Ericson Xperia X1 (meh-ish). No matter what I got, I’d keep the same contract and not need to shell out for a data plan. To give me time to research the phones, my mom (who is nice and polite pretty much all the time) asked if we could change our plan to match the current offerings. Eventually, we came out of the deal paying $65/month for the main line and $15/month for the two additional lines, with 500 extra monthly daytime minutes and countrywide My5 for all three phones. Total: $95/month, for a better plan. Not bad, and we didn’t even have to yell and scream and talk to customer retention!
I had grudgingly decided to go with the X1, if only for its sliding keyboard. However, since we’d earned a lot of goodwill from the customer service lady, I asked what kind of phone I could get for more than $80. The next step up was the Motorola Quench (known as the Cliq XT in the US) for $130. Officially, it’s stuck at Android 1.5 because there was no way to get 2.1 to perform adequately on the mediocre hardware. But recent updates to CyanogenMod have added support for the phone, so the decision was made: get the Quench, root it the day I get it, and optimize everything for performance. Since I spend most of my time either at home or on campus, I’ll have access to secure-ish WiFi most of the time. Why bother spending $30/month just so I can check Facebook while I’m on the bus?
The only potential downside here is that the phone might just suck so much that nothing runs well on it, but with all the customization options, I’m hoping I can manage. As long as I keep in mind that it doesn’t have gigabytes of RAM, I should be able to run things pretty smoothly… one at a time, anyway.
Until I get a hold of it around Friday, you’re safe from me talking about all the stuff I’m doing with it. But when I get it, expect to be inundated with an absolute nerdfest of Android-love.
Greenman gaming is a website where you can buy games for Steam and for their own capsule client for cheaper than the regular retail price, you also get an extra $5/£5 store credit if you register and buy through my link, there’s also a 20% off discount code for you here: 20PEC-FACEB-SAVER
If you’re thinking of buying Deus Ex HR, Red Orchestra, etc then I strongly recommend buying from there.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get Deus Ex: Human Revolution for $45, but it cost me $34 here with the 20% off coupon and… yeah I bought it. You don’t get the credit until after your first purchase, though. However, they have a neat thing where they suggest games you could buy with the credit you’ve earned - I could get Hitman: Blood Money or Tropico 4! I’ll just hang on to it for now, and come back next time I want to buy a PC game.
I’d pass on my referral link, but that would be uncouth. I am grateful to our bro, Cameron, and I shall show my gratitude for this deal by passing on his referral link as well. Also, Vael bought the game yesterday and paid more than I did so har har.
Stumbled upon the website psychologyofgames.com, which I will hyperlink even though you could drag it into your address bar, and in addition to being worth exploring on your own I thought I’d link to a few interesting pieces. And actually, I’ve posted about them before - their Three Reasons We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles article is very good at keeping me from wasting my money!
A follow up to something I posted long, long ago is Procedural Generation and User-Generated Content II: Storylines, AI, and Emergent Gameplay. I didn’t title it, so don’t blame me. While I like the idea of generating random contexts, and I’m sure it is being done already in the games we play. The emergent storylines part, in particular, is very interesting to me from an AI perspective - but also in terms of what the player can be allowed to do in something like a browser-based game where players have to be explicitly allowed to do things. Also, basing the game on text (i.e. most of the browser-based games I’ve played, because games made in Flash are “flash games”) makes it super easy to add mechanics. You want to let the player seduce, or murder, or steal from, or lie to any NPC in the game? Easy, just give them dialogue options. No need to animate it all, or have art, or a button dedicated to doing this action, or show what happens when they succeed or fail.
All of that being said, I’m dubious about the idea of totally procedural games. It would have to be very, very sophisticated to match the kind of output talented human writers and game designers can come up with. As soon as a player realizes that they’re being sent to [kill] [X] [for Y coins] for the seventeenth time, by some randomly selected character archetype (last time it was a peasant, this time a wizard!) it will all fall apart. Not only that, it would be hard to craft deep and truly meaningful experiences - mature experiences! - without a human hand to guide the complexity.
Catherine is deep and meaningful by virtue of its subject matter, but then there are games like The Witcher (first and second) that become deep and meaningful through the complexity of the situations they present. Any given quest has various interpretations, based on who you talk to and what you know. So then any procedural generation has to make your gameplay situation, but also add a lot of context in terms of ulterior motives and hidden information unavailable to the player. And then you get into the realm of things that need so much processing power, they have to be generated during development rather than at game time, and that’s cheaper than paying humans but far less dynamic.
Game AI vs Traditional AI offers interesting insight into AI in games, and why it sometimes seems to lack in the Intelligence department. I don’t have much to add to what’s already there, but if I tell you that it’s an article about how to make players feel like they are The Batman will you be more interested?
Yeah, I thought you would be.
Trenches seems like a relatively interesting webcomic project between Penny Arcade and the guy behind PvP, at least as far as a webcomic with five comics can be “interesting.” However, what is very interesting is their Tales From The Trenches that accompany each comic - anonymous stories from people who have worked as game testers. These are fantastic tales of horror, and I highly recommend reading a few. The one you’ll see linked to if you read this the day I post it, titled “Ship It,” is particularly soul-crushing.
vael:
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/6.0/releasenotes/
Honestly seems more like a release for developers. The problem with firefox releasing like this is that they’re trying to compete with Chrome… but chrome users aren’t even aware when their software is updated most of the time….
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/is-it-compatible/
This puts an addon’s compatibility versions right in your addons thing, and all of my addons have assumed compatibility for FF 7-12. Probably because all the developer has to do is type “compatibility = 7” in a file and it claims to work. I actually still haven’t updated from FF 4, but now that I see everything is compatible even with FF 6, I may as well update.
Still, I’d be interested in knowing what Chrome does differently with its addons from Firefox. Or does it just have different kinds of addons? If an addon doesn’t change anything that a browser update would (interface, deeper fiddly features) then it makes sense it would always be compatible, but those are the best kind of FF addons. Also, I have my addons set to update themselves automatically in FF 4, so I never know when I’ve gotten a new version of one. You can set the same option for Firefox updates, but I like to have control over that.
[Continuing from yesterday’s post about Catherine, here’s the critique part. Or at least, critique-ish. It was meant to be one post originally, but it got to be really long. As in, I spent three hours writing it, so… Best to split it up. You know, this seems to happen whenever I talk about the game…]
Up until the end, I was also going to say that Catherine is a great example of how you can make meaningful gameplay. There’s a lot of symbolism in the game, and most of the gameplay is a metaphor for one thing or another. Then they shot themselves in the foot during the ending. “Did you notice the central conflict that this game’s masterful creators placed at its core?” says the narrator. And then they tell you what that was. So… what did I say about literal references to these deeper meanings, because otherwise players won’t notice? “The stairway Vincent was forced to climb could be taken as a metaphor,” the narrator says after explaining the central conflict. And then they tell you what it was. And we were so close to a game that just hints at this stuff! You get a few hints in the game towards the end, and at the start there’s a nod towards the metaphor as well to get you thinking. So you’ll probably get a rough idea of what’s going on if you think about what’s going on as you play, and that’s great - some serious analysis would piece the full story together, even if they never explained it. And then they did! It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I kind of wish they hadn’t. Still, at least everyone will get the idea, and maybe take the time to re-evaluate the game based on the explanation.
I’ve got a few things to mention inspired by comments on a (spoiler-filled, you’ve been warned) community blog on Destructoid called, simply enough, “Catherine Sucks”. One of the main problems the author has is that most of the game feels like the “rising action” of your typical three act structure, and Vincent really only makes up his mind in the game’s final hours, which makes the conclusion feel weak and a bit rushed. Commentor (commentator?) ‘fulldamage’ notes that the sort of long-form character development the author is looking for is the “hero’s journey” type, exactly what you got in Personas 3 and 4 - by contrast, Catherine is more like a short story, and it focuses on just one pivotal moment in time rather than an entire lifetime of the characters. The comment by 'Noir’ echoes something stated in the Art Book included in the game - the character designer, Shigenori Soejima, writes that the characters in Catherine are all fully-grown adults who don’t necessarily grow throughout the story as the teenagers in Persona games would. When you meet someone for the first time, you’re not going to get every detail about their lives or see some long struggle to overcome their problems - you just pick up bits and pieces of what’s important to them as you talk to them, and that’s more or less what happens in Catherine. 'The Silent Protagonist’ also mentions that it’s a more “adult” - dare I say “mature”? - kind of story because none of the characters are blank slates or in need of psychological profiling, but how things are said and what’s left unsaid can speak volumes.
I didn’t mention the game’s story in my “review” up there because that would imply that you’re taking something as is, and just playing through the game to unlock the story that the developers made for you. Browsing through the GameFAQs board for Odin Sphere on the PS2, a few people said that even though the gameplay can get tedious (since you play 6 different characters, and start over each time and do the same basic stuff) it’s worth playing for “the story.” At that point, why not just look up the cutscenes on youtube or download a completed save file so you can watch the cutscenes in theater mode? That’s what we call film, where you passively watch something that’s delivered to you, as a finished product. From that point of view, the first comment by 'VenusInFurs’ on the c-blog I linked to is absolutely right - the plot and characters are “sub-par” and it’s a “typical anime,” and the last three hours truly do get “beyond silly.” “There’s nothing deep here, it’s not intellectually stimulating or mature,” says 'VenusInFurs.’ But that’s if the situations in the game mean nothing to you, and you’re just watching what the characters choose to do without thinking about it. If you empathize with the situations, and make decisions based on your honest feelings, there’s a thousand different stories to be told by this game. And like the other commentors mentioned, there’s a lot of character development for you to infer from the dialogue, in the sense of things to learn about the characters (i.e. how they develop for the player) as opposed to ways that the characters themselves change over time.
Speaking of the plot twists towards the end of the game, they occur so quickly that it might make your head spin. I truly don’t want to spoil the game for anyone, and I don’t accept the “willing to be spoiled” idea because it will ruin the game for you should I ever bring my PS3 to your house and make you play it. Which is something I would rather do than post story spoilers! Suffice to say that the game could have ended at one point, and it would have been pretty interesting and tragic. Fifteen minutes later, a (literally) crazy ending opportunity comes up, and it would have been phenomenal. But the game continues after that, and ruins the whole thing with a really dumb explanation. The problem is that they take a game that has been totally “normal” - the Nightmares stages are weird, but they’re nightmares, right? - and throw that all out the window. Either of the two points that I mentioned - the tragic one, and the crazy one, which you’ll understand if you’ve played the game - would have been so much more fitting, and even interesting. So, yeah, from that point of view the game has a pretty bad “story.” But again, that’s only if you take it all at face value and care nothing for the situations the game puts you in.
If it weren’t for the part where they explain it all to you, there’d be a lot of analysis to make about Catherine. And there’s stuff I could analyze about it anyway, but that would require spoilers, and I wanted to avoid those in this particular post. Mainly, the purpose of this post was to say how much I love the game and convince people to buy it. Then a little bit of critique, just the amount I can do without really mentioning anything specific. Kudos to you if you made it to the end of this post, and I hope you give the game a shot if you haven’t already. If you already have, have an internet high-five.
First, some good news: Catherine sold really, really well. It’s the highest selling game at launch that Atlus USA has ever published, so advertising, word of mouth, and good reviews all clearly paid off. To whoever failed to advertise Shadows of the Damned and Child of Eden: you’re doing it wrong, but it sucks that your games sold so badly.
Anyway, here’s the “review” part of this post. The English voice actors are absolutely fantastic. I mean, these are award-winning performances. When they give the award for best voice acting to some other game at the Spike TV Awards and whatever other award shows games have, it’ll be an absolute sin. As for the music, Shoji Meguro’s score is fantastic as always - the game features a lot of remixes of classical music, but mostly avoids the really iconic stuff so you don’t find it overly familiar. So, the audio: terrific.
In terms of the visuals, the game has a great aesthetic. The character models in particular deserve special recognition, because they look “better” than anything I saw in Heavy Rain, or that I’ve seen from LA Noire. It’s probably got something to do with the light anime vibe and the fact that they weren’t going for photo-realism, but Catherine dodges the uncanny valley completely. I mean, the thing about the former two games is that they tried to portray completely realistic people, and it was weird to see because it was done imperfectly - you can’t necessarily render every little wrinkle on someone’s face, much less animate and shade it perfectly. But I actually think I like the in-game parts of Catherine more than the anime parts, because it looks that good. In sum, the visuals are just as good as the audio.
The gameplay has two different parts: the puzzles, and everything else. I’ll start with the puzzles, set in the main character’s nightmares. I found them tough, even on Easy difficulty, and I wouldn’t recommend even playing on Normal your first time through the game. In Easy mode, you have the option to undo 9 (?) of your most recent moves, so you don’t have to restart the level if you push a block the wrong way. Which happens, even when you’ve been playing the game for hours. I don’t play a lot of puzzle games, really, and I didn’t know if I’d like the Nightmare stages at first. But the action is really quick, and when you complete a difficult boss stage it’s a whole lot more satisfying than some jRPG boss fight.
Aside from the regular stages in the story, there are 128 (!!) stages in an arcade cabinet in-game, and a whole bunch more stages in the Babel mode that you unlock by getting gold medals on Normal difficulty. I don’t really want to tell you what the puzzles are like, or how they introduce different types of blocks, because none of that matters. The puzzle stages are intense, and you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy them once you give it a shot. I had to look up walkthrough videos to get past a few mind-bending stages, because sometimes you just wont get what they want you to do. Even so, I finished the game and found myself wanting more puzzles, which - as much as I like the game - is more than I can say about the battle system in Persona 4.
The “everything else” gameplay is all of the social simulation stuff, but some of that occurs at the “landings” in between Nightmare stages. The game’s story mode is referred to as “Golden Playhouse,” and a narrator introduces you to the game by saying that your role as a “viewer” is to help guide the main character, Vincent, and that his fate depends on you. You aren’t supposed to be Vincent, or agree with the way he deals with situations, but instead make honest choices when talking to people and answering questions. Your choices influence Vincent’s inner thoughts, and at different points in the game a meter will come up and you’ll see the results of your “guiding.” For example, what you do before Vincent first cheats on his girlfriend decides how he reacts to waking up with a strange woman in his bed - you don’t get to literally choose whether he thinks “oh shit, what have I done” or “SCORE!”. So when you’re playing, be honest and just go with what you’d do IF you got into a similar situation - even if you wouldn’t do the kinds of things Vincent does.
Anyway, I found a lot of meaning in this part of the gameplay, and it’s pretty good mechanically as well. You’re in the bar, and you spend your time talking to people, drinking, and answering text messages (which is great, by the way, and much more interesting than the e-mail mechanic in .hack or Xenosaga), and as time passes people will enter and leave the bar. Who you talk to, and what you say, influences their lives… although if you don’t talk to them, or care about their problems, then what happens to them probably doesn’t matter to you. There’s a theme of selfishness and selflessness to this part of the game, especially in the Nightmare stages, where most of the people you meet think that helping others will only give them more competition for survival. You can play the game as a selfish person who only cares about himself, or a kind, compassionate person who realizes that it doesn’t cost anything to give people a few kind words and helps others to help themselves. Although, because of the way the game plays, you don’t really get to know the characters well - it’s just a brief snapshot of their lives. More on that in a bit.
So with all of that said, it gets high scores in every category and I really do think it’s worth $60. It’ll probably take you 12-15 hours to finish the story for the first time, which is a pretty good length because it doesn’t overstay its welcome but gives you enough to feel like you got what you paid for. After you’ve finished the game, if you replay on the same difficulty level, you can actually skip the puzzle stages and just play for the story if you want to try for different endings - you could probably blaze through in a few hours that way. If you hate the game after playing the demo, you probably won’t like the full game, but do give it a shot if you own a PS3 or 360. If you have both, I’d recommend the PS3 version, because I’ve heard the 360 version may not play as smoothly, and I hear the d-pad on the 360 controller sucks? But then, as someone who only owns a PS3, of course I would say that. Still, consider giving it a rental, and at least download the demo if you have a decent internet connection.
[This will continue tomorrow, it was really long so I split it up]
Tying up some loose ends here with a lot of small things that don’t quite deserve entire posts of their own. This is all the miscellaneous stuff I’ve been doing in recent weeks, but haven’t really gotten around to posting about. So, without further ado…
Anime:
I also watched Summer Wars last week while waiting for EBGames to open and give me my copy of Catherine. It was kind of the anime equivalent of a Hollywood summer blockbuster - in other words, take the forgettable cash-grab junk and replace it with beautiful art and a fun little scrappy-kid-saves-the-world story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Also, they do some neat future-esque computer stuff that is actually possible, which makes it more awesome somehow. I was really happy when the gamer kid lends his laptop to a guy and switches to a different virtual desktop on his desktop-cube.
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I watched American Beauty a few weeks ago, and I’d definitely recommend watching it. I’m not sure what to say about it, really, because it doesn’t have any one core thesis, but it’s got a ton of little ideas worth thinking about and it’s open to a lot of interpretation. I don’t know a whole lot about any of the parts of film, but I can tell there’s a lot of artistry in it. If you’re going to watch a movie, you may as well watch this one instead of some dumb romantic comedy or popcorn-munching action movie.
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I’ve started and nearly finished Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter for the PS2, and I think it’s fantastic. I really think it’s one of the better jRPGs I’ve played in recent memory, though my backlog for those has tons of quality stuff waiting to be played. It takes a lot from roguelikes - you can restart the game and keep the equipment, money, and some of the experience you’ve gained, and the more restarts you’ve done, the more you unlock of the story. It’s a very quick, focused version of a jRPG - I’ll probably be pushing 30-40 hours by the time I finish my first time, but the game rates a “perfect” playthrough as 8 hours or less. It’s just really solid mechanics, all the time. There are a few little town areas, with basic utility NPCs, and one relatively short sidequest. Well, plus the Antz Colony passive sidequest.
Now, allegedly FF XIII was an attempt to streamline the jRPG and cut out all the fat, but it felt very lacking. It felt empty, dull, pretty and flashy but with no substance. Dragon Quarter, on the other hand, is streamlined and constantly satisfying. To me, FF XIII felt like it gave me no reason to enjoy what I was doing - it never seemed like I was making any progress, or accomplishing anything useful. Dragon Quarter doesn’t have that problem, and for one reason or another it’s just an inherently more satisfying experience. It’s probably just a great combination of all the things it does well, against the things FF XIII did not. Anyway, I super enjoyed it.
Also, I’m going to talk more about Catherine soon, but it’s going to get its own post. So wait for that.
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I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods during my vacation to PEI, Robert Sawyer’s Wonder, and Patrick Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. All were excellent, and I recommend them wholeheartedly. I’m working on finishing Steven Erikson’s The Crippled God, and I started George R. R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons and Frank Herbert’s Dune. I know I should finish one book before starting two new ones (at the same time!) but when I’ve got two houses and a car (where I’ve spent a lot of time lately) I need to have something to read all the time. Erikson is doing his thing, and I happen to love it. The HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - which I haven’t mentioned yet, so know this: I love it, go watch it! - has changed my view of Martin’s work, and it’s better for it. Peter Dinklage’s voice behind Tyrion’s lines is just great. As for Dune, I’m enjoying it so far, but I’ll get back to you when I finish it.
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I’m probably forgetting plenty of stuff, but I can’t really call to mind everything I’ve done recently. Maybe I’ve already posted about the books I read, too? I didn’t think I said much about my vacation because it would be boring to tell you about how I hung out with my friends. I’ve been catching up on things in my bookmarks and Read It Later lists, which is nice, but many of them weren’t quite worth posting about. I haven’t been working on my Grand Quest To Finish All The Final Fantasies, but whatever. Although, I did read The Final Fantasy VII Letters and alongside the Final Fantasy Things tumblr, it’s got me feeling better about the vast amounts of time I’ve spent on this. There’s a certain sense of beautiful community behind these jokes, and I kind of don’t regret spending 50-100 hours on each of these games. Maybe it isn’t time perfectly spent, but spent well enough. I can live with that.
Part 2 of my post from yesterday. If you haven’t read it, this won’t make as much sense. I said that I would write about “how I see love, why I say that Brittany “cheated” on me with an emphasis on the quotation marks, and why I have no problem with it.” Read on if you’re interested, and if not, you probably hate me by now. Sorry!
……
NOTE: THIS IS UNEDITED AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE AND/OR POORLY WRITTEN
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Okay, I’ll admit that I still check your tumblrs and although I’m trying to keep a low profile… I really have to reply to this.
I guess this is partly because I don’t like your point of view but mostly because it’s just an interesting subject.—
Hmmm, where should I start?
Well here’s something, it’s pathetic to be selfless.
I mean this and if you don’t already know why, you should by the time I’ve finished explaining myself.You’re losing if you’re being selfless, you’re worse off, you care more than they do, etc.
I’ve never really had a good relationship that involved me being selfless, and by the looks of it, neither have you.A relationship is more like a mutual agreement; you have something to offer them, they have something to offer you. This isn’t love, this is just my definition of a relationship.
Now, if you’re being selfless in a relationship, guess what? You’re losing, you’re with them because you love them, not because of what you can get from them.
You need that person to feel the same way about you for you to be on even ground.A good relationship is a balanced one.
All in moderation.Here’s where it gets complicated.
Love is a fickle and difficult thing, it’s difficult to control and it usually has awful timing. To put it simply, love is a mess.
You don’t want to take love lightly because it’ll bite on you on the arse as soon as you throw it off balance.This is why you can’t be selfless, the most emotionally invested will be the most hurt by the end of it. Selflessness is the path to self destruction.
(I’ll write more on this if you ask me to.)
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This is the part that sickens me. The fact that you could accept being cheated on, the fact that you’d let this shit happen to you.
I really wonder if you have any pride at all, you never seem to show any backbone and that’s one of the reasons why I never particularly made an effort to talk to you.Y’know what? I don’t think I can talk about this subject without getting biased or angry. I guess I’ll write more (if you want to see it) when I can be sensible about it.
The difference here is that you’re looking at relationships as something game theory calls “zero sum” - in order for one person to gain, another person has to lose. Wikipedia’s example is cutting a cake - if one person gets a larger piece, then someone else gets a smaller piece. On the other hand, I see it as a “nonzero sum” situation - essentially a win/win situation. If I say something nice to cheer up a friend, I haven’t lost anything by giving them a bit of happiness. Which sounds dumb because you can’t give happiness but shut up. Anyway, now that I’ve introduced the idea of nonzero sum situations…
What, exactly, do you lose by helping someone? You say that as if it’s a totally obvious conclusion. And caring about someone more than they care about you is only a problem if there’s a massive difference (i.e. they hardly care about you, while you’re under the impression that they are the love of your life) or you think that caring about someone entitles you to get something out of it. The thing is, whether you’re friends or more than that, having a good relationship with someone probably makes your life better. You enjoy talking to them online, or hanging out, or whatever. So you’re getting something out of the deal by default.
Not to mention you aren’t entitled to anything. You don’t “deserve” to have someone love you, or stay in a relationship with you. You earn that. They could leave at any moment, so don’t take them for granted. They probably won’t, but so what? You shouldn’t treat someone badly under the assumption that you can make up for it later.
There’s a fundamental problem here in that you say all of these things as if a relationship has to be zero sum. It doesn’t. I’ve become friends with Vael over the past two years, and not only has it not cost me anything to have great conversations with him, we’re both better off for it. Why would a romantic relationship be any different?
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It needs to be said that love isn’t binary - you’re not 0: in love and then suddenly 1: in love. When you kind of like someone, you definitely shouldn’t place their happiness above your own yet. When you’re starting to love them a little, you should think twice before doing something that would hurt them. Then when you love them a lot, you’re really, truly in love, that’s when you should be selfless. If you’ve come that far, they probably feel the same way. Ideally, they’d treat you equally well.
If it’s a romantic relationship, and you break up, then whoever made that choice probably has good reason for doing so. A lot of the time, the other person probably still cares about them, and is naturally pretty hurt by that. But then, if your feelings for each other were mutual, why would you be breaking up? Of course the person who still cares will be hurt. So I don’t think it’s right to judge the end of a relationship the way you have. Alternatively, you’re judging entire relationships based on how they end, which is equally wrong.
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Two things that should be disgusting to anyone with a heart: basing a relationship on what you can get from someone, and basing a relationship on the need to possess. Granted, we all have acquaintances we only talk to when we need notes for a class we skipped missed, and other small things like that. I’d understand if people have a problem with being used that way - because, yeah, if you’re that person then you’re being used. But I’m not going to get worked up over something like that. Now, if someone only talks to you when they want to borrow large amounts of money, should you be ok with that? No, definitely not. But that’s different from giving someone your notes, or only being asked to hang out in specific situations.
The second, then - the desire to possess. This is supreme selfishness, and it’s something a lot of people wind up in without realizing it. Love isn’t based on the desire to possess someone as an object, for them to be yours, and yours alone. Are you upset that your partner is leaving you because you care about them and think they’d be happier if you were together? Or are you upset because you’ve lost a thing that is yours and it makes you happy, which is what really matters? It’s one thing to be hurt, because something that made you happy is gone. It’s another thing to want it back only because it made you happy. When your happiness makes someone else unhappy, that’s a zero sum situation, and you should generally feel bad about that. If it’s someone you care about (or think you care about), you should feel especially bad about it, and doing so is proof that you care.
So I ask you, what would having pride have done to change my situation? Should I have been proud to possess such a great thing, one that makes me happy all the time? Should I have been proud to have a girlfriend, simply because I did good things for her and her gratitude was confused for love? I’m proud to have done the right thing, even though it hurt. I’m proud that we managed to work things out in the end. I’m proud that I had the strength to pull through it all. I’m proud of the things that I can do, the good fortune I’ve had to lead the life I have, and the relationships I’ve forged along the way.
I have enough of a spine to stand by what I believe, but not so much that I become a massive, bony dick who stands stubbornly by things that are proven wrong, and insults others because they disagree and not because they deserve such unkind words. It would sicken me to see someone act like that, and I could never live with myself if I were to act that way. Luckily, then, those kinds of people tend to be unaware of their true nature. I can only hope that someone would show me the truth, if I became so despicable.
Part 2 of my post from yesterday. If you haven’t read it, this won’t make as much sense. I said that I would write about “how I see love, why I say that Brittany "cheated” on me with an emphasis on the quotation marks, and why I have no problem with it.“ Read on if you’re interested, and if not, you probably hate me by now. Sorry!
I think the ideal form of love is selfless. If you really, truly love someone, then you should want them to be as happy as possible. If being in love requires you to get something out of it, then you don’t love them as much as you think you do. If I had forced Brittany to stay away from this guy, because I really did think that being with her was the only way I could be happy, that wouldn’t have been love. Or, at least, it would have been showing that I loved myself the most, and cared more about my happiness than hers. I let her go because I knew that if it worked out, she would be happier with him than she ever would be with me. We might have been content together, but because she didn’t truly love me, it wouldn’t be a perfect, happily-ever-after kind of thing.
This is mainly a romantic thing, because it’s not like you ever formally agree to spend the rest of your life with your closest friends. Still, when you care about someone a lot, you should be more interested in what you can do for them than what they can do for you. Since they (hopefully) care about you the same way, they’ll take care of you just as selflessly. And everyone wins.
So, as for infidelity specifically, I should start by saying that I wouldn’t ever do something like that to begin with. The fact that I could accept it from my partner doesn’t mean that I condone it. To me, the worst thing about a one-night stand would be if it was kept a secret - that’s a betrayal of trust, which hurts. Who cares about the sex at that point? If they come clean right away and don’t make a habit of it, it’s forgivable. And could you really blame someone if they fell in love with someone else? It sucks, but sometimes people just click. Again, if they keep it a secret and start seeing someone else, that’s intentional and wrong. But it’s love, and if they’d be happier that way, let them go and move on. I do think that we can be monogamous with the right partners, and I’m willing to forgive a lot. And, yeah, I’m tough enough to let someone go so they can be happy. It’s hard to appreciate right away, but I think it’s the best decision to make.
It never really bothered me that much that Brittany was with this other guy, that she had feelings for him, and so on. It was never a secret - she asked for my permission repeatedly, and I gave it every time, with the one condition being that she not do anything behind my back. If she’d done all of this and pretended our relationship was fine until the day that we broke up, I would have been infinitely more hurt. I would have no issues telling people that she cheated on me. If I were to say that now, it would make it seem like I was victimized - when in reality I personally encouraged her to go after this guy. Yeah, we were "officially” together while all of this was going on, but that really doesn’t matter. She didn’t want to hurt me, but at the same time, she was falling in love with this guy and going back to me would have been impossible. I can’t honestly say “no, you should stop yourself from falling in love, and also you should stay in a relationship where you are content rather than search for one where you are truly happy.” Even if someone could do that, why would they? And why would you want them to?
Anyway, now you probably understand better why neither of us is honestly worried about old feelings coming back. The people who were worried about that, they don’t know this stuff - they just know that we dated in the past and now I’m offering her a place to stay. I’m still surprised that I’ve never posted about this before, but now I have and now you know! It’s probably not worth the effort to explain all of this to people so that they can understand why we could live together and not consider being more than friends. But the people who know we were together ought to know why we broke up, and not just that we did.
I mean, man. How did I not write about this before? Still amazed by that.
I’ve been thinking for the past week about what different people get from reading my tumblr. Random internet strangers probably just read the posts about things they’re interested in. People who know me well will get to know me better. But for people who don’t know me yet, it’s not a perfect window into my life - there are a lot of things that don’t come across all that well in text. I post about the things that interest me, and I post a lot of information about my life, but not so much about more abstract things - what I believe in, what kind of person I am, and so on. There’s not much point in simply telling you those things. because there would be nothing to back it up, and even if you accept that I’m nice because I said so, it wouldn’t really leave much of an impression on you. Trying to show you things like that with words is tough, but I’ll think about it and work on a few drafts to give the internet at large a better idea of who I am.
I started playing Catherine last night, and aside from being a pretty satisfying puzzle game (as long as you don’t get really stuck on a hard part), it’s an absolutely wonderful thing to experience. I’d be surprised if I got more than ten hours out of it, but the value of playing it can’t be measured in time spent playing. The basic gist is that you guide Vincent, a 32 year old underachiever, through the worst week of his life. First, his girlfriend of five years, Katherine, starts talking about marriage. Then he drinks a bit too much and has a one-night stand with a girl named Catherine. What happens from there depends on the player’s decisions, but it’s a really well-crafted experience.
If you absolutely love puzzle games, there’s probably $60 worth of gameplay in there, but everyone else should play the game on easy and act as honestly as possible. It’ll get you thinking about what you would do in a given situation, and about relationships in general. Which is absolutely fantastic, and I’m so glad that this is a “mainstream” video game. I mean, ok, it’s not a AAA blockbuster release, but it’s not some budgetless, vague indie game either. It’s a game that deals with marriage, cheating, responsibility, the nature of relationships… It’s a work of art in every definition of the word.
So I’ve been thinking a lot since I started playing it, and naturally one of the things I’ve been thinking about is infidelity. Apparently, I’ve actually never written about this before, which is surprising because of what happened between Brittany and I. It’s kind of an important detail, which makes it strange that I’ve never mentioned it. It also means I have to write about it now, in order to get into the stuff I want to say. Alright, so, here’s the quick and dirty version. When we were in 9th grade, Brittany got involved with a guy a year younger than her, and she was really serious about him. It ended badly, she did her best to get over it, and then in November of 10th grade we started dating again. In PEI, high school doesn’t start until 10th grade, so when we moved onto high school she didn’t really see the guy until the fall of 11th grade. Before too long, despite having a girlfriend, he started flirting with her. She was wary of him because he proved to be a supreme asshole the first time, but I knew she was drawn to him in a way she’d never been drawn to me, and so I gave her permission to talk to him and braced for impact. Fast forward a few months, and by November things are very serious between them and we finally break up ten days before our anniversary.
I don’t think I need to get into what happened between them after that, but suffice to say that he was actually worse than a supreme asshole. An uber asshole, if you will, the horrible embodiment of all the terrible things women expect from men. Meanwhile, I had encouraged my girlfriend - who I loved dearly, and who was at the time my one source of happiness - to leave me. In the end, her relationship with him made her reevaluate her feelings for me, and there ended the possibility of us getting back together. Understandably, our relationship became strained as things went on, and we spoke less and less often. Eventually it seemed like we couldn’t even manage to carry on a conversation. Considering she was my only close friend, the only person I thought I could share my secrets, doubts, and fears with, this was hard for me. I was incredibly lonely, and of course I spoke occasionally with my friends and family about this stuff, but it was this loneliness that led me to meet Vael and open up to him.
What I realized, over time, was that I missed Brittany as my best friend far more than I missed her as my girlfriend. We went from speaking all day, every day to never speaking at all, and that alone was hard. Not having anyone to talk to about personal stuff was worse. I don’t remember the exact details of what happened, but at some point I must have told her this and asked if we could “just be friends.” Yeah, I said that, and I said it after we’d broken up. Delicious irony, if you can ignore my crying, desperately lonely 16-year-old-self long enough to laugh about it. Of course there were issues to work through, and of course I struggled with my feelings for her. After all that time, I couldn’t just snap my fingers and only think of her as a friend. But in the end, it all worked out, and now we’re friends and she’s living in my mom’s house. It’s been almost a week now, and it hasn’t been at all awkward for me (although I’ve been at my dad’s house this whole time). She doesn’t find it weird being there, and I assume being around me is no different than it was a month ago. Which is to say I haven’t asked about that, but maybe I should.
SO OK NOW WE’RE BACK TO CATHERINE AND THE THINGS IT MADE ME THINK ABOUT. Now I can tell you how I see love, why I say that Brittany “cheated” on me with an emphasis on the quotation marks, and why I have no problem with it. Except that when I say now, I actually mean tomorrow, because this is really long. And the chances of people reading it all probably increase when it’s split up. So, that post will go up tomorrow morning, and I hope you all enjoy it!
Just a couple of links to share today as I try to clean out my bookmarks a bit. They’re #AltDevBlog posts about the practical parts of actually being a game designer, and not just a programmer who kind of designs or a designer who just throws things together. They also have a number of great comments by industry folk; Mike Birkhead in particular has some great comments, so at least read his if you choose to ignore the rest of the comments.
Respecting Design tackles the issue of everyone thinking they know how to design a game. You don’t know how to design a game just because you’ve played a few games. “No one in their right mind opens up the code depot, alters files at random, and then, when rightfully questioned on their sanity, say in defense, "Hey, everyone’s code is valid man”. So why is it ok for game design?“ Reading this made me realize that, yeah, I don’t know shit about being a game designer. I can read all the blog posts I want, but that doesn’t mean I know anything useful. Not that I thought I was a game designer, mind you, just that I thought I was learning about it. It would probably be more accurate to say that I was learning around it, if that makes any sense. Circling the perimeter without ever entering it.
Design Docs Debate is less of a debate and more a collection of interesting links in the comment thread and a few good comments - specifically, Slone’s and Mike Birkhead’s. It sounds to me like the original poster is in a program where they got really anal about the requirements - but then I remember hating essay outlines in tenth grade, too. From the sounds of things, it seems like a good design document is pretty similar to a good outline (for an essay, or a short story, or even a novel) - you can go without to a certain degree, if you’re ok ending up with a lesser result because of it. Being able to create a good one is one of the things you just end up doing when you want to produce better results, because if you sit down without a plan, your final product will be nothing like what you envisioned.
Random thought - ever notice how the "blog post” has supplanted the essay? Two hundred years ago you could be an “essayist,” someone who writes essays. Now you’re just a blogger, and your wonderful essays are just “posts” like any other. I’m going to use the term essay, so there. Lead by example, right?
