The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
Before it stops being topical, I’m going to post a couple of Ars Technica articles rather than make one of the posts I have floating around in the back of my head. I’m not sure how much I want to say about this, because it’s all information I’ve cultivated from intelligent people writing blog posts I couldn’t hope to source now. At any rate, here’s the first link:
Or, in plain English, more properly called “Self-Entitled Whining, Lack of Industry Knowledge, and Free Bonus Stuff Isn’t Good Enough For Me.” I’m going to look at his points in order, because the fact is, these things don’t happen just to piss you off and keep you from playing the game you bought. Not only that, but none of these things even have anything to do with “new” games! Buying a game used doesn’t solve any of these issues, except perhaps that you don’t get the free DLC codes that the previous owner probably used.
Or worse, you DO get the codes, and they’ve already been used. Jerks.
I don’t want to install the game, or an update.
A) Installing a game is one thing developers use to make the game perform better. You know how load times are practically a thing of the past? That’s because we don’t have to load every new area off of the disk when you move across some arbitrary boundary point. A lot of games will make installs optional on PS3, which is nice, but it’s probably easier for them to force you to do it. Go make lunch or something.
B) The code sent to the manufacturer who makes the physical discs you buy (or to the publisher who controls the digital platform you’re downloading on) is likely months old, in order to give enough time for the discs to be made (or the content to be reviewed by Sony/Microsoft/Steam). Is the development team supposed to twiddle their thumbs until release, or start working on DLC expansions (or the sequel)? Not only that, but patches cost a lot of time and money to push through Sony/Microsoft on consoles. That’s why they don’t release patches to fix every little problem, because it’s just not worth it. For example, a problem people had with Costume Quest was fixed if you bought the DLC for it, because it just wasn’t worth the money to patch it.
So there’s two things at work here: it’s more economical, and that’s important when you’re spending millions of dollars on developing a game. And the second thing is that you get a better product after the patch, and the game can be released six months sooner, so why complain about it? Unless you have a dial-up connection, it’s going to take you two minutes to get the patch. Go to the bathroom while you wait.
I don’t want to input a stack of codes.
Gosh, getting free stuff is just awful. It’s hard to say for sure if the content you’re getting would have been on the disc if it weren’t DLC, because that really depends on the individual game. Aside from that, I guess this is the only one that’s relevant to buying new vs used. The goal is to reward people who buy new, and/or punish those who buy used, and packing in DLC is a perfectly fine way to do that. Assuming the content really isn’t on the disc, you are getting free stuff. Now, if these codes were abolished, one of two things would happen: the game a few months later to add some DLC, or you’d have to fork over five bucks for it the day of launch. DLC codes don’t seem so bad now, do they?
I don’t want to watch an unskippable trailer for your next game.
I don’t know about this. Does this actually happen? I’ve never experienced it. This is a good point, I guess. Why anyone would do it is beyond me, so I’m glad I haven’t played a game that does this.
I don’t want to make a new account for your online service.
There aren’t that many services to sign up for anymore. You’ve got an EA account for BioWare and (Dark)Spore and Dead Space, and you’ve got a Uplay account for Ubisoft, and maybe on PC you have an old GameSpy account… I’m sure I’m missing some, but for the most part these kinds of accounts are from publishers or something and not game-specific. Most of them come with free stuff, too, so why not use them? Having an EA account lets you get free Dragon Age stuff, having a Uplay account lets you get free Assassin’s Creed stuff and upload your save data to their servers. It’s really not that bad, and it’s great for them because they can track your stuff more accurately, pimp their brand a bit, and if they’re doing it right give you some sort of reward for using the service. Alternatively, if it’s to sign into their servers or whatever, that kind of sucks. But it’s not different from making an account for an MMO.
The one legitimate argument against this is when the Terms of Service basically say that you don’t own your game, as has happened with Dragon Age II (turns out that was an error, allegedly) and Dragon Age: Origins (server problem) recently.
Boy that was way too much. Well, onto the next link!
This is a long one, but it can be basically summed up by two graphs later in the article:
Mass Effect 2 is a kind of oddity among the group, considering it’s very story driven and a lot of players were probably coming in from the first game. Red Dead Redemption, Super Meat Boy, and Shank, all of which were very well reviewed, have abysmal completion rates. Essentially, most of the people who played those games probably didn’t see the last half of the games. If you’d released the game with half as much content, 30% of the people (a very vocal minority) would have complained, while everyone else would have finished it and been perfectly satisfied.
I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. I know I don’t finish the vast majority of the games I buy. Yet I do like to have more content in the good ones. I really don’t mind the multiple almost-endings in Persona 4, because any extra time spent with that game was just great. On the other hand, I feel kind of cheated that I spent so much time on Final Fantasy XIII, considering I didn’t enjoy it that much and just felt obligated to finish it.
What would be really interesting is if some data like this was available for older games. I’d love to see how many people made it through older, 40+ hour RPGs (western and eastern) and how many managed to finish shorter titles. We know players don’t see most of the content in a game, yet demand that it exists, but we don’t know how things used to be either. Could be that just as many games were going unfinished.
I don’t think we’ll ever see 100% completion rates, no matter how perfect the fit between length and quality becomes. But then a class average of 70% is considered phenomenal in a large first year university class (more people take the course than there are people who care about doing well), and considering the even larger sample of people who play a given game, you could probably expect something a bit lower on any game longer than two hours.
ok that’s enough I’m going to go have lunch now, too bad I don’t have a game to install
Taken from Abstergo Industries phone records
Dated April, 2011
I take a great risk in sharing this audio file with you. But you must know: everything around you has been engineered to keep you subservient - to a master with a million faces. Look as hard as you like - all you’ll find is one of its masks, a mere front, designed to throw you off their scent. The true mastermind controls everything…
except us.
All I can say is awkwardness.
He must not like asians because you’re definitely pretty.
If only every relationship in life could be based on physical attractiveness. The world would be so much better that way!
/awful, totally rude sarcasm
I think guys only insist on asking who a girl likes when they know it’s them. That’s the only reason I ever did it, at any rate. I dunno. High school.
ok look java I know we’ve had our differences in the past
but we’ve had some great times too
so please stop making all of the blue objects in my game go backwards
I don’t even know how you could screw that up
but the red ones work just fine
so yeah
edit1: fixed the blue ones, now the red ones are going backwards
it’s a problem with the sign, if you move something in a negative x/y, the sign gets lost amid all the pythagorean calculations and whatnot
brb fixing it for good
I went to Carleton’s varsity banquet last night, even though I’m not on the actual varsity fencing team. They put my name on the list without even asking any questions, and I actually just walked in and sat down at the table without even showing my ticket (luckily enough, because I didn’t have the ticket). Which is all to say that it wasn’t exactly an exclusive event.
Anyway! The banquet itself isn’t really important, and there’s nothing really interesting to say about it. What is interesting, though, is what happened afterwards. I was there for about two and a half hours, with maybe a couple hundred people there. We were unlucky enough to get the table closest to the speakers, so the music was so loud you had to lean towards the people beside you to talk to them. When all the awards had been given out, I basically just said goodbye to my friend (and none of the other people I kind of know) and took off as quickly as I could. I’m sure it was rude and etc. but I just wanted out! So I left, and I’m walking around wearing a suit, and I was just so glad to be alone. I missed the bus, met up with a guy I kinda know and hadn’t spoken to all night (he was at a different table), and he knew the way to the light rail train station so we could get back to Carleton and I could take the bus from there.
After we got off the train and he left, I just started getting incredibly tired, as well as an instant headache. I’ll blame that part on the music. The other thing is I started thinking about stuff I should have done at the banquet (actually socialized with people, for example) and being lightly miserable. Really just wanted to get home and crawl into bed. So I hopped on the bus and did that, and remembered that, oh yeah, I’m really introverted. And that’s what this post is really about!
I don’t dislike people in general, and I like the people I know. I’m not trying to avoid you! Really! What happens is this: I need to be alone when I work, because it’s really hard to keep up three conversations and write an essay at the same time. When I want to relax, I prefer to be by myself. And then suddenly I’m “too busy” to sign into Miranda and talk to the people I know and love. And I say I’ll be around more often, because being alone all the time is depressing and bad, and then it doesn’t really happen. And that sucks.
The absolute worst case scenario is when I either spend a lot of time with a few people (having friends over for the entire weekend like I used to in junior high and high school) or any amount of time with a lot of people (parties, banquets). Then I get mentally and emotionally drained, and it puts me off for a long time afterwards. When I went to the Halloween party in October, I was miserable literally all weekend. It isn’t as bad this time, though I don’t know why. I’m feeling mostly better, at any rate. Having a hard time getting settled in to work, though.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is an actual thing that happens to people other than just me. Odds are it’ll seem familiar if you’re introverted, because I’ve realized in retrospect that it has pretty much always happened and I just never realized it until I really thought about it. Maybe you’ll notice it from now on.
Ok this is getting long and I’m really just procrastinating. Tl;dr I half-ass an apology, rationalize my failure to socialize, half-heartedly justify my continued status as a hermit, and try to remember from now on to accept my introversion. Denial doesn’t really get me anywhere.
I’ve played Diablo II and never got into it… Eventually sold my copy for ten bucks to a guy who’d been banned on his previous CD key. I played Titan’s Quest for maybe an hour, and I don’t even know where that went. Never tried Torchlight or Deathspank or any of the other Diablo-esque games that have come out (actually I tried Hellgate: London a little bit), because they just never hooked me on the “collect rare lootz” premise.
Spore was… ok. I played it long enough to get to the space part, and promptly wanted to leave. Controlling the creatures themselves was really the best stage. So as a game it didn’t really get me. The animation and random creature generation, even the creature editor itself, that stuff was all great. But it wasn’t a whole lot of fun, when you include all the various stages.
Darkspore, first of all, is an inevitability considering they probably didn’t make any money off of Spore. They’ve got amazing procedural generation (clearly a hot topic recently) for both the creation of random creatures and animating them, so why not make use of it? I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the game’s assets were made by a guy pressing the “generate horrific monstrosities” button and then picking the five coolest ones out of the thousand possibilities that came up. From a business point of view, they’ve hit the jackpot, because the Spore creature editor will probably always be cool.
As a game, though, it’s actually pretty sweet. You’re a Crogenitor (pffffft), and what that really means is you’re one of the demi-gods blessed with the ability to genetically modify powerful mutants. The game doesn’t say this, but you know that it’s true. In your role as “the last surviving god-thing from Spore,” you control a squad of Genetic Heroes (read: deadly mutant creatures) and you upgrade them using the various shiny pieces of equipment you find while running around murdering things.
The heroes have subtypes (Necro, Plasma, Bio, Quantum, stuff like that) which decide their powers (summon ghosts, stun guys, create minions, slow down time) and then classes (Ravager, Sentinel, etc.) which determine your main stats and attack type (strength and melee attacks, dexterity and melee attacks, mind and long range, etc.). Then they have some detailed backstory stuff I didn’t read, which may or may not have been randomly generated too. The equipment you find is equipped to them in the same way body parts were in Spore, and I think you can find new body parts as well eventually. And of course the equipment has all sorts of stat boosts and cool adjectives like “Laseth’s Thunder Claws of Sharpness” and there’s a few levels of rarity. You can gamble your equipment by beating progressively harder levels one after another - double or nothing, essentially. Beating multiple levels in a row also increases the odds of getting rare (rarer?) items.
Collecting some ugly little staff that claims to be a mystical bone wand, but really looks like every other staff, isn’t very engaging. Collecting energy claws, mystical hoods, cybernetic implants, crystal growths, etc. etc. and “equipping” them through the creature editor, however, is a whole lot more awesome. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s that they took the good parts of Spore and the good parts of Diablo, but I actually liked playing Darkspore. That’s pretty good, since I didn’t like either of those games. I don’t know if I’ll buy it, but the beta’s free until friday, so go check it out. We can team up and stuff and maybe that would be cool?
(some dumb people in the game’s chat were like ‘wait is this game free to play’ and 'screw it if they want a monthly subscription’ because they don’t realize it’s a normal retail game lol)
The game has a campaign mode, with extra unlockable difficulty levels (and, I assume, better lootz) with co-op that increases the shiny stuff you and your team members get. It also has PvP (unlockable through a purchase at like level 9 or something) and I don’t know how that works. I have no idea if the full game is going to have more in it? I assume the campaign is going to the only single-player mode, which is ok I guess but it’s not like it has much of a story or anything. You’ll be hard-pressed to remember what the cutscenes tell you after five minutes of murder.
Anyway! As I said, free until friday, we can team up and stuff if our schedules work out. In fact, I’m free tonight… but it’ll take like two hours to download. I’m ok with this multiplayer because it’s co-op and everyone wins.
I’ve got a bunch of things I want to say, but not a whole lot to say about them. Not enough to make individual posts, but too much to say in a facebook status update. So I’m shamelessly stealing the term ‘quick hits’ from The Electric Hydra podcast (or internet radio show) and presenting a bunch of stuff to you, with shiny bullet points for your reading pleasure.
The moral of the story is you should probably read AltDevBlogADay. I love the idea of “GDC all year round” because there are a ton of awesome people with great stuff to say who wouldn’t get a spot to speak at a conference because they aren’t famous. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be given an hour to talk about best comment coding practices or the glory of “scripting languages” that don’t need to be compiled for ten minutes in order to test minute changes.
Not going to lie, I was actually wishing for a collection like this when I first got my Kindle. I settled for a few books and just left the rest, but now I have this! And so does everyone else who wants it. Does that include you?
It’s a good thing I’m never going to be making charts in Java, because I would probably be screwed if someone thought Excel wasn’t good enough and asked me to write a new chart program. We’ve had two tutorials now on working with these chart program, and in both of these tutorials I’ve spent an hour and a half trying to get past the first instruction. It certainly doesn’t help that every step in the tutorial is meant to somehow summarize half an hour of work - there are only four or five steps in each. Why couldn’t I just spend ten minutes accomplishing the same work with a little more instructions?
It’s not like the notes are any help, either. Here’s the entirety of our notes in the “Graphics” chapter. Think you could make a graphing application out of that? So we have bad notes that probably teach less than the Java documentation does (educate yourselves hurr hurr and we’ll just take your money), and we have unclear instructions that are written with the understanding that you’ll waste your time doing it wrong for a while until you figure out the problem through trial and error. What makes it worse is that every tutorial begins with you downloading at least five pre-built classes and then trying to fill in missing functionality. Last week’s tutorial had… 14 classes to download. Most of these have variables like X_AXIS_OFFSET and YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH and they’re used in a few places without giving you any real explanation of how it’s meant to work.
Last week’s tutorial was to draw the chart, and I couldn’t get that working. This week was to do some mouse stuff. Anyway, the chart drawing code was supplied this week, and here’s the formula for the (x,y) of the points on a graph that I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out:
X: ORIGIN_OFFSET_X + i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET + DATA_HEIGHT - DATA_HEIGHT * histogram[i] / maxValue
The code I had, which was drawing everything slightly off for no reason I ever figured out:
X: (i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH)+ORIGIN_OFFSET_X
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET+DATA_HEIGHT-(aDVDCollection.yearHistogram()[i])
Why does that multiplication happen? What’s wrong with my code? I could have asked the TA to write it for me, but that really doesn’t help anything. At best I finish the tutorial without learning anything. Or, wait, what was I supposed to learn? How to use the drawLine() method? Or was I supposed to learn how to make a mediocre program after inheriting someone else’s code? It’s the destiny of your average software engineer, after all. Really, though, it’s not really a useful learning experience.
So what I’m getting at with this boring little rant is this: last semester, I learned stuff in our tutorials and by reading the notes. They were written by the same guy. Clearly he just gave up trying to teach the second course, and figured we’d learn what we need to know through hours spent working on assignments. My instructor (a different guy) isn’t really teaching us a whole lot during class time, either. I mean, there’s some stuff he tells us that’s great, but he’s a professional programmer, not a teacher. If you’ve ever done any programming, you’ll know what I mean by this. You can probably figure out that watching someone do that for three hours every week would be boring as hell.
So as for the title of the post, last semester was definitely a win, and this semester was pretty much a loss. Doing the assignments and looking at example code from class assignments and the notes has taught me plenty, but did I really need to pay six hundred bucks for it? Technically yes, because I need the course to graduate, but realistically, no. Sometimes you just don’t get what you paid for with post-secondary education. That’s the unfortunate truth.
All in all, this just reinforces my decision not to specialize in computer science as part of my cognitive science degree. I may as well just teach myself everything I need to know with a tutorial and the official documentation. Maybe I should steal a few of the assignments for the other courses before they’re taken off the Carleton sites to give myself something to work towards…
So I’m in a philosophy class this semester called “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and we’re getting into the “mind” part of the course. At the moment, we’re looking at the debate between Dualism (the mind and body are separate things) and Materialism (the mind is a material thing) and while there are a ton of different positions within these broad categories, that’s the basic gist of it. Thus far in the course, everything we’ve considered has seemed pretty good on its own, at least until we get into criticisms coming from other philosophers. So I’ve been open-minded and accepted that they may have a point with what they’re trying to say.
Getting into Dualism, it’s been really hard to do that. And that bothers me a lot, oddly enough. What am I learning if I cheer for every little argument against what we’re considering and can’t think of anything but problems with the position? That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that I’m looking for it to be wrong, or want it to be wrong, because of my own personal bias. Dualism isn’t literally about some kind of soul or mystical property or another of our minds, but it’s hard to escape the influence when you’re trying to separate the mind as a thing from our brain and our bodies. I’m sure that contributes to my bias against it - in a kind of abstract way, I would certainly say we have a soul or something along those lines, but I’d see that as something that arises out of what we are. As in, you have a soul because you think and hold ideas about things and all of that comprises the “soul” of who you are. I guess I’m saying it’s equivalent to your identity.
At any rate, that’s a Materialist position (or maybe Idealist…? that’s something about ideas making us who we are, or something) and pretty clearly shows my bias against what we’re learning. It just seems wrong and ignorant to look at this as somehow better than Dualism just because it’s the thing I happen to think is right. It’s a totally natural way to be, and just about everyone is that way. But does that make it right? If everyone is wrong, that doesn’t necessarily make it any better.
I’m not bothered by the idea that I could be wrong, really - if some form of Dualism turned out to be right, well, that’s just great. Today’s topic, specifically, was a philosopher trying to show that sensations are proof of Dualism. A few of the examples he used were afterimages and pain. Now, I can tell you that there are specific types of nerve fibres for experiencing pain, and if you get distracted you can actually not perceive the sensation of pain your nerves are actually bringing to your brain. I can also tell you that, because of a certain way your eyes work and the neurons for sight work, afterimages are caused when they fire in reverse after a stimulus is taken away. So you stare at the sun and close your eyes, and you’ll keep seeing some colours. This is a purely physical, or material, thing - you’ve got neurons firing and they’re creating this sensation you’re having.
Dualism is the idea that the mind is somehow separate from the body - so this philosopher was saying that the perception of things such as sounds and etc (sensations) is something that belongs to the immaterial mind, and aren’t equivalent to the causes of the perception - i.e. the sensations. I’m using psychology terminology, but he described it a little bit differently and this is more precise. Anyway, the whole defence against such a “this is what makes you perceive something” argument is this: the cause of your perception (the sensations, neurons firing, etc.) aren’t equivalent to the perception itself. So, the fact that you stubbed your toe and nerve fibres are bringing that message to your brain, doesn’t equal the fact that you, as an immaterial mind thing, realize “ow my toe”.
That’s all well and good, but that’s why the term perception exists separately from the term sensation. They’re different things. You could have perfect vision, and see everything, and yet think you’re blind, because you aren’t getting the perception part. You might even look at someone while speaking to them, and your neurons are reacting, but you’d still say you don’t see them. But I don’t see that as proof that the mind is somehow different from the brain and the neurons in it and the difference cortices and etc.
The fact that you can’t see the mind doesn’t mean it’s not there - if I can track every single little thing leading to you feeling pain, why is it somehow separate and special? That’s what gets to me about this particular argument, anyway, but I let it slide when the professor gave it to me as an answer because I don’t want to get the class off track. Things to do and discuss and whatnot. But, really, it’s not that I think the argument is wrong that bothers me. It’s the fact that I can’t bring myself to consider it seriously because I think I’m so smart and have all the real answers already. Well, not consciously. But on some level that’s obviously going on.
You don’t get a good wrap-up of this post because I have to go to class. Everything I wanted to say is here, so there! Good for you if you wanted to read it. If not, I probably went on for way too long. Ah well.
First of all, I think I’ve already mentioned here that I adore Insomniac. They’re just cool dudes. But second of all, this is actually a good, concise critique of the majority of facebook games (and whatever mobile games there are that take after them). I don’t really have much to say that isn’t already mentioned there, so go check it out.
On the subject of how problems and goals work in game design, here’s an Extra Credits episode more relevant to “core games” on choice and conflict. It’s not a new episode, but I thought of it right away as I was reading the Insomniac post, and I don’t think anyone has actually started watching Extra Credits on my recommendation yet. So I’ll keep linking to good episodes and that’ll be enough.
Because I worried (or hoped) that someone might worry about me and not get the joke, no, I don’t actually think I have a ton of mental illnesses. Sorry guys.
If you still think self-diagnosing is a good idea, check out my notes for today ‘cause my psychology professor spent a good ten minutes telling people not to do it. I didn’t write much down because that would be useless, but there you go - diagnosis is complex and you don’t know anything about doing it, so don’t even try. She didn’t mention it, but I wouldn’t go into a meeting with a psychiatrist/therapist/whatever and say “so I think I have x, y, and/or z” because they’ll look for symptoms of that and probably jump to conclusions just like you did. “You’ll see what you expect to see,” after all. Unless you want to be diagnosed and get meds because you’re sure they’ll help/don’t care if they don’t help, in which case, feel free to continue.
As for the actual reason I’m posting today, I wanted to mention again how much I like WriteMonkey. I like it as much as I liked Q10 when I was working on essays last semester, except a bit more, because it fixes problems Q10 had and adds a number of useful features. For example, something I’ve gotten used to using as a project-specific todo list is comments in my programming assignments - and WriteMonkey allows you to keep track of comments and dims them out a bit to set them off from the rest of the text. It lets you set progress goals (I think for the entire project) and then track partial progress, as in how much you’ve done in one session and stuff. It can do lookups for stuff on google and dictionary.com and stuff. And I haven’t used it yet, but you can create tags it calls “jumps” and automatically find them in the text - so you could have like @[INSERT IDEA] or #[INSERT TODO] or whatever. It also tracks your most frequently used words! So that’s pretty cool, and you can see “hmm, I used the word "something” twelve times, that’s not good".
Also, Ninite has made it possible for people to embed installers in their sites and show only certain programs, which is pretty neat because you can say “here are the programs I recommend using” and people can take whatever they want and just install them without any crap.
So we’ve been covering some cool stuffs in my psychology class recently. You’ll find my notes on motivation (why I became a hermit to do well in school), personality development (raise your kids not to be dumb), and stress (spoiler: it’ll kill you). Next couple of weeks will be mental illnesses - your depressions, schizophrenias, etc. Everyone’s favourite topic, really. On that note, I’ve self-diagnosed myself with every anxiety disorder except Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (though I’m only lightly OCD) and just about every personality disorder. Hopefully they can medicate those away for me.
My other class this semester is phonetics, which will be boring to everyone who isn’t a linguist, aka just about everyone. And if you are a linguist you already know phonetics so you probably don’t care. So that sucks I guess.
But my other other class this semester is philosophy! And that is pretty cool and you’ll probably find interesting stuff in the notes for that. The topic is “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and so far we’ve done Knowledge and we’re about to move into Mind. I can’t really organize those in any meaningful way for you, unfortunately, but check ‘em out anyway. Some of it is boring, some of it isn’t.
The best thing from PHIL 1301B, however, is definitely Pyrrhonian scepticism. There are three basic parts to Pyrrhonian scepticism: making no assertions, the method of opposition, and the four modes of acquiescence.
Check out the last three (or four if you read this on monday) days of notes for more on this. The only really valid criticism we’ve covered would have to be that knowledge of skills - something the Pyrrhonist accepts as “know-how” because it doesn’t involving making assertions - at some point has to involve a bit of “know-that”, or regular knowledge which eventually becomes equivalent to assertions. So being a doctor doesn’t just mean knowing how to treat your patients (know-how) but there’s also knowing facts and things to help you treat your patients (know-that).
I’m writing a paper about scepticism and how, as far as I can tell, Pyrrhonian scepticism is a perfectly tenable (fancy word for “it works”) position. So COME TEAR IT APART so that I can include that criticism in my paper! However please do check out the notes in case I’ve screwed up somewhere.
edit: also I’ve replaced Q10 with WriteMonkey for writing in peace
edit 2: if you google certain things, my notes show up as results - awesome, except when I’m looking for answers and find my own notes
Crunch time, as defined by Urban Dictionary:
The interval of time immediately before a project is due, when it becomes apparent that the schedule has slipped and everyone is going to have to work like dogs to try to complete the project in time. Crunch time usually occurs during the period between the next-to-last scheduled milestone (prior to which everyone was able to delude themselves tht the schedule had NOT slipped) and the final deadline for delivery. During crunch time, workers are in crunch mode. Prevalent in the software industry, but used elsewhere as well.
If you’re not familiar, crunch time is (allegedly, anyway) part and parcel of working in the video game industry. There are any number of reasons it might happen, and according to the bitter folk, you’re lucky if it only lasts a few weeks. Even indie developers do it, apparently (see the link). But they basically work for themselves - nobody is FORCING them to work extra hours with no compensation. If you have a deal with Microsoft to put the game on XBLA by a certain date, you might be stuck, and I’m sure it’s the indies who have teamed up with publishers who get into crunch time. At any rate, these are guys who love what they do, but I’m willing to bet nobody loves their work so much that they enjoy working twelve or more hours per day.
What I realized as I was reading the post and thinking about vael, was that I work for myself too. And I crunch all day, every day, except when I get too stressed out and resort to procrastinating - which only continues the crunch. Why am I always crunching? Because I have nothing else in my life except for school work. I don’t really have anyone to hang out with here in Ottawa, and I’m always so “busy” that I don’t sign in to IM the friends I do have. Fencing is really the only thing I do to relax, and I haven’t been going to that as often as I used to - it’s getting easier to say “I’m too busy to go tonight”. I’m going to go on saturday, for sure, and next tuesday as well. It’s hard to know if I should go on wednesdays and thursdays because sometimes I have nobody to fence with.
I’m doing really well right now, and everything is totally on schedule, and it’s awesome. But I feel stressed out when I’m not working and I could be. Even if I say “this weekend I’ll work for six hours and play games for two hours, then spend the rest of the night relaxing” I’m probably going to feel awful about that “lost time.” It sucks, and I know I’m not the only one who gets that way, and I’m willing to bet indie devs have some form of that too.
But it’s not healthy. And I’m going to work myself to death, probably literally, if I don’t do anything about it. We covered the chapter on stress in my psychology class this week, and Brittany came to visit, and she sat me down to chat about how I always seemed pissed off and a variety of other things. Eventually, I told her that I was going to keep working at better managing my time, and through that I’d easily be able to stop being so “busy” and stop isolating myself. I said the same to vael, and I’ll ask you, faithful reader, to do what I asked them both to do: send me a message every once in a while and ask me where the hell I’ve been. Don’t let me get away with being a stressed out hermit and spend all my time “working” without accomplishing a whole lot.
When I sit down and actually work, stuff gets done, and I honestly shouldn’t have problems getting everything finished. But sometimes I get too wrapped up in working, and when things are going well, I get pretty excited to finish “this one last thing” and then never really stop to relax. So help me out! I’m going to try, but when I slip, I need people to remind me to get back up. Something like that. I’ve always been awful with metaphors.
I’ve been reading a fair bit since Christmas, so I thought I’d make a post about what I’ve read. Let me know if you like the format! I’m trying to give recommendations without getting too spoiler-y, but sometimes you have to give out a few spoilers to tell people why a book is actually interesting.
All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka: A time-travel sci-fi action novel from Japan. I realize action isn’t a genre for books, but it was a lot like an action movie in book form - but maybe it would be more appropriate to think of it as an action game instead. Basically, aliens are invading Earth and they’re just brutalizing the human race. The main character is killed in his first battle, but then he wakes up the next morning - thinking it was just a dream. He goes off to the battle again, and does something differently from the dream - hoping it will turn out better. But he dies. And wakes up again the next morning. The day of the battle. He’s trapped in a loop, doesn’t know why, and tries a variety of things to get out of it - eventually he just decides to learn from his mistakes and become an alien killing machine. Nothing particularly deep and thought-provoking here, but it was pretty badass and I liked it well enough.
Metagame by Sam Landstrom: I got this one as an ebook for free online, and it was pretty good. It’s a sci-fi adventure novel in a kind of super-internet future, and in a way it reads kind of like MMO fanfiction. The kind where they keep their completely non-fantasy usernames for the character names. The characters have underscores and numbers in their names, they say “noob” and other internet slang that’s getting to be a little outdated… The book is a few years old, I think? So whatever. Anyway, there were a few interesting things in here, the best one I can remember is that in their future timeline, marriage is abolished in favour of civil unions and then all kinds of relationships become ok. Because marriage has such religious connotations, and the religious folk get all upset about the “sanctity of marriage”, their solution is just to make marriage a special option for people who want it and let everyone else be happy and love whoever they want.
Pretty neat, I think. Also at one point in the book the main character hacks the source code of life. That may be spoilers but it’s so badass that you need to know.
Azumanga Daioh by Kiyohiko Azuma: OH MY GOD SO FUNNY
SO AMAZINGLY FUNNY
I laughed OUT LOUD, physically hahahahahaha, on a regular basis while reading this manga and that should be all the recommendation you need. It’s about girls in high school and that’s really about all I can tell you, it’s hard to get more specific than that. But it’s so funny. Oh man.
Buy the official English translation, because it’s localized really well (as far as I know) and you can get the omnibus (the whole series) for like $30. Or you can watch the anime if you prefer that. I’ve been told by everyone ever that it’s hilarious too, so you can’t go wrong.
All That Lives Must Die by Eric Nylund: The second book in the Mortal Coils keeps the same great style from the first book with DBZ our-powers-are-getting-stronger kind of cool. I can’t really give you any specifics about their super duper Immortal/Infernal (gods and devils respectively) powers but it’s pretty sweet. Like the first, it also does the thing I love most about young adult fantasy - mixes and matches myths and cultures from all over the world to get the very best selection of supernatural beings possible. I feel like a lot of “traditional” fantasy either wants to make its own epic mythology (with mixed success) or use elements from one specific place (Celtic, Norse, whatever) and be as “true” to the source material as possible. Which is what makes young adult books that have Norse gods hanging out with Greek gods so appealing.
One other thought about young adult vs regular fantasy: Young adult books don’t play with point of view, and for that reason they tend to be a lot simpler than more mature fantasy books. At least, my favourite fantasy books (Stephen Erikson, George R. R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker) all use point of view to craft incredibly intricate plots and constantly surprise the reader. All that Lives Must Die has a couple of chapters from points of view other than the two main characters, but even aside from that I was actually genuinely surprised by a few things in the book. So hats off to the author for that.
Harmony by Project Itoh: Another Japanese novel, this time a sci-fi thriller set in a hyper-socialist future where human beings are considered public property. Basically, World War 3 happens and nukes are tossed around like spitballs, and nearly everyone dies. Governments are decimated, and eventually dismantled completely as “admedistrations” - health care providers - gain power by offering health and security. Everyone agrees more war would be bad, so standing armies are disbanded along with traditional governments - admedistrative conglomerates become the unofficial government. Because so many people died, humans are the most valuable resource, and so everyone takes care of each other and people start to “suffocate from all the kindness.” Lots of philosophical musing, comparisons to Nazi society and their advances in health care, and ultimately a number of questions about the idea of consciousness itself. Oh, and mass suicides and other thrilling, globe-trotting adventures. It was one of those “can’t put it down” kind of books, so I do recommend it if you want to grab a copy off of Amazon for ten bucks!
I’ve been working with it for a few weeks now - almost a month, I think - so I’ve come to a definite conclusion: Leechblock, a firefox extension for FF 3-4, is awesome. If you prefer chrome, there’s a similar extension called Chrome Nanny or something like that. Here’s what they do:
You set up a list of sites that keep you from doing your work. Be honest: add all the sites you use to procrastinate, all the sites that distract you. You can use * for a wildcard: *.tumblr.com will block your dashboard and any individual person’s tumblr. Then, set out a list of times where you want to buckle down and work. I set mine up to block whenever I’m in class, and almost all day on friday, saturday and sunday (the days I have no classes). During that period of time, the sites listed will be blocked, and by default replaced by a screen saying “You can come back when the site is no longer blocked.” You can set it up to redirect to, say, google or something. Or a file on your computer that says “GET BACK TO WORK”.
As far as other features go, it has plenty: you can set up multiple “groups” for blocking, so you can set up different sites to block or different times to block on different days. You can manually enter a “lockdown” mode, which keeps you out of the sites in the group for whatever period of time you specify. You can also set up a timer and have Leechblock kick you off after that time is up: right now, I have Leechblock set up to give me 45 minutes every three hours to screw around on facebook and reading RSS feeds and stuff.
You can set up different options for “how to block” a specific group of sites: it can actively block pages from your sites (when the site is going to be blocked, it will refresh the page and block it), you can prevent access to options for that group when it’s being blocked (sites can be added to groups under the right-click context menu), and in firefox 4 you can prevent access to your addons page so that you can’t get into the leechblock options. You can also set up a timer in the status bar to tell you how long before a site is blocked, and display a popup message x seconds before a site is going to be blocked.
Honestly, after one weekend of having my favourite sites blocked all day, I stopped wanting to play Echo Bazaar. After a couple of weeks, I’ve forgotten what my daily routine used to be - I have to go into the bookmarks menu to remind myself to play BvS and check on tumblr. It’s actually really nice to get up in the morning and spend two hours working, instead of getting up and spending two hours reading RSS feeds. Ideally, I’ll uninstall Leechblock and have that same resolve to get to work. Then, since I’m actually doing work when I have the time, I’ll have more time to relax and talk to people and maybe live a little.
Note: This isn’t anywhere near as good as I imagined it would be. Send me your ideas for making it better! You may think it’s ok, but I can guarantee it wouldn’t make the front page on Destructoid, and THAT is what I had in mind. Probably asking too much there.
There’s a pretty unfortunate trend in big-budget games these days: creative new IPs don’t sell, and sequels do. So every game that comes out is a “franchise opportunity” if it sells well, and it’s abandoned if it doesn’t. Rather than publish something like Brutal Legend, publishers like Activision will put their money where they see potential profit: Call of Duty and Prototype. They’re allowed to do that, of course, because video games are a business and businesses want to make money. But they’re leaving gamers like me behind.
When Dead Space 2, Mass Effect 2 (and soon Mass Effect 3), Uncharted 2 (and soon Uncharted 3) come out, you can’t spend two minutes on the internet without hearing about how great they are. I’d love to play them, but there’s one problem: I haven’t played the previous games. I just don’t want to play sequels without playing the previous games and understanding the context and the characters. That’s even more true for games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age where you literally transfer your character from the previous games to the new one.
I barely have time to play one game, and I certainly don’t have the time to play one game and its prequel (or two). So instead I buy games like Stacking, Costume Quest, Inside a Star Filled Sky, Super Meat Boy - games I can play in short sessions and know I’m still making progress. Or I play freeware games like Desktop Dungeons or Cave Story. Five minutes here, five minutes there, half an hour during a boring computer science class… That’s how I game these days.
So when I look at the list of releases for 2011, discounting any sequels to games I haven’t played, here’s what I see that I might like to play: Okamiden, Portal 2, The Witcher 2, inFamous 2, Resistance 3… Then there’s five times as many sequels I’ll never play. I’m sure they’re great games, but they’re great games for someone else. Maybe Dragon Age II will be unanimously declared the Game of the Year, but I’d have to play Dragon Age: Origins first in order to enjoy it.
Of course, I’m part of the problem too. There are still new games coming out in 2011, but none of them really catch my eye… because they’re new IPs and I don’t know if I’ll like them. If I have to buy only one game, like most gamers these days, I end up going for the sequel I know I’ll like over Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, or Singularity, or any of the other good new IPs that came out last year. That’s how I got into this situation in the first place. Dead Space, BioShock, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Uncharted, God of War, all those AAA games that are still getting sequels years later - I looked at them, wasn’t sure I’d like them, and played my part in the vicious cycle.
I’m not here to make dire predictions about the future of the industry. I can’t honestly say “we need more new IPs to keep the industry alive,” because people like me will keep those games from selling. I can’t honestly say “sequels are killing the industry,” because if it weren’t for those games, there wouldn’t be any money to fund new IPs. But I’m buying fewer and fewer games, and the games I do buy aren’t the AAA titles. What’s to stop Call of Duty or Uncharted from being the next Guitar Hero? How many sequels can they make before people stop buying them?
Coils (0.618…) by Transcending Bizarre?, an avant-garde/black metal band.
I haven’t posted music in ages. But I was listening to this and loved it enough to rush to tumblr and post it, so there you go. Enjoy it if you’re into that kind of stuff.
I have homework to do :/ So I’m not going to start writing massive and wonderful posts just yet. I have plans, and I’m writing them down and organizing my thoughts, so it’ll be even better when I finally write. Later, that is.
A little while ago, Crysis 2 was leaked in its entirety onto the internet a while in advance of its release. Then Killzone 3 was leaked - a PS3 game. Not that PS3 games haven’t been on the internet for years, but now that people can (theoretically) actually PLAY them, it’s serious business.
So…
Just a thought that this brought up, all the free to play games with micro-transactions that’ve been popping up.
also leaked games tend to sell more if they’re actually good.
Geez, I forget where it came from now, but I’d heard someone, somewhere say that buying a game is a huge commitment. You spend $60 on something, not because it’s going to be good or worth it, but because you’re hoping it’ll be good. From the publisher point of view, that’s great, because you can’t take your money back after the scammed you into a shitty game.
I’m not convinced about “episodic” games, but I’d like to see more mainstream retail games adopt the method Fable II (?) did. You get a demo for the first chapter or something, then you can buy the next chapter in game, and progress through the whole game like that. What makes that different from an “episodic” game is that the entire game was actually available from the start. “Episodic” game usually means “we don’t have enough money to finish this game, if enough people buy it then we will keep going” and that’s sad for them and sad for the people who love the game and never get to finish it.
Also, I think that “free to play” games that give competitive benefit for paying money (just about every F2P MMO and many, many facebook games) rely on their competitive nature for their success. D&D Online tripled its profit after going F2P, as did LoTR Online, but that’s because everyone wants to level up faster and go raiding and whatever high-level MMO content is there for them. If someone said “here’s Mass Effect 2, you can play the entire game for free, BUT equipment costs real money or takes hours to earn” I’m not sure it would go over as well. Although maybe experience boost items would be nice to have…
edit: I had an argument about leaked games but I deleted it because it was bad, but yeah good leaked games will sell more because gamers like good games, but publishers don’t like potentially lost sales and they especially don’t like it when people refuse to buy their shit games
A little while ago, Crysis 2 was leaked in its entirety onto the internet a while in advance of its release. Then Killzone 3 was leaked - a PS3 game. Not that PS3 games haven’t been on the internet for years, but now that people can (theoretically) actually PLAY them, it’s serious business.
So all kinds of noise and hoopla was made over piracy and arguments were had. You know the drill. Over on Destructoid, Jim Sterling made the point that game developers only have one source of revenue - retail sales of their games. Other industries, like movies and music, can make money through multiple avenues - theaters and DVD for movies, live shows and merchandise for bands, etc. But that’s not really true, now that we have easy ways to sell additional content to players. I forget whether Jim actually mentioned that, though he probably did, but I’m in “work mode” at the moment so I’m not going to risk getting distracted while I look it up.
Everyone feels kind of cheated when “downloadable content” comes out for a new game that’s really just a code to unlock content that’s already on the disc. Generally that just happens with console games, since PC gamers would probably just dig the content up on their own, but anyway. Fact is that DLC for an existing game is incredibly cheap to make and market, compared to making a brand new game, and it has way higher profit margins. Even if you only sell $5 map packs to 1% of your player base, it takes a fraction of the time to create those maps. As long as it’s actually adding content to the game, DLC is great for giving players more of what they want, assuming they like the game enough to spend more money on it. DLC can also be sold to people who bought used.
No matter how you look at it, DLC is really, really profitable. Most studios need to turn a profit in order to keep making games. Conclusion: Most studios now churn out DLC for their games.
The PC game market is different in a number of ways from console games - there’s no retail used game market, but by contrast, they have piracy to deal with. Usually pirates will get their hands on DLC and make patched versions of games that can play the DLC, but if you pirated the game and want to buy DLC, you can’t. Why not? Yes, they don’t “own” the game as far as Steam and whatever other online authentication system is concerned, but getting $5 from a customer is better than getting no dollars.
Somehow I don’t think this is going to fly with anyone staunchly against piracy, because they want you to buy the game in the first place. It really depends on the distribution and authentication systems, though, because clearly you can’t register DLC with your Steam account without having the game registered.
Alternatively, game developers should have tip boxes (like developers on Kongregate have) so people can send them five bucks any time they steal DLC. That works too.
vael:
Hey folks I didn’t tell you I’ve scheduled an appointment for ADD because I want to keep the tumblr entertaining and not full of personal stuff. But yeah I just did that.
Anyway :D check this out!
http://www.ldpride.net/addsub-types.htm
I’ve obviously read about ADD, but when they jog my…
Jeez, ADD sounds a lot more like me than ADHD, whereas my brother is pretty much all of the things for ADHD. He may not get into a good university because he has bad grades in his non-math classes.
It seems to me that ADD is spoken about far more often in the US than ADHD, while the opposite is true in Canada. Am I just imagining that? I only know about both because of American culture.
I’m not going to lie, I’m a console gamer through and through. I grew up with a controller in my hands, and I just don’t connect to PC games as much. I know that plenty of people like to game with a mouse and keyboard, so I’ll let you know right now that the second half of this post is not for you.
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Part one: XBMC
XBMC is a media center program that started out on the original Xbox, and has since grown to become a great media center program that would look absolutely gorgeous on your expensive new TV. It works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and if you really want to get your hands dirty I expect you could still install it on your old Xbox, Wii, or PS3. At least, if it doesn’t work on PS3 yet, it probably will in a few months.
Plenty of people are building cheap PCs to handle all of their entertainment, putting XBMC on it, then hiding it somewhere in their home theatre. So if that sounds good to you, go check it out - it works perfectly well independent of what this post is really about.
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Part two: XBMC as a console
Since it primarily runs on a PC, you may not feel like you’re gaining much by using XBMC as a “game console”. Isn’t that what USB gamepads are for? The answer to that is yes, and if you’ve ever used an emulator or played a PC game with a gamepad, the only thing you’d gain by doing this is a larger screen - since in theory you’d be using XBMC on a TV bigger than your monitor. If you’ve got a laptop you could just plug it into your TV, and win forever!
But I still thought this was really neat because it would take all the trouble I’ve had with PC gaming - either using keyboard+mouse (meh) or setting up a gamepad every time I want to play (meh) - and give me that console experience I love. Basically, XBMC just acts as a sexy launcher for your PC games and for any other game you can play with an emulator. OF COURSE these would be perfectly legal backups of games you own, or games that are hard to purchase these days, etc. etc. You can have everything from arcade games to PS2 games on your PC if you’ve got the hardware for it, so by extension you can have all of those integrated in your XBMC box.
Honestly, I’ll probably set this up at my dad’s one of these days. We just moved the home theatre into the basement, so we can sit around the fireplace and watch movies and play games and etc., and my brother’s PC is pretty close to the TV. Or I could just use my laptop. Either way, it’ll be cool. And we’ll go from watching some awful movie he got in the mail (Netflix will send out DVDs and it saves bandwidth) to playing a NES game and it’ll be great.
This isn’t an official thing I’d actually send around, so I’ve put in fake contact info, but check it out and let me know what you think. I’m going to submit it to a bunch of jobs soon and maybe make minor modifications based on the job, but this is the core stuff I guess.
It looks pretty nice with all the formatting and stuff I have on it, but it’s still good as plain text, which is important apparently. You can see that at the link. Feedback would be great! Also it fits on a single page in the nice version.
Anyway, since I’m mentioning my tumblr in my resume (maybe it’s a little cheesy to say I do creative writing and essays here, but it sounds nice) - I need to make the actual page look good. Mine is atrocious and I don’t really have anywhere to put links such as RSS, an ask button, contact info, etc. Vael, I like your theme’s layout, but I would change the colours. I will take any and all help I can get with this, so send me your thoughts or get a hold of me when I’m around.
I have a list of things to post about, so rest assured - I haven’t forgotten about my tumblr. I just have more important things to write, such as a resume and job applications.
This is a relatively short thought, but I wanted to have a public post and get reactions. There’s a part in Capitalism: A Love Story (that sadly I don’t have a link for - if you look for and find a clip, please do share) where they discuss how life was “back in the day” in regards to taxes and the economy - according to Wikipedia “ the past "golden days” of American capitalism following World War II". I guess it’s close to the start of the movie. Anyway, excuse the huge oversimplification, but from what I remember the basic gist was that the taxes were far higher but everything was just fine because you didn’t need as much money anyway. Then presidents got elected by promising tax cuts and etc. and now people have grown up with low taxes and feel taxes are evil and think the government is stealing their money.
I know there’s a lot of economics and history missing from this (feel free to enlighten me, though) but just focus on the taxes aspect. Whether or not you agree with government spending policies or like the people in charge or whatever, just the part about your money and the government using whatever portion of it.
If your government were to RAISE taxes, and put that money towards increasing your quality of life and generally taking better care of its citizens, how would you react? You and everyone else with a job might stand to lose as much as 20% more of your income, but the money would go towards cheaper/better quality education, lowered costs of living, governmental childcare, lowered sales tax and things like that. It could very well be that you come out of the equation with more disposable income.
Don’t just respond and say “yeah sure” or ravage me for being a socialist and a tax-lover - what’s the logic behind your position? Why do you think (or, more likely, feel) that way?
For my part, yeah, I’m sure I already sound pretty sympathetic in regards to this. But then I’m unemployed and almost all of the money taken off of my previous paychecks came straight back as a tax return. Plus my parents (both previously/presently employed for the Canada Revenue Agency) have handled my taxes for me in the past. I would be ok with this, though, because I don’t NEED a whole lot of money above and beyond my expenses - money is only a means to an end. Money pays for my food, money will in the future pay for my lodgings, and at the moment it pays for my education. Maybe if I were nearly bankrupt I would worry about how much money I have, but as long as I can afford to live, I’m doing alright. If I have extra, that’s great - but having $100 in the bank and $10,000 is emotionally equivalent for me.
You may, of course, dismiss this as naive and nod sagely from your vantage point in “the real world.” I doubt I will ever value money, however. If that’s the case, I doubt I’ll change radically when it comes to taxes. But please do tell me if you believe I’m wrong, or right, or if you believe much of anything on the subject.
Well, if you consider your monitor a bunch of tiny shining lights (pixels) rapidly flashing in front of your eyes. Honestly even if you don’t know my last name, I’m the only Matt on the page, so scroll down a little and look for it.
This is what I was talking about a few weeks ago! The Language and Brain Laboratory is doing a lot of cool stuff and it seems like I’ll be the one putting together the programs for the experiments. Or helping to, at any rate, when I learn to use the tools. I’m hoping it’s pretty easy, it honestly can’t be that complicated to have a black screen show words with a specific timing and capture a couple keyboard input events. There’s a program for it, and I’m willing to bet it’s designed so you don’t need to be a hardcore programmer to put experiments together, so it ought to be pretty simple.
Famous last words, I know.
At any rate, here’s what I need to do in the next little while. Unfortunately, most of these have no due dates, so it’s hard feeling really motivated about it.
Except for the part with Dr. Hirotani, this is all stuff I’ve known I have to do for at least a week. I, uh, haven’t really done much work in the past week. If I HAD been working all of the time, I would probably be able to rent a game and play that in my spare time. It’s all going to get done, of course, I just used my free time tweaking my computer and reading things on the internet. Ah well. Some day I’ll run out of things to check out.
Some random tidbits about my day/recent happenings:
Anyway, I’m off to help set up the strips for the fencing tournament being held here this weekend. I hurt my leg last week (pushed myself too hard when I was trying to be tough) so I won’t be competing, but I’m probably going to go watch with my parents so they can see what it’s like and I can learn what to expect if I ever get to compete.
I went to fencing last night, and ended up going to bed around 10:30 - getting up at 6 am was hard for me this morning. I’m considering moving my alarm up to 6:30, because I don’t really need the extra time, but this is as good a time as any to make this post about how early I actually go to bed.
My schedule this semester is this: I have class at 8:30 AM from Monday until Thursday. It can take a good 40 minutes to get to school, more if I get really unlucky, so it’s best to leave early - the other thing is that early in the morning, the buses are less busy because there are fewer people making their way to work. Busier buses means it takes a lot longer to get to school. So, that’s why I get up so early - I’d rather spend half an hour extra at school than half an hour extra in transit and get to class right on time.
I happen to like getting up early, and don’t mind going to bed early to do that, which makes me the polar opposite of just about everyone I’ve ever met. A couple people barely every sleep, the rest are all night owls, and so I have this problem where every couple of night at 9 PM I get messages from people who aren’t going to bed any time soon. Maybe they have something important we need to talk about, maybe not, but of course I want to talk. Then I end up staying up for two hours and start getting ready for bed at 11 PM instead of 9, and then I end up crazy tired and it’s not really anyone’s fault. The thing is, I was likely online for hours, and they probably were as well, so why this almost always happens at 9 PM is a mystery to me.
So here’s my request: By 9 PM, I’m already winding down for the night - I’ve been up for 15 hours already, and I need to sleep. Talk to me earlier. Talk to me at 5 PM. Just keep in mind that I have a totally different sleep schedule from you.
Actually, there is another option - if and when I mention that it’s late/I’m getting ready for bed/I should sleep/any other not-so-subtle hints, tell me to go to bed and refuse to talk to me. It’s so incredibly nice for you to consider my best interests like that and I’m actually grateful towards the one person who ever does that for me. So that’s something else you can do that takes into account the fact that I may not be ready for bed yet.
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Listening to an episode of the Hey Ash Whatcha Playin’ Podcast titled Come Here Uli, and here’s a brilliant quote about game design:
“In a movie, you’re being asked implicitly to empathize with a character. In a game, you’re trying to do two things at once: you are trying to empathize with a character and to be a character at the same time. In something like inFamous, if you’re just trying to empathize with the character, when his girlfriend comes up like ‘raah I’m angry about stuff and later on you’re going to have to decide whether to save me or not’ then you can look at that passively, as in ok, we’re going to learn something about who this character is by how he decides to deal with his girlfriend. When you’re controlling him, and your girlfriend is like 'raah I’m mean at you for blowing up the city completely by accident and not your fault and later you’re going to have to decide whether to save me or not’ then it’s no longer a matter of 'what would Cole do, I’m interested to see how he grows’. It’s like ok, I guess what am I doing in this situation? I guess I’m supposed to manufacture a two year history, mentally, with this girlfriend I’ve just met, and in the entire time I’ve known her she’s just been a bitch to me, but I’m supposed to extrapolate that at one point this character, and therefore kind of me, but kind of not, once cared about her.”
I bought a Kindle copy of Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson and, thanks to that, managed to finish the book after… a year and a half. Below is a conversation between two characters near the end of the book that I really enjoyed, and reminded me of Socrates style philosophical dialogue. I’m posting it because I liked the book enough to buy it twice. So, yeah, I liked it a lot.
‘In the world, there are attackers and there are defenders. Most of us possess within ourselves elements of both, but in a general sense a person falls to one camp or the other, as befits their nature.
This is not to say that aggression belongs only to those who are attackers. Far from it, in fact. In my talent with the sword, for example, I am for the most part a defender. I rely upon timing and counter-attack – I take advantage of the attacker’s forward predilections, the singularity of their intent. Counter-attack is, of course, aggression in its own way. Do you see the distinction?’
‘I think so.’
‘Aggression takes many forms. Active, passive, direct, indirect. Sudden as a blow, or sustained as a siege of will. Often, it refuses to stand still, but launches upon you from all possible sides. If one tactic fails, another is tried, and so on.’
‘Yes. What you describe every child learns, at the hands of the bully and the rival.’
‘Excellent. Of course you are right. But bear in mind, none of this belongs solely within the realm of childhood. It persists and thrives in adult society. What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person.
Cultures tend to invite the dominance of one over the other, as a means by which an individual succeeds and advances or, conversely, fails and falls. A culture dominated by attackers – and one in which the qualities of attacking are admired, often overtly encouraged – tends to breed people with a thick skin, which nonetheless still serves to protect a most brittle self. Thus the wounds bleed but stay well hidden beneath the surface. Cultures favouring the defender promote thin skin and quickness to take offence – its own kind of aggression, I am sure you see. The culture of attackers seeks submission and demands evidence of that submission as proof of superiority over the subdued. The culture of defenders seeks compliance through conformity, punishing dissenters and so gaining the smug superiority of enforcing silence, and from silence, complicity.’
‘Is there no third way of being?’
‘In my long life, I have seen many variations – configurations – of behaviour and attitude, and I have seen a person change from one to the other – when experience has proved damaging enough, or when the inherent weaknesses of one are recognized, leading to a wholesale rejection of it. Though, in turn, weaknesses of different sorts exist in the other, and often these prove fatal pitfalls. We are complex creatures, to be sure. The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words.’
‘Passive.’
‘Of a sort, yes. It is more a matter of warning off potential adversaries. In effect, you are saying: Be careful how close you tread. You cannot hurt me, but if I am pushed hard enough, I will wound you. In some things you must never yield, but these things are not eternally changeless or explicitly inflexible; rather, they are yours to decide upon, yours to reshape if you deem it prudent. They are immune to the pressures of others, but not indifferent to their arguments. Weigh and gauge at all times, and decide for yourself value and worth. But when you sense that a line has been crossed by the other person, when you sense that what is under attack is, in fact, your self-esteem, then gird yourself and stand firm.’
Over the holidays, literally half of my friends asked me about my “tumblr thing.” I’m glad that more than one person is actually reading it now, so to make sure everyone who finds my “tumblr thing” keeps reading, I’m going to lay out the three main ways to keep track of my new posts.
The simple way: Bookmark the site.
The convenient way: Make a Tumblr account and read it on your dashboard.
The nerdy way: Subscribe to the RSS feed.
I’m sure you know how to bookmark a site, but the main problem with that is that you have to keep checking my ugly site and never know when there’s a new post. Eventually you’ll end up forgetting or just miss posts completely.
The tumblr dashboard shows you all the new posts by the people you’re following, which is great, and that’s what I do. Probably what most people do. It’s easy to post your own stuff and follow a whole bunch of people and keep up with their posts.
If I were only reading one person’s tumblr, though, I’d probably just use RSS. I think the easiest RSS reader to use would be Google Reader on a computer, but if you’ve got a smartphone of some kind I’m sure you have an RSS reader in there somewhere.
As long as you check your RSS reader/tumblr dashboard, you’ll see the brand new posts at the top of your list and it’ll be great.
I’ve been thinking about something for a little bit and couldn’t manage to explain it last night, so I’m going to attempt to work it out here. I’ll edit before posting until I’m sure it all makes sense and I haven’t exaggerated anything.
What I’ve been thinking about is how I’ve long had a kind of ideal image of Britt in my head, and that holding onto that was what kept me hopeful for a long time after we broke up. It’s not like I was completely deluding myself, just that I liked to think everything could go back to the way it was. Of course I knew it wouldn’t happen, but it was still a nice thought, and I had the odd dream about us getting back together and things like that.
The problem, though, is that this ideal I had in mind didn’t change at all in the last two years, regardless of the ways she’d changed. In some way, I still thought of her as I did during the summer two years ago when (relatively speaking) everything was going well. Which isn’t really that horrible, as the worst consequence to come out of it is probably my consistent surprise at her unhappiness. My reaction tends to be something like “oh, I thought maybe it might get better…” because that’s just how I’d like the world to be.
I started thinking about this a couple of weeks ago after a dream I had that, essentially, was really about this ideal image of Britt. I forget the details, but it was a nice enough dream, so take from that what you will. When I woke up, though, I realized that Britt isn’t anything like how she was in my dream - and that’s what made me question the fact that I’ve been doing it all along.
Britt and I spent the day together two days ago, and that was great - I think it’s the only time we’ve expressly hung out as friends… At least, it’s the first time I felt that way about it. Essentially all we did was cook brunch, talk, cook supper, and talk some more. Fun seems like an overly exciting way to describe it, but I enjoyed the visit a lot and it was just good to see her again. What I wanted to mention, though, is that it also let me recalibrate the way I think about her. I’m one of those odd people who like the idea of platonic love, so I’m going to go ahead and say that I love her as a friend, and I’m happy with that. Despite the things that have changed over the past few years and plenty of disagreements, we still get along, and that’s awesome.
So here’s to you, kid. These past five years have been wonderful. Looking forward to five more.
I started my tumblr in April, so my 2010 recap is actually a recap of everything I’ve posted. Which is why it’s a good thing everyone suddenly wants to read my tumblr, because they can just read what’s on this list and that’ll be good. Mostly, this is all my long posts, so if I’ve missed anything you think is worth mentioning, let me know. I can do a recap of music/downloads/links that I’ve posted, if anyone wants to see that, because those are pretty much the remainder of my archive. Oh, and this is in chronological order - from oldest to newest.
I think this is pretty representative of my personal growth over the past year. Overall, I think I’ve grown and matured a lot in 2010. Tumblr probably helped in some way, not the least of which would be serving as an outlet for me to organize my thoughts. If you haven’t gone through my archive yet, there you go - now you’ve got all the best ones right here.
I’m not going to include the things like candy, body wash, and socks that I received - know that I received at least two of each of those in addition to everything else.
The games and trip were all at my request, but the razor was a very nice surprise. My mom was buying things for my brother even yesterday to even out the spending - I couldn’t figure out why, because I thought the things I had already picked out for my brother were enough (Epic Mickey and Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and Rune Factory 3 for DS, Azumanga Daioh omnibus, Gunslinger Girl season 1, The Witcher + The Last Remnant + Super Meat Boy from Steam, a Lego boardgame thing, and a book) but I guess that was an expensive razor.
Bonus: You now know what my brother got for Christmas. Also he got a pair of skates but that was one of those “you really didn’t need to” gifts.
I’ve already posted that I’m with my grandparents for Christmas, and I ought to mention that Christmas is a religious event for them. Christmas, for me, has been purely commercial from a young age, without even getting into my lack of faith. They don’t mind going to Christmas mass - being stuck with far too many people in a hot, sweaty church listening to an excessively long sermon, late at night when you’d rather be in bed. I’ve been able to shirk the responsibility of going by way of my father a few times, because he isn’t religious either, but now I have no excuse.
My mother, it seems, is either religious or feels compelled to be religious to please her parents - I’ve never figured out which, as she doesn’t really . She has tried a few times to bring us back into the fold of Christianity, especially around the accepted ages for first communion and confirmation, but eventually we’d get lazy and stop going. So I’ve had my first communion and I’ve been confirmed and I’m “a member of the Catholic church” and as I told her today I don’t want or need that status. And, I think, she feels like it’s her failing as a parent that I’m not particularly faithful.
Earlier my mom told us that we would, in fact, be going to Christmas mass. A shame, really, because I was planning to learn Python at that time. Anyway, she took my brother and I aside to tell us that we would be going and we would be participating in communion (I’m sure that’s not how you’re supposed to say it). Some more backstory: I decided not to do communion at my brother’s confirmation, though I don’t remember what inspired that little rebellion. I know that I told my mom it would seem dishonest to do that when I don’t actually believe. At any rate, I told her that I would do the socially accepted thing and avoid making her look bad in front of her parents. She said that she knows we don’t go to church often, and that she’d like to fix that, and asked whether I would go to church with her in Ottawa. I said no, and that I don’t need or want it.
The part that makes me suspect she feels responsible for my lack of faith, and that it’s bad/wrong for me to not be religious, is that she said there might come a time in my life when I want to be religious so that my children will have a place to belong. I feel bad about that, but I’m doing my part and going to church tonight. I don’t, however, have an hour or more to waste every sunday morning. Sunday morning is when I buckle down and do schoolwork. If I’m going to replace good working time with something else, it’s got to be worth more than whatever work I could be doing, like fencing practise.
There’s no real moral or purpose to me telling you this, I just felt like making a post about it for the sake of exposition. So now you know, and my disk defrag is done, so I can get back to using my PC. My dad used to run a disk defrag overnight and forbid anyone to use the computer until it was done, and I guess I picked up the habit.
My vacation’s going pretty well. I’m catching up on my Read It Later list, I checked out a number of to-do list managers (spoiler: I realized I didn’t need any of them), and today I’m going to keep reading and start organizing music in my library. As far as what I’m reading, yesterday I read The Little Prince, a few Lifehacker articles, and a number of Click Nothing articles. Reading more of the latter today.
Highlights of the day, which I definitely recommend: LastPass - a cross-browser password manager - a program that tints your monitor based on time of day. LastPass is pretty nice, it integrates nicely into your browser and can autofill forms for you and hang onto personal info and stuff. Most interesting is their Security Challenge, which checks all your passwords and kicks you in the butt about having bad ones. It can also generate randomized passwords for you - such as 8DIy@!Y2%EtO - but the downside to this is that you will never remember these on your own, making you rely on LastPass forever. The reality is that you need to know the password (what if you want to check your e-mail on another PC?) but you’re more likely to lose the password to a database compromise (oh snap Gawker) than to a brute force attack. Anyway, have a strong master password and then modify it as needed.
Second recommendation is Flux - a program that tints your computer monitor to simulate a natural light cycle. In the morning, it’s the usual bright blue-white that’s guaranteed to wake your brain up and stop the melatonin flow. Later in the day, it’s a warm red that is a lot nicer on the eyes. It seems really drastic when you use the preview of the entire cycle at once, but if you change it to the slow setting (takes an hour to transition) it’s very subtle. When you first come to your computer and it’s a strange kind of red, it might throw you off, but it’s… oddly comforting. Trust me, it’s good for your eyes and your brain, so try it out.
Third thing that may not be any use to you is custom address bar search engines in Firefox and Chrome. If you’ve used chrome, you’ll know that typing something other than a website will automatically do a google search. Great, but it gets better, because you can add search bars from sites and access them with a keyword (at least in Firefox). Go to a site, right click any search bar, and click “add a keyword for this search”. I did this for a french translation site - so I type “enfr bus” and it gives me the translation for the word. You could do this for your favourite torrent tracker, for a blog, whatever site you visit that has a search bar.
You can also add keywords for your bookmarks by right-clicking and going to their properties - type f for facebook, t for tumblr, w for wikipedia, whatever. It’s pretty good. You should do it.
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Went to a family supper last night, but it wasn’t actually an awkward sit-around-and-chat kind of affair. We ate our food and rushed out to a coffee house at my cousin’s high school to see him play. Some of the music was bad, some of it wasn’t, eh. Honestly I don’t have much to say about the whole event! We didn’t spend hours together and it wasn’t horrifically awkward, so… Yeah, I guess that’s it. In a few days I may have a good story to tell.
So I realize I haven’t been posting much, and there’s a very good reason for that: exams. I even had to skip fencing practice saturday because I wanted to do a bit more studying… I kinda spent too much time talking to people on thursday and friday.
But anyway! The past week has been like this: Linguistics exam on monday (took me about 40 minutes), tuesday was Applied Linguistics (roughly an hour), wednesday was French (a little over an hour - my essay as twice as long as it was supposed to be, lol). Thursday I almost literally didn’t study, friday was more or less the same. I studied 3/7 chapters in those two days, which is like an hour and a half of studying across two days. And I read the easy chapters because I didn’t feel like studying. Friday I spent 3 hours writing up ineffective instructions for Rainmeter, and thursday I was talking to Britt pretty much all day. I even claimed I was leaving to study only to keep talking for a few more hours >.> So that’s why I avoid talking to people when I have things to do.
Saturday I thought I had my Computers exam at 5 pm. Around 5:30 pm I realized it probably wasn’t at 5 pm. I was hoping to use one of the public computers to check my exam schedule, except some stereotypical jock was on facebook for 45 minutes and then TURNED IT OFF WHEN HE WAS DONE. You know how display consoles at Wal-mart are in little boxes where you can’t touch them? Imagine how rude it would be for someone to turn one of those off, because nobody can turn them on again without opening the case.
So I was still afraid my exam might start any minute and didn’t want to spend 20 minutes going to get my cell phone, so I used a pay phone to call my mom and get her to check my exam schedule. As I feared, the exam wasn’t set to start until 7 pm. I told her I should be done by 7:30, because it was 45 multiple choice questions and I generally average 45 seconds per multiple choice. At least, on a normal multiple choice question.
This was not a normal multiple choice test. I was there for an hour and a half, spending five minutes or more on some particularly crazy questions. The questions required you to check every single possible answer - “which of these is not false”, “which of these is not a problem with this code”, “which of these statements is most true” - and was generally designed to be a total asshole. So that was unpleasant but at least it’s over.
We left my mom’s house by 7 am yesterday (sunday, day after my exam) to drive to my grandparents’ house in Fredericton. Took us ten hours total to drive there, only stopping once for gas and simply eating food we brought with us. My grandmother was worried we might be stranded in a snow storm (the weather was great) so we had supplies for two days. During the drive I finished reading The Art of Manliness, read chapter 9 in my psychology textbook (the first chapter we’ll be doing next semester, or so I assume) and read a bit about Python. Eventually I realized I couldn’t really learn Python just by reading about it, so I stopped.
Now we’re here, and today I’m going shopping for shoes, winter boots, and pants. I’ll be staying here until the 27th, at which point I’ll be taking a bus to PEI. Staying there until the 31st, then we’ll drive back home. And the best part is the realization that I don’t have to do anything. I read ahead for my psychology course, sure, but aside from that… I really should just relax for the next two weeks. And that’s awesome. I’m going to do whatever I feel like doing, and it’ll be great. Demon’s Souls got an extension on its server expiration date, and they’re doing a Christmas event again this year, so I’m going to play a whole lot of that :D Of course I’ll have to go visiting and shopping and things like that, but I’m old enough now to not cry and complain over not getting to play video games for 12 hours per day.
This is pretty good news, assuming they can learn something from it and devise a better/easier/safer/whatever way to do it.
In other, much less life-saving news: I got Miranda IM up and running, and it is beautiful. I have a small tab on my desktop for it. My contact list appears when I mouse over it. It does everything I liked from MSN, and it does everything I liked from Xfire (including launching games, displaying what you’re playing, and displaying what friends are playing) and it looks better and takes up less room. It took me several frustrating hours, but now I can share my knowledge with others.
And, for the first time in five years, I may uninstall MSN. That’s how good Miranda is. Expect that post alongside my super-duper post tonight. I’ll see if I can find out how to create easy installers for my Rainmeter stuff, and stuff.
Note: This article, sadly, isn’t on the Art of Manliness website. It’s great, though, and relevant to a discussion I was having earlier. Is it wrong to post one of the few book-exclusive Art of Manliness articles? Maybe, but I think it’ll be alright. If anything it should convince you to buy the book yourself.
One last thing - you’d be silly to think this only applies to men. It’s all good advice, though the relative usefulness depends on your situation - which includes the gender of your friend. Some people don’t like being grilled for information, others will be more than happy to talk. Go with what works, and recognize when you’ve stopped being helpful.
If you see your buddy going through a rough patch in life, it’s only natural to want to offer some advice on how to remedy the situation. But helping a man friend with a problem can be a sticky situation; men don’t like heart-to-hearts, they’re often too prideful to ask for help and a marathon of watching Sex and the City reruns and eating pints of Ben and Jerry’s won’t soothe their troubles. So when helping your friend with a problem, you must walk softly and carry a fishing pole.
Go do something together. Men tend to be uncomfortable with baring their souls. So instead of sitting your friend down and gazing into his eyes, go jogging, take him fishing or bowling, or play some pool. It’s easier to unburden yourself when you’re sitting looking outward, instead of face-to-face. In between fishing casts, ask your friend about his problem.
Get the facts. Before you can successfully help someone, you need to know all the facts about the problem. Harness your inner news report by asking who, what, when, where and why questions. And make sure you listen attentively while your friend speaks.
Enable your friend to discover the solution himself. Men are most likely to follow through with something if they feel like they thought of the idea themselves. And oftentimes a man simply needs to be able to think out loud to come up with the answer to his troubles. Therefore your job as a friend is to act as a facilitator. After you hear your friend’s problem, ask him very nonchalantly, “So what do you think you can do to fix your situation?” Usually he’ll start listening some things. When he says something that you think would be particularly effective, let him know and explore the idea further.
Ask him if he wants your advice. If helping them figure out their own solution isn’t going anywhere, ask your friend if he would like some advice. By asking before you jump into the ray, you respect your friend’s manly pride. If they say no, then it’s no great shakes. Just keep fishing or bowling and let your friend know you’re always willing to talk about it in the future. Don’t bug him about it; that’s the man code.
Don’t preach. Men hate being preached to. Don’t put off a smug vibe that makes your friend feel you think you’re better than him for being in this pickle. Skip the patronizing sermon of “shoulds” and “musts”; instead offer suggestions. Say, “This is what I would do if I were in your situation,” “You could try doing X,” or “I once had a similar problem and here’s how I handled it.”
Give ‘em some straight talk. Men don’t like to be preached to, but they do appreciate a justified kick in the pants. If your friend’s been a dunderhead, then you need to call him on the carpet. Talk to him respectfully and honestly, man to man. Sometimes you have to tear a man down to bring him back up.
Naturally the specific situation should determine your approach. If the problem is more sensitive, like his girlfriend cheating on him, be more sympathetic.
