So I lost 5% on my last comp 2001 assignment for something that, to the best of my knowledge, actually works. On the other hand, I lost nothing for all the other “features” I managed to include. So I think it’s best not to argue the...

So I lost 5% on my last comp 2001 assignment for something that, to the best of my knowledge, actually works.

On the other hand, I lost nothing for all the other “features” I managed to include. So I think it’s best not to argue the point.

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I mainly wanted to post the above image, but thought I’d flesh out the post a little with a story. So here’s the deal with the above card, which will make a lot more sense if you’re familiar with the source material. The blue and green icons on the side indicate that the character can participate in Intrigue battles and Power battles, respectively. “Renown” means that a character has a lot of political clout - whenever they win political power for your faction, you get more than normal. I’m not so sure about the effect on non-unique characters, but it’s the final ability that really stands out for me.

“After Lyanna Stark is killed, stand (untap) all Lord characters in play. Those characters gain deadly until the end of the round.”

This is so perfect if you’re familiar with the source (both the books and the game), but I’m going to give you a rundown of what the mechanics are saying. After a number of fierce battles (offence and defence lead to kneeling, as well as using other abilities), the death of a well-loved (in more than one sense) Lady leads all the Lords in play to surge up and seek deadly vengeance. For the rest of the round, they shoot to kill, so to speak. The catch here is that few abilities outright murder a specific character - when a player loses a military battle (or any challenge that includes a deadly character), they get to choose who dies. So generally speaking, this will be a strategic sacrifice.

Moreover, the way the deadly keyword works is that it only comes into effect if the attacker has more deadly characters than the defender. If your opponent has two Lord characters, who are now deadly, and you initiate a battle with three Lord characters, the fact that everyone gets the benefit of the card is irrelevant. Everyone rejoins the fight, but that doesn’t mean they can win. “But this is an outrage! Lyanna’s death won’t go unavenged!” And so on.

Anyway, I know this is probably uninteresting unless you share my interest in card games and Game of Thrones. But I think it’s important to appreciate good design in any kind of game, even if you only play video games. With keyword systems to cut down on the text for individual cards, a lot of the heavy lifting is already done to sum up the mechanics and communicate with the player. If every single card simply said, “During a challenge, if the attacking player controls the most participating characters with this text, the defending player must choose and kill a defending participating character after the challenge resolves.” it would never occur to (most) players that this mechanic means the same thing as what the deadly keyword communicates.

It’s a definite strength of the format, and I don’t necessarily have ideas for how to adapt it elsewhere. I know memorizing keywords is a challenge whenever you’re learning a new CCG - we’ve always had to play AGoT with a keyword cheat sheet. So taking the benefits of the system without the negatives could be a challenge. But it’s something worth thinking about in terms of ways to communicate mechanics more effectively, and (if you’ll forgive one pretentious sentence in this whole endeavour) how to situate them in the overall narrative context of the game. Stay tuned for a post in a week or two that might make this a bit clearer.

lingllama: “ ˈtiːm.wɝk [Picture: Background: 8-piece pie-style color split with alternating shades of blue. Foreground: Linguist Llama meme, a white llama facing forward, wearing a red scarf. Top text: “There is too” Bottom text: “an /i/ in team!”...

lingllama:

ˈtiːm.wɝk

[Picture: Background: 8-piece pie-style color split with alternating shades of blue. Foreground: Linguist Llama meme, a white llama facing forward, wearing a red scarf. Top text: “There is too” Bottom text: “an /i/ in team!”]

nyoro~n

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So yeah anyway. Actually trying to work on my problems has been helping a lot. I’m sleeping better (though not quite enough), and haven’t had a whole lot of anxiety despite actually spending time with people. Still not so hot on the whole “starting conversations with strangers” thing (even when they’re cute strangers), but that’s less of a crippling issue.

But hey, if you’re that girl with the glasses from the Unexpect concert who was orbiting me for almost an hour, call me.

School’s doing alright, although I wish I could be further ahead than I am. You know how I said I should get X work done over the weekend? I did all of that before class thursday morning. But then I did practically nothing friday, had no time to even think about working saturday, and then got through MAYBE an hour of actually working on sunday. Bleh. Still, I’ve got ½ synopses done and the second just needs to be written, which shouldn’t take long (famous last words, etc.). I’ve got a written assignment to do for that class, as well - a 2 page research proposal. I’ve successfully resisted the urge to “propose” the research project I’m already working on, but again, it shouldn’t take too long. After that, I become a code monkey until December 2nd. More time would be better, but provided I have at least a week, I should be alright.

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I’ve got stuff to write about, but no time right now. Come Christmas break I’ll throw up a few posts. Mostly gaming-related. But speaking of gaming, I think it’s hilarious how everyone is off playing Skyrim and I’m like FINAL FANTASY VI ADVANCE! XENOBLADE ON THE WII! As far as the former goes, the right hinge on my old DS Lite just broke yesterday morning D: The crack has been progressing for a while. It’s still relatively playable with the screen flopped back.

As for Xenoblade, it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting since the end of the PS2. It’s really a natural extension of that era of jRPGs, the most striking influence being Rogue Galaxy - a game I absolutely cannot stand anymore, but which Xenoblade improves on in every single way. Now I’m finally playing an unarguably great “current generation” jRPG, and it’s on the Wii. It’s better than PS2 games, sure, but where has this game been for the last five years?

Anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying your games. I’ll be over here, playing single player japanese RPGs, loving every minute.

3Linguist Llama

net slum: If "the censorship bill" eventually goes through...4

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:

  • When we were moving to Ottawa last summer, the usage based billing hammer had just dropped on independent ISPs. The one available to us in Ottawa, TekSavvy, had pretty high praise from its existing customers. 
  • Suddenly, TekSavvy’s bandwidth caps were dropped dramatically - on some plans, they went from 200 gb/month down to 25 gb/month.
  • We ended up going with Rogers, paying $47+tax for 60 gb/month, “up to” 12 mbps download, and “up to” 512 kbps upload, plus inescapable throttling and outages in response to torrenting activity.
  • Looking at TekSavvy now, for $43+tax per month, we would get “up to” 24 mbps download, “up to” 1 mbps upload, and a 300 gb/month cap. While they use the Rogers infrastructure, I don’t believe they enforce throttling and otherwise screw with their users. And for another $10/month, we’d get unlimited bandwidth (although we actually survive just fine with 60 gb).

        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…

3net slum
I had a prof last year for COMP 1005, the first programming class for non-computer science majors, basically just an intro to Java. I thought she was great, even if she demanded we actually know stuff in order to pass. Plus, she’s very personable,...

I had a prof last year for COMP 1005, the first programming class for non-computer science majors, basically just an intro to Java. I thought she was great, even if she demanded we actually know stuff in order to pass. Plus, she’s very personable, poking fun at talkative students and stuff.

I’ve got her now for COMP 2001, and again, she gives people the marks they’ve worked for. Apparently, the same goes for COMP 3004 (a class I’m not taking), where 75% of the class is failing. This is a month before the term ends, by the way. Apparently, her angry tirade was so vicious that it inspired the above image. Somebody put it on their facebook, and it’s made the rounds among all her prior and current students.

I know you won’t find it as funny as I do, but it had to be shared.

thegreatcrate: “ I remember the first time I did this in Skyrim. I was so excited when I saw I could catch a butterfly and then…well, I felt kinda bad. —- I play a game while I’m editing stories now, called “paragraph importance”. Each paragraph has...

thegreatcrate:

I remember the first time I did this in Skyrim. I was so excited when I saw I could catch a butterfly and then…well, I felt kinda bad.

—-

I play a game while I’m editing stories now, called “paragraph importance”. Each paragraph has to work like the piece of a puzzle, or a link in a chain, where the overarching idea is portrayed in the small steps. It must form a cohesive whole. As I’m reading through I ask myself, “What is this paragraph about? Is this paragraph important? Would anything change if I deleted it?” It works wonders for weeding out the unnecessary bits.

I have a similar game I play when I’m writing an essay: the first sentence of a paragraph tells you what it’s about, and when you put them all together, you should get a nice little paragraph summarizing your essay. And, of course, they should transition from the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

It doesn’t quite apply to other forms of writing, but it’s a pretty good way to make sure you’re getting your point across well.

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As for the image, panels 1 + 2 pretty much describe me now that we’re actually running the experiment I’ve spent the last two months creating. It used to be just a big block of code, and now it’s all growed up :’)

Also, KillScreen’s Things I Ate in Skyrim.

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Also, I’m playing FF VI and enjoying it a lot. At least in the GBA port, you can really see how it falls in between the other SNES era FF games and FF VII, the way they play with the point of view at times and integrate cutscenes and dialog into battle. From what I understand, at least the tutorial conversations you get in battle didn’t exist in the SNES version. But it’s a nice touch, making the “battle screen” less of an alternate dimension and more of an actual place.

Twice so far I’ve had to control three parties in a battle against a series of enemies, which is sort of neat. Except for the part where you just place your parties at the perfect positions to block off all the enemies and there’s absolutely no challenge to it at all. Aside from that, because they split you up in situations like that and due to the story, the cast is gigantic. After a couple of hours you play through three separate “scenarios,” and the size of the cast doubles (from 4 to 8) by the time you finish all three and meet up. But what’s cool about that is that all the characters have different abilities - the Super Saiyan monk (he punches laser beams) has a combo system of sorts as his special ability, while the samurai can spend time preparing ridiculously powerful abilities. A few characters unlock new abilities later on in the story, I think, because there are empty spaces on their command menus. Anyway, it’s great to see an RPG actually distinguishing its cast members from each other.

3The Great Crate

Too busy planning for later, to think about right now

[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.

net slum: re: Gmail's new layout is kind of bad4

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:

image

From 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…

3net slum

Hey Matt, Whatcha Up To?

        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!

“It’s like Apple products”

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]