Rambling Brand

Sworn Enemies

2006-01-18T07:13:00.000-08:00

There's a common expedient in video game design, where the game will give the player a "sworn enemy", an ancient enemy that the player has to just assume is the bad guy from the start. The only problem with that is, game players today are just too sophisticated to accept a cartoonish version of motivation like that.

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Did you ever notice how many games just start off by handing you a sworn enemy? In GTA San Andreas, they start the game by dropping you in 'Ballas' territory, and the first time you run across one of those gang members, the game tells you that they are your 'sworn enemy.' What I don't get is, Why?

Why are these guys my sworn enemy? Because they killed some of my gang? Sure, but I've killed a whole slew of them, so it's kinda a wash, right? I mean, either we actually keep score, or we just assume that we have to kill everybody. Either way, we've got no real reason for all the hostility.

Some games will start out by giving you a reason for hating the bad guy, and that works out a lot better. You are a simple peasant going about your simple life of collecting mushrooms, when suddenly a boulder destroys your entire village, and as you look up, you see the evil troll grinning down at the smoking crater of your home. . . now that's motivation!

But lots of of the games start you off with a 'sworn enemy' just as an expedient. If you play Sudeki, you start off with them handing you an enemy. An ancient enemy, the Aklorians, who have been at war with your people for some time, and seem to attack you for no reason. At the beginning of any game, I've got nothing but love for all God's people. When you tell me I've got an ancient enemy, I tend to question it more than just jump in and say, "Yeah! Let's kill those bastards!"

I find myself more interested in their motivation than angry with them. I kill those that attack me, but I just can't buy into calling them enemies. Then, about half way through the game, I find out that they are not my "real" enemy. In fact, someone else is manipulating both sides to attack each other. Well, how . . . underwhelming. Sorry, it just doesn't feel like betrayal when you don't really love or hate either side.

What's worse is that most games will foreshadow this situation. Look, if you are told to attack somebody, and you aren't given a reason for it, and people actively avoid questions which might mitigate the hatred, chances are you're being manipulated. If you really want to make the players believe a story, you have to give them a believable motivation for both sides. We hate the bad guys because they want to take over our world. Okay, but if you don't tell me why they want our world, then it just doesn't quite gel. These days, it's hard to accept general greed as a motivation, unless you make your enemy so cartoony in his manner that people accept him as generally shallow and two-dimensional.

Now, this would be a great betrayal. The troll destroys your village, and you see him dancing on the mountaintop, gleefully enjoying the destruction. You hear him say, "Boy I really do hate all humans. I just love smashin' em." Okay, at this point, you accept that your story and motivation are going to be two-dimensional, and you just play the game normally, trying to stop, or kill, the troll. Along your jouneys, you pick up a pal who tells you that his village was destroyed by the troll, and he has been following the troll ever since. So, cool. Now you've got a party in the standard video game sense.

But then you notice, in the middle of one of the battles, that the latest village the troll destroyed was a troll village. You notice that your new friend always seems to know just where to go next to head off the troll. Through cutscenes, you notice all kinds of intricate little details (like the troll is always rubbing the silver band around his head, like it was giving him a headache).

If games can do that, start with a simple two-dimensional story, and slowly evolve it through small, incremental clues, it would keep the player's attention, and build them up for a much better betrayal. For instance, the game leaves clues that lead you to believe your new friend is controlling the troll, but does it in a way that seems like the game is trying to keep that secret from you. Then, just when you're expecting the betrayal scene, where you are ready to confront him, you get stabbed from behind by a huge, new enemy with his own army of controlled trolls. You wake up in a jail cell thinking, "What the hell just happened?" Now, that's a sweet setup.

Any story that leads you subtly into building your own idea of which side is good and which is evil, then completely obliterates those beliefs in climactic storyline changes, will be heralded and loved.

LDTV - The Wave of the future.

2005-12-19T00:37:00.000-08:00

I was just looking through the glut of hardware that makes up my handheld media system. My IPod Video, PocketPC computer, Neuros 442 video player, Treo video phone, and Playstation Portable. It occured to me that they all play video, but none of them are HDTV.

I started wondering why we care so much about HDTV.

The US government has decreed that we will move all TV signals to HDTV by 2006. The media conglomerates have tried twice to ram legislation through congress that will make it impossible to record HDTV, and half of the people who have HDTV systems think they are watching it, without actually having the systems hooked up properly.

That means half the people who have HDTV only think they're watching HDTV, while they are, in fact, only watching normal TV.

In fact, Hollywood doesn't even want HDTV. Turns out, when you see a movie star in the Megapixels view, you can see their skin imperfections. They look more human, presumably. This, of course, scares the hell out of Hollywood.

So why are we in such a hurry to get HDTV? Every time I've seen it, I've said, "Okay. The picture is clearer than normal. Of course, it doesn't make the movie any better."

Every one of the media viewers I own has the capability to play video at 320x240. And believe me, at 30 frames per second, 320x240 is plenty for a handheld device.

What's more, the compression savings are a godsend. I can get the typical 1.5 hour movie into 450megs at 320x240. That means I can store just about 9 movies (or 13.5 hours) of video on one DVD. 13.5 hours is enough space to store all the Lord of the Rings movies and still have room for the Rankin-Bass versions! (whoa, really showed my geek stripes there)

So that's what I'm doing. I'm letting the whole HDTV movement pass me by. I'm not going to be one of the early adopters who buys a $3,000 TV just so I can get smaller pixels. Instead, I'm going to convert all my DVDs to low res, cut my DVD collection to 1/10th it's size, and carry my videos with me wherever I go.

I think I'd enjoy being the world's first Low-Def Television Missionary.

Sony's rootkit 'Hot Coffee'

2005-12-05T21:06:00.000-08:00

Tags:Sony rootkit GTA Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee ITunes

Sony is probably one of the biggest backers for Take Two, and GTA in particular. Every GTA game that has come out so far, debuted on a Sony System. So it could be said that Sony has a pretty close relationship with those guys.

It could also be said that Rockstar made a big mistake when it left critically dangerous code (now called 'Hot Coffee') in its game. When they put the Hot Coffee minigame in there, they took out the reference to it, thus removing it in practice without removing it in fact.

Now, in an odd moment of serendipity, it looks like Sony has done the same thing with their DRM software.

It turns out that the (now infamous) Sony rootkit employs code which came from DVD Jon, and was used to circumvent Apple's DRM software. The code from DVD Jon was released under the GPL, which means that in this case, Sony would have to publish the fact that they used this code.

Now, I'm not going to go after them because they broke copyright with their rootkit. That ground has already been covered. What I find funny is the news today about what they're doing with it.

It turns out that Sony had code that would allow ITunes to play their music, but only on the one computer. Of course, that meant hacking the Apple DRM in order to do it.

So, the story of the day would have been "Sony breaks copyrights twice in order to protect their copyrights". But that isn't the story at all. Because Sony took that function out.

Possibly at the last minute, Sony removed the call to their "ITunes enabling" code, thus leaving the functionality out, but not actually removing that code.

So, much like the way Rockstar accidentally leaked a "Hot Coffee" game, now Sony is accidentally leaking a "Hack ITunes" game.

Honestly, what Sony is doing behind our backs really makes the whole "Hot Coffee" scandal seem timid, sad, and tame.

Now, surely Hillary Clinton and all the anti-videogame people will come screaming for blood from people who actually do harm to peoples computers, data, privacy, and content. I'm just waiting to hear them start investigations of Sony.

Any minute now. . .

Existential Save Games

2005-11-29T23:35:00.000-08:00

In this podcast post, I talk about a singularly odd thing that happened in GTA, which brought into question the very nature of the universe.

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I was just playing GTA: San Andreas a second ago, and I noticed something wholly unseen in the history of man.

First of all, you have to understand something about the way they do savegames. When you step on the little floating floppy disk, the game will do five things: save your game progress (obviously), fully heal you, fully feed you, drop any wanted level you may have gained, and advance the clock by six hours.

In the past, I have always assumed that it worked like this: I walked into my safehouse, got something to eat, had a bit of a lie down to refresh myself, and then came out six hours later. However, I have a spinning savegame icon that's standing in between two pillars in front of a garage, so it's not really a safehouse.

Anyway, I was running out of health, because my wanted level was at about three stars (not impossible to survive, but impossible to ignore). Cops were pouring out of the landscape, shooting off all of my armor, then most of my health. I got to the savegame icon with only one percent health, and a cop pointing his gun in my face. As I was looking down the cobalt blue barrel, the screen flashed to a "Save Game?" prompt.

I said yes, and the game resumed. It was six hours later, I was still standing in the middle of the parking lot, and still looking death in the barrel, when the cop put his gun down and walked away.

It had such an existential feel to it, like the last scene in Time Bandits, where Sean Connery gets back into the firetruck and waves as they drive off.

I figure this is what happened: The cops were pursuing me when I suddenly blipped out of existence. They ran a five-hour exhaustive manhunt, during which I could not be found. One cop stayed in place, swearing to all the others, "I don't care what you say! He freakin' vanished, man!" Then, just as he was giving up hope, I blipped back into existence in front of him. The vision of me, appearing like magic in front of the cop was a highly religious experience, one that made him rethink his whole moral outlook. He put his gun down, swearing never to raise it to another man in anger, and went home to tell his wife that they were going to buy a farm and live off the land.

Of course, it could be one of those normal gameplay invariants, but I like my version better.

Video Game Ethics 4 - Sex

2005-11-27T21:47:00.000-08:00

In this podcast, I talk about the ethics of sex as handled by games. With added 'Hot Coffee' goodness.

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It's kind of tough to talk about video games, ethics, and sex, because I don't think humanity has completely defined what appropriate sexual ethics are.

I mean, sexual issues seem to wax and wane with each generation. For instance, in America, just thirty years ago, homosexuality was never referred to on TV or film.

In that thirty years, however, we have seen "Will & Grace", "The L Word", and even the Crying Game. So, morals swing a lot over time.

Rather than try to determine where games stand on the right or wrong of sex,let's look at where they stand on individual issues within the realm of "sex".

Before I get started, let me point out that I'm drawing a distinction here between sex in games, and sex games.

The first group is personified by games that you can buy on the shelves at any Best Buy or Electronic Boutique (Leisure Suit Larry, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto).

The second group is usually bought over the internet or downloaded (Hentai games, strip blackjack games, stuff like that).

Without trying to offend anyone, I'm going to call the first group "Normal" games (games that revolve around gameplay), and the second group "Hentai" games (games that revolve around sex).

I should point out that there are very few games out there that have courtship or sex, and of those few, they all feature a male courting a woman.

But while you may see a game where the male has to buy expensive presents, flowers, and candy for the female, you won't ever see a strong female lead striving to convince a male to love her. In this, at least, art imitates life.

Monogamy:

Of the entire range of "Normal" games, there are almost no games that support monogamy.

Whenever courting is represented in a video game, it is almost always a man courting a woman; and in all of those situations, the man is allowed to court as many women as he wishes.

Every episode of Leisure Suit Larry was about the player trying to have sex with as many girls as he could.

In Fable, a man can marry a woman in a grand ceremony, then walk to the nearest town and marry again.

In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there are six different women who are designated "girlfriends".

It is quite possible, and apparently pretty common, for people to co-mingle in "The Sims". They can even get married, although even that is limited to kissing and hugging. Also, the Sims condones poligamy by allowing the male to marry as many females as he wants.

Now, there are several games out there that have a woman as a goal ("Save the Princess" to receive a chaste kiss on the cheek), but in those games, there is never an alternative.

You can't get to the end of the game and say, "Actually, I think the evil witch is more my type."

And because there's no choice, it's not really monogamous (was Adam really monogamous with Eve, or was there just no other choice?).

In Hentai games, monogamy is not even a consideration. Most of the game is involved not with which woman you should sleep with, but rather details about how you sleep with them.

T&A:

Given how much it's been covered in the past, it's almost not worth mentioning that body styles in video games have grown unbelievable.

Every leading man has a 30-inch waist, washerboard abs, four foot wide shoulders, and rippling muscles.

Every leading lady fits a 36-24-36 DD format, and in some games, you can even set how much the breasts bounce when she moves.

This section is obviously tailored to the lowest common denominator, and it will not change. Why? You may ask? Because there's a lot more people in the lower common denominator than in any other group, and they spend money the same way anybody else does.

And, of course, it's even worse in the Hentai games.

The Act:

In Normal games, showing the act is very rare, and usually involves creative editing. GTA will show a car bounce up and down if you hire a prostitute.

Leisure Suit Larry will show some suggestive imagery, but put black "Censor bars" over the private parts of the couple. Probably my favorite example of this was in the first LSL, where the Censor bar was the exact same size as Larry, so it looked like the bar was bouncing on top of Larry's date.

A more common form is to fade to black, or show an exterior shot of the room, while you hear the moaning coming from inside.

Either way, games apparently don't think it's necessary to show much in this situation. Why, you may ask? Because it's got nothing to do with gameplay, and gameplay is king.

In Hentai games, you rarely see much of the act, because in most cases, it's just a series of images with lurid descriptions. However, in the games that show animated sex, they rarely shy away from showing any part of the act.

Now, no modern discussion about sex in video games would be complete without talking about the biggest news story in video games this past year, the Hot Coffee Mod.

It seems that, while developing the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the guys at Rockstar thought it would be fun to make a minigame based on sex itself. However, the company decided to cut the minigame, because of censorship concerns. For all we know, this happens a lot in video games, but we never find out, because they always remove that code before shipping the game.

And, in fact, we probably never would have heard about this one, except that when they took out the minigame, they didn't completely remove it. And so, after some enterprising hackers got into the game, they unlocked the sex minigame, and created a mod so that everyone could play it.

Now, to be fair, there wasn't a whole lot to see there. It was basically a couple of sexless Barbie dolls bumping into each other, in time with a beat. The game was already rated T for Teen, so it was pretty much in line with what had been seen before. A lot of people compared it to the sex scene from "Team America: World Police" where two marrionettes bounce into each other humourously. It was, frankly, pretty tame.

The gaming world went nuts. Parents groups were up in arms. Walmart, KMart, Target, they all said they would be removing the game from their shelves. The ESRB decided to re-rate the game as "Adults Only", a rating which had previously only been used for Hentai and other porn-based games.

So this is probably the clearest indication we can get as to what the culture thinks of sex. Whereas it was entirely valid to suggest that a player can have sex with multiple partners, it was entirely off-limits to actually show two androgynous people engaging in consensual sex. Once again we get the message that the image of sex is bad, but the concept of sex is good, or at least, not worth mentioning.

Re-cap:

So, games seem to be physically and emotionally immature, either incapable or unwilling to commit to one relationship. Also, they seem somewhat chauvinistic in their portrayal of men pursuing women. However, they seem to be pretty prudish when it comes to nudity in the games.

That seems kind of odd, that they are okay with multiple partners, but unwilling to show naked people. But when you think about it, it's not that odd. Our censorship is based on images, not on content.

Next up - Gluttony and Envy

In-Browser Podcast Player

2005-11-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

If you look at the top of this page, just under the title, you'll see a Flash player that will let you listen to the Rambling Brand Podcast in your browser!

If you're like me, you load up podcasts on your MP3 player for the commute to work. If, however, you want to 'try before you buy', this gives you a great opportunity. I hope you like it.

Lying

2005-11-21T08:09:00.000-08:00

In today's post we look at the ethical situation in video games regarding Lying. Where are you allowed to lie in a video game? How do most games handle it (if at all).

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Theft

2005-11-16T21:53:00.000-08:00

In today's post we look at the ethical situation in video games regarding theft. Namely, is there anything wrong with stealing the red key from a Troll?

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ITunes Listing

2005-11-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

If you'd like to follow this podcast using ITunes, it is now listed.

Just open ITunes, click on the Music Store, then click podcasts, and type "Rambling Brand" in the search box next to the magnifying glass. When you hit enter, you'll see this Podcast listed at the top!

Video Game Ethics Chapter 1 - Murder

2005-11-13T18:15:00.000-08:00

A long time ago (nearly a year ago), I wrote a short treatise on ethics in video games. Now I don't mean the effect that games have on society, children, or whatever. This is solely a look at what kind of ethics a game expects from it's players. Ethics are imposed on players inside the game, and it's worth looking at what set of ethics people are expected to have in-game.

Anyway, today I recorded, mixed, and posted a podcast version of the first chapter of these treatises, about murder.

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Sandy rough draft.

2005-11-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me that I should post the actual story for Sandys, along with the podcast. This is actually the rough draft that I used for the final story, but it does at least give you the gist of it. Hope you like it.

If you'd like to hear the podcast form of the story, it's here.
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---- Sandys
---- by Brand Gamblin

Susan scribbled down one last saccharine platitude, and threw the pen into her bag. Staring down at the paper, she was glad to be done with it. American History papers always had to be syrupy patriotic and uplifting for a good grade.

She shut the history book with an unintentional slam, and stretched.The library was quiet and vacant, as it always was after classes. The air had time to settle, and dust wafted lazily through it, illuminating the afternoon light coming through the windows. Just watching it made Susan want to sneeze.

She liked having study hall at the end of the day. It always gave her a head start on the others, and gave her a chance to wind down before the evening. In the quiet of this room, it seemed like time slowed down to the speed of dust in the light. She yawned and grabbed the book with both hands.

Susan walked back to the reference section, her low heels snapping loudly in the empty room. Finding the right shelf, she slid the heavy book back into its place, healing the gapped-tooth row of historical encyclopedias.

"You've got to stay away from work!" A voice shouted from behind her. She grabbed the bookshelf in shock and spun around. The woman standing behind her was older, probably mid-fifties, in a power suit and expensively-styled hair. The woman looked intelligent and alert, but
very obviously stressed. "Susan, do you understand me?"

Susan leaned back against the bookshelf and put one palm over her heart. "Jesus, you scared the crap out of me."

The woman looked unmoved, "I'm sorry for my arrival, but I don't have much time, and I have to tell you –"

Susan pushed past her as she headed back to her table, "Just shut up. I don't want to hear it."

The old woman followed her, expensive shoes snapping crisply on the floor, "You don't understand. I'm from the future! I've come back with an important message!"

Susan shoved her papers back in her bag, refusing to look at the woman, "Oh, I understand all right. You've got an important message that will change the course of history, or change my life forever." She pulled the bag over her shoulder, and ducked under the strap as she fitted the bag, bandolier style, across her chest, "Now will you please shut up and go away!"

The woman grabbed her shoulders, "Prepare yourself for a shock."

Susan looked disinterestedly into the woman's tired eyes, "You're me, right?"

This stopped the woman suddenly, and she let go of Susan, "Uh, yes."

Susan frowned at her and raised an eyebrow, "Then, I suppose there is a question you can answer for me."

The woman brightened, "Wonderful! That's what I'm here for!"

"You could tell me, at exactly what point . . . I became so stupid." She breezed past the old woman, and headed for the door.

Her older self stood there, and put her hands on her hips angrily, "Young lady, you stop right there and take this seriously!"

Susan called out over her shoulder, "Don't bother. You can't change history, everybody knows that. Just go home." Susan opened the door,and nearly walked into the woman standing in the doorway.

Susan covered her face in embarrassment, "Oh, wonderful."

The woman in the doorway was clearly in her seventies, wearing a long sundress with bangles and tassels hanging all over it. She had a floppy hat, and kind eyes. She had deep and long laugh lines, and her mouth looked like it was unaccustomed to frowning. "My dear, have you already talked to her?"

The power suit walked up behind Susan, "Who are you?"

The old woman in the sundress said, "I'm you, dear. I know it must seem confusing, but I can't let you stop her."

Susan actually found it within herself to be embarrassed, angry, and bemused, "So, if I get this right, we're maid, mother, and crone, right? How about you guys wait here for MacBeth, and I'll be right back."

The others looked at her, and the older one said, "Dear, this is a serious matter. You know I wouldn't have come back if it weren't the most important –"

The power suit interrupted her, "That's what I'm telling her. That's why we can't go to the embassy today!"

The old woman put one wrinkled hand on the power suit, "No, hon. I know what you're going through, but it's something you're just going to have to deal with. I know what happens after –"

Susan pushed past them, "Great. So you two get acquainted, and I'll see you in about thirty years." She started a brisk walk down the hallway, headed for the exit. Behind her, the two were still bickering.

"No! You can't go to work today. Lives are at stake!"

"Woman! You leave that girl alone. She's got to do what she's got to do, and you can't stop her."

At the entrance, Susan could see her friend Becky, gawping at the tableau. As she approached, Becky asked, "Who are they?"

"They're Sandys. Can we go please?"

Becky's lip curled in a disgusted sneer, "Omigod. Sue, I'm so sorry for you."

Susan didn't even break stride, "Let's just go, they'll have to leave soon anyway."

Becky put one hand lightly on her back in sympathy, "Don't worry, hon. We'll go home the back way, nobody will see them."

Susan shook her head, "Actually, I forgot, I've got to go to work today." Behind her, a plaintive cry called out, "No! You can't go today!"

Becky looked back at them as they quickened their pace, "Wow, they get really worked up, don't they?"

"Yeah. It's really pathetic."

Becky faced forward again, smiling, "Good news. They're gone."

Susan pantomimed wiping the sweat off her brow, "I was afraid they were going to follow me all the way to work."

Becky pointed up ahead, "We're almost at the corner." She angled off toward home, "I'll see you tomorrow."

Susan nodded and waved, "Yeah." In the back of her mind, she thought, 'Unless the Sandy's right.'

Susan walked on in silence. It was more than five blocks from her school to the Hungarian embassy, a perfect distance for leisurely walks through the city. This was a special time of day for her, when she could just breathe deep, watch the trees bow with the wind, and just enjoy the time alone.

But not today. She did her best to ignore the Sandys (after all, that's all you can do) but they had got under her skin. Of course it was embarrassing enough to know that she would one day go back in time to give lifestyle hints to herself, but that wasn't the worst of it.

She took a deep breath, and tried to clear her head. Nobody knew when the time machine was invented, and these days, nobody cared. At some point in time, someone will discover the secret. Soon after that, the secret will be exposed. Soon after that, it will be mass marketed. And after that, who cares about keeping up with the timeline?

There was one ironclad rule to time travel that everybody knew. You can't change anything. If you go back in time to tell yourself to buy a certain stock, your earlier self will buy the wrong one, or you'll get the breath knocked out of you just as you're about to give up the information. Causality works like that, just one big stupid sitcom of comedic interference.

Or worse, if you actually fight causality, go back and change something big, you end up splitting off an alternative timeline, with ramifications you won't even see, because you're still stuck in your timeline when you get home. Or else, you end up in a timeline you couldn't have predicted, or something. It got into egghead territory at that point, and Susan frankly didn't care.

Still, for some people, the pull is just too great. They can't help themselves. They just feel like they have to go back in time and fix some terrible wrong, no matter what the consequences. It never works, but desperate people will go to desperate measures.

Whenever you see one of those desperate people (they were called Sandys, after the Cassandra complex), all you can do is shake your head and let them say their piece. Everybody knows it won't make any difference, but it's embarrassing to let people know that, someday in the future, you'll be stupid enough to become a Sandy.

The only thing worse than the Sandys was the –

Susan looked up at block ahead of her. There was nothing noticeably wrong, but it seemed to her like there were a lot of people standing around outside the Hungarian embassy. They all seemed to be watching the building, as though expecting something. She gritted her teeth, and finished the thought. The only thing worse than the Sandys was the Tourists.

Tourists were people who went through time, not to change anything, but just to witness it. These were the guys who packed Ford's theater the night of Lincoln's shooting. They are the ones trying to push their way into the Zapbruder film. They were the ones who stood in the high rises on September 11th, watching the World Trade Center. Bunch of voyeuristic bastards.

You could always tell which ones were the Tourists, too. They would be a large group, spaced out around some event that no one else could see happening. They would all be quietly staring at the same thing, and they'd refuse to tell you what it was. If you asked what they were looking at, or what was going to happen, most Tourists would just smile that know-it-all smile, and say, "Oh, nothing. I'm just hanging around." Or else, they would just play coy and make little jokes like, "Well, you never know who'll be dropping in." while staring at the sky.

It wasn't the timeline that made the Tourists act like that. They knew about causality, and didn't really care. They didn't like to tell people what was going to happen, because they felt like it spoiled the moment. It was like talking during the movie, saying, "I've seen this movie, the wife's the killer." Tourists thought it was rude to give away the ending.

But they weren't spies, and they weren't good at hiding their presence. Susan had never seen a crowd of tourists before, but a mammalian, pattern-recognition part of her brain recognized the danger. After that, it was hard not to notice them.

Susan stopped by a deli just a block from the embassy and waited. There was no way to tell what was going to happen, but she suddenly knew she didn't want to be in there. She started looking around, thinking she could grab one of the Tourists, and shake the truth out of him, when the bomb went off.

The first thing she noticed was the shock of it. From a block away, the explosion managed to knock the wind out of her, just before the sound hit. It was so loud, she didn't hear it at first. It was too sudden for her to realize what she'd heard, and it was replaced by the rumbling sound of the collapsing building.

Susan hadn't been looking at the embassy, so she missed the bright light of the explosion, but she turned in time to see the building buckle forward, tearing it's foundation apart in the back. Smoke had just started to issue out, and it all came at once, white dust, small grey rocks, and black smoke.

Embassys are political targets, and they're made to be defensive. Because of the recent Baltic struggle, this embassy had built up their defenses in preparation for protests. In the end, all the preparations did was force the car bomber to ignite the front of the embassy, rather than the whole first floor.

The entire building leaned forward over the thin two-lane entranceway. It leaned into, and crushed, several of the top floors of the building across the street. Then, after a sickening, twisted metal groan of effort, it seemed to settle temporarily against the other building.

Susan stood there with her mouth open. She didn't feel anything. She was bone weary suddenly, and she just wanted to sit down. She couldn't move, though. She just stood there and looked at the smoke.

She saw an ambulance pull up to the building, and the sight of it woke her up. There were people in there. She blinked quickly, as her brain unfroze. She started walking quickly over to the building. The paramedics would know what to do. Maybe she could help them.

She watched as they climbed out of the ambulance, and opened up the back. They looked around at all the Tourists, and waited. They turned and looked at the building. As Susan ran up to them, she could see that they weren't going in. They were just standing outside, waiting.

She ran up to them and breathlessly asked the nearest paramedic, "What's wrong? Why aren't you going in?"

The paramedic looked stoically apologetic, "I'm sorry, but we just can't go in yet. We gotta wait for the bomb squad."

She looked back at the building. She could see people behind some of the windows, trying to find a way to break through the bulletproof glass. "But there's people in there!"

He shook his head, "Look, I know how you feel, but there's about a dozen reasons we can't go in there." He looked back at the building, still shaking his head, "It's technically not American soil. We could be starting an international incident. What's more, the bomb squad will have our jobs if we go in there first. There might still be another bomb in there." He leaned over to her and whispered, "The tourists haven't left, see? They're still standing around."

She looked around at them. Some looked sadly up at the building, others looked stoically at the entrance. Some even looked bemusedly at the paramedics.

The paramedic continued, "Whatever they came here to see, it's not over yet. Now, I don't know it for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if they were hanging around to see the second bomb go off."

Susan turned around, looking at them, all of them. Some from the future, some from the present, and all just watching.

She pulled off her bag, and dropped it to the ground, "Well, let's give them something to watch." The paramedic reached out after her, but Susan was already gone, running toward the back of the building.

Susan stumbled over some of the bricks, looking for a rear entrance. The back of the embassy had a powerful steel door which was solidly bolted to the wall in three areas, and could only be opened by a fingerprint scan, with positive retinal and fingerprint ID. However, when the building toppled forward, that door was popped off its frame like a piece of plywood, providing a nice wide opening for Susan to get through.

She climbed through the opening, and swayed for a moment with a sense of déjà vu. There was rubble everywhere, rocks and stone dust coating the ground. The whole room seemed to stretch forward, toward the front of the building, and it took her a moment to get her bearings. Tables, desks, and chairs were crushed haphazardly together, making a jungle of plastic and metal. The strangest thing about it was how normal parts of the room were. There was a candy dish sitting on someone's desk. Right beside it, was a metal cross beam used to support the ceiling, crushing into the desk.

Through the smoke, Susan could hear a moaning, gurgling shout. She started toward the sound, "I can hear you. Where are you?" She climbed over one of the desks, squinting into the darkness. She saw a young boy, lying down and sobbing. She reached for him and said, "Come on, I know the way out." Then she saw that his arm was pinned under a chair.

She crawled over to him, ducking under a table leg, and grabbed the chair, "Don't worry, hon. I'll have you out of here in no time." She strained against the chair, but it was pinned under a heavy mahogany table. She felt sick to her stomach as she asked, "Can you wiggle your fingers for me?"

The boy's crying didn't falter, but he nodded a bit, and she saw his hand shake. She pulled on the chair again, then said, "Okay. I'm gonna be right back. You're gonna be okay." The boy started screaming, "No! Don't leave me! Don't go!"

She crawled out of the space, and started looking around for something that she could use as a lever. She started sifting through all the rubble, but everything heavy and strong seemed to be buried under things that were too heavy and strong for her to lift.

As she was running into another room, she tripped over a man, lying face down in the dust. She screamed, and curled herself up into a ball on the floor. At the sudden noise, the man shook, and started moving. He slowly put his hands underneath himself, making her think of zombies. He looked at her, squinted, and frowned all around him. As he started to get up, his legs slipped on the dusty floor, and he rolled over onto his back.

Recovering, Susan stood back up and grabbed his shoulder shouting over the noise of the distant fire, "You need to help me. There's a boy in the other room. He's trapped. You've got to help him out."

The man slowly nodded, "Uh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay." He started to get up again, slowly. She helped him up, and they crawled back into the main reception room. The man took one look at the boy pinned under the chair, and hacked out a cough. He nodded, and pointed at the boy, "You grab him. I'll try to move the chair." He hacked out another cough, "You just be ready to pull him out when I move it."

Susan took the sobbing boy by his shoulders, and held him. The man grabbed the chair and pulled upward, hard. He groaned with the effort, and sweat beaded on his brow, as Susan pulled on the boy's arm. The boy kept wiggling his arm until the elbow popped free, and Susan pulled him away from the chair, just as the man dropped the chair.

She picked up the child and headed for the door, "Come on, it's this way." They crossed the room quickly, and headed out into the bright mid-day sun.

Squinting at the ambulance, Susan could see that the paramedics had grabbed a bullhorn, and were trying to shout to her. "Come on back. We can't help you if you get caught in there. Come out here, and wait for the cops."

She ran with the man over to the paramedics and handed them the boy. After a moment, she caught her breath and said, "It's not hopeless. There's a lot of other people in there, and we can probably get them out if we hurry."

The paramedics were busy working on the man and child. One of them said, "We can't go in. It's too risky. The cops and the fire department are on their way. Just wait here for them."

Susan shouted, "No!" and grabbed the bullhorn. She ran out into the rubble, and shouted back at the Tourists and rubberneckers, "There's people in there! They need our help! Come give me some help to get them out!"

Some people broke free from the shocked silence, and started running over to help her. As she watched them, she continued, "And the rest of you, all of you. The ones who can't help, or won't help. Just go home!" She glared at them with undisguised contempt, "Go back to your soft little beds, and tonight, turn on the news to see what human beings do when their friends are in need!" She threw the bullhorn at them, and ran over to the growing group of supporters.

There were about eight people, and when Susan got there, she said, "Okay, we need to split up into pairs. You two." She pointed at a couple who looked like they were together, "You go to that building across the street. Make sure they're evacuating, and check all the floors. Just shout loud, and try to help whoever answers."

She turned to the rest, "For the rest of us, we'll need to just buddy up and check everywhere we can. There's a stairway in the back of the building, along the eastern wall. If it's still there, we can use it to get to the other floors. Try to climb as high as you can, and just start pulling people out. Anybody you see who looks like they can walk on their own, just show them where the stairs are."

They all broke up into their pairs, and started back into the building. They paid no attention to the bomb squad that was just pulling up.

And through it all, no one noticed that the Tourists had disappeared.

******************************************************************************

My Great American Moment
By Ronnie Porter

For my American History assignment, I chose the Hungarian embassy bombing of 2010.

I'm a big fan of Susan Cavanaugh, and in her autobio, she listed that bombing as the most important moment in her political career. A lot of people remember that as the first time she was in the public eye, but Ms. Cavanaugh said it was important because it made her so mad at the system, she felt like she had to do something about it.

So me and my brother went back to see it, and we watched her give the famous speech on the steps of the embassy.

And then, when the first female president asked for volunteers to go back into the building, my brother and I ran to join the group that helped her.
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Sandys

2005-11-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

Sorry, but this post has been deleted by the author.

My Personal Podcast

2005-11-07T18:24:00.000-08:00

I just set up my own podcast. It's basically me reading blog posts. So far, I've just got the one story up there (R4TB0T), but I'll have more soon.

These are the news stories mentioned in the R4TB0T post rat brain. Implantable memory.

I've got music by the Brothers Burn, and the whole production comes off as very professional. If you'd like to subscribe, the link is here.

If you'd just like to download the files, this is the link for R4TB0T, and this is the link for my Introduction.

Of course, this doesn't come without a cost. I still have to pay for servers and stuff. So if you like the show, please make a donation.

I've been discovered!

2005-05-20T22:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, that might be a bit much, but I have been invited to act as a featured Games blogger for MindSay.com. I'll be writing much the same stuff as I do here (in fact, I intend to republish a lot of this stuff on the new blog), just for a wider, more targeted audience. Apparently, the new blog is going to be promoted in search engines, grassroots word-of-mouth campaigns, and general blogging circles.

For those who read this blog, you'll probably want to update your links to point to http://gamecoder.mindsay.com/

Hope to see you there. I'll probably keep this blog alive for a while, but with less frequent updates. Maybe I'll just put the non-games stuff here. I don't know. To be honest, this is happening really fast, so I don't know what I'm going to do.

My brief brush with greatness

2005-05-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

My friends know this story, but I don't think I've told it here, so here goes:

A few years back (wow, it must have been about 4 years or so) I was sent to E3 as an emissary for the Microprose game "Gunship!" The setup was pretty simple: there were two of us in the booth. One would play the game, while the other talked about how great the game was to whoever seemed to be interested in it. Occasionally, one of us would take a break and walk around the floor, while the other one manned the station.

Now, at the time, you could tell just what Atari thought of Microprose, by how much floor space they gave us. Atari had one large cylinder of space, separated into pie wedges, and you could tell how popular you were by how big your companies wedge was. The corporate dealmakers section took up 50% of the pie, Hasbro Interactive (for kids) took up another 25%, Atari took up 15%, which left Microprose . . . cramped.

To add to that, we had a 12-foot tall statue of a MechWarrior in the center of our little pie wedge, and half a dozen games to display.

I guess what I'm getting at is, that it felt really crowded. It was especially crowded at one point where my demo partner decided to take a break. He was off walking the floor, while I played the game and answered questions about it. It was getting pretty close in there, and I scooted my seat forward to let traffic by, when over my shoulder, I saw a gaggle coming toward us.

It was a clump of people so big, that I could only judge the size of it by where the boom mikes and light stands were set up at it's perimeter. The gaggle moved slowly, inexorably, toward our station, and I thought to myself "Okay, this is our big break. Some TV show's going to be recording this section, so I gotta keep my mind on the game and show off how cool it is."

People pressed into our section, pushing me so close to the computer that I tilted the keyboard up to rest on my chest. I still didn't turn around to look, I just kept blowing things up, and demoing the targetting system, and generally making the game look as graphically intensive as possible. Suddenly, there was a furry head in my peripheral vision, so close to me that I thought it was resting on my shoulder. The man with the glasses and scruffy beard said, "Wow, this looks really good. You guys have done some good work."

I had to stop myself from recoiling. I mean, it was totally unexpected, and I was so intent on making the game look good, I hadn't even noticed this hanger-on watching the game. So, I did my best to seem cordial, saying, "Um. Thanks. Well, we're doing our best."

The furry man patted my shoulder, and moved on. About a minute later, the rest of the gaggle moved on. I turned to one of the booth babes in the Kids area (yes, Hasbro really did hire a sexy blonde to sell kids stuff in a short skirt and shorter apron) and asked her what that crowd was all about. She said to me, wide-eyed, "You don't know? That was Steven Spielberg!"

I was beating myself up about that for the rest of the day. Did I shake his hand, no. Did I introduce myself, no. In fact, when he said we were doing great work, did I say, "Oh, yeah. Well, you did a good job on Indiana Jones." No. At the time, the best I could do was to keep from recoiling.

Later, I found out that Spielberg is a huge fan of European Air War, another project I had worked on. So, I had something I could have chatted with him about, if I had just thought of it. Ach. I can't believe I'm still beating myself up about that four years later.

According to one news article, Spielberg said that he was introduced to European Air War by Robin Williams, who he referred to as his "digital pimp". Somehow, the idea of Steven Spielberg and Robin Williams sitting down to play a game that I made . . . I don't know. . . it just seems so freakin' cool. Sort of like the way Upton Sinclair must have felt when he found out that Theodore Roosevelt was reading "The Jungle". Okay, that's an obscure reference, but surprisingly apt.

Flash Sucks

2005-05-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry. I really want to like Flash. When I decided to put The Limit online, I chose Flash as my platform because I wanted system independence. I assumed it would be really easy, because they handle rendering movies seamlessly. Turns out, there's a big difference between building a movie, and programming a game in Flash.

Ever notice how all Flash games are pretty simple? I mean, I've seen the Trogdor Burnination game, and websites devoted to dozens of small Flash games , but I haven't seen any advanced games in Flash. I think I know why. I think Flash was made solely for movies, and any programmatic capabilities are happy mistakes.

First off, it has no typed variables. Okay, I'm used to that with many of the latest generation languages. I mean, it's not as safe for programmers, but so be it. But add to that the fact that you don't have to define a variable to use it. I mean, if you misspell a variable name, you've just created a new variable (even if you're inside a test condition).

But not to worry, right? I mean, if you create an error like that, the program will just crash out gracefully and tell you where the error is, right? Wrong. A Flash program will do the worst possible thing when faced with an error. It will ignore that line. A Flash program will just skip over a line it doesn't understand.

But surely, these errors can be caught when you compile the instructions, right? I mean, that's just basic checking, been around for ages. Nope. The closest Flash will get to error checking is making sure that you have the right number of braces, and that the basic syntax of a line is correct.

Also, if you start using a variable without explicitly defining it in a function, it will become part of the "root" object, and will exist beyond the function, gaining global scope. I mean, Holy Crap!! This system was made for errors!!

Okay, sorry about that. I know a lot of you readers are not actually code monkeys like me, so you probably don't know or care what I'm talking about. Long story short, I've created a Flash version of "The Limit" which is available here.

It's not finished, but entirely playable, and I'm still working on it. Currently, it doesn't show a score, or end appropriately when the game is over. So, it's got a ways to go, but if you want to play the game for free online, without any downloads, this is the place to do it.

And, um, Flash still sucks. Next time, I'm gonna use Java. =)

Shirley Temples

2005-05-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

My favorite drink is Cherry Pepsi, but there's almost nobody that stocks the stuff. Sure, just about everyone has Coke, Pepsi, Diet Coke, and that kind of thing. Each shop has one or two the specialty drinks, but it's difficult to find a shop that has your own personal favorite (for example, my wife's favorite drink is Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, see how often that shows up).

Anyway, I was thinking, all these different flavors (Cherry Coke, Lime Coke, Vanilla Coke, etc.) are Actually just your basic Coke with some other syrup thrown in. So, what if the different stores could stock up on Coke and Pepsi, then sell little packets with Cherry, Vanilla, Lime, and other syrups. That way, the user could buy a regular drink, then add their own favorite flavors to it.

In fact, that way, you could customize your drink even further. Want a double Cherry Pepsi? Just buy two packets of Cherry Syrup. Want a Vanilla-Lime Coke? Easily done. It's easier for the shopkeeper to stock the little packets rather than dozens of specially-flavored drinks, and it's more convenient for the soft-drink connoisseur.

In fact, since children are the most obvious audiences for soft drinks, this would be a great way to teach them about how different people have different tastes, and how things that look similar can be very different on the inside.

It would even introduce children to the concept of dosages, and how to make mixed drinks . . .

Um. Wait. I'm not sure that last bit is such a good thing.

Sterilize the poor

2005-05-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

Sound excessive? Sound like a raving madman, with insultingly stupid, illegally invasive solutions that no one would follow? Sound like the kind of thing that Klansmen would only whisper to each other at parties? Well, that kind of thing can happen here. And it did happen here. For 45 years, in America, land of the free.

In 1929, 33 states began a program of secretly sterilizing "undesireables", defined as people who were believed to be promiscuous and/or poor. I know, it sounds like conspiracy theory stuff, and if it were unfounded, I wouldn't believe it either, but the states employed in the practice are now dealing with reparation lawsuits, and presenting public apologies. Here, this ABC News story tells about a woman in North Carolina who was sterilized after being raped (because they thought she was dim-witted, and promiscuous).

I'd like to believe that this is just another mainstream media screwup, like Rathergate, or Newsweek fudging the Koran-flushing. But when one of your sources is a current state representative, it's hard to think that they are wrong about it.

Now, yes, I'm shocked to find out that we were going overseas to fight (among other things) eugenics, while we practiced the same thing at home. And, yes, I'm shocked to find out that this was still going on until 1974. But the thing that really shocks me. . . this story came to light on April 23 of this year, and I only just now heard about it.

I mean, Jesus Christ! This is the kind of news that should be shouted from the mountaintops. There should be widespread criminal investigations to determine where this governmental push came from. It was multiple states, so that screams federal government coordination. I want perp walks with these doctors holding newspapers up to their faces as they're marched into the courtrooms.

I want criminal investigations for the politicians who found funds to pay for this procedure. I mean, is it just me, or does this just scream Strom Thurmond? I want to see them sweating under the hot lights, taking frequent sips of water, and whispering to their lawyers.

I think I need to walk away from this one for a bit.

Evangelical Spam

2005-05-08T00:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as I was cleaning out my spam folder in GMail, I was surprised to see an offer to "FIND CHRIS*TIAN SING*LES IN YOUR AREA!!!!" It wasn't so much the idea of the message, as it is well known that there are thousands of swinging Christian ladies just looking for a good time. No, the part that surprised me was that they had to put an asterisk in the middle of the word "Christian".

It's an old practice to put special characters in the middle of words so that spam filters don't recognize them as spam titles. Common words are hor'ny, sing*le, unde-rage, Ere:ctile, Mort`gage, and Ro:ckha:rd. They're generally annoying, almost unreadable, and ultimately ineffective, because any normal spam filter can catch these anyway.

Still, it surprises me because, when the name of your religion is a signal for spambait, you might want to reconsider your methods of evangelism.

P.S. My favorite example of this was:

From: Mort`gage Direct
Subject: Jesus!

Sure, I'm not gonna click on it, but this Christian obviously feels very strongly about my potential home value!!

An impotent media

2005-05-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

So, I was reading today about the RIAA's latest volley in the war between people and property. They have introduced a Boy Scout badge for "Intellectual Property". A scout can earn this badge by sitting through one of their indoctrination videos.

I tried to imagine what the badge must look like. I figure it should be a phonograph. Linked directly to recorded music, and at the same time, linked to an antiquated, barely used, out of date format. Yes, that should do nicely.

Quick on the heels of that, though I realized just how impotent media has become recently. The issue of internet music sharing is a perfect opportunity with which to test the media. You know how people argue about the enormous swaying power of the media, how it can mold people's minds; Wag the Dog stuff. They say that the media can make or break a political candidate by affecting the unwashed masses.

Now here is a situation where the media truly feels (mistakenly) that they are under attack. They seem to fight this battle with every tool and weapon in their arsenal. They have used psychological warfare to get us to refer to file swappers as "Pirates". They have expose's, press releases, and short commercials dedicated to convincing us that file swapping just isn't "hip" (don't copy that floppy!). They have studies that show how file swapping is costing them billions of dollars (while all independant studies show that the studios are making more money than ever). They have created their own paramilitary enforcement wing, to raid duplication labs, and storm citizens houses. They have sued thousands of citizens, and settled almost all out of court (not one successful lawsuit yet). And today, they announced a badge that coerces Scouts to agree with their position.

But let's look at the results. After all, we're trying to test what the incredible might of the media can do to a single issue. The companies representing the RIAA/MPAA are no less important names than BMG, Apple, Virgin, Columbia, Time/Warner Brothers, Buena Vista, Sony, MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and United Artists. These are the guys who control 90% of all TV and Radio in America. They make and break candidates based on their endorsements. So, surely one small issue like "We want this to be illegal, and we want to arrest everyone who does it" should be a relatively easy thing. A "slam dunk" to use the Bush administration terms.

But here's the thing: there has been more music, movie, TV, and video game piracy every year since they started this campaign. The lawsuits slowed down file swapping temporarily, but when people did the math, and found out that they were more likely to win the lottery than get sued by the RIAA, those people started coming back to "the scene". As the lawsuits made online music swappers more afraid of the RIAA, they learned more about privacy, and they found alternate paths. When one BitTorrent site was taken down, the others saw a sudden explosion in patronage. People move their allegience from one file-swapping format to another (Kazaa today, BitTorrent tomorrow, IRC the next day), which seriously messes with all attempts to track them. Because the population shifts, the RIAA points to a format with decreasing patronage and says, "There, see! The people are running scared now!"

But remember: these are the people who make or break public policy. Remember the incredible power? Remember the earth-shattering potency of their work? It's been almost a decade now, and they haven't managed to even cut down on this "piracy".

From the very beginning of this war, people have been asked why they do this. The answers have been universally the same:
1) Media costs too much.
2) Media isn't portable enough.
3) Artists don't get the money anyway.

The RIAA/MPAA chose to counter those complaints with lawsuits, slander, name-calling, and privacy attacks. They tried to raise prices (to pay for all the piracy, don't you know). They made the media less portable (just try to make a backup of an Apple ITunes song on a new computer), and they forced the artists to speak out against file-swapping, even over the artist's objections.

Now people hate them, artists hate them, they are losing the battle worse every day, and each thrust they make in this battle ends up as a punchline on Slashdot.

These were the titans! They had all the power! How is it possible that they did not utterly humble the file-swappers?

Simple. People online, in general, know what they're doing. When a person is introduced to the internet, the first thing that hits them is how incredibly free everything is. News, Weather, Sports, Opinion, there are sites out there for every possible interest, catering to every possible fetish, without worry about governmental strictures.

Once they are acclimatized to that environment, they suddenly see stories about how a company is tracking people online, how they are raiding houses, ransacking privacy, and attacking their own customers. When faced with the ultimate freedom of the internet, these attacks seem like an affront on their own personal privacy. Every single person feels insulted, violated, and angry.

One of the most common arguments for the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the Japanese would never surrender. Conservatives shake their heads and say, "If we hadn't dropped the bombs, every single citizen would have fought to the death to bring down America. We did it for peace, to save both sides."

This is the same situation. Every single person who logs on to the internet will feel like they are being spied on and attacked by these huge, American conglomerates. And they will fight, to a man, against these attacks.

Following that logic, the only sensible thing that the RIAA/MPAA can do is to Nuke the Internet. Take it out, switch it off, for our own good. You know, like China does with it's Internet.

When the smoke clears, they will be able to count on the goodwill of the returning customers, much like the goodwill that America enjoys from the descendants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Duke Nukem Whenever

2005-05-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning out the library today, getting ready to turn it into a sound studio, and I came across a whole bunch of old games. Diablo, Populous, Syndicate, Requiem, Colonization, just a lot of great games that I hadn't thought of in years.

Then I came across Duke Nukem, and I paused. You know, for the time it came out, Duke Nukem was one of the coolest games around. At the time, people were saying that first person shooters were the closest games to reality. All there was at the time was Doom, and some Doom rip-offs, all of them dealing with shooting demons, usually in space, surrounded by occult imagery. Now along comes this game where the player had a character, the indomitable cross between Clint Eastwood, Schwartzenneger, and Ash (from housewares). Suddenly, the player had lines to say, witty quotes to throw at the bad guys. It pulled the player in enormously.

For the first time, we were playing a fps in an urban setting, with real props that mirrored the real world. There were inside jokes, references to popular movies (remember Tom Skeritt's "Kill Me" from Alien? It's in there), and lots of attitude. Sure, you were still shooting aliens, but this time, you were shooting them in a titty bar, or in a darkened alley, or porno store!! It was the coolest thing!

They made some sequels, just add-ons really. You might still be able to find "Duke it out in DC" in the bargain bin. But the big promise would come later, in '98, when 3D Realms announced that they were making a real sequel, Duke Nukem Forever. They were going to use the Quake II engine, and the demo looked astounding. Then, they decided they were going to use the Unreal Engine instead. And, if you've ever worked with the two engines, you'll know that kind of conversion requires almost a complete rewrite just to keep your framerate up.

Okay, so the rewrite slowed them down, but even after a decent interval, we still didn't hear anything about it. People started mumbling that there were problems with the game, that it was in danger of being shelved, or just relegated to vaporware. Then at E3, in 2001, they came up with some more clips, which showed how well the game was moving along. The clips had some amazing screenshots of a plane crashing into a building, and one of a woman falling to her death (presumably jumped from the building). In light of the September 11th attacks, 3D Realms had to go back to the drawing board a bit for that.

So, one would figure by conservative estimates, that means they would ship in late 2002. Or early 2003? Maybe make the Christmas rush of 2004? No.

Even though we occasionally hear about them incorporating new features (there are rumors that they are moving to the new Unreal engine, which would mean another rewrite, or that they have some new fangled engine of their own), this game has been on the vaporware hitlist for too long. In fact, it has been MIA for so long, magazines don't even list it in the vaporware awards, because it wouldn't be fair to the other competitors.

So I started thinking. At this point, if I was 3D Realms, I would ignore the issue completely. After all, anybody who's played it probably played it from 1996 - 98, which was nearly a decade ago. Chances are, they've forgot about it. We don't have to even think of it as a sequel anymore. If we think of it as a totally new game, then we don't have to watch the clock at all. Anyone who played the game is probably an adult now, and most of them have given up on games.

So, thinking of it as a totally new game, rather than a sequel, we can rehash the same old jokes, make the same old characters, and even use the same maps. The only thing we can't do is let it be technologically lacking. It has to be up to par with Half-Life 2, Unreal 3, and Doom 3 (funny that ID managed two iterations of Doom and an entire Quake enterprise in the same amount of time that 3D Realms has taken to NOT release one sequel).

So, the needed direction is obvious. Get some good voice acting, rehash the story, use the old levels as a basis for the new ones, and license one of the new heavy hitters. But, whatever you do, don't rush. Because, after all, there's no hurry. It's not like anybody's expecting you to FINISH the game, after all.

Recent happenings

2005-05-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hey, I just realized, if that was the night that they hung an innocent man, then why did all the lights go out in Georgia? I always thought that was because they electrocuted the guy. But if they hung him. . . nevermind.

Okay, as some of you have pointed out, I haven't been updating this much. I could point to all the stuff that I'm working on, but the fact is, I've been totally immersed in World of Warcraft. I've been playing it to the exclusion of all other things. However, yesterday, divine intervention stepped in. My laptop blew up.

Not literally, but there were bad sectors in the FAT table, which made it unable to boot, format, or even partition itself. Long story short, it's dead, and I have no system butch enough to play WoW on.

There are two positive aspects to this. One, I'm getting more work done. I've just finished my first outline of the sci-fi story that I'm converting to a radio script, and tomorrow I'm going to start retrofitting my library into a sound studio (hanging up egg-crate foam, closing off vents, blocking out the window, general soundproofing). I've also got a basic outline for a second radio show based on a monsterous hungry sleeper sofa.

The other positive aspect is that I'm playing other games again. When I took my laptop to be repaired (hard drive replacement, rather) I also bought a PSP. So now, I'm playing games again, and I'm back to ranting about all the design mistakes. I'll leave that stuff for another post.

In other news, the PocketPC version of "The Limit" is now at about 95%, although development has been stalled somewhat by the loss of my laptop. I'm going to start looking at Flash development soon, to see if I can get a Flash version of the Limit available online.

I've also got an idea for a new game based on cutting in line. It's a little hard to describe, I'll try to put together a mock-up so that I can explain it better.

You know what's really weird. I've been gripped by a need to get something done all week, and yet, I've been immobilized, unable to do anything. I know the feeling well enough to recognize it as a depressive swing in my manic/depressive cycle, but I don't remember it lasting this long before. Maybe I need more exercise. All I know is, I feel like I need sleep, all the time.

It sucks.

Teenage Japanese Schoolgirl

2005-04-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

My wife had to undergo surgery recently, so she's home and healing now. We often compare her strength to a kitten (usually by saying "as weak as a"). One of my major jobs now is to act as her hands, doing all the heavy lifting, and medium lifting, and light lifting when appropriate.

My wife is a beligerant and proud woman, so she has not taken to her depreciated strength well. That's why I have to constantly remind her that I am acting as her hands. Recently, I said, "I want you to think of me as an exoskeleton. A big, dumb shell that is constantly around you, and does all the heavy lifting so effortlessly, that you don't even realize it's there. Like the shell of a crab. Or better still, like the mech outfit that a teenage Japanese schoolgirl might use to fight crime."

"Basically, I want you to be my Teenage Japanese schoolgirl."

"What? Why're you looking at me like that?"

What a dreamer can do in a day

2005-04-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

At 7:00 A.M. I contacted a favorite author of mine, and asked him if he would give us his blessing to do a radio adaptation of one of his books. He's tentatively interested, but I won't name him until he's decided he wants to be associated with this venture. =)

At 8:00 A.M. I downloaded Nullsoft's shoutcast server. By 9:00, I had it running on my system, and playing Old-Time-Radio Public Domain Sci-fi stuff.

At 8:42 A.M. I contacted some friends about re-working some of these old 30's scripts with me, updating them, and punching them up.

By 10:00 A.M. I had built a stable of actors who are willing and interested in lending their voices to a new set of radio shows.

At 11:00 A.M. I contacted a friend who knows a guy, who has his own recording studio. We have reason to believe that he will lend us his studio for long enough to do the recording.

By 12:00 P.M. I had started discussions with an ex-Acclaim sound guy, who's doing freelance work in Austin, and has already said he'd love to help with FX or music on new projects.

Then, I woke up my wife. She was sleeping late, because she had been up all night working on the taxes. When I told her about my day, she said, "It's amazing what a dreamer can do with just one day."

And the day is only half over.

Seams

2005-04-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

So, I was doing the laundry last night, and I started thinking about seams. You know, the part of clothes where you fold two pieces of cloth together and sew them together.

Seems to me, all clothes are made the same way. You fold the two pieces together, then sew them so that the interior has a rough, unfinished edge, and the exterior has a smooth, sleek line.

However, I've noticed that if I sit cross-legged in jeans (as I often do when I'm coding on my laptop), the seams can get uncomfortable, and leave red lines on the skin of my legs. So, I was thinking, why do we make clothes like that? Psychologically, why do we put the uncomfortable side so close to our actual skin?

The only good reason that jumps to mind is that it looks ugly to have the seams on the exterior. Our basic need for symmetry makes an irregular seam abhorrant. However, this reason only seems to enhance the idea that we are willing to sacrifice comfort for looks. I hate that impression. I actively avoid it.

What's really weird is how innured we are in that method for all of our clothes. It's not a class thing, because we do this to Tuxedos, suit jackets, dress shirts, t-shirts, even sweaters. And I don't understand sweaters being in that list at all. If you're knitting the entire thing as one piece, why would it have seams at all?

We even do this to underwear, which can't really claim that it's done for looks. I mean, why have the seams on the inside, when nobody's going to be looking at the outside?

Maybe I'm just off on a rant at this point, but I don't really see a purpose behind having seams at all. All through history, clothiers have been hindered by the basic premise that they had to work with flat pieces of cloth, stitching them together to make other shapes. However, we have made huge strides in clothing over the last thousand years or so.

We keep seeing stories about "mood clothes" that will change color to match the user's heat signature; or the "stain proof" clothes that use nanotechnology to move foreign matter off of the surface. So how hard would it be, to stitch denim material together in the shape of a pair of pants? How hard would it be to make cotton cloth in the shape of a T-shirt? I mean, if it's that difficult for us, why don't we get those nano-mites working on it?

It seems odd that in one way, we have completely transcended past science, but in another way, we are irrevocably mired in an ancient form of thinking, so ingrained that we don't even recognize it as a form of thinking at all.

Ah, well. Such a lot of thought about such a small, thin line. Never mind.

In other news, I've now completely changed the FlipBall game over to it's new name "Limit", and I've submitted it to PopCap. Hopefully, sometime today or tomorrow, I'll set up a banner ad, and try to start getting some online sales.

That's right. V1.0 is out the door, and available here Limit

6 to 6 the hard way

2005-04-04T00:14:00.000-07:00

It's 5:30 A.M. on Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in costume with a bunch of teenagers in prom dresses and tuxes. My costume is a pair of brown courderoy pants, a yellow-brown plaid shirt, and a gray, ratty, patched-elbows, sweater vest.

At 6:00 P.M. the previous day, I showed up to play as an extra in "Gretchen: The movie" a great film that you should see as soon as. . . well, as soon as it becomes available anywhere. When I showed up, they put me in a cafeteria with all the other extras, and told me that they'd call for us when our scene came up.

They had also told us that it would be a full night, meaning that they intended to shoot footage from 6:00PM to 6:00AM the next day. I was to play a disapproving parent in one scene.

The first few hours, we got to know each other, and played cards. After that, we listened to somebody's ITunes and read from a book called "If..." which was a series of questions like "If you could put any one person into prison, who would it be?" So that was pretty fun.

At 2:00 AM, they broke for lunch, and we got to share in some of their food. Have you ever noticed that catered food, no matter where it comes from, always turns into the same kind of industrial fare that you can get at any junior high school or in prison?

So then, it was more of the same. Lots of sitting and waiting, running through different card games, chatting with others. Some people had brought sleeping bags, and others were sleeping on the floor. Somebody had a WebCam for their laptop, so we shot some footage of our own. Mostly people acting stupid. Okay, mostly me acting stupid. Still, I think my version of Christopher Walken's "Weapon of Choice" video was inspired.

Then, at 5:30 AM, we got the call that our big scene was coming up. They bustled us outside to stand in the cold, in a staggered row, and told us to wait again. They would let us keep our coats on, but just before they would start shooting, we would be told to turn the coats in (because the scene was supposed to be in June, not April).

Three or four times they shot footage of us looking angrily at the rebel leading man, then they called it a wrap. I changed clothes, and left there at about 6:00 AM.

Know how much I was paid for it? $1. And I'd do it again. It may not sound like fun, but I got to watch the process, see real professional filmmakers at work, and be a (small) part of the whole thing.

It was awesome.

In other news, I've made some subtle but important gameplay changes to FlipBall, which makes it both easier to play, and much more strategic. Give it a shot, and see what you think. I would really like help determining if this version is better or worse than the previous.

A little WoW story

2005-04-02T01:54:00.000-08:00

In a recent patch, some players of World of Warcraft experienced a problem where the fogging gets really bad underwater, and they can't see anything. Luckily, I have not suffered that problem. I was doubly blessed, because as a Warlock, I can breathe underwater indefinitely. As I was swimming around today, I saw a general chat post saying "LFG Vast Ocean, Deep Sea". Translated, this means that the poster was looking for a group to help with the mission "Vast Ocean, Deep Sea".

I knew that quest, and I knew that it was really difficult to do unless you have a group of three or more. So, I posted saying that I'd join the group, and that I could give everyone Unending Breath (for swimming underwater). Then, right after getting the group together, the leader of the group said, "I'm going to my uncle's place. BRB". I said I'd wait, and she responded with "Great. It'll only be about 30 minutes".

So, I left the group, and told her to call me when she got back. Suddenly, she said, "No. Wait. I'm not going." and reinvited me.

Upon reaching the quest location, I noticed that there were only three of us, and one person bailed out. As I'd mentioned, this quest needs about three or more people. I mentioned this to the sole remaining group member, and she replied, "Don't worry, we can handle it."

So I dived. As I had expected, there were mobs of MOBs down there, and they all converged on us at the same time. I was fighting them as best I could, casting curses and spells on the different enemies, when I realized that the other member of my group was still on the surface, treading water. I sent a message, "WTF" (which translates to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), and she responded, "I can't see underwater. Good luck."

Grrrr...

In other news, I made $50 on an investment of $2500 today, which brings my 4-day profit total to $309. This represents a 12% increase over four days, or 3% per day. When you consider that most banks will give you one or two percent interest per year, my investment strategy is looking pretty cool.

In Flipball news, Erik McKenney got me some new artwork, which I've employed in the latest demo. I've been really amazed at how professional this project looks. I'd forgotten what incredibly talented people I'd been working with.

The Best FlipBall Demo since the last one!!

2005-03-31T23:45:00.000-08:00

In the past few days, since I first unleashed FlipBall on the world, I've received several questions. Like, "It looks so easy, so why does it make my head hurt?" and "Why don't the balls collapse in both dimensions?" and others. However, the one that I'm hearing the most is, "When is the next version coming out?"

Well, I've been stymied for several days, trying to get this difficulty level issue resolved. But tonight, I solved that problem, and put up a new version with all the latest bells and whistles. It has difficulty levels, sounds, new input formats, an "Undo" button, and various, nefarious, bug fixes.

This is really getting cool, because I think there's only a few features left, and an art update, then I'll be ready to send it to PopCap. BTW, if you don't want to wait, you can register Flipball to get the full version by clicking here.

That's really all the news there is for today. I spent the entire day on that.

Oh, wait, I also made a 10% profit on my investment today with LittleTrades.com. This morning, I had $2500 invested, now I have $2750 invested. So that's pretty cool.

Happy Birthday to Me

2005-03-30T22:06:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday to Me
I belong in a Tree,
These aren't the right words so
You cannot sue me. :)

Long day. I've been working on the difficulty levels for Flipball, and that's coming along (though, it's not quite done). I'd really like to finish this tomorrow or over the weekend. I've got a really great soundtrack, and lots of good audio in the next version, which will hopefully be released soon.

In stock news, I made $50 on a $2,500 stake, which is good by any measure. Then, I held onto a different stock (bad move. I should have honored the dump price), and lost $107. Oh, well. Once I learn to trust Littletrades more than I do my own instinct, I'll be able to start reaping the benefits.

Here is why the internet will come to dominate our lives: I wanted to make a reservation at a local restaurant. I didn't remember the whole name, just that it was Italian, and sounded like Beppo. I found the yellow pages, opened it to restaurants, and couldn't find the one I wanted, I then pulled out the business white pages, and couldn't find it there either. I looked through the phone books for both city and county, but with no luck. Then I fired up Google, and just did a search for "Beppo Austin". The first reply was Google Local, with an address, map, and phone number for the restaurant "Buca di Beppo" (which was, incidentally, exactly what I was looking for). I actually felt stupid for trying a search in meatspace.

Wanna buy stock in Me?

2005-03-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

Damn, I'm in a good mood. Seriously manic mode.

Yesterday, I found out about a website where they rate blogs, and trade fantasy shares in those blogs. It's here if you're interested. I only found out about it because my blog is listed on there. I account for 0.00024 % of the market share. Look upon my blog, ye mighty, and despair.

Anyway, I get a complimentary 1000 shares (20%) of stock in my company (you would think I'd have controlling interest in it) and I used half of my money to buy more shares. I'm listed as as "Stable Blog (HOLD)" and also as "Underpriced (BUY)". How sweet.

Hey, it just ocurred to me, If you guys jump on there, and buy up all the stock, I bet that'd make it split! We'd all be (virtually) rich! And then, you could have controlling interest in the blog, and fire my sorry ass for not updating it enough.

Speaking of stock trading, I took my first big steps into applying LittleTrades today. I used $2,500 of my own money, and invested in two of the top stocks recommended by LittleTrades. At the end of the day, I had made $82.15 profit (after commissions) which is a 3.3% increase. Kick Ass!

Of course, one swallow does not a spring make. I'll have to try it out more before I can call it a resounding success, and start charging people for it. Still, it was a good day.

In other news, I'm pretty much wrapping up the Flipball game. Guthrie pointed out to me a design inconsistancy, in that FlipBall only closes holes in one axis (vertical). I'm in the process of fixing it, and trying to decide if fixing that bug breaks the gameplay. More news as it develops.

You know, I bugged the Ex-Acclaim people for art and sound, thinking that I could maybe get an artist to work on it in his spare time. But when you open yourself up to a mixed group of people, you find those people had skills you never knew about. For instance, a programmer sent me an excellent soundtrack for the game (some of you Ex-Acclaim people might remember Mr. Osborn), and a designer sent me some great art. I'm getting responses from all over, and I couldn't be happier.

Yeah, it's a good day. I'm working on difficulty levels for the game now, and once that's done, I think I'll be ready to ship. I'll probably take it to PopCap or talk to the SPA to try and publish it myself. I'm also thinking of porting it to the PocketPC and offering it to Handango.

In other news, I'm working with the Bastrop Opera House on two radio plays which are to be performed live either May or June. I'm playing main characters in both plays. Rehearsals are a blast.

So, yeah. If I had to guess, I'd say my stock is rising.

Games are like Icebergs

2005-03-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

They both take out thousands of players when they crash.

No, seriously. I was referring to the old analogy of an iceberg being 90% underwater, so you never see it. In the same way, game development is 90% unseen.

As an example, I wrote 90% of the gameplay for FlipBall in the first day (maybe two days). I already knew how I wanted the game to play, so it was just a question of organizing a program to reflect that gameplay. That was the 10% that people see.

Now, I've spent the last few days working on the other 90%. Sound, dialogs, gameplay refinement. This is 90% of the work, and most of it is totally ignored by the player. They just expect it to be there. For instance, I put in a "Resign" button, for when the player feels that they just can't finish a level. Even though it took me time to do, most people will never realize that it was there, or know what the game was like without it. I put in a registration screen, a hyperlink in the main game, and a web page that would let people register the game. Even though that took a lot of work, and won't even be seen in the full version, nobody's going to recognize that work.

Not that I'm bitching about it. I know this is just part of the development process. I just realized how easy it is to look at a game in development and say, "So, it's done, right?" and not understand why the developer says they still need weeks or months to finish it.

BTW, I expect to be finished with this one by the end of this week. All that's left (gameplay-wise) is difficulty levels, and I already have an idea how to do that.

After that, I'm thinking I'll either start on a new game, or port this one to the PocketPC.

Check out the Website! (Work in Progress)

I also figure I'm going to submit it to PopCap soon. Cross your fingers for me.

Game in a Day? Yes and no.

2005-03-19T06:48:00.000-08:00

Okay, I started working on this at about noon on the 18th. It's now almost 9:00 AM on the 19th, and the gameplay is already implemented.

If you download the game, you will be able to move the bars with your cursor keys, and swap rows and columns with the 'A' and 'X' keys. Give it a try!

So, was this an entire game in a day? Not quite. Some things are still missing:

Automatically collapsing columns horizontally.
Adding a font to show the score.
Recognizing an end-game situation.
Difficulty levels (by changing the number of different colors, the number of balls in a row/column, etc.)
All the front-end stuff (where I beg for registration money, give instructions on how to play the game, and make a decent loading screen).

Still, all the basic gameplay functionality is there already. Sweet.

game, popcap

Game in a Day

2005-03-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, maybe not that fast, but I managed to make a live version of the FlipBall game mock up in just about as much time as it took to post this message. It's here if you want to see it. Yeah, it doesn't do anything, but most mock-ups don't.

My point is, the PopCap framework is pretty sweet. It took me longer to make the art than it did to implement it. Wow.

Next step is user interaction. Get those bars moving, get the columns and rows to switch places, and get the explosions to play. Step three, profit!

UPDATE: In, like, the two seconds that have past since I wrote this post, I got the explosion to animate. So, uh, it's not totally sedentary.

FURTHER UPDATE: Okay, I've managed to get keyboard input, so now I've got the bars moving. All I need now is the flipping of the balls, and the explosions working. Hmmm . . . I just might be done tonight. No more updates, though. Not unless I can get real gameplay going.

FlipBall (Working Title)

2005-03-17T11:16:00.000-08:00

I had this idea for a new game, kinda like the PopCap stuff, basic Match-three thing. I've got a basic gameplay mock-up here. The idea is that you can swap columns or rows of a grid, to match like-colored balls together. The goal, of course, is to clear the field.

I'd been thinking about it a lot recently, it's just stuck in my head. Coincidentally, PopCap just released an SDK for writing their games. I figure it should be fun to play with.

Of course, this is on top of my LittleTrades work. Gwen wants me to apply intraday evaluation, so that I can determine whether the buy hit before the sell, or if the dump price was hit. That's a pretty ambitious thing to do, but I think it will improve our validation by showing that you should get out before the cost of an investment becomes too dangerous.

And there are other candlestick patterns that I want to try to implement.

And I'm still working on the Kid's version of GTA.

With all these irons in the fire, I wonder if being employed wasn't an easier life. :)

P.S. If you ever want to turn on a movie to run as background noise while you work, I highly recommend Stanley Kubrick's works. They are so incredibly slow, that you don't really miss anything if you don't look up for a while. And when you hear "Open the pod bay doors, HAL" then you know it's time to look up, because the good stuff's coming. The antithesis of this is the first two Godfather movies. Oh, it feels like it's moving slowly, but it engages you so fully with its consistently great writing, acting, and web of intrigue, that you can't concentrate on your work.

My LittleTrades

2005-03-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed, I haven't been updating this blog as religiously as I once did. This is largely because I've been working on a project with an equal fervor.

This is something that I developed about a year ago, and I just recently picked it up, brushed it off, and started working on it again. It's a stock prediction system, and it works like this:

It's very difficult to say how much a stock is going to move over a week or a month. Even when you are trying to guess how much a stock will move in a couple of days, it's difficult to accurately predict. However, if you look at the stock movement over a single day, there are a lot of them that will rise and fall as much as two or three percent regularly. If you had a way of knowing how high a stock was likely to rise, and how low it would fall, you could make one or two percent in a single day.

Why should a single percent be worth the risk? Because, if you can verifiably make 1% every day, over the 20 days in a trading month, you will make a 20% increase over one month. This means that, if you invest $5,000, and only make 1% per month, you end up with $6,000 at the end of the month. At the end of the second month, you would have $7,200. And so on.

So, by looking for regular, daily fluctuations in a stock rather than the overall movement of the stock, you could make 1% a day, which could make even a modest investment turn into a profitable venture (notice, most day traders start out with about $25,000 for trading. This system can work with investments as modest as $1,000).

But can we make those guesses? Can we know how high and how low a stock will trade on a given day? That's the crux of the matter, and that's what I've spent about three months working on.

I've developed a website that takes historical data for every single symbol in the NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX markets, evaluates them for trend, average delta (high to low), and other factors, then creates a list of the "best bets" for a given day. So, if you go to this website, it will tell you exactly where to buy and sell stocks to make that 1%.

And I don't take the easy way out either. Each recommendation is evaluated after the day is done, to see if it was successful or not, and the main page of the website tells how many made money, and how many lost. Right now, I'm hovering at about a 35-50% accuracy rating, and I'm working on that. But if you think about it, out of 7,700 stocks, I made 35% of my predictions accurately. When you consider only the "best bets" the numbers get exponentially better.

Anyway, once I get up enough money, I'm going to start putting it into this project. For now, though, I'm just playing on paper. I'm doing pretty well on paper, though.

For now, this website is provided for free. If I figure that there's a whole lot of people interested in it, I may require paid membership (to feed my trading habit).

If you're interested in seeing it in action, it's at http://www.LittleTrades.com

stock,
day-trade

Treading the boards

2005-03-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

So, I had my first professional audition in 21 years today. I know, "Brand, You're a programmer, not an actor!" However, in reality, I've been acting for most of my life.

When I was five, I was the youngest person ever to play the lead in my school play (a kindergartener outshining the fifth graders was something of a coup). I played an acting lead all through my school years. When I was nine years old, I had a leading part in a feature at the San Antonio Little Theater, and I was in a couple of episodes of Sonny Melendrez's Disney channel exercise show. In High School, I entered in the UIL one-act play every year (some years, we nearly made it to state). In college, I took acting as all of my electives. While working for video game companies, I did voice acting for every project I was working on. Basically, if it wasn't for computer programming, I would have been a starving actor a long time ago.

So, now that I'm unemployed, I'm taking the opportunity to rekindle my passion for the theater. I checked on open auditions near me, and went to the first one today. I had to present an audition piece, and since I couldn't find one I really liked, I just turned one of my blog posts into a monologue, and presented it.

You know, there's a feeling I'd almost totally forgotten about. I'd forgot what performing in front of people does for my metabolism. It might just be me, but I don't think so. What happens is, I get really nervous before a performance. That's normal, and everybody gets that. When I try to talk through my monologue, I get it wrong every time. I'm always skipping parts, dropping parts, adding unnecessary ad-libs, and (worst of all) stopping dead in the middle of the performance. I pace, I crack my knuckles, I can't sit still.

When I walk on the stage, though, that all stops. As soon as I have a group of people with their eyes on me, I totally cool off. Suddenly, all my speech is smooth, measured, correct. The fight or flight instinct floods my body with adrenaline, my eyesight gets better, my concentration is razor sharp, and every word comes to me with ease. Even though I'd spent the previous few hours sweating out the details of the performance, when I get up on stage, I feel totally cool, like my blood has turned cold, and every muscle motion is a calculated effect. I have complete control of my body and mind, and I feel so cold, I have to suppress a chill. I feel happy and excited, full of energy and ready to bounce off the walls. Then, when the performance is done, I'm on a high that lasts for hours. I feel like I can do anything, I sing along with the radio, I dance in my car seat, I generally make an utter fool of myself.

I'd forgot how great it feels. After the audition, they asked me if I had any questions, and all I could think of was, "When's the next audition? When do we start filming? Christ, put me back up there!"

I know it's because of the manic depression. In fact, once it wears off, I crash hard, and nap for hours. But I don't care. All I know is that I want that feeling again. I want to do that as much as I can, and for as long as I can.

I figure, that's the way all actors are. It's not that we're looking for fame or attention, it's just that we thrive on the pressure of having tens, hundreds, thousands of eyes on us. That kind of pressure triggers the adrenaline and endorphins. That pressure makes us perform better than we ever could without it, and we just want to hold that feeling for as long as we can.

Somehow, I could see how this ties to actors with addictions, because when you walk off stage, you feel so good that you just want to go party. Now I am not the most wild party animal, but when I walked off that stage, I wanted to go dance. I wanted to go party. I wanted to spend time with friends, do exciting stuff, and live life large for a while. I guess, if I was a popular actor, who does this all the time, I'd spend a lot of time partying, and I'd probably be weakened in the face of a lot of the partying temptations (sex, drugs, drinking, etc.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to look forward to an addiction (I could do that without acting). I'm just saying that I can empathise with how so many of these people fall into such traps.

acting

What does Heaven look like?

2005-02-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

So, I saw "Constantine" recently (in fact, I saw it twice, because I love the story), and I noticed something odd. Well, odd in the societal sense, not in the "why is there a demon riding on the bus?" sense. There's already plenty of that.

In this movie, there are a plethora of demons. There's a scene with a swarm of them in the air, a weird demon made up of bugs and vermin, the eurotrash demon, and the standard group of Anne Rice-vampire demons (what is the collective term for vampires? A pride? A gaggle? A murder? No, I think I'll use 'a clutch of vampires'). In fact, the movie even ranks demons and gives them names (Half-breed, soldier demon, Balthazar).

Two angels. Two. And only one gets a name. Now, granted, that angel is a pretty pivotal part of the story (and my personal favorite character). Still, only two angels in the entire story. The neutral witch doctor gets more screen time than they do.

In "Constantine" we spend roughly 2-3 minutes in Hell. And I must say, they did a damn fine job representing Hell. However, while the movie makes multiple trips to hell and spends about two percent of it's film-time there, we only get to see Heaven for about ten seconds. Heaven is seen from a great distance, and we just get a vague idea what it's like.

The devil gets about 3-5 minutes of airtime. He cavorts and japes, and pretty much acts like you would expect the devil to act (although, I don't get that outfit). He chats, he deals, he whines and threatens. Meanwhile, God doesn't even get a walk-on role.

I guess, what I'm getting at is, why is it so much easier to display evil than it is to display good? We get evil in movies and TV all the time. To use Keanu in another example, the movie "Devil's Advocate" spends the entire time revolving around the devil (masterfully played by Al Pacino), while not showing a single minion of God. Pacino raves against God, but we get no rebuttal.

Now that I think of it, there are so many examples, it's funny. We seem to take evil seriously, but we barely touch on good.

From the dark side, The Omen, The Exorcist, The Prophecy, Legend. From the side of good, Bruce Almighty, Angels in the Outfield, Touched by an Angel, and Heaven can Wait. So, the Devil is horror and drama, God is sappy comedy.

Sadly, the last movie I can think of that really explored the nature of "good", or dared to feature God as a serious character, was a John Freakin' Denver movie!!!

That's right. Go watch the old "Oh, God" movie again. It's dated, but the part where George Burns starts answering questions is sheer genius. It stands out because you had a Hollywood movie that actively presented God's position.

It seems like you can only show God in one of two ways. The first is to make a movie that trivializes God to a simplistic caricature of a spunky grandfather (see Bruce Almighty). This is the route that almost all movies will take. It's safe, it tests well in the bible belt, and doesn't offend anyone.

The other way is to make a ballsy movie that speaks unflinchingly about your own personal view of God. Let's call this the "Passion of the Christ" method. While it is incredibly one-sided and exclusionary, this method is the best way we, as a culture, can advance. And, when it is done with the fervor that Mel feels for his God, it can make the world take notice.

If I can digress for a moment, I should also note another great film, forwarding the cause of religious thinking, "Dogma". It may seem odd to talk about one of Kevin Smith's Jay & Silent Bob movies as a serious treatise on religion, but just look at the story. We have fallen angels, the metatron, cherubim and a muse. We see a 13th apostle, and discuss the idea that Jesus was black. As far as making people think about religion, I think Dogma was incredible (however, they really dropped the ball when Alanis Morissette showed up).

Anyway, back to God's screen time. Think of what Hell looks like. There, that was easy, wasn't it? Lots of smoke, fire, dark caves with dangerous looking stalactites, people being whipped for no reason, or doing manual labor that has no purpose, guys with pitchforks laughing as they torture people, and a red filter over the whole thing. Easy!

Now, picture Heaven. No, really think about what it's like. Not as easy, is it? Most people picture Olympus, with everyone standing on clouds, wearing togas for some odd reason, and constantly watching the panoply of human strife. Do they have books in Heaven? If so, why? Don't you have access to all knowledge and wisdom? Do they play sports, and if so, how do they get around the idea of violent competition? Do they listen to real music, or is it really just harps? Why togas?

The problem is that people have a really good idea of what Hell is like, because they just lump together all the things they hate about Earth into one experience. However, they can't really picture Heaven, because most people define 'good' as a lack of evil. How do you lump a "lack of evil" into one experience, without making it look incredibly boring?

And what about God? When most people think of God, the first thing they think of is asking questions. The really religious people will think of supplicating first, but eventually, they come around to the idea of asking the questions that never seem to be appropriately answered (why must innocent children die? Why must people suffer at all?). Would it be possible to come up with a character that actually can answer these questions, can expand people's understanding of what it means to be good, and even make it seem attractive to people? Could you really make a character who is good, and inspires people to emulate him? Inspires them to give of themselves?

I think most writers say, No. They really can't. Or at least, it's just too hard to try. And that's how we get things like "Bruce Almighty".

By the way, if you ever get a chance, check out the British mini-series called "The Second Coming". It's about a guy who, on his 30th birthday, realizes that he is the son of God. The show asks the question, if Jesus came back now, would we be able to handle it? What would we do? The show takes no easy shortcuts, it flinches from no difficult questions, and it seriously makes you think about religion.

movie, religion, god, devil

So you wanna be a game programmer?

2005-02-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, I'll get a question along the lines of, "How do I break into video games?"

After many iterations, this is the answer that I think works best:

There are many paths to breaking into games. Personally, I applied to
every video game company I could find as soon as I graduated college.
I ended up moving across the nation to work as the first junior
programmer Microprose had ever hired. For that path to work, you have
to be willing to accept low pay, long hours, and hard work just to
prove that you can do it.

Another path I've seen is to work your way up from another job. Many
people graduate from QA into development. Usually, they become
designers or artists, but programmers are not unheard of.

What I think is probably the path of least resistance, is to write
your own games, sell them or give them away, and use them as proof of
experience in a job interview. Remember, the most important thing in
applying for a game programming job is experience. Game Programming is
not exactly like any other type of programming, because it is heavily
user-centric, heavily random, and heavily optimized for speed (many of
the best speed hacks have come from video game programmers).

It may seem daunting to say 'write your own games', but I'm not saying
that you have to write a AAA title by yourself. Consider writing a
smaller, common game (Battleship, Reversi, Space Invaders, Pong), then
extending it to show that you know how it works (make the game
multiplayer, put in your own special effects, improve the gameplay to
make it the way you think the game 'should have been made'). There are
books out there that show how to write games, specifying what needs to
be done for the gameplay engine, graphics, sound, networking, and AI
(Andre LaMothe is making serious bank on the subject). You probably
only need to read one to understand the underlying code path that most
games follow. The most important thing is to have a product that plays
well, looks smooth, and shows that you know how to put the game
together.

Another path to writing your own game is to build it off of someone
else's engine. For $100 USD, you can buy a licence for the 'Torque'
engine from GarageGames.com. This is an engine that has been used for
several professional games, and has a lively development community.
It's easier to look at a fully-developed FPS engine, and think of ways
to enhance it than it is to write your own from scratch.

Once you've got your game (or games) developed, apply to companies
near you, and don't get discouraged. With recent layoffs in several
major game studios, there is more experienced talent than there are
jobs, so it's pretty cutthroat.

P.S. I hate to burst your bubble, but I can almost guarantee you that
you are walking into a pay scale far lower than you had before. I
can promise you hard work, long hours, aggravating company politics,
and no bonus. They will tell you that there's a bonus scheme in place,
but after seven years in the industry and three shipped games, I have
never received a bonus for shipping a game. Bonuses always disappear
in the detailed definition of the bonus system, or they are delayed
until people stop asking for them.

So, anyone have anything to add to that? Bruce, I know you read this occasionally, and you're a pretty clever game programmer. Anything I left out?

Update: Sam de Pauw pointed out something I'd missed. Talent. It's pretty easily recognizable and absolutely crucial to video game development. The most fool-proof way to recognize talent is by job experience. In an interview, experience says more about your worth than your appearance, social skills, or educational background.

game, programmer

Cory Doctorow's "I, Robot"

2005-02-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, news came out that Ray Bradbury was demanding Micheal Moore rename his film "Fahrenheit 911", because of the (obviously intended) similarity to his own book "Fahrenheit 451". As a kind of response, or way of thumbing his nose at the absurdity of the idea, Cory Doctorow started writing short stories based closely on other great Sci-Fi works.

For instance, his first short story "Anda's Game" was similar to Orson Scott Card's most famous work, "Ender's Game" not only in name, but also in the theme of the work. In "Anda's Game" Ender's Battle School became a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), and once again, it was a child in this virtual world that was faced with terrible choices and forced to make huge decisions. Doctorow does not crib everything from Card, though. The situations are distinct, the choices and characters are unique, and in the end, Cory Doctorow shows that he can write well in anybodies world. I think one of the most amazing things about this story, was that Doctorow drew not only from "Ender's Game", but also from real events that are changing the shape of MMORPG's and industrializing nations in our own world.

However, I didn't come here to discuss that story (that mini-review was more of a tangent). I wanted to talk about his newest release, a short story titled "I, Robot".

This short story takes as its source the Isaac Asimov world of Robotics, where the three laws rule. Once again, we are following the life of a police detective who has no great love of Robots (obviously taken from Asimov's character 'Elijah Bailey'). Once again, Robots play a huge part in the story. However, this is not just another Robot novel. Cory Doctorow adds to this story in the best possible homage. He questions the very fundamentals of the three laws, just like Asimov did.

In almost all of the Robot novels, we were presented with quandaries involving problems with the three laws, and showing how they can be manipulated or overridden to make Robots malfunction (usually causing the injury or death of a human). In Doctorow's work, we are presented with a larger question. Aren't the three laws, or rather, a totalitarian application of those laws, already a danger to humanity?

Doctorow subtly points out how the basic assumption behind Asimov's world is that the three laws must be imposed by a totalitarian governmental dictate. For instance, in Asimov's universe, only U.S. Robotics was allowed to build Robots, and the government oversaw many levels of development. Further, Doctorow ties this in with current examples of Digital Rights Management, and shows how any technological oppression will spawn a black market as freedom breaks through all barriers.

Doctorow even ties the analogy up tightly by referring to George Orwell's "1984", naming his nations "Eurasia" and "Oceania". While keeping a taut, quick-moving "Blade Runner" detective story feel, Doctorow manages to remind us in almost every passage how only a benevolent fascism could create Asimov's world.

As is necessary for a short story, there are huge, sweeping changes happening to individuals over a short time. The characters themselves are almost cliche' in their characterizations (The gruff cop, the rebellious teen, the smarmy pencil-pusher), but this is a necessary device for a short story, and one which Doctorow handles well by giving the characters lively dialogue. As always, Doctorow's narrative description is dense and visceral, reminding the reader less of "Blade Runner", and more of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".

Doctorow also shows off his talent for "visual writing", by creating one of the most believably futuristic action scenes since the first chapter of Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers". There is something exhilarating about watching a thought exercise explode into actions that shock the reader with both their impossibility and inevitability.

Cory Doctorow's "I, Robot" is a compelling argument against Digital Rights Management, a thrilling story of a father fighting to protect his daughter, and an excellent sci-fi story in general. Take a half-hour to read it online. You'll be perusing it for days.

Cory Doctorow, Asimov, robot, review

Liberté de Squirrel

2005-02-14T11:44:00.000-08:00

So, I'm standing on my roof, measuring the distance from to the ground by dropping a rope, and wondering, "What is one unit squirrel length?"

A little bit of backstory. This morning, our dogs started freaking out when they heard squirrels running down our roof. That's not really unusual, the squirrels know the dogs can't get up there, so they taunt the dogs from the roof.

However, we suddenly hear a scrabbling thump coming from our chimney. The dogs are there in an instant, barking at the empty chimney. My wife and I know that the flume is closed, so there's no chance that the squirrel is going to get in, so we wait a bit, and let the dogs sniff around the chimney as much as they want.

From the sporadic bursts of scrabbling, scratching noises, we quickly determine that the squirrel is trapped in there. He's not going anywhere. We briefly consider trying to trap it. I got the brilliant idea of taking all the cardboard boxes we've been storing, and building a tunnel from the chimney to the door, which the squirrel could run through. My wife just shakes her head at that, and tells me to call Animal Rescue. She says,"They know how to deal with this kind of thing."

When I get through to them, and explain the situation, the person at Animal Rescue says, "Oh, that's an easy one. Just throw down a rope ladder."

I stop and cock my head to one side, still holding the phone to my ear. After a brief pause, I say, "Um. I don't think I have a rope ladder."

She says, "Just get a length of knotted rope, and drop it down the chimney from your roof. The squirrel will climb the rope, and get out."

"Okay, but you do realize we're getting into candid camera territory now, right? I mean, I'm not being Punk'd here, am I?"

So here I stand on my roof, looking down the inky blackness of my chimney (I removed the apparently useless squirrel-proof top). Steve (for narative purposes, I have named the squirrel Steve McQueen), is apparently huddling in the shadows, waiting for the guards to leave before trying once more to scale the wall.

I'm knotting the rope at six-inch increments, which I guess is one unit squirrel length, while whistling the tune from "Bridge on the River Kwai". Then I drop the rope, and wait to see if Steve reacts.

Steve's not stupid. Until I identify myself properly as a member of the French resistance, he's not gonna take any chances with my offer of liberation. So, I leave him alone, and go back inside. At some point, isolation and fear will force him to risk liberation, and hopefully tomorrow I can bring the rope back in.

Nice Doggie

2005-02-09T11:36:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sitting at the computer when the doorbell rings. My wife goes to answer the door at the same time that the dogs come running in from the back yard.

The little dog has a baseball cap in her mouth. I've never seen that cap before. It says, "Time Warner Cable" on it.

I start running for the front door.

To quote Wynn Catlin, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice Doggie!' till you can find a stick."

The Tobies

2005-02-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

To those people who were regular readers, I'm sorry. There's three reasons why I haven't been posting much:

1) Work - I'm almost finished with my chapters for the video game textbook. Man, I'll really be glad when this is done. I'm working a lot more than I'm getting paid. Of course, being a game programmer, I'm pretty used to that.

2) I've been hopped up on goofballs because I messed up my back. About six months ago, I screwed up my back picking up a 55lb. bag of dog foot. I've been suffering through it until the last two weeks, when I managed to convince my doctor that this was, in fact, a serious problem. He took it seriously, medicated me heavily, and now my back feels all better. I'm not even taking the painkillers anymore.

3) World of Warcraft. This was the first time I've tried a MMORP since my disastrous first experience with Ultima Online (ask me about it, if you're really interested). Man, I've got a lot to say about this game. But it will have to wait until another post.

Anyway, I'm better now, and I'm going to try to get back up into the practice of writing.

I noticed something kinda funny today, while reading through the Electronic Gaming Monthly. They were giving away this year's Tobies (a booby prize for bad games, named after Tobias Bruckner, from Turok:Evolution).

They named the Tobies after Tobias Bruckner, because Turok:Evolution was one of the worst games they had reviewed, and Tobias Bruckner was one of the worst conceived villains ever.

Now, I'm not going to try to defend Turok:Evolution. I know why it was such an abysmal failure, and I know my friends and I were not to blame. That's why I don't mind telling people that I worked on it.

Anyway, the funny thing is, I noticed that several of the people who worked at Acclaim during the Turok debacle, now work at Retro, and are part of the smash hit Metroid. Metroid, by the way, took the prize as Gamecube game of the year. In fact, the guy who's technical director on the Metroid games is the same one who was the producer for Acclaim's 100 Bullets.

How does that work out? How could anybody work on the best and the worst games at the same time? Does it mean that the developers don't matter? Did the Retro guys suddenly learn a lot about making games?

My guess is, it was the management. Nintendo was desperately worried about making the best possible game for their license, which culminating in them buying Retro studios outright. They threatened, they cajoled, they watched the game every step of the way.

Acclaim was worried about one thing, shipping on time. There was no leeway with regards to that, so a lot of art, story, and gameplay had to be scrapped. There was lots of office politics, finger pointing, team competitiveness, and extreme crunch time.

The result? Acclaim wins the first of the Tobies.

Dreamcatchers: Now with the fresh scent of pine!

2005-01-28T02:13:00.000-08:00

I saw a minivan in a parking lot today, that had a Native American dreamcatcher (or at least, a cheap knock off) hanging from the rear-view mirror. A dreamcatcher is, as I'm sure you already know, a round or tear-shaped frame with twine laced around its interior. These are made by the Ojibway indians, and their purpose is to catch nightmares, and let the sweet dreams filter through (like and ancient Indian mental Firewall, I suppose). Ojibway parents would hang these up in rooms where the children slept, so that they would have nice dreams all night.

Hanging from the same rear-view mirror, slightly behind the dreamcatcher, was a pine tree-shaped air freshener, the kind you can get free at any filling station with a five dollar purchase of gas.

This brings up a few questions for me. First, why do you need to keep away nightmares when you're behind the wheel? I could understand it if this was hanging in a long-distance shipping truck, but not a minivan. I mean, how much sleeping does this person plan on doing while driving?

Second, does hanging the air freshener with the dreamcatcher make the dreams fresher? Does this make sure that the dreams which do filter through will all be sanitized? Do you end up dreaming of the forest?

Another question, If one decides to hang a playboy air freshener with the dreamcatcher, instead of the pine tree, does that person get an entirely different kind of dream? I mean, if I knew there was a way to have playmates in my dreams, I would have done this years ago.

Dark Parable

2005-01-24T14:06:00.000-08:00

Warning: Not everything in this blog is funny. I started writing this to share the things that I think might be interesting to others.

This, for instance, is not funny. It's pretty freaking dark, but it's part of a dream I had, and I can't shake it.

There are two men alone.
One has dark skin, the other is fair.
One has wealth and riches, the other has nothing to his name.
One has a religious fervor, while the other believes in nothing.
One is enraged, frothing at the mouth, while the other feels nothing.
One is huge, strong, and powerful, the other is small, weak, and tired.
One has a gun, the other has no weapon.

They fight to the death.

Which one survives?

Answer:
The one who has the will. All it takes is a willingness to kill another person. The ability to agree in your heart to take another persons life. All other factors are immaterial.

TV Blocks

2005-01-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

Recently, I talked about the major networks moving their shows around so that they could keep people from switching channels, and so that they could screw up DVRs. The way it works is, the networks will make a show last two or three minutes longer, so when one show is finished, people don't want to change the channel, because they might enter a new show late.

ABC scheduling chief Jeff Bader said, "It's not my job to make it easy for people to leave our network. Our whole goal is to get people to stay with us from 8 to 11." So, effectively, making viewers angry is not as dangerous as letting viewers change the channel. Screw the viewers, as long as the ratings stay up and the ad revenue rolls in.

I started thinking about this line of reasoning, and I figure they're not going far enough. I mean, if you decide that keeping your viewers happy is secondary to keeping your viewers watching, you could go a lot farther with this.

For instance:

Ten-minute episodes. Break up an hour long episode into four parts (each one 10 minutes long), then shuffle them together so that it works like this:

6:02 PM Alias
6:12 PM Commercials
6:17 PM Desperate Housewives
6:27 PM Commercials
6:31 PM Lost
6:41 PM Commercials
6:46 PM 8 Simple Rules
6:56 PM Commercials
7:02 PM Alias
.
.
.

See? Now, if you were an Alias fan, you would have to watch from 6:02 until 9:02 to get 40 minutes worth of an episode! Also, it would give viewers exposure to shows they might have otherwise not known about (in fact, if you juggle them from one week to the next, people will have to check their TV Guides to make sure they don't miss their favorite shows). Now that I think about it, the very fear that they might miss their shows could be enough to keep them locked on your network!

Also, since most of your 10-minute episodes will need a "previously on . . ." segment at the beginning of each episode, you can cut down the actual episode time to only 9 minutes (or 36 minutes per "hour long" episode). Did you notice I even managed to squeeze 20 minutes of commercials in there!

You could even use it as a marketing campaign, "Get four times the comedy in ABC's Laugh Block! There's something for everyone in the Laugh Block, with 8 Simple Rules, Complete Savages, America's Funniest Home Videos, and According to Jim, all together in one block".

Sure, some of you might think that this would be horrible, that forcing people to watch TV for four hours just so that they could get one whole show is evil and manipulative. But if you think that way, you're probably a viewer.

Screw the viewer. "Our whole goal is to get people to stay with us from 8 to 11."

Eggroll Porn

2005-01-19T03:46:00.000-08:00

True Story.

At about 4:00 a.m. I couldn't sleep, so I got up and made plate of mini-eggrolls for a snack. I sat down and turned on the TV (which had been left on Showtime) as I took a bite out of the first eggroll. It split open and some of the (celery/carrot/chicken/other) burst out and landed on the remote control.

Well, I didn't have a napkin or anything to wipe off the remote, and it looked pretty clean anyway, so I started to lick the eggroll yolk off of the remote control.

That was when my wife walked in, to see me, in my pajamas, licking the remote control, while soft-core porn played on the TV.

Some things, you just can't adequately explain.

Today's plumbing triumph

2005-01-19T01:01:00.000-08:00

"I'm sorry, but we are not available to take your call right now. Please leave a message at the beep."

[beep]

"Um. Hi. This is Brand Gamblin. I had an appointment for you guys to come take a look at the clog in my kitchen sink.

Um . . The appointment was for about two hours ago. . . I've been waiting and . . .

Anyway, I started messing around with the pipes under the sink, and I found the problem. I took it apart, and fixed the clog, then I put it back together again. It seems to be working like a champ now, so . . .

I guess we don't need you to come out here. Thanks anyway."

God, that felt good. Saved about $100 bucks, too.

Not to sound too much like a geek, but I think that by making my plumbing savings throw, I just leveled up to a +3 house hubby.

How I learned sheet music (in a day)

2005-01-15T02:48:00.001-08:00

In the course of one humans events, I've had to take several music classes. When I was about eight years old, I had a guitar teacher who thought I was a natural. I could play anything I heard, and repeat it with near perfect precision, but I couldn't read sheet music. My tutor was sure I would become the next Clapton, but I could never figure out the sheet music, and I got frustrated. Eventually, I gave it up, and dashed his hopes. Such is the mind of a child. I've had many opportunities to look back on that in regret.

Now, allow me to explain why I had so much trouble with it. My brain is just wrong in some fundamentally odd way. I have a learning disability called Dyscalculia (bad math, bad memory, but an uncanny skill at the printed word), and a mild manic/depressive disorder. I am a concoction of mental oddities, but I'm cool with it.

I have a very simple system for learning. If something makes sense, it will stick in my mind forever. I can remember derivations of projectile physics formulas that would make Newton proud. However, I can't remember anything if you tell me, "Just memorize it." I still don't know my multiplacation tables. I can't remember them by rote, but my mind is quick enough to calculate it so most people don't notice ( 9 * 6 = (10 * 6)-6 = 60 - 6 = 54).

The rules are simple enough. Tell me why something is, and I'll never forget. Tell me to memorize something, and I won't remember it long enough to write it down.

Sheet music was rote memorization. The teacher would point at five lines and say "That is E, G, B, D, F. You can remember them by the phrase "Every Good Boy Does Fine!" I would ask, "Why are the letters all over the place like that? Why aren't they in order?" The teacher would respond, "Just memorize it. Remember the phrase!" I would then reply, "What phrase?"

I even found out that there were letters for the spaces between the lines, but those were just as bad, "F, A, C, E, you can just remember 'face' and memorize it!"

So anyway, I had similar results in all my school music classes. I had a better voice range than my choir teacher, I could pick up any instrument and play a song running through my head. But I never could get very far in music, because all the school curriculum wanted us to play specific songs, written in sheet music. Damn.

I learned to live with it. Sheet music kept me out of band, so I ended up working in journalism in high school (school newspaper, yearbook, that kinda stuff). I took up the theater, and went to the State UIL competition twice in high school for acting.

But the sheet music thing always bothered me. It's always been something of a personal failure to me. Something that I just assumed I would carry to my grave.

I keep a guitar by the desk here at home, and occasionally I pluck at it. My wife bought me a 'Guitar for Dummies' type of book, perhaps to rekindle some interest in playing. Yesterday, I opened up the book, and as I flipped through it I cursed aloud to see my nemisis in bars staring back at me. Every clef was a middle finger, insulting me with my own deficiency.

So I started reading it from the front, and when they got to the half-page explanation of sheet music, they pointed out that all the bars were E,G,B,D,F and the spaces were F,A,C,E. Then something astounding happened. The book pointed out that if you put the bars and spaces together, you get E,F,G,A,B,C,D,E,F. I just blinked at the page. It was so simple. So obvious. It was all the letters in order, one right after the other. There was a reason behind it. It made sense.

And it clicked. After an hour or so, my hands were hurting, and I'd thrown away that book in favor of my internet search on Paul Simon solos. Holy crap! I can find any note now, and I don't mean I can read it off the page. I mean, I can hum it just by seeing the note. I can tell what 4/4ths means, I can find sharps for given notes. Baby, I can play!

Now that my fingertips are throbbing and I've stepped away from it for a while, it makes me think about alternative education. Why the f*%# hasn't any teacher thought to mention this? Is is just so obvious for normal people that it's not even worth mentioning? Or is this simple measure just one that's been forgotten by music teachers that grew up with the "Just memorize it" school of thought?

Technocrati tags: music, guitar

GTA Jetpack

2005-01-13T17:53:00.000-08:00

As the more astute readers may have noticed, I changed the name of the blog to get rid of the "mind of an unemployed video game programmer". I saw what it looked like on other people's blogrolls, and figured I should fix it. Nobody's blog should take up three lines. Sorry about that.

[GTA Spoilers]

So, anyway, I noticed something odd about GTA about two thirds of the way through the game. Now, I have always loved flying in GTA, ever since it was introduced in GTA:VC. As soon as I got access to a helicopter, I flew it everywhere I could. It gave me such a great sense of freedom while lifting me above traffic, police, rival gangs, or any of that. There was nowhere I couldn't go, nothing I couldn't do. If I couldn't find a good landing place, I could just bail out and only take minimal damage.

So, when I started playing GTA:SA, I was drooling at the prospect of those new planes. I thought it would be so incredible to fly the planes across the map, viewing the countryside from a whole new perspective, and bailing out anywhere on the map (this time, with a parachute).

As it turns out, you don't really get full access to flight until near the end of the game. And once you get in a plane, all sense of wonder is lost. They start you out in a P51 Mustang, one of the greatest planes in WWII. However, as soon as you stop taxiing over the runway you realize that the flight controls are way off. I mean, they're really bad. That's coming from a guy who's written flight controls for two published flight simulators. I'm not saying they needed to be more realistic, I'm just saying they needed to be more playable. I could go into what was wrong about them, and how it should have been handled, but you don't really want to hear me bitch about flight controls.

So anyway, saddened, I went on about the game. Then, after the mission "Green Goo", they unlocked the jetpack for me.

Wow. I mean, wow. That thing is the ultimate in vehicular freedom. You could fly anywhere, land anywhere. If you want to cross the state, it takes maybe two minutes. If you want to see what's written on the top of the tallest bridge in the game (yes, there is something written there), the jetpack made it easy. You could target and shoot at enemies while hovering. It was the ultimate expression of freedom in the game.

And that was the problem.

Up until that point, I was working on my driving skills, my bike skills, even my boating skills. But as soon as you strap into a jetpack, they all seem trivial and silly. Then, when you go back to the normal missions, there's a hollowness to them. The missions are great, but their greatness is dulled by a little voice in the back of your mind saying, "This would be sooo much easier with the jetpack."

I'm familiar with the feeling, it's one I used to get at work a lot. When you're developing a game, you usually walk around with god mode turned on. Infinite ammo, all the weapons, stuff like that. You turn all that on because you need to be able to work in the world, not just play around.

The downside is that, by the time you've finished the game, the challenges all seem kinda hollow to you, because you keep thinking, "This would be soooo much easier in god mode."

So that was the problem. An otherwise excellent game gets tainted by having too much freedom, then losing it in the game. As I coasted over a gas station the other day, I found myself wondering how to go about fixing this.

Then it hit me. Fuel!

What's really missing from GTA is fuel. They already pay attention to how often you eat (forcing you to eat periodically, and making your avatar grow too fat if you eat too often), so why not pay attention to the fuel consumption of the vehicles?

This isn't just a simple way of annoying the player, either. With fuel, the player would be forced to decide which vehicle they want to take for different missions. Some vehicles have a massive benefit over others, but if those were the gas guzzlers, you might think twice about it. Also, this idea gives a new possibility for gameplay challenges. Imagine a mission where the player has to drive this huge, gas guzzling, two-lane wide, vehicle from one end of the map to the other. Not only would the player have to make sure that he doesn't take damage from the oncoming traffic, but the player would also have to map out his route so that he could periodically refuel. The mission could make every leg of the route a challenge, because suddenly the player has to worry that climbing too high a hill would use up more gas than normal.

Also, you could give realistic fuel consumption to the jetpack. From what I've heard, a real jetpack can only run for about twenty seconds without running out of fuel. Now, compared to the GTA jetpack, that's a huge limitation, but imagine if you could use it as an inventory item. You get to where you want to go, switch to the jetpack, and fly over an obstruction. That way, the jetpack becomes more of a tool, and less of a dominating vehicle.

Anyway, that's what I'd do. Your mileage may vary.

game, gta, jetpack

My brief foray into Hymenoptera

2005-01-08T07:10:00.000-08:00

I'm staying at this old hotel (really old, I mean, it's Barton Fink old). There's a convention of the "National Honey Association" staying here, and I've been kinda interested in poking my head in to see the hardware. Apparently, it's mostly hive hardware, and chemicals for beekeeping.

Anyway, this morning I went down to the restaurant for their continental breakfast, and I was more or less seated with a bunch of beekeepers. Now, at 31, I'm probably the youngest person in the room by about 15-20 years. I'm dressed mostly in black, with a "Microprose" T-Shirt on. Of course, nobody in the room knows what Microprose is, so I think they are relating it to some type of bee chemical (Micropores?)

I think I was the subject of much speculation before one of the old men asks me, "So, what do you think of it so far?" I knew he was talking about the convention. I knew he had mistaken me for either a presenter or a beekeeper. The intelligent, mature thing to do would be for me to set him straight, and tell him that I had nothing to do with it.

I said, "Well, it's good stuff, but so far it won't work for my projects." In the back of my mind, my superego is giving my ego a sharp slap on the back of the head. One of the old man's eyebrows inches upward and he asks, "Really. Can I ask what you're working on?"

Now I realize that several people are watching. They think I'm a young upstart in the world of beekeeping. They think I have some new chemical or process that's cutting edge. Well, at least it's not too late to set the record straight.

"It's still in the early development stages, but we're working on a system for providing spider silk from our hives." Inside my mouth, I'm biting my lower lip.

"Really? Now how do you go about that?"

By now, I've given myself over to the lie, and the sci-fi writer in me starts coming out, "Well, you may have heard this past year about a genetically-engineered goat that secretes milk which can be processed into spider silk. My company's contention is that, what with insects arachnids being so much closer to insects than mammals, bees make a more direct route to spider silk. Genetically modified bees can be used to fill a hive with spider silk rather than honey."

Suddenly, it's like one of those E.F. Hutton commercials. Everybody's looking at me with the same slack-jawed acceptance of one who is currently out of their depth.

I'm well into my stride now, so I just plunge on, "As you know, spider silk is one of the strongest flexible materials made in nature. One of the most famous uses for spider silk is a bulletproof vest that weighs less than a tenth of a Kevlar vest." I pause for a moment and make sure that I'm nearly ready to leave, "One of the funny things about this project, the bees refused to produce spider silk exclusively. Despite genetic engineering, they fill one out of every three cells in the hive with honey. For the moment, we're just extracting the honey and storing it. Who knows, it may be considered a novelty item later. 'Honey made by spiders' or something like that." I smile at everyone, get up and leave.

I still don't know why I do that.

beekeeper, funny

Bad Pun

2005-01-07T21:09:00.000-08:00

So, I was on a plane today, and I saw something kinda funny. I have a bad habit of reading over people's shoulders, and I saw a magazine article about reddish swimwear under the title "Coral Fixation". Okay, I get the pun, add a "C" to Oral Fixation, combine it with the reddish color of coral, and suddenly it's funny.

I was just wondering, if it was an article about bluish G-String bikinis, would they call it "Canal Fixation"?

Riot

2005-01-06T23:08:00.000-08:00

[ Warning: GTA Spoilers ]

In the last few missions of GTA: San Andreas, the game is radically altered. Burned out cars litter the streets. Cops jump out of burning cruisers that coast down the street before exploding. People are looting, fighting, and killing. The sky changes color only between different shades of an oppressive red. Fires are lit all through the city, making the whole city burn.

It is truly excellent.

Here's the cool thing. I've been playing that game for months; Now, out of nowhere, the game feels like new again. There is a new element of danger that didn't exist before. The whole world is harder, angrier, and much cooler.

Suddenly, I find myself wondering, "Hey, I wonder what it looks like downtown?" and "Hey, If I base jump in the middle of the riots, will I be able to see all the fires and killer homies?" "I wonder what the VineWood sign looks like now?" I start running through the streets, totally ignoring my missions, just so I can see all the cool new stuff in this world.

This is, needless to say, a pretty rare thing in games. It's not often that you see a game where the developers are willing to change the overall fabric of the world just to show this cool effect. Occasionally, you will see an alternative version of the level you walked through before ("This is what the world would be like, little one, if you do not save us all!"), but usually, those are in pre-scripted missions with a very similar map, and different textures.

Now GTA is a generally unique game, because they allow far more freedom than other games. But was it the open architecture that allowed them to completely change the world? I don't think so. I think it was the will to do it that made the difference.

Whenever you see that world-shift in other games, it is temporary, cosmetic, and brief. If you think about it, an "alternate world" is just another level for the gamemakers. In fact, it's easier than that, because you only have to edit the current one, rather than build a whole new one. I think, the only reason game developers don't cotton to that idea much, is that they don't believe in the coolness factor. I think they see it as a gimmick, something that's kinda cool, but not that big a deal.

I started thinking about this, and came up with the following idea. Going along with the original ideal for Fable, and to a limited extent KOTOR 2, what if you made the entire world shift constantly to fit your current player needs.

In Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, everything bends slightly in the path of the beam. "The Beam" is a lay line of power that runs through the world, unseen. While you can't see the Beam, if you look at a forest, you will see tree branches leaning slightly in that direction. You will see subtle paths in the grass that flows in the way of the beam. You will see leaves falling slightly against the wind, in the path of the beam. The clouds seem to flow in that direction. It is the kind of effect that can't be seen when you look at any one of those, but when you let your view relax, the lines are there, clear as day.

Now, imagine you changed a game world to work like that. Not necessarily using the "Beam" analogy, but just set your game objects to subtly change based on current situations in the game. For instance, imagine this: You set up a "dirty" texture that blends with the standard diffuse texture to make the image of a house. As the player commits more evil deeds, the "dirty" texture gains opacity, making the house look dirtier. At the same time, you set the house's mesh to become slightly tilted, angular, evil. You could create about eight versions of each building (from friendly and rounded, to dirty and angular) and pick the texture and mesh based on the player's "evil" rating.

Now, there would need to be limitations, of course. It's a huge undertaking to make multiple meshes for all the buildings in a game. However, the argument could be made that you only need to do multiple meshes on the highest level of detail mesh, so if you say eight levels of detail for each building, and eight versions of the highest LOD mesh, you only have 15 meshes per building. It's still a lot of work, but it's adjustable depending on how much work you want to do.

Now, there would be multiple uses for this, other than the "evil house" analogy. You could make the entire world catch fire, or switch to a translucent X-ray view, or turn slowly into Smurf huts.

Oh, this would be cool. What if you were doing a "Back to the Future" kind of game, where you have to save the world before it all disappears. As you're playing the game, the world could slowly devolve, not just by losing opacity, but by changing its very mesh (picture the Escher building they used in "Memoirs of an Invisible Man").

The idea of changing the world to fit new situations in the game is an extremely attractive and seductive one to the player. I just hope more developers can see that it's worth the expense.

Cool quote

2005-01-04T23:31:00.000-08:00

We have a huge library of DVD's, which has only grown this holiday season. We've got a huge glut of media to get through, and I was trying to choose which one to watch with dinner. I asked my wife which one she wanted to see, and she said dismissively, "I never could pick my favorite spot of blue out of the sky."

That stopped me cold. I just stood and thought about it, and after a moment, she said, "It's not that deep, Brand." Still, I'm unconvinced. I keep coming up with symbolic interpretations for the quote. It speaks to the multitude of options available from choices in our lives. It talks about how similar all the choices seem when we see them. I don't know, maybe I am reading too much into it, but I was still pretty impressed.

Just not sure about Halo2

2005-01-03T23:56:00.000-08:00

After living through GTA for the last few months, I finally started playing it like a game, rather than a way of life. By doing that, I finished it pretty quickly. (which reminds me, I gotta write down the blog posts about the Riot levels and how the jetpack hurts gameplay).

I've written a few posts that pissed people off. Very few, actually, because I'm a pretty amiable guy in general (although, the Apple guys probably have me on a bad list by now). Either way, I'll probably upset some people on this one.

I've started playing Halo2 now, and I just don't get it. I mean, I'm running around again, shooting things again. Remember how Halo (the first one) started off with you on a space ship being overrun by the alien baddies? Guess how the second one starts out?

Don't get me wrong, I like being able to wield two weapons (although I don't see why that's better than wielding all the weapons I pick up, a la Doom, Quake, GTA, and just about any other action game), and I like being able to drive vehicles without worrying about their physics model. And, sure, it's pretty and all that. . . but. . . it's the same old stuff. I mean, okay, I'm not very far into it yet. I haven't found out what the "flood" is or any of the cool storyline. But I guess that's the point. I've got almost no interest in finding out about the storyline. The game is linear as all hell, with the same baddies jumping out at you and the same weapons all over again.

I think it's the linear thing that really gets me. Maybe three months of GTA has spoiled me to linear gameplay, but it just feels like . . this is gonna sound weird . . it feels like a street luge game. There's only one direction to go, and if you go fast, you don't even have to worry about obstacles in your path. A couple of times, I just ran past the wall of teeming enemies that stood as the only thing between me and my goal. Of course, then I just ran through the next wall of teeming enemies that stood as the only . . . blah blah blah.

Oh, and yes, I am playing on the "easy" difficulty level. Rail on me all you want, but I don't think a bad game is made better by me dying more often.

Now, despite the "sameness" of the game, I really do like the cutscenes. Remember back in the old days of graphical text adventures? Back in those days, the gameplay would be the same in every level, but you'd play through just to see the cutscenes. Like letting Leisure Suit Larry walk out into traffic because they had that cool LSL factory floor cutscene. On the games with bad puzzles or graphics, people didn't play for the games, they played just to get to the cutscenes. I feel like I'm doing that now. I'm not playing because I enjoy the game. I'm playing so that I can get to the cool bit.

But I'm progressively more afraid that the cool bit is going to be just like the other bits. Like the story is the only thing that makes this one any different from Halo1.

Am I wrong about this? Is there light at the end of the "Day on the beach" level? Say it's not all just running through a linear path, shooting down the same old guys. Say it ain't so!

An Apple Conspiracy Theory

2004-12-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

Matt Given pointed out to me the same product placement I was seeing in "Blade:Trinity" and "Flight of the Phoenix", was prevalent in TV, where all you see of a computer person is the top of their head, with the back of the computer screen in full view (and of course, that bright shining apple on the back of the screen).

This got me started thinking about what Apple's doing in Hollywood. It's easy to say that they are doing the same product placement that everyone else is doing, but I don't think that's true. I've seen lots of TV shows and movies where people only use Apple computers and Apple hardware (like IPods). There seems to be an inordinate amount of Apple hardware, as compared to others. How many times have we seen a guy on CSI show his forensics report on his computer with a penguin background? How many recent TV shows have shown a person listening to music on his walkman?

Now I should point out that all of this is guesswork based on observations made of the end product (the movie or TV show). I have no inside knowledge, and do not speak from a position of authority (hell, I'm just an out-of-work programmer. I get all my info from the web).

The first stone to throw is the Microsoft analogy. Why do you not see any AMDs or IBMs in movies? Because Apple pays big money to be the sole supplier to Hollywood.

The second stone is related to that deal. How did Apple get such a sweet deal? Well, there's two sides to that one. The first is, most computer suppliers don't want in on Hollywood. They don't figure that people are going to buy a laptop because it looks like the one that Vincent D'Onofrio uses on "Law and Order: Criminal Intent". The major computer industry is hoping that people are going to do more research, and buy the system that best suits them.

However, there is another side to this: Hollywood wants Apple. The MPAA is seriously interested in Digital Rights Management (DRM). For those of you who don't know what DRM is, it's a way of limiting users abilities to preserver the copyright of the producers. While that sounds very logical and magnanimous, DRM itself has become a monster that it's creators can't control.

The very first ability that content producers tried to limit was the ability to copy content. This means that, while you can make a backup of your VHS movies, you cannot make backups of your DVDs (they call that stealing). Next, they tried to take away the ability to skip over sections you didn't want to watch (because that leads to skipping over commercials). Of course, that lead to the discussion of removing the Fast Forward button, and now, oddly, they are trying to remove the Pause button (I don't even understand the rationale behind that). They want to use DRM to control how many times you can watch media. If you store information on a PVR, they want to control how long it stays stored before disappearing. And of course, you can't copy anything from one place to another.

So basically, the MPAA is becoming demonized (just like the RIAA) by the intelligent people who pay attention to the media landscape, and fight for their rights. DRM itself is now becoming a buying feature for hardware:
"Well, I really like this HDTV, and I love that it's tied in with the PVR, but I can't buy it because it's built by Time Warner. I've already read about how they take away viewing rights after a sale. Maybe I'll just buy this other TV instead. It doesn't have as many cool features, but at least I know I'll be able to watch the things that I buy for as long as I want."

So, with DRM demonized and the MPAA trying to figure out how to get people to buy the stuff, they turn to a white knight, Apple. Apple agrees with DRM, they have closed formats for audio and video. They have already limited their IPods after the sale, and have forced people to get ITunes "upgrades" that limit their media rights. So we end up with a culture where Apple needs the advertising that TV and Hollywood can give them, and the MPAA needs people to buy Apple products so they can limit viewing possibilities.

It's like a match made in heaven!

Painful night of Mainstream Film

2004-12-30T00:09:00.000-08:00

So, I just got back from mainstream movie night. It doesn't happen that often, but occasionally, the missus and I will go out and watch what Hollywood wants us to watch. No "Donnie Darko", no "Equilibrium". This is just a night to watch the kind of mindless pap that Hollywood has been gleefully spooning out.

We always go to the Alamo Drafthouse, because they've built one near us, and it's always a great experience. For those who don't live in Austin (which is to say, nearly everyone), I should let you know that the Alamo Drafthouse is the single coolest movie experience you can have. They have all kinds of promotions (like, everybody gets a free beanie cap if they come to the opening night for "The life Aquatic"). They show avant-guarde stuff (like a montage movie called "The 100 greatest kills" which features 100 movie film deaths). Best thing about the Alamo Drafthouse is taken from a line in Pulp Fiction,

"Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy beer in a movie theatre. And I don't mean in a paper cup either. They give you a glass of beer, like in a bar."

At the Alamo, you can have pizzas, beer, wine, cheesesticks, deserts, and a movie. It's just all kinds of cool.

The very first time I went to the Alamo drafthouse was when I was on a job interview for Kinesoft, and the lead programmer took me to see "Fight Club" at the Alamo. At least, I think it was "Fight Club". Either way, I'm straying from the point.

Tonight, we were able to see these hallowed halls profaned by "Flight of the Phoenix" and "Ocean's 12". Wow. I mean, really, wow. I've seen worse films, and that's about as kind as I can be.

[ spoilers follow ]

Let's start with Ocean's 12 (about the worst movie sequel title possible, I suppose we can expect to see Seth Green in Ocean's 13?). I remember Ocean's 11 was pretty bad, largely due to the almost unbelievable theft plans. However, it did have one saving grace in that the interpersonal relationships were very strong, and they evolved in the course of the film.

None of that in Ocean's 12. We have apparently added Catherine Zeta Jones and Bernie Mac to the cast, and by having such a huge ensemble cast, everybody gets no lines. This is really a movie about Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta Jones, and George Clooney. Everyone else is a walk-on.

Bernie Mac is especially underused, and I have to thank the filmmakers for that. Check this out, Bernie Mac gets five times as many lines as Eddie Izzard, but Izzard shines over Mac. How is that possible? One of them is a stand-up comic, actor, and genuinely funny person. The other is Bernie Mac.

However, that is probably the only kindness the filmmakers deserve. The storyline is atrocious, the characters are either two-dimensional or bored silly. Brad Pitt and George Clooney sit and look bored through most of the film. The only scene that has any energy in it is when (and it pains me even to relate this concept to you), Tess (played by Julia Roberts) creates a distraction by pretending to be the famous movie star, JULIA ROBERTS! Get that? The only scene with any energy to it is the one where Julia Roberts pretends that she's meeting Bruce Willis for the first time, and she's pretending to be Julia Roberts. Seriously, it was painful to watch.

I mean, once you've broken down the fourth wall there, why not just go all the way, have Bruce Willis turn to the others and say, "Wait a minute, you look just like that kid from 'Good Will Hunting'! And you over there, weren't you in 'The United States of Leland'? And my God! You're comedy legend, Carl Reiner, aren't you?"

Pathetic.

Moving on to "Flight of the Phoenix", I honestly don't think it was as bad as "Ocean's 12". It was pretty bad though. From simple logic problems (like, "I found bullet casings next to a man's corpse. He must have been used for target practice." If they were using him for target practice, the shells would have been at some distance away from the body, wouldn't they? Not much practice shooting a guy who's half a foot away from you.) to much larger story problems (like all of them getting shot at while hanging onto a wing, and nobody getting hit, or having them doing stunts with an experimental mock-up of a plane).

Probably the thing that bothers me the most was the IPod commercial. Now first, let me say, I love IPods and I love Apple for making them. They make it really easy to carry what feels like an infinite supply of music with you. However, this is the second movie where I've seen a really blatant IPod commercial.

In Blade:Trinity, we find out that the girl from Seventh Heaven likes to listen to hard rock while she kills Vampires. It's not like you need to hear them sneaking up on you or anything.

You know that scene where they do extreme zooms on a team as they get their gear ready? We see Wesley Snipes sharpen the blades of his Katanas, we see the "Van Wilder" guy loading clips in his nine, and we see Jessica Biel messing with ITunes so that she has just the right playlist for that night's hunt. It makes a person cringe.

In "Flight of the Phoenix" we are treated to a scene where the whole crew dance to "Hey-Ya" while fixing up the plane. It's not quite the worst scene in the movie, but it still makes a person cringe. I was fully expecting something like this:

"We're lost in the desert, with almost no water or food. All our flashlights have gone out, but the IPod batteries still crank out the fresh tunes!"
"You're right. And as long as we've got this party started, I should tell everyone that I found a cache of ice cold refreshing Pepsi in the plane!"
"Woo-hoo! You're right! This is gonna be some par-tay!!"

I think the thing that really bothered me about "Flight of the Intruder" was the lack of Karma. They've got a character in there who is genuinely vile. I mean, totally lacking in kindness, charity, human decency, anything. He's so broadly drawn, that he's almost a Montgomery Burns, cartoon villain. You have to assume he's the bad guy, and will get what's coming to him.

However, by the end of the film, they only show that all people can get together. They teach that heroes can work with total bastards to make a better life for everyone. By the end of it, I felt cheated that the nameless Asians didn't kill him (I can't come up with a better name for them, because the movie didn't think it was important enough to identify the largest potential threat to our heroes.)

Now here's the weird part. I love it when people throw out cliches and conventions, and make movies more spontaneous, original, and alive. Therefore, this slight deviation from the standard, this lack of Karmic retribution, should please me greatly. But the thing is, it pissed me off because I wasn't in the arthouse mindset. If you're going to do a truly artistic movie, then yes, throw out conventions with abandon. If, on the other hand, you are going to make a standard Hollywood crap film, you'd better stick to the cliches, or everyone will get mad.

When I walked into that theater, I made a deal with the movie makers. We may not have discussed it, but I agreed not to argue about the incredible story gaffes, plot flaws, bad writing, or any of that. In exchange, I expect the good guys to win, the bad guys to lose, some minor plot twist that I could see coming a mile away, and lots of pretty explosions.

Somehow, the fact that they broke our unspoken contract was the biggest problem with an otherwise barely passable movie.

Sorry about this long post, I just had to get it out of my head.

Whoa, this is weird

2004-12-27T23:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I've been away for a bit. What with Christmas, and the textbook, and stuff, the only substative entry I've made so far was the dog stuff. So naturally, I expected readership and interest to wane.

But here's the weird thing. Every possible indicator says that my blog is doing gangbusters in my absence. I've had lots of hits this week. I've had more people blogmark my site in the last week than I did in any previous month. I've even been making money on the Google AdSense ads!! Get this, in the first three months of operation, I made about a buck fifty on AdSense. In the last week, I've made three bucks!!! That may not sound like much to you guys (it doesn't even really sound like much to me), but if it's an indication of acceleration rather than speed, this blog could take off!!

So tell me, faithful readers, what made you stick around? Or perhaps a better question, what would make this blog more interesting to you?

Here are some blog standbys that I've tried to avoid:

Big News. If it's big news, there's a good chance you've already seen it, and I don't expect to scoop CNN on my little blog.
Political Commentary. If I have a choice between reaffirming your current beliefs and writing the same contrarian viewpoints you've already seen, I'll choose silence. When I've got a truly original opinion I'll gladly use this forum to piss off half of you, and please the other half.
Day-in-the-life posts. God, I hate those. I know I've done a couple of those in the past, but I really, honestly hate them. I'm not talking about the ones where something happens that makes you seriously think, and you use the blog to explore those thoughts and share them with others. I mean the ones where you talk about the things that you did during the day, when the day is no different from any other day. God, how I hate those posts. But I digress.

When I've seen something cool on a blog, I've cribbed it (which is how I got the blogchalking and bloginality and stuff). But is there something I'm missing? Something you guys would rather see here?

Of course, this gets back to the first comment I ever got, which was, "The posts are to long." In that vein. . .

Video for the day: Matrix Pong

Dog Stuff.

2004-12-26T12:40:00.000-08:00

Don't worry, this isn't one of those "Look at what my cute little doggies did" post. I generally don't do those.

However, my wife has an eclectic sense of humor, and a hawk's tunnel vision for e-bay auctions. And one day, she bought two very cool dog toys. The first was called the BowLingual (the dog translator). The way it works is that you strap a wireless microphone onto the collar of your dog, and you hold the cute little receiver. When your dog barks, the microphone picks it up, relays that bark to your receiver, which completely ignores all inputs, and rolls a 20-sided die to tell you what your dog is thinking.

At least, that's the way it seemed to me. I put this one on of my dogs, powered up the system, and in the first setup menu, it asks for the breed of dog. It had a huge list of dogs, many of which, I'd never heard of (like the Bovier de Flandres, voted breed most likely to have it's milk money stolen.) Well, crap. My dogs are both shelter rescues, mutts, so it was pretty tough to guess what breed the dog was. How do you tell it, "It's a black dog, about the size of a lab, but definitely not a lab because of that thin snout, and those thin legs. Also, it seems to have a greyhound's powerful back legs, and a terriers tail."

I went with "Mixed breed, Medium Size, large snout".

After setting up the rest of the dog's "profile", I went to "Bark Translation Mode". The system waited for a moment, processed and analyzed an incoming bark, then told me that my dog was threatening me. It showed a cute little picture of a dog growling. Now I thought that was pretty odd, because the dog hadn't even barked yet. I noticed that after a few minutes of the dog not barking, there were angry messages queuing up. My guess is that the problem was one of three things: 1) The system was totally random. I'm not discounting that one yet. 2) The ID tag, Rabies tag, and name tag were jingling enough to make the translator think that the dog was barking, or my personal favorite 3) The BowLingual was reading my dog's mind.

Now suddenly I found myself sitting not three feet away from an animal that clearly wanted to kill me, and it was only through the power of BowLingual that I was able to see into the dog's dark intent. Oh, you can hide a lot of hate behind cute, sparkling eyes, and a lolling tongue. If only Cujo's owners had been armed with a BowLingual.

After heroically jumping up and scrabbling away from the dog in, what now seems like, a awkward and cowardly way, I monitored the BowLingual from my post on the chandelier. My dog seemed to move through a series of emotions, through jealousy, anger, joy, and sorrow, all while staring up at me with her head cocked to one side.

When someone knocked on the door, and the dogs started barking at her, the BowLingual did relate threatening messages, but I just didn't trust it given how sensitive the microphone was.

I should point out that later, when we tried it on a purebred collie that belonged to a friend, the BowLingual performed like a champ, giving accurate (at least, context-sensitive believable) answers. So, maybe it just couldn't handle either of my mix-breed dogs.

You know what we discovered from hearing exactly what the dog was thinking? We found out that we already knew pretty much what the dog was thinking. They are apparently pretty good at getting their intentions across, without needing a common symbolic representation of ideas and things. When a dog puts his nose in your food, he wants your food. When a dog growls at you while you try to move it from your seat, you don't need a translator for that.

The other nifty invention that my wife found for our dogs was a bark inhibitor. It was a little battery-operated thing that you strapped onto the dog's collar. It also had a microphone, but whenever it heard a loud noise (like a dog bark), it would emit a high frequency sound. Now, I must say, that sounds fairly painful and inhumane, but after listening to it for a few days, it's really not a big deal. You see, the frequency wasn't any higher than human hearing, so whenever it heard a bark, it would emit a loud noise that was more annoying than the bark.

This microphone was also more sensitive than it needed to be, so any time the dog's collar would jingle, there would be a high-pitched screech. Every time the dogs barked, played, or moved, there would be a painful beep.

For a few minutes, the dogs were surprised by this. And, for the first few hours, it might have even stopped them from barking. Soon, though, they got used to it, and got to where they would ignore it. Now, I could hear the dogs barking outside with a loud beeping to accompany it. The dogs got so accustomed to it, that they would bark and play freely in the house, while their collars beeped incessantly. So, we got rid of that one.

The obvious social experiment was, what if you put the BowLingual on to translate barks, and the bark inhibitor to stop the dog from barking? First of all, I'm sure I was giving my dog cancer by putting so many battery powered things on its collar. It must have been pretty heavy, too, though the dog seemed not to mind. And, the first time she moved, the bark inhibitor went off, and the BowLingual caught it. A little picture of a dog holding it's paws over its ears came up, with the message, "Ow! Turn that stupid thing off!" So ends the grand experiment.

So now, I've got a new idea. This one should be cool. I'm thinking the real problem is that I don't have a way to just contact the dogs while they're out barking. Usually, by the time I get to them to stop them, they've already seen me coming and stopped on their own. I need a remote control to contact them, and that's what gave me this idea.

I'm going to sign up my dog for a cel-phone. I'm going to set it to vibrate, lock the buttons, and strap it to her collar. I'm going to set the custom ring tone to my voice shouting, "No! Stop! Bad Dog!"

This way, next time the dog starts barking, I can just ring her up and give her a shock!

Video of the day: DUI Stop

Missing a vowel.

2004-12-24T13:44:00.000-08:00

Short, funny moment:

When I heard about the TV show "Lost" I set up the TiVo to record them all, but I hadn't watched any until yesterday. My wife and I have been watching all the episodes in one big block, and we got up to the last one today.

So I walked into the kitchen and said, "You wanna watch the last Lost in the list, lest we lose it?"

She slitted her eyes at me, and said, "You're trying to fit the word 'lust' into that question, aren't you?"

Too busy to think funny.

2004-12-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

I've been working on these chapters pretty much non-stop today. I'm so freakin' tired.

Unfortunately, I've been to busy to even read the news or pay much attention to current events. One thing I saw did really burn me up. Apparently, a seventh grader was booted from a school "holiday dance" for wearing a Santa suit.

The principal defends this decision by saying that there are many children who attend the school who are not Christians, and he didn't want to upset them. Because, as you know, Hindi children are stricken dumb with fright at the sight of Santa Claus.

I'm not religious, and I'm not arguing in favor of Christians, but dammit, Santa isn't religious either! Apparently, the offending seventh grader was going with a friend who wore a green hat and elf ears. Why they didn't throw the other kid out on his elf ass, for Christmas by association, I'll never know.

This could be a really slippery slope for people. Last year, we banned Christmas as a separation of church and state. This year, we're banning people who try to look like Santa. Next year, we're banning anyone looking jolly or giving gifts to one another. And the year after that, we take out the Clydesdales. One day, we will finally be able to abolish snow, and then we will have finally wiped this horrible season of kindness, generosity, and joy.

My wife says I'm taking this too far, but I think snow has as much to do with the religious celebration of Christmas as Santa has.

A better solution? Allow all the kids to dress up as whatever the hell they want, as long as it's not religious. I agree, the state has no place telling people what religion to follow, but again, Santa's not religious!!!

By the way, we do kick kids out of school for wearing burkas, right?

Video of the day: Red Sox

3D Willy

2004-12-21T01:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'll admit that title came out a lot more lewd than I'd intended, but at least it does describe the content.

First off, I have to apologize both to you, the discerning reader, and to myself, because I promised I wouldn't let this happen. It's been more than two days since my last post. Sorry about that, but I actually have been really busy recently.

I have already mentioned that I was working on a video game textbook, and that's kinda fun. However, I'm working with an engine that I had never even seen two weeks ago. I've had to immerse myself in this engine (the Torque engine, if you care), so that I can write intelligently about it. The downside is, while I'm writing, I'm constantly second-guessing myself.

It takes three times as long for me to write a sentence like "Dynamic objects must be instantiated through script or through code." Because I keep thinking to myself, "Is there some way to do that with the editor? I should check the forums to make sure. Nope. No listing. But, does that mean nobody's done it, or that it can't be done?". Then I dive back into the documentation and forums to check again.

My wife says that I'm worrying about it too much, then adds that she's proud of me for being so thorough. Somehow, I feel like I'm being thorough in a Woody Allen sort of way, where I'm overanalyzing every minute detail, giving each two minutes of angst, then going ahead with it anyway.

So anyway, I was thinking about a game, combination FPS and third-person shooter. I'd like to combine the environment of Willy Beamish with the gameplay of GTA (where there are lots of little missions to choose from). Picture this: You play an ordinary kid in the suburbs. You want to go to the local QuikMart to get a smoothie, but the entrance is blocked by three big bullies. You know that the only way to really stop a bully is by getting a bunch of your friends with you (positive proactive message saying that friends working together can always beat the bad guys). So, you have a list of icons on your map that tell you where you can find each of your friends.

You go talk to Skippy who says, "Mom won't let me go until I pick up all the trash in the front yard. Thing is, she wants me to get the whole yard done in the next thirty seconds, or I'm grounded!" So now, you go running through the yard, picking up all the trash, and when you beat that level, Skippy will follow you.

Next you go to Butch's house (BTW, you could pick which ever missions you want in whatever order, I'm just using this as an expedient). Butch says, "I'd love to help, but my Dad wants me to help with fixing the car. He gave me these four tubes, but I don't know where to put them to fix the car. Can you help?" So now we have a puzzle game.

You get the idea, you gather up all your friends, go to the QuikMart, and have a quick FMV not-violent confrontation. You and all your friends are enjoying your smoothies when suddenly there's a bright flash of light from inside one of the freezers. A weird, wacky alien (picture Doc Brown from "Back to the Future") comes out of the freezer and says, "You must help me, the future of your planet is at stake!"

He explains to you that there are enemy aliens pouring onto your planet. He says they can camouflage themselves to look like anything, and the only way to see their true nature is to look at them through these glasses (hands you a pair of "X-RAY specs"). The alien tells you that the "bad" aliens are deathly afraid of water, so if you shoot them with a water gun, they will retreat to their spaceship.

So now, armed with your new specs, you go out and start looking for the bad aliens. Thing is, there are adults all over the street, and when one of the adults looks in the direction of an alien, it turns into something else (a tree, bush, fire hydrant, mailbox, etc.)

You should be able to walk into any house on the street (although people will indignantly shout, "What are you doing in here?"), and there should be other hidden games/puzzles all around the street.

Of course, there would be more storyline leading to more environments (Downtown, Airport, Spaceship interior). It's just an idea that's stuck with me for the past few days. It would certainly be fun to do.

Video of the Day: Talking Dogs

Game / Life Ratio

2004-12-16T23:24:00.000-08:00

The electrician came by today because we seem to have destroyed a 50 amp fuse. As I plug in the third space heater between the six desktop systems, the big screen TV and the three game systems, I'm pretty secure in blaming that space heater.

He started talking about how he spends all his time on Dark Age of Camelot, and how he is a really high-ranking GM. At one point, he told me that he had instructed two of the clerics in his guild to cancel their holiday plans, because he didn't intend to be missing any buffs over Christmas. On the outside, I'm smiling and nodding. On the inside, I'm shaking my head in pity. He reminded me of another soul I'd encountered briefly about a year ago.

When I was visiting my parents in Vegas, I was going through the obligatory hotel/casino walk. While I was waiting for my parents (I forget what they were doing, shopping, maybe), I saw this girl standing listlessly on a Dance, Dance Revolution machine. I say she was a girl, despite the fact that she was probably as old as I was. She was as thin as a crack whore, pale, and gaunt, with stringy blonde hair tied up into a short ponytail. She was wearing gray baggy sweats, and an oversized dark blue hoodie. She had her hands in the front pocket, and she just stared down at her shoes. For a moment, I wondered what she was looking at, then I realized she was just waiting, as suddenly her legs started pistoning under her.

Her torso didn't move at all, her hands never left the pocket of the hoodie, but her feet touched the pad with precision, timing, and grace. I watched her go through three levels like that, rarely looking up at the screen, and only taking her hand out once to scratch her nose.

Later that day, I saw her again, this time dressed in a blackjack dealer's suit. Her hands moved with deft precision and light swiftness, but again, her expression never changed. She never looked up from the table. She had the practiced ease of an experienced game player, but almost no joy at all. It seemed unbelievably sad to me.

She was an extreme example, there probably aren't many out there like her. However, the world is full of people like my electrician. People who honestly, seriously live for the game, not out of a sense of fun, community, or even accomplishment. To them, it's a job. He talks about how he gets a certain amount of XP per day, while it takes others a week to do it. He talks about his buff bots, and speed bots, like a craftsman showing off his favorite tools. I picture him listlessly skimming through forums every night, trying to find new tips, tricks, and God forbid, exploits.

There are a lot of people out there like that. They live for the game, then they live through the game, then they just game without living. I don't want to call it an addiction, because it's probably just as easy for them to stop as it is for a person to switch jobs. Still, it's really sad because it is more like a job than a game.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Video of the Day: Dangerous Place

I love bad Eggnog

2004-12-16T21:40:00.000-08:00

It's not a popular sentiment, I'll grant you, but I just love the stuff. I could drink it all year round. No kidding.

I should point out that I'm not talking about the "good" eggnog. You know, the stuff that's basically just a way of thickening a whiskey drink, so you don't get drunk as fast. I mean the "bad" eggnog. The non-alcoholic kind that you can get from any corner store. The kind that Californians wrinkle their noses at, and turn away from you in disgust.

It tastes like butter, sugar, milk, and just a little bit of egg (to make the drink thicker). It's so thick you can sip it and still feel full. You can warm it and have a sustaining bracer against the winter wind. Myself, I gulp it down cold until I get an ice-cream headache. I'm just weird like that.

It looks horrible, yellow and thick, with tiny seeds in it (that I dare not inquire about). The taste is a sugar rush that puts Mountain Dew to shame. Were it not for my increasing waistline and the fact that they don't stock it all year, I would drink it with every meal. And between meals, while I'm working. And as a midnight snack. . .

Video of the Day: Snow Blind

Busy Day

2004-12-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

Okay, I just started work today writing a few chapters of a textbook on Video Game development, so I'm going to be a little busy for a while. I'll try to write in when I can, but it will probably be a little less often. It should only be a couple of 10-day jobs, so I expect I'll be back to full unemployment by mid-January at the latest.

I've got details on the Austin Acclaim Auction, but I'll have to transcribe my notes later.

Video of the day: Two-legged Dog.

Video Blog Test

2004-12-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

I don't have a camera or anything, but I get a lot of short video clips that are usually pretty cool. Anyway, I wanted to try using my server to start offering these movies to you guys. Here's a couple:

The new Citroën C4

5 Drums

What do you guys think? More of this kind of stuff?

Acclaim Austin Auction - The Precursor Legend

2004-12-13T17:18:00.000-08:00

So I went back to Acclaim for the first time in about a month. We were viewing all the Acclaim property up for grabs before the auction tomorrow. I saw a few friends there, but a lot of angry looking, older people who seemed to be there for the sheer mercenary pleasure of the auction. I try not to be angry with them, because really, they're just doing the same as everyone else. Still, it feels like a family member just died, and we're watching people go through their clothes, digging through delicates and arguing about how much they're willing to pay.

The whole place was gutted worse than last time, with everything moved into rooms devoted to their items. I walked into a room that was full from floor to ceiling with a wall of phones stacked on top of each other. Standing just in front of the phones was a woman talking to someone on her cel. Man, sometimes I wish I had a camera phone just for those unintentionally ironic moments.

Anyway, there was a room devoted to Wacom tablets, a room devoted to PS2 Dev systems, a room for XBox dev systems, and room after room of systems. Man, I had no idea there were that many. I'm hoping to pick up a dual Xeon 2.4ghz machine, like the one I was working on in my office. It was sweet. If I get it, it'll be the first system in the house that can run Doom3. Hah!

Still, I'm over Doom3. By the time you get to hell, the game just seems all downhill. I'm really more into creating a better server for FTP, Apache, and other stuff. What I'm using right now is entirely capable, but it is getting old.

Back to the auction. For the first time, I was allowed to go into the main server room, where we had racks of systems from floor to ceiling. It felt like an Intel ad, or one of those ads that's trying to convince you that Windows makes a good server. Now, I'm not as tech as some people there, so maybe this makes perfect sense, but I saw an oscilloscope in the middle of one of the server racks. Is it just me, or is that really old school?

The thing that really got me was one box that was clearly made up of stuff taken out of somebody's office. I happen to know it was Bruce Cooner's office, and I'm tempted to win that box of stuff just so that I can send it back to Bruce. Well, maybe. I might keep the Vexx doll.

Anyway, we'll see what happens tomorrow. Tomorrow, they're having the actual auction.

Disneyland Senior Trip

2004-12-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

True Story.

When I went on my senior trip, we went to Disneyland. Now, this is not the uber-cool DisneyWorld on the East coast. This is the smaller, paler, cramped version that you find in California. Almost every ride that was in DisneyWorld was mirrored in a smaller, dirtier version in DisneyLand.

I had already been to DisneyWorld, so I'd seen the good stuff already. We had rented rooms at a hotel just a block or so from DisneyLand, so when I got bored, I just decided to walk back to the hotel.

Now, there's an interesting phenomenon about DisneyLand and the world around it. In DisneyWorld, they own all the land around the park, so they can maintain the same level of cleanliness, and make it look like the park is the only thing in the world. However, in DisneyLand, there is a sudden division between the park and the world around it. When you step just outside of the park, you are suddenly surrounded by gas stations, sex shops, newsstands, and general urban development. It's actually a very weird feeling, and I looked back a couple of times to relish in the contrast.

I was about half a block away from the park when a prostitute walked up to me. I guessed she was a pro based on her outfit, and the fact that she was approaching a total stranger. But what really convinced me was when she said, "Hey, you want to sleep with me for fifty bucks?"

Now, you have to understand that I was just a seventeen-year old virgin, a nerd in the classic sense of the word, from the big thick glasses to the acne riddled face. I had absolutely no experience with women, so I had no idea how to respond.

I went with the first thing that popped into my head, "Well, I'd have to see the money first."

Before she could figure that one out, I continued walking back to the hotel.

The Cardinal Sin of Gaming

2004-12-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

There's a part of GTA: San Andreas that involves "capturing" hoods. You go into an enemy's territory, start up a gang war (by shooting several of the enemy gang members), then survive through three waves of attacks. If you survive all three waves, the hood is yours and marked with your color on the map. You first learn how to do this after a mission called "Doberman" and you are encouraged to take over as many hoods as possible. Each time you take over a hood, you gain money and respect. Perhaps more importantly, when you take over a hood, your gang members show up there, and the enemy gang members don't (at least, not nearly as many).

Of course, I tend to take over all the hoods, which takes several days of gameplay, but it's a great feeling. Once you've taken over all of Los Santos, you can drive around anywhere, and know that there's almost no chance of running into an enemy gang, or getting shot at as you cross the street.

However, when you progress in the story far enough that you reach your first betrayal (you knew there had to be betrayals), you leave Los Santos, and the whole game changes. Instead of fighting in the urban jungle, you now have access to the "Badlands", a large open area surrounding Los Santos, full of forests, lakes, hills and mountains.

The game goals also have completely changed. All the missions you are given are in that open area, and although you can drive back to Los Santos, there's almost no reason to do it. After all, you lost all of your hoods.

That's right. Days of gameplay gone in an instant. Suddenly, as you drive down the street, Ballas or Vagos will shoot out your tires. They are all around, everywhere you go, and there's nothing you can do to stop them. You couldn't even start up gang wars and win back the territory (even if you wanted to go through the whole egregious procedure again).

Now, I haven't finished the game, and for all I know, I win back the hoods. Perhaps, at some point, they just blink back in and show that I've still captured all the hoods. But for now, that is supremely depressing. I lost a huge source of income, but more importantly, I lost security in my home town.

I know why Rockstar did this. They want the story change to be poignant and noticeable. They want it to hurt. All the same, I can't help but think this is the most horrible sin a game can commit.

Once a person wins something, let them keep it. When Mario gets to the castle, don't tell him, "Sorry Mario, but the princess is in another castle". Make sure that the player has a sense that what he's doing matters, that it makes sense, and that he is truly earning what he has. If something has to be taken away, make sure that it's a bad guy who takes it, and make sure that the player knows he can get it back.

There's a social contract between the player and the game. One of the unspoken laws is that, if I follow the game's rules, I should get the rewards the game promises. Of course, there are exceptions (for instance, taking all of a player's weapons away when he's put in prison), but there should always be a way to recover from that (by letting him find his weapons in the prison storage area, after he has broken out).

You see, the game holds all the cards. It can define at any moment how many weapons I have, how much ammo I have, how much health I have, even which direction gravity is leaning. With that much power, we have to have faith that the game will only make those changes when absolutely necessary for gameplay. Without that faith, we can't respect the game itself.

I worked on a game once called Turok:Evolution, and I was responsible for the weapons code. When the designers noticed that certain weapons would give the player an unfair advantage in certain levels, they set up a system that would make the player just lose those weapons in those levels. You would just have the weapons at the end of one level, then not have them at the beginning of the next. There would be no explanation for it (but then, there was damned little explanation of anything in Turok).

I said at the time, and I still believe that this is a big mistake. It should be taboo, this cavalier asset theft. Every status change should have a reason, and should be recoverable. To ignore the game's responsibility is to commit the greatest breach of faith; and as such it should receive the greatest punishment.

Obscurity.

More Experiment Results

2004-12-10T02:35:00.000-08:00

On day one of my experiment, I shut off all BlogExplosion promotion, and found that I got about ten visits, with an average of one page view per visit. This makes sense, because people who come to the site without advertisements, have probably already read the background stuff, and are probably just reading the new day's story.

Yesterday, day two of the experiment, I turned on the banner ads, but left the normal surfer promotion starved for credits. On that day, I got around forty visits with around eighty page views. And, looking at the data, it was a more consistent two page views per person. So, it could be argued that the banner ads provide more "real" viewers.

As a side note, the experiment gave me a chance to see where a lot of my visits were coming from. Most were from the banner ads, but I also saw a few from "Preponderance of Ponderings", SEV's blog, and a couple of new ones. I'm apparently listed on Swift's blog, and del.icio.us, so that's cool too. I'll be putting up buttons to their sites soon.

So, anyway, when I was applying 100 credits to the blog every day, and funding the banners as well, I was getting about 100 to 130 visits a day, and only 110 to 150 in page views, so that comes to about one page view per person. Now most of that can obviously be seen as the 100 credits I had put into the blog, but I think the blog's "popularity" is growing more through the banners than the surfers.

It makes sense, because people who click on the banners are people who are already curious about my warped imaginings (as compared to those who are just 'doing time' for their thirty seconds). I'm seriously thinking about just paying for the banners, and ignoring the surfing credits.

Speaking of banners, hey, click on the picture of the IPod, and help me win it, so I can get rid of that red banner up top. If you sign up for the Video Professor, you can immediately cancel and you can be on your way to getting an IPod of your own.

Had a kinda weird moment there.

2004-12-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been caught by an idea, something that you just had to think through, no matter how unimportant it seems?

This morning, I had a problem with a very simple set of functions. All they had to was convert a pixel coordinate to a tile location. See, in this graph:

You're given a pixel location, and you want to find out what tile that pixel coincides with. There are easy brute force ways, but of course, programmers want the math ways. And besides, the math isn't that tough. The basic formula is:

TileX = (PixelX / TileWidth) + (PixelY / TileHeight)
TileY = (PixelY / TileHeight) - (PixelX / TileWidth)

But for some reason, in my squirrelly little head, I thought that I could come up with something more optimal. I decided I would take the X pixel component, find out what row that coincided to, then subtract that height from the Y pixel component, and get the distance in TileHeights from that, then just add this new distance to both the X and Y components to find my new location!

Simple, huh?

Actually, it was a really stupid way to make something easy into something really complex. But I just couldn't get it out of my head. I mean, what if, after reducing this complex setup, it actually was more optimal?

So I sat down and built the formulas, reduced them as much as I could, coerced them and massaged them, until I finally came up with this:

TileX = (PixelX / TileWidth) + (PixelY / TileHeight)
TileY = (PixelY / TileHeight) - (PixelX / TileWidth)

Great. It took me three hours to build a mathematical formula that had been around for, oh, I don't know, about a thousand years.

And people tell me I'm smart.

So then, resolved and frustrated, telling myself that Edison found a thousand ways to not make a lightbulb before he found out how to make one (maybe I just found another way not to derive a 2D transformation?), I decided to take a short walk outside.

The leaves had fallen fairly recently (remember, in Texas we get our winters late, and light), so I decided to rake the leaves. At night.

Well, it was physical exertion, and that's what my tired, stupid mind wanted right then. So I raked leaves in the dark. I was guided only by a flickering, tired porchlight.

I managed to rake the whole front yard, and as I gathered all the leaves into one big pile, I noticed that I was subconsciously fretting with the pile of leaves. I didn't mean to do it, but I formed the leaves into a pile about six feet long, three feet wide, and two feet tall. It was weird, I felt kinda like Richard Dreyfuss with a plate of mashed potatoes. And when I was done, I looked at what I'd made.

It was a grave. I don't know why, but I'd managed to make a pile of leaves look just like a freshly dug grave. Suddenly, I had images of Freddy, Jason, or Evil Eddie jumping out of the leaves and grabbing me.

I think I'm going to go lie down for a while.

Experiment results

2004-12-08T23:32:00.000-08:00

Wow, did I nail it or what? I got 10 unique visits total, with a page view count of 20. I found out about a blog out there () that I didn't know was linking to me, so that was pretty cool.

Most of the page views were from SEV, but I'm not too worried about that because I figure any return business at all is probably just looking at the main page to see what I'm going on about today.

On the whole, pretty much the results I expected. Now I'm going to try loading up the banners, but nothing else, and see if that changes anything.

Is it just me?

2004-12-08T04:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not normally political, but I see a caption to this picture as, "Okay, guys. On three, get him. One, two. . ."

Running a little experiment today.

2004-12-08T03:07:00.000-08:00

Since I've started working with BlogExplosion, I've been using a really simple strategy for credits. I'll buy about $30 in credits each month, and use around 100 credits per day on my blog. Any credits I get from surfing go directly to the blog as well. I also give my two banner ads about 100 credits whenever they run out (which fluctuates pretty wildly).

So, that means that I'm getting about 110 to 140 visits a day, with about 120 to 160 page hits per day. So, if we assume that 100 of those hits are the ones that are just surfers who walk on by after their 30 seconds, then what about those extra visits? Are those the banner ads? Or are they that holy grail of all blogs, the repeat customer?

Recently, my banner ads ran out of credits, so, instead of topping them off, I've let them run out, and today, I won't add any credits to the blog itself. In theory, this will show me how many "real" viewers I've got.

I expect that there will only be about five or ten of you reading this. But understand that if you're reading this on December 8th 2004, then you've got a special place in my heart.

Don't Blame Me, Blame Society

2004-12-07T02:20:00.000-08:00

There's a part of GTA that my wife really hates. The player has a bunch of random phrases that he spouts off based on the context of the moment. For instance, when you pick up money off of a dead enemy, he'll say something like, "I'll take that paper" or "Thanks, I like to share, too".

The thing that pisses my wife off is one of the phrases he uses right after killing someone. The phrase is, "Don't blame me, blame society." Every time she hears it, she asks me to drive off a cliff, or somehow punish the character.

I think the thing that she hates about it is that people are willing to do bad things as long as they think they can blame it on "society". There's a lot of that thinking going around, and it's applicable to all kinds of situations. "I eat a lot because people judge me and call me fat", "I steal because the man won't give a brother a break." That kind of thinking is inherently irresponsible, and leads to irresponsible actions, which degrades society, which gives more people an excuse.

I gotta segue here to something else for a second. The networks are starting to shift their schedules around by a minute or so, adding a minute here or there. The idea behind it is, if you watch a show until 9:01, then you won't change the channel to watch another show that started at 9:00.

I've got a TiVo, and I haven't watched live TV in three years. This means that when they pad the time out, I end up getting a minute clipped off of my shows. Now TiVo may not be an international norm, but there are tens of thousands of people who have a TiVo. Or if not TiVo specifically, then some other kind of PVR; And there are still the people who use the timers on their VCRs. So I can't help but think that a lot of other people are dealing with the same problem I am.

Now, let's look at another data point. BBC Tech news points out that people are spending more time on the Internet, which is eating into TV viewing time.

So, putting these all together, this is what I see happening:

A user is watching his favorite TV show, which is cut off just when the detective says, "You're all wrong. The killer is right here in this room and . . ."

Anguished, the user turns off his TV, and goes over to his computer. He tries to find a synopsis for his show, asks on boards, "I missed the last minute, does anybody know what happened?"

Two posts later, a BitTorrent link pops up. The user clicks on it, maybe not even knowing what BitTorrent is, and about ten minutes later, he sees the whole episode sitting on his desktop.

He gets back on the board, "Thanks! Where did you find that?"

And so, the user finds out about suprnova and newsreaders. Looking through the index, the user sees that he can download an entire season of this show. He finds shows he remembers from his childhood (Wow! Every episode of "The Greatest American Hero"! The pilot episode of "Automan" and "Manimal"!) HDTV quality video! No commercials ever!

At this point, the user has gone from consumer to leech, and by some definitions, a pirate. But in his mind, it's okay, because the networks were the ones who did this to him. The networks put twenty minutes of commercials into every hour. The networks time-shifted their episodes so that his favorites got cut off.

As the networks add one hurdle after another to their shows, aren't they guaranteeing more piracy? Aren't they shooting themselves in the foot and inviting piracy by doing this?

Or, and here's the big question, are we just taking a page from GTA and saying, "Don't blame me. Blame society."

A Jewish Credit Card

2004-12-06T01:43:00.000-08:00

I know, it sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but this is real. One of the largest banks in Israel has started using a credit card that respects the Orthodox Jewish Sabbath.

Now, a little disclaimer here. I'm not Jewish, so if I'm wrong about any of the orthodoxy, please feel free to correct me. My knowledge is just based on a general interest in comparative religion.

Apparently, the credit card will be refused if it's used on the Sabbath. For those who don't know, it is forbidden in the Torah for Jews to work on the Sabbath, and they have a pretty comprehensive description of 'work'. The description is "Any act in which man interferes with nature and shows his mastery over it." For instance, you cannot turn on a light on the Sabbath (however, if a light was on before the Sabbath, you cannot turn it off).

So obviously, you cannot buy or sell on the Sabbath. The interesting thing is the questions that this credit card opens up. For instance, why not take this a step further? Every time you use the credit card on the Sabbath, the bank would refuse the card, and at the same time, send a letter to your rabbi?

My wife pointed out that this would have to be based on the bank's clock, which poses a problem for people outside the city. You see, the Sabbath begins on Friday night at sundown. But what if you happen to be vacationing in Spain? Local sundown is going to be at a different time (good thing they aren't sending a letter to the rabbi, then). Or, and this would be even cooler, have the bank's computer find out where the charge is coming from, look up that local time online, and check weatherchannel.com to find out whether the sun has set where the charge has been made. Now that would be really cool.

Sworn Enemies

2004-12-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

Did you ever notice how many games just start off by handing you a sworn enemy? In GTA San Andreas, they start the game by dropping you in 'Ballas' territory, and the first time you run across one of those gang members, the game tells you that they are your 'sworn enemy.' What I don't get is, Why?

Why are these guys my sworn enemy? Because they killed some of my gang? Sure, but I've killed a whole slew of them, so it's kinda a wash, right? I mean, either we actually keep score, or we just assume that we have to kill everybody. Either way, we've got no real reason for all the hostility.

Some games will start out by giving you a reason for hating the bad guy, and that works out a lot better. You are a simple peasant going about your simple life of collecting mushrooms, when suddenly a boulder destroys your entire village, and as you look up, you see the evil troll grinning down at the smoking crater of your home. . . now that's motivation!

But lots of of the games start you off with a 'sworn enemy' just as an expedient. If you play Sudeki, you start off with them handing you an enemy. An ancient enemy, the Aklorians, who have been at war with your people for some time, and seem to attack you for no reason. At the beginning of any game, I've got nothing but love for all God's people. I find myself more interested in their motivation than angry with them. I kill those that attack me, but I just can't buy into calling them enemies. Then, about half way through the game, you find out that they are not your "real" enemy. In fact, someone else is manipulating both sides to attack each other. Well, how . . . underwhelming. Sorry, it just doesn't feel like betrayal when you don't really love or hate either side.

What's worse is that most games will foreshadow this situation. Look, if you are told to attack somebody, and you aren't given a reason for it, and people actively avoid questions which might mitigate the hatred, chances are you're being manipulated. If you really want to make the players believe a story, you have to give them a believable motivation for both sides. We hate the bad guys because they want to take over our world. Okay, but if you don't tell me why they want our world, then it just doesn't quite gel. These days, it's hard to accept general greed as a motivation, unless you make your enemy so cartoony in his manner that people accept him as generally shallow and two-dimensional.

Now, this would be a great betrayal. The troll destroys your village, and you see him dancing on the mountaintop, gleefully enjoying the destruction. You hear him say, "Boy I really do hate all humans. I just love smashin' em." Okay, at this point, you accept that your story and motivation are going to be two-dimensional, and you just play the game normally, trying to stop, or kill, the troll. Along your jouneys, you pick up a pal who tells you that his village was destroyed by the troll, and he has been following the troll ever since. So, cool. Now you've got a party in the standard video game sense.

But then you notice, in the middle of one of the battles, that the latest village the troll destroyed was a troll village. You notice that your new friend always seems to know just where to go next to head off the troll. Through cutscenes, you notice all kinds of intricate little details (like the troll is always rubbing the silver band around his head, like it was giving him a headache).

If games can do that, start with a simple two-dimensional story, and slowly evolve it through small, incremental clues, it would keep the player's attention, and build them up for a much better betrayal. For instance, the game leaves clues that lead you to believe your new friend is controlling the troll, but does it in a way that seems like the game is trying to keep that secret from you. Then, just when you're expecting the betrayal scene, where you are ready to confront him, you get stabbed from behind by a huge, new enemy with his own army of controlled trolls. You wake up in a jail cell thinking, "What the hell just happened?" Now, that's a sweet setup.

Any story that leads you subtly into building your own idea of which side is good and which is evil, then completely obliterates those beliefs in climactic storyline changes, will be heralded and loved.

Waste of a Sunset

2004-12-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

So I watched "After the Sunset" yesterday. Yes, thank you, Ms. Hayek. They are very nice. You can put them away now.

I watched the movie because it had all the trappings of an Elmore Leonard film. A cast of criminals and thieves, one big score out there, backstabbing, betrayal, and lies. I'm a huge fan of Elmore Leonard, books and movies, because I like to think. I like movies that let me think, and I love movies that force me to think.

This is not one of those movies. It makes me think of a frat house, where in a drunken stupor, the whole fraternity decides to make an intrigue movie, "So, look, all we need is, like, a thief and a cop trying to catch him, right? And the thief's trying to get this one big diamond, and they are, like, outwitting each other. That would be righteous." Somehow, I have absolutely no trouble seeing Woody Harrelson playing the drunken frat member.

Seriously, 'National Treasure' had more intelligent theft plans. The whole thing was written poorly, from Salma Hayek's constant display of sex (SFW sex, if it matters), to Woody Harrelson's idiotic blundering.

Speaking of Salma Hayek's assets, I noticed something kind of odd while watching the movie. As any male in a civilized society, I recognize moments of weakness that I should look away from. For instance, if there's a woman in a low-cut V-neck blouse standing in front of you, and she drops her pencil, you are consciously aware of your line of sight. Maybe you're into that kind of voyeurism, and you blatantly check her out. Myself, I deliberately avert my eyes, the same way I do when the person in front of me at the ATM is typing in their password.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against appreciating the female form. In fact, I like it quite a bit. But I can't bring myself to take advantage of a moment of weakness. It's like violating whatever tenuous relationship you already had with that woman. If she doesn't mean to flash me, I'll look away. If she rips her top off and says, "Hey, whaddaya think of these?" Well, that's a whole different ballpark (a nice ballpark to play in).

If you do that often enough, avert your eyes to avoid mutual discomfort, you get to where it's second nature. You don't even recognize that you're doing it. One minute you are looking at the woman in front of you, and then you're checking your watch for no reason. The funny thing is that, while I was watching "After the Sunset" I found myself subconsciously looking away from the movie because of Salma Hayek's "accidental" displays of cleavage. The best example was when they opened up the hood on a SUV, and she climbed on top of the engine, with her shirt hanging open. Suddenly, I'm looking through my bag of popcorn. Sad, really.

Back to the movie: This was the biggest waste of Don Cheadle since "Oceans 11", and the biggest waste of Pierce Brosnan since, Hmmm . . . let's see, the "Thomas Crown Affair". In fact, that's what this whole movie reminds me of. The Thomas Crown Affair was another example of atrociously stupid writing in one of my favorite genres.

I don't want to keep ranting, so I'll just leave you by saying, it failed to reach the lowest common denominator, and that's coming from an American. I believed "Armageddon" more than this, for crying out loud.

An Excess of Freedom

2004-12-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

Okay, with my back feeling a lot better today, and now that I seem to be seeing the last of whatever cold has been bugging me, I am now able to consider what to do with the rest of my life. To be honest, I've spent the last few weeks just agonizing on how sick I've been, and now I'm trying to figure out what to do with my dynamic new lifestyle.

Basically, I can do anything. My wife is making money now, so we're not in any dire need for funding. I don't have a job, so my day is pretty much free. Now, I have spent the last seven years of my life as a video game programmer, and I've spent the last twenty-five years of my life programming, so it's a pretty good guess that I'm going to fall back in with programming. But at least, I have the chance now to consider alternatives.

For instance, here's a brief list of the things I'm currently working on:

Children's story based on Grimm's fairy tale format.
Novel based on cryogenic freezing.
Treatise on the state of ethics in video games.
Small Civ-clone for the PC/Pocket PC.
Web-based (using Laszlo) MMORPG City builder game.
This blog.

So, there's a lot of stuff there, and most of it is writing (wonder if I should put Linux on my laptop, if I don't need MSDev), but even that is just scratching the surface of "what should I do". For instance, I want to get back into Tae Kwon Do, I want to take guitar lessons, I could be a damn fine actor (character actor, probably).

Here's the really weird part. This freedom scares the bejesus out of me. I'm almost paralysed with fear, not the fear of doing the wrong thing, but just the fear of the decision itself. That's why I think I've spent so much time wallowing in sickness, rather than doing anything.

So, little help here guys. What would you do if you could reinvent yourself today?

Sadly, lacking in lesbian video clips

2004-12-03T06:54:00.000-08:00

This is kinda cool. If you hang out with Blog stuff long enough, you find a lot of stuff about SEO, meta tags, and generally how to make search engines find your blog. Personally, I never submitted my blog to any search engines, because I just don't think my blog fits any category that somebody's going to go searching for.

All the same, I got a hit today from somebody who was using Yahoo search to find "video clips two girls massage".

Now, first, how does my site get linked to lesbian porn? Guess you'll have to check Yahoo search to find out. Second, I can only guess how disappointed the reader was when he got my ugly mug on the screen instead of Jenna Jameson & friends.

But third, and this is really cool, he read multiple pages. Now, the shallow pragmatist in me guesses that he was just trolling the site, looking for the hidden porn; but the optimist in me says that he (I'm assuming it's a he) found something interesting and funny in these pages that made him want to stick around and read.

Well, doesn't that give you a warm fuzzy inside.

My Apologies

2004-12-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

I really hate those blog entries that are just fluff about what someone's doing during the day. The ones that go, "Nothing to report. Went to class today. Don't you hate Mondays? Etc."

I promised myself, when I started this blog, that I would adhere to two cardinal rules. Rule 1) Never write a situation report without anything to say. Rule 2) Write every day.

In theory, this would force me to write something interesting and worthwhile every day. In doing so, this would force me to think of something interesting and worthwhile every day.

So on to my apology, I'm about to break both rules. I have to explain why I'm not writing that much, and in order to do that, I have to give you a situation report.

About a year ago, I screwed up my back pretty good when somebody kicked me during a Tae Kwon Do test. At the time, the doctor said it was all musculature, and gave me some meds to relax the muscles. It worked great, and my back got all better, until July, when I picked up a 55 lb. bag of dog food. Suddenly, my back started giving out on me again. Not terribly, I could still function, but it was always there as a nagging reminder that I should never pick up anything again.

So, today I had an appointment scheduled with a Massage Therapist, and I came down with a cold. It wasn't a bad cold, not enough to cancel the appointment, but enough to make the world a little swimmy.

During the massage therapy, he tells me that by loosening up the muscles, they will be dumping a bunch of poisons into the bloodstream (because the muscles had previously been to pinched to circulate normally). He tells me that I should expect to feel a little sick for a few days.

Did I mention I would also be sore after the therapy? Of course, I knew that going in. But, see, here's the thing. I'm currently suffering from the following issues 1) Bad back, 2) slight cold, 3) sore back, and 4) muscle poisons. The cumulative effect is that I'm completely wiped out, and I can't even think of anything funny to say. Not even with an obvious joke like "muscle poisons".

I was actually watching Jim Henson's "The Storyteller" earlier today, and I started thinking about how easy it would be to write my own children's stories (after all, if Hillary Clinton can write a children's book, surely I could). But that's going to have to wait for the walls to stop spinning.

Immoral cells made good

2004-11-30T07:13:00.000-08:00

You've probably already heard about this, but I'll tell you here just in case. A woman in South Korea has been paralyzed for the last twenty years because of damage done to her spine. Yet, last week, she was up and shuffling around in front of reporters. How is this possible? Through the miracle of stem cells.

I really wanted to shake an accusatory finger at the Bush administration, using this story as background. Unfortunately, the stem cells used to save this woman were from the blood of an umbilical cord; and it turns out that GW has always been a fan of those stem cells. The issue is not the umbilical stem cells, which are limited in the number of tissues they can build into, but the embryonic stem cells, which are capable of becoming almost any tissue in the body.

Still, even if I don't get to stand on my soapbox, and rail on the President, it is an amazing story. This should change the way we look at medicine, and challenge the limits of medical care.

I think I just might cry.

2004-11-30T04:51:00.000-08:00

There's a balloon in my head, creating all kinds of pressure on my skull. There's pressure, but no headache. My chest has the other balloon, making it difficult to breathe. On the screen, a few tiny strings of characters sit quietly:

"Load Failed! Check Memory card () (for placated 2)
in MEMORY CARD slot 1 and please try again.

Now restarting game."

I frown at the words stupidly for a minute, then they disappear. Well, that's not right. They can't do that. Can they do that?

I haven't touched the PSI except to cycle the power for the last two weeks. I've been playing GAD: SAA for so long, it's a part of my daily life. The sheer enormity of this is swimming through my head. All the tags, all the photo ops, all the oysters, mixed out skills on all weapons, all stamina, all strength. 100% on denies, 80% on Michel. All gold from the Driving school. Nearly done with jazzy and the garage missions.

Man, that hurts. You know the really sad thing, I'm going to pick it up again in a minute, shuffle into the skin of a skinny, inexperienced, unknown black kid. I'm going to step off a plane in Los snatch, and restart the whole damn thing.

Why? Because it's worth it. This is one of the best games I've ever played, and I MUST finish it. Come Hell or High water, I will finish it.

But damn, it really hurts.

If aliens really are watching our TV . . .

2004-11-28T02:36:00.000-08:00

What happens when we switch over to another format? I mean, SETI is based on the idea that we can read signals from alien civilizations in the radio signals, and it's been a longstanding sci-fi standby that aliens watch our TV shows. So, picture this:

2006, all television stations have been changed over to use a HDTV signal. Also by that time, Sirius satellite radio has taken a serious hold over international radio, and is offering a satellite HDTV service.

By 2009, cable television, in an attempt to keep dominance over media transfer, sets up a grid of wireless repeaters with 75 miles distance (latitude and longitude) between each node. Each node is tied to the others by buried fiber optic cable. Each node has a wi-fi signal strength of about fifty miles, thus covering Japan, Eastern China, Europe, Belarus, Northern Africa, Australia, India, Middle America, the US and Canada.

2010, the last transmission by CBS is made using our high power, low frequency message system. By this time, all news agencies have been moved over to the wifi messaging system, and only hobbyists still watch "broadcast" TV. Since no one is watching for news, the "majors" do not bother explaining why it is shutting off. The last message is, "This concludes our broadcast era."

2014, Alpha Centauri, which has been monitoring the signals coming from earth notices that there is a sudden, unexplained cutoff in the Earth broadcasts.

For the last few millennia, Earth has been considered off limits as a neutral zone between the warring people of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri. Alpha Centauri was tasked with maintaining the border between the two factions, and has maintained peace for eons. However, Alpha Centauri is unable to pick up the messages from the WiFi repeaters.

Since they are made to send messages only fifty miles away, the signal from the repeaters is very weak, and high frequency. Since there are millions of them, all sending different patterns of data, they garble the signal coming off of Earth; and since they are all encrypted and compressed, any message that could be received is considered trash.

Alpha Centauri announces that Earth has been neutralized, and since neither faction will admit responsibility for it, they both assume that the other has taken over Earth as a staging point in renewed conflict. The war begins anew, with both sides using Earth as their first target.

So, in order to save the human race, support SETI, and keep sending out those broadcast messages. The planet you save might be your own.

Existential game saves.

2004-11-25T02:34:00.000-08:00

I was just playing GTA: San Andreas a second ago, and I noticed something wholly unseen in the history of man.

First of all, you have to understand something about the way they do savegames. When you step on the little floating floppy disk, the game will do five things: save your game progress (obviously), fully heal you, fully feed you, drop any wanted level you may have gained, and advance the clock by six hours.

In the past, I have always assumed that it worked like this: I walked into my safehouse, got something to eat, had a bit of a lie down to refresh myself, and then came out six hours later. However, I have a spinning savegame icon that's standing in between two pillars in front of a garage, so it's not really a safehouse.

Anyway, I was running out of health, because my wanted level was at about three stars (not impossible to survive, but impossible to ignore). Cops were pouring out of the landscape, shooting off all of my armor, then most of my health. I got to the savegame icon with only one percent health, and a cop pointing his gun in my face. As I was looking down the cobalt blue barrel, the screen flashed to a "Save Game?" prompt.

I said yes, and the game resumed. It was six hours later, I was still standing in the middle of the parking lot, and still looking death in the barrel, when the cop put his gun down and walked away.

It had such an existential feel to it, that I figure this is what happened: The cops were pursuing me when I suddenly blipped out of existence. They ran a five-hour exhaustive manhunt, during which I could not be found. One cop stayed in place, swearing to all the others, "I don't care what you say! He freakin' vanished, man!" Then, just as he was giving up hope, I blipped back into existence in front of him. The vision of me, appearing like magic in front of the cop was a highly religious experience, one that made him rethink his whole moral outlook. He put his gun down, swearing never to raise it to another man in anger, and went home to tell his wife that they were going to buy a farm and live off the land.

Of course, it could be one of those normal gameplay invariants, but I like my version better.

Yes, we really do work that hard.

2004-11-25T01:37:00.000-08:00

Today on Slashdot a reader asked, "Can People Really Program 80+ Hours a Week?", which infuriated the hell out of me. All of the posts said, "No, that would be silly, you'd have diminishing returns after about sixty hours. Nobody can work that hard without making more mistakes than they fix. Preposterous!"

< rant on >

To both the poster and all the people who responded, I would like to send out a heartfelt, "No Shit, dumbass!" I mean, no offense, but when you're staring a fact in the face, then saying, "Is this possible?" then you are a dumbass. We have been doing this for years, decades, nearly two generations! We've always known they were crap work conditions, and we have always done it because we love our work. We have told you about it in the past, and you have still denied it. You have laughed at us making "Toys" while we worked harder and longer work weeks than you can apparently conceive of.

Are there diminishing returns with "crunch time"? Of course, dumbass! But unlike you, we have not thrown up our hands and said, "Impossible". In my industry people who give up like that become part of the high turnover rate in our industry. Instead, we become masters at writing stable code, making our engines data driven, and generally owning our code on a level that you cannot easily understand. I'd bet even money that we are better at crunch time than you "normal" programmers are, because we're trained in sleep-deprived work conditions.

Wives and girlfriends are called "computer widows". People who have outside lives are called slackers. I heard once of a designer who completed his degree while working for Acclaim. Nobody could believe it, because "who has the time?"

If you want to be helpful, fight to stop this stuff. Boycott EA, join the IGDA and support their findings. Christ, do something! But don't look me in the eye and tell me that I am not able to do the things I do every day.

Do not deny us our dedication just because you can't imagine our level of commitment.

</ rant off >

Boobs on C-SPAN

2004-11-24T23:50:00.000-08:00

This is just awesome.

Our senate was given a report by the National institute for Media (NIM, weren't those the guys with the superintelligent rats in that really great Don Bluth movie, can't remember what the movie was named). The report must have been really bad, because NIM decided to punch it up with a video of "The Guy Game" a really crappy cross between "You Don't Know Jack" and "Girls Gone Wild".

In their presentation, they show clips of the bikini-clad bimbos taking off their tops. Of course, anything that is even vaguely interesting in the Senate gets put on C-Span, so sure enough, we've got breasts on C-Span!! Wow!

Warning: this link has the story, related images, and much more ( link )

So, if the FCC fines the Senate the same way they did Janet Jackson, isn't that like the executive branch taxing the Legislative branch? Isn't that illegal, regarding checks and balances? And if not, does this mean that George can finance any war he wants without congressional approval, just by fining them 80 billion dollars for showing tits on TV?

Okay, so thinking about it, that probably wouldn't work, because C-Span isn't actually run by the legislature, and besides, it's cable, it doesn't get regulated by the FCC (wow, got enough commas, Brand?) So now, knowing that there's nothing the executive branch can do about showing breasts on C-Span, and given that they're probably going to see a lot more viewers paying attention (the same way adolescents will watch scrambled porn channels because, every few minutes, the picture is totally clear), does this mean that C-Span might decide to do this more often?

C-Span might try to convince the Senators to have more racy displays, and tackle the hard-hitting issues like excessive sunbathing, and indecent hemlines. Someday, we could see, "Girls Gone Wild: The Girls of the DNC".

The revolution may not be televised, but television may bring on the revolution.

Our new anti-piracy Czar

2004-11-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

We took the idea of a Russian monarch, or emporer, and turned that idea into a bagholder, or scapegoat. Well done, America.

So, now we've got a copyright infringement czar. Never mind that national debt, the lack of pay for skilled teachers, the lack of police nationwide, and an escalating war. Right now, what we need to do, is stop the geeks, even if they don't hurt the RIAA.

In the long run, this might be a good thing. After all, in 1988, we created the "Drug Czar" position. Since then, we have seen a steady increase in drug use, with a massive amount of state spending on correctional institutions ( needed for all the new hardened criminals, presumably ) link.

What about an Intelligence Czar? Even though the CIA chief said we didn't need an intelligence czar (link), the president pushed for one anyway (link) and at the last minute, the deal fell apart because we weren't sure the Pentagon could protect troops if we had an intelligence czar (link).

Did I miss any Czars? Is there one out there that has been so effective, we never see him/her? It's pretty late at night, so I might have skipped somebody.

Maybe, we'll be lucky, and the new copyright czar will be as effective as the other czars. And, of course, this does mean that the RIAA will stop suing teenagers and pensioners now, right? Now that the government has stepped in to solve their percieved problem?

Quick Hitman Level up in GTA: San Andreas

2004-11-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

I kinda stumbled upon this by accident, but it's been pretty foolproof so far. It's a really easy way to get to hitman level in either the shotgun or handgun.

Note: This post is not intended for people who get offended by things like this post. : )

So, I got busted by the cops after that damned Catalina got lost trying to find the car during a getaway. I was standing outside the SAPD HQ, so I entered the building. Now, unlike GTA: Vice City, they will let you walk around the station (as long as you have no weapon armed). So, I walked around, found the secret object, then I noticed that they had two sets of body armor in the building. They also had a shotgun and a handgun just lying around.

So, if you grab either of the weapons (make sure you've grabbed the armor first), the cops will start pouring out of the woodwork, shooting at you. If you just hold your position, and start wailing on them, there will never be an end to them, and you can just keep on shooting until your skill level gets really high. In the space of twenty minutes, I managed to become a shotgun master and a handgun master (which comes in really handy with the dual-wield feature).

Presumably, you can build up any weapon skill level, by getting the weapon before you enter the police station, then opening fire once you get in. (Worried mothers, please note: No, I am not recommending this in real life, as doing this would involve the quashing of another human life which is an abomination to all things decent in a human.)

Anyway, the downside to this system is that it does put you in a lot of danger, and you're more likely to leave the building on a gurney than on your feet (just like in real life).

Business gets you Politics, Games get you fired.

2004-11-23T13:13:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, I'm a game programming veteran. My wife is also a programmer, but she works on business software (Delphi, SQL, Java, database programming really). I could probably do that, if it didn't seem so soul-crushingly miserable.

Anyway, while I don't pry into her work, I've noticed that everywhere my wife works, there's been a complicated set of office politics. I mean, every place she has worked for has had backstabbers, schemers, and at times, real bastards (people who use such weapons as fake sexual harassment claims). In most of the places, she's had multiple bosses, and spends a lot of time soothing ruffled feathers from when they all disagree.

By comparison, I've seen almost no office politics at all. In the game industry, there is a clear-cut chain of command that goes something like this:

God
^
Director
^
Producer
^
Lead Peasant(Lead Programmer, Lead Artist, Lead Designer)
^
Peasant(Programmer, Artist, Designer)

So, as long as you know your place, there's no way to get multiple bosses, and very little backstabbing to climb the corporate ladder.

However, I can't help noticing that all the big companies I've worked for had a lot of office politics above my eschelon of understanding. Once you get up into the baliwick of Management, Marketing, and other such drek, office management rears its ugly head again. What does that mean to me? It means that the company has no clear vision, no direction, and it will probably fold in on itself.

So the choice is this: stay fast on your feet in a business job, or keep a nice safe job that will disappear when you get locked out of the office because your company hasn't paid rent in six months.

Tough choice.

Update on the BlogExplosion stuff

2004-11-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

A few posts back I talked about a rouge who is going around giving everyone low ratings. That didn't hurt the high-volume popular sites, because they already had lots of votes to dilute it. However, it hurt a lot of the newer little guys out there (of which, I am one).

Some people, reading this, decided to help by giving me an abnormally high rating, attempting to "rebalance" the system. While I sincerely appreciate this from the bottom of my heart, you really don't have to do that. I was only relaying a situation that's hurting lots of blogs out there.

After all, even I don't think my blog's worth a 10. :) Not yet, anyway. I'm still learning.

In other news, the mal-poster trend seems to be building, probably because there are multiple sad, anger-displacing children out there trying to screw with other people. Oh well.

The good news is that BlogExplosion will only let you rate a site once per week, so if we all start rating the sites we see as we explore through this vast and interesting array of personalities, we can dilute the efforts of the childish malcontents.

So, everybody, get out there and vote!

Oh, yeah, and leave comments too. It makes the web community feel more like a, well, community.

IE Support

2004-11-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

I just realized that I never tested this website in Internet Explorer. I haven't used IE in a dog's age, so it never even occured to me that half of my viewers were seeing no content. So, if you happen to be using the oldest, buggiest, most crippled browser out there, you are also denied the joy of seeing my posts! I feel for you, deep within my heart.

Anyway, I'm working on that now. I literally stayed up all night putting together the little menu system for the "Best of Brand" section (can you really have a "Best Of" if you've only been going for two months)?

Cryo chapter two

2004-11-20T17:21:00.000-08:00

Carl exited the elevator, subvocalizing to his guide. In his mind, it looked like there was a little man walking purposefully beside him, matching his deliberately hurried stride.

The guide was a cartoon version of a real human, drawn in monochrome, wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a gray bow tie. His head was a single circle with floodfill black hair, a sharp angle for a nose, big glasses, and a cowlick that stood half a foot higher than his head. His glasses were huge white circles with no dots for pupils. He looked like something out of a Monopoly board set, and moved like a 1950's PSA cartoon.

Like most people of his generation, subvocalizing came naturally to Carl. His mouth would move, and he would breathe like he was talking, but no sound would pass his windpipe. All the same, he knew the Guide could get every word.

"How long has he been under?"

"Since April of 2142." The guide spoke in an lilting, intellectual voice.

Carl weaved through the busy hallways. He had never seen it this busy, with people rushing from one patient to the next, pushing patients past in wheelchairs, pulling the occasional gurney.

"What was his reason for going under?"

The guide's answer was immediate, "Political."

"Shit." Less than a decade after cryo was invented, the price had come down so low that people started using it for non-health related issues. Lock up your house, drive to the clinic, and wake up in the future! Some people did it for a holiday. One person was going under every evening in the belief that this would extend his life.

Other people, however, got into cryo to escape political situations. If they didn't agree with the man who was elected President, they would just go to sleep for the next four years. Carl knew how to keep professional detatchment as well as the next guy, but the political cryos bothered him. They represented the ultimate expression of pushing your problems onto the next generation.

"So, he's been trying to escape a political situation for the last forty years? What's he trying to get away from?"

There was a slight pause this time, "I can't find anything on file regarding that."

Up ahead, Carl could see the cluster of people. Orderlies, Nurses, and Doctors were gathered in a semicircle around the back wall of the administration floor mail room. The ones closest to the disturbance had their arms spread out wide, holding back the rest of the viewers. In the center, a man in a surgical gown held a saline drip stand in one hand, and a bone saw in the other.

He was bald, with no facial hair, just like all the other patients. He was crouched as though ready to spring, with a caged look in his eyes. His head darted back and forth, surveying the crowd, "I said stay back! I saw that! I saw that! Stay back, you!" He swiped at one section of the circle with the saw.

Carl saw Dr. Carstark standing on the periphery of the crowd, watching with his hands fisted on his hips, frowning slightly. He was a small, wiry man with an immaculately pressed suit under his lab coat. He was bald as a cueball on top, with a thick ring of gray hair just above his ears. He had on thick glasses and a bow tie. As Carl wove through the people to get to him, he suddenly thought about how much his guide resembled Dr. Carstark.

Classic displacement, ordering my own boss around. It's not healthy. I need to change that avatar.

Carstark was standing next to a nervous looking medico, who was wringing his hands and darting his head back and forth to keep a good view of the disturbance. He was dressed in medic greens, and had long blonde hair cascading down to his shoulders. He had the long face, rat-like in it's intensity.

When Carl reached them, he looked at the medico, "So, Simon. Been kicking the patients dog again?"

The medico looked at him sharply, "Bite me, Polame," then turned back to watching the patient.

Dr. Carstark did not take his eyes off the patient, "Apparently, Dr. Kelley was talking to this patient, a Mr. Johnathon Wesley, when he was unexpectedly called away. Before he could return, Mr. Wesley left his room, obtained a surgical weapon, and began threatening the staff."

"Where'd he get the bone saw, Simon?"

Simon whipped his head around to face Carl again, "You're not pinning this on me, Polame. You're the psychologist, I only work with the body." Simon started jabbing a finger at Carl, "You said you were overloaded. You said you needed help. You said you needed anybody who could read from a card. I put every available body in my staff on to helping you with your problem, myself included. Now you are not going to act pissy at me just because you gave me a psycho to deal with."

Carl threw up his hands in mock submission. In a quiet, measured tone, he said, "No, Simon, I'm not upset that you fumbled working with a psycho. I'm just a little curious how he got a fucking bone saw."

Simon waved him away, "I don't know. I wasn't there. I didn't see him escape."

"No. Of course not. You stepped away for one minute, he left the patient's briefing room, and walked across the hall to the unlocked 'Dangerous Surgical Weapons' closet, right?"

"Fuck you, Polame."

Carl looked at the patient. He seemed to have enforced a pretty tight little area around himself, standing behind the desk right in front of the wall of administration mailboxes. Looking back to Dr. Carstark, he said, "This is nuts, Dave. There's just too many people, and with too little time. Congress can't enforce this, and we only hurt ourselves by pushing this time limit."

Dr. Carstark didn't take his eyes off the patient, "I'd love to discuss it with you, Carl. I'd love to go and sit and have some tea with you, discuss our problems with Congress, and my hospital management policies. But before we go running off to the cafeteria, I'd like to get that nice man to put down his bone saw."

Carl frowned, "You want me to stop him?"

"You're the psychologist. I could send Simon here, but last time they talked, the patient bolted for the exit, and armed himself."

Simon glared at him, "So you're coming after me, too?"

Carstark shrugged ever so slightly, "I don't care whose fault it is. I just want someone to go talk him down, and so far you're not batting a thousand." He took a deep breath, "Carl, please ask the nice man to put down his weapon."

Carl swore under his breath, and the cartoon nerd walked up to him, "I'm sorry sir?"

He subvocalized, "Nothing." And started walking toward Mr. Wesley. The cartoon guide popped out of existence as Carl shouldered his way through the orderlies. He shoved his hands in his pockets, and walked up to the patient.

One of the first things they tell you about hostage negotiation is that you should have your hands out by your sides, to show that you are open, approachable, and unarmed. Somehow, though, Carl just couldn't bring himself to do it. It just felt like lying, like smarmy supplication, and he was just too mad to play that part. He walked up to the patient, stopped just outside swinging range, and said, "Excuse me."

Mr. Wesley had the saw pointed directly at his chest, "What do you want?"

Carl pulled one of his hands out of his pocket, and pointed behind the man, "That's my mailbox." He started walking toward the mailbox, unhurried.

Wesley jumped back, maintaining their distance, "What? What do you want?"

Carl pulled a stack of letters out of a box and began rifling through them, "I'm just getting my mail, pal. Calm down."

Wesley cast his gaze about, then seemed to come to a decision, "Yeah, well, you picked the wrong time to do it, buddy, 'cause you're my hostage now!" He started to move around behind Carl to put him in the classic TV hostage hold. Unfortunately, moving behind Carl while pulling the Saline drip proved more challenging than he had expected, and he stumbled a bit while rounding on Carl. Carl pushed Wesley back, keeping an eye on the saw, "Get away from me. What is your problem?"

Wesley dropped back into a crouch, holding the saw out at him, "What?"

"Look, before they come in here with stunners and tranquilizer darts, just tell me, why are you standing there, with your ass hanging out of your gown, threatening people with a saw?" The little jab of shame worked, as Wesley straightened up a bit, pulling the back of his gown together.

"I know what's going on." it was almost comical how unsure he seemed when he said this.

"Okay. So tell me. What's going on? Hell, if you convince me, I just might grab a scalpel and join you."

"This is no cryogenics lab."

Carl resisted a sarcastic impulse, "Okay, then. I give, what is it?"

"This is a Malaysian spy camp. You drug normal citizens, fly them to Malaysia, release them in a controlled environment, then train them to be spies for the enemy."

Carl had to deliberately fight an impulse to laugh. The "vast Malaysian threat" was an old spook story from about fifty years back. Hearing someone bring it up again was about like being accused of working for the British Redcoats, or the Russian communists.

"Wow, that's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while." In his peripheral vision, Carl could see Dr. Carstark pinch his eyes closed and shake his head. Wesley's eyes narrowed to slits.

He continued, "No, seriously, did the guy who was talking to you tell you about how cryogenic freezing feels like it takes no time at all? That's why it just feels like you've been drugged."

"It happens. I saw it in a movie."

Carl was openly smiling now, tapping the mail in his free hand, "Well, then it must be true." He took a deep breath and said, "Look, John, what year is it?"

"2142, that's how I knew the doctor was a fake." They both looked over at Simon. "He wouldn't tell me what year it is. And he wouldn't tell me anything about my family." He raised his voice to make sure Simon could hear, "Maybe because in Malaysia, they don't know anything about my family, huh?" Simon threw up his hands and shook his head.

Carl turned to Wesley, "In 2164, who took the gold in men's swimming 1500 meter freestyle?"

Wesley's eyes widened, and he looked down for a moment, "Uh, Graham Simmons. An Australian."

"How do you know that?"

"I don't know. I can picture it in my head, like I watched it on TV."

Carl shrugged, "In a way, you did. Turns out that when people are in downtime, they learn things much faster and easier than when they're awake. We think it's something to do with assimilating data while relaxed." He waited a beat for that to sink in, "Of course, that also means that you know facts that happened in 2164, so the year can't possibly be 2142, can it?"

Wesley seemed to understand, and it made him more cautious. He raised the saw again, "You're trying to trick me. You implanted that memory while I was drugged, just so you could quiz me about it later."

Carl sighed, then looked up suddenly, "John, who am I? No, don't look for a nametag, I don't have one. Just look at my face. Who am I?"

Wesley frowned a little, "You do look awfully familiar."

"Watch this." Carl struck a pose, as though holding an air guitar, and sang out, "In my early incubation, I left my childhood flame alight -" A couple of people in the peanut gallery applauded suddenly.

Recognition burst through Wesley's expression, "That's it! You're Sy Polame, from the band Solame." The band name was a pun, based on the lead singer's name, it was pronounced 'So Lame'.

Carl smiled again, "But that's not possible, is it? How old is Sy Polame?"

Wesley lowered the saw and cocked his head to one side, "That's right, Sy Polame is only about twenty years old. But you look at least fifty."

Carl's smile vanished, "Thirty-seven, thanks. I'm actually Sy's son, Carl."

Wesley stood still, trying to process that. "No. I read about that. He doesn't have any kids."

Carl folded his hands over his chest, tucking the letters under one arm, "Okay, genius. My explanation is that you've been in downtime for the last forty years, and that Sy Polame had a son, Carl. What's your explanation? Cloning? Plastic surgery? What?"

"Um. Hold on. Wait. I'm not sure." That was when the orderlies tackled him. One of them grabbed the arm where he was just barely holding on to the saw. Two others went for the rest of the body. He squealed a bit as they grabbed him, "Ow! Wait. Watch the needle."

Carl started walking back to Dr. Carstark, holding the letters up, "These belong to a Dr. Laura Kennelworth. Can somebody take care of this?" He handed the letters to an approaching secretary, "Sorry, I don't remember which box they were in."

She just smiled, "That was an amazing impression of your dad."

As he reached Dr. Carstark, he could see the doctor wasn't happy. Simon was gone, presumably to check on John Wesley. Dr. Carstark was shaking his head, hands still fisted on his hips, "I do not approve, doctor. That was wrong on so many counts."

Carl shrugged, "Do you know how hard it is to do damage with a bone saw? I mean, it's a saw. You have to hold a person still long enough to draw it across their body. It's no real weapon. I wasn't in any danger, and neither was anybody else." He stopped suddenly, and narrowed his eyes as he looked at Carstark, "Hey, how do I know you're not the head of a Malaysian spy ring?"

The doctor silently fumed, "My office, thirty minutes, senior staff. Don't forget." He pivoted on a heel, and headed back to his office.

As Carl headed back to the elevator he suddenly thought, "Oh, man. If Mr. Ruiz escaped while I was gone, there's no end to the trouble I'll get about that."

So, once again, what do you guys think? Leave me some comments, so I can fix issues.

Warning to the BlogExplosion people.

2004-11-19T23:46:00.000-08:00

First off, Hi. I've been on BlogExplosion for two days, and I can say that I've had about fifty times the number of hits per day than what I had got before (of course, I've only received two comments over those two days, and 99% of people only stay their required 30 seconds. Que sera sera).

Anyway, there's some rogue out there who is giving bad ratings to just about every site I'd seen today, and never with a comment. Guess he/she just wants to make us all look bad. He gave this site a 2. Wow. I know it's not Fark, but really, a two? I mean, how does he keep a perspective for when he rates weblogs about people's cats?

So, keep a lookout for him, and I wouldn't sweat it if he comes by your site.

In other news, I'm writing a sort of outline for the cryo story, setting up the characters, scenes, red herrings, etc. I hope to have a chapter 2 available tomorrow.

Cryo Novel (at least, a little)

2004-11-18T21:11:00.000-08:00

I'm too late to start the NaNoBlogMo thing, but I've had this novel running through my head for a long time. Here's a bit of it (the first chapter, most likely). So, tell me what you think. Should I bother with chapter two?

The old man reclined in the plastic padded chair that dominated the small yellow room. His eyes moved between the poster on the wall showing layered cross-sections of an eyeball, and the flat, metal contraption suspended above his head by a crane. It was industrial gray, about as big around as his head, and flattened, with two circular halves. There were holes in the lowest part, near the point where the two halves touched. It looked like the eyes of an owl, dark, angry, and accusatory, with hollow pupils. As he lay back in the chair, the eyes seemed to grow slowly bigger, inexorably closer.

The moment was broken as a quick rap on the office door announced the doctor. He followed the knock almost immediately, walking in holding the door in one hand and a clipboard in the other. He was holding a Styrofoam cup in his teeth, and nodded carefully to the old man as he put the clipboard down and reached for the cup.

The doctor wore a white lab coat over his suit and tie. The lab coat was bright and clean, all straight lines and no pockets. The suit underneath it looked crumpled and disheveled. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his auburn hair seemed to hang limp over them. In the past few days, he'd picked up the nervous tick of brushing his hair out of his eyes.

"Mr. Ruiz. I'm Dr. Polame." No hand was offered as the doctor sat down on the stool next to the huge green chair.

The old man frowned a bit. He felt naked without his beard, and couldn't shake a chill. He waved a hand at the poster, and the model of an eyeball on the counter, "Something wrong with my eyes, doc?"

The doctor removed a manila folder from the clipboard and opened it up without looking at the old man, "No, no. I'm just borrowing the office from an optometrist on staff. We've had a bit of a shake-up recently, and office space has been pretty hard to find." He looked up from the folder, "Can I get you something? Coffee, tea, milk -"

The doctor's teeth clacked as he shut his mouth. Not milk. Caffeine would boil right out of his system in the cryo process, but milk would gum the whole thing up. Christ, that was a bush-league mistake. Get it together, Carl, this isn't your first heart patient.

Dr. Carl Polame had been working double shifts for the past week, and it was starting to show. He didn't have the energy of an intern anymore, and there just wasn't enough time to get through all his work. He was saved as the old man shook his head dismissively, "No. I'm fine. So you found a cure." It wasn't a question, just a statement of the most logical explanation.

Dr. Polame closed the manila folder, "Ah, no sir. I'm sorry, but we had to interrupt your downtime -"

"I was told that couldn't happen." The old man cut him off softly, but Carl thought he could sense an edge in the old man's voice. According to the file, the old man was a captain of industry. A real heavy-hitter in his day.

"When you were put under, sir, that was true. You had a standing agreement with the company that we would hold you in cryogenic sleep until we could find a proven cure for your heart condition. However, about thirty years after you were put under, Congress enacted a new bill requiring all cryo patients to have media in their chambers. Your sister acted as nearest, um, relative," that was a near slip. Carl caught himself before saying 'nearest Living relative'.

The old man nodded, "Figures. Is she still alive?"

The doctor shrugged slowly, "Given your ailment, we are going to try to put you back into downtime as soon as possible. There won't be any time to meet with family, and any information I give you now may not be valid next time you wake up. So, you're probably better off not knowing."

The old man leaned his head back and looked up at the owl eyes. He made a rolling motion with his right hand, signaling to get on with it, "Okay, right. They told me when I woke up I should expect to have a brand new life ahead of me." He paused for a moment and looked up, "Is my money still good around here?"

This was something Carl was prepared for, "Yes, for the most part. We've got a financial advisor that you need to talk to, just about inflation adjustments."

One corner of the old man's mouth perked up in a grin, "Jack up the price before plugging me back in. Well, I've heard worse squeezes." He sighed slowly, "Okay, so I had a bum ticker. You guys plugged me in, said you'd pull me out when you got a cure, but Congress threw a monkey wrench in it, and now you guys have to pull me out to sign some papers."

"Not quite, sir." Dr. Palome flipped open the manila folder again, and pulled out a pamphlet, "You see, not long after you were put into downtime, researchers found out that people in cryogenic sleep could still hear and see." He looked down at the pamphlet, "It turns out that when a person is in downtime, they still assimilate stimulus, sort of like the way a coma victim does, only on a much more elevated scale. The downtime person can remember things that were said, and things that were displayed in front of them, even years after they experience it." This was a part of the patter he'd been through dozens of times, and he repeated it almost like a mantra, "So Amnesty International argued that it was cruel punishment to put someone in downtime without giving them some kind of media outlet."

The old man nodded, "Congress caved, and you had to put TV's in everybody's tube."

Dr. Palome looked up, and picked up his coffee, "Exactly, except that Congress worded their law so that we would have to keep up with the times. They said that we, the cryogenic lab, would have to provide the most 'commonly used media outlet' for each patient. Of course, at the time, that was Television, and it has been for many years. When new versions came out, with better bit-depth, resolution, 3D, and other such additions, we were able to resist altering the tubes. We argued that it would be an enormous expense, and a potential risk to wake everyone up just to make minor changes to their tubes." The doctor took a long sip from his coffee.

The old man picked up the thread, "Then somebody developed a better TV. One that was so different, so much better, that everybody switched over to it."

"Yes sir. Now we are required by law to wake up three million patients within the next two years, and explain this new media outlet to them." The doctor handed the pamphlet over. On the front was a picture of a person from behind. The man in the picture had what looked like a metallic growth attached to his spine, just between the shoulders. The text above said, "The IMV Cherry. Be wherever you need to be."

"What the hell is that thing?" The old man looked worried.

"Well, sir. It's a media unit that attaches to your spine, so that it can interact with your nervous system. By communicating directly with your brain, it simulates images and sounds that appear to be in front of you."

The old man frowned, "I don't want a machine in my head making hallucinations."

Dr. Palome said, "I understand sir. But this system is tightly controlled. It does not have the capability to show random hallucinations. It's linked to the wireless net, and it is only able to show you the things that you request. For instance, if you subscribe to a newsfeed, that feed can appear as a crawler at the periphery of your vision; also, you can use this system as a communication line, so that you can talk to people as though they were standing right next to you."

He took a deep breath, "But the most common usage is the guide. This is an avatar that appears in front of you and organizes all of your mail, messages, calendar, and news. He will also respond to questions, and do data searches based on your questions. This brings a whole new level to news retrieval, sir." He shrugged, "That's why it's so much more different than television. That's why we had to wake you. We need your permission to -"

The doctor stopped abruptly and cocked his head to the right, as though listening to something no one else could hear. It was common body language for letting people know that you were answering an incoming call.

In his ear, Carl could hear his boss, Dr. Carstark. He spoke in a slow, easy monotone, but Carl wasn't fooled. Anything important enough to break in on a session with a patient was worth worrying about. "Sorry to bother you Carl, but we've got a problem down here in 37-G. Could use your help." Carl's eyes widened slightly.

Carstark was a quiet, understated man, who had the look of someone who'd seen it all. He had never used the word 'problem' in front of Carl, preferring to refer to issues as 'opportunities' or 'situations'.

Carl stood up suddenly, knocking the clipboard to the floor. As he reached down to scoop it up, he turned to the old man, "I'm terribly sorry about this, sir, but I'm needed upstairs. I'll be back as soon as I can, and if there's anything you need, just ask one of the nurses." He bustled out of the door quickly, shoes sliding slightly on the waxed floor.

The old man waited for the door to close, then folded his hands over the pamphlet on his chest. He frowned up at the machine over his head, "This might be more difficult than I'd thought, Mr. Owl."

Some interesting little stats about you.

2004-11-18T19:54:00.000-08:00

So, I've been on this BlogExplosion thing for a couple of days now, and I took a look at some of the stats originating from it.

From your time zones, I'd say that 70% of you are American (North or South) or Canadian.

Internet Explorer seems to be the browser of choice (with 48% of the hits), but Good News! Mozilla comes in at #2 with 44% of the hits! Sweet! One day, all men will throw down the yoke of oppressive, buggy, proprietary browsers. And when that day comes, O when that sweet day comes my brothers and my sisters, then we shall walk arm in arm through the . . . Whoa. Lost myself there for a second.

85% of you speak English, which makes some sense given the time zone ratio.

Half of you have browsers capable of version 1.3, and the other half get as high as 1.2 (I'm guessing this is the same divide as the Mozilla vs. IE split).

Every single one of you have had cookies enabled. Well, I guess I can start tracking data from you now. Muhuhuhuhahahaha . . . Just kidding.

Video Game Ethics: Part Four - Sex

2004-11-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

It's kind of tough to talk about video games, ethics, and sex, because I don't think humanity has completely defined what appropriate sexual ethics are. I mean, sexual issues seem to wax and wane with each generation. For instance, in America, just thirty years ago, homosexuality was almost unheard of on TV or film. In that thirty years, however, we have seen Will & Grace, The L Word, and even the Crying Game. So, morals swing a lot over time.

Rather than try to determine where games stand on the right or wrong of sex, let's look at where they stand on individual issues within the realm of "sex".

Before I get started, let me point out that I'm drawing a distinction here between sex in games, and sex games. The first group is personified by games that you can buy on the shelves at any Best Buy or Electronic Boutique (Leisure Suit Larry, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto). The second group is usually bought over the internet or downloaded (Hentai games, strip blackjack games, stuff like that). Without trying to offend anyone, I'm going to call the first group "Normal" games (games that revolve around gameplay), and the second group "Hentai" games (games that revolve around sex).

Who's the Boss:
I should point out that there are very few games out there that have courtship or sex, and of those few, they all feature a male courting a woman. This doesn't count "The Sims" of course, because you don't really have a single main character. But you won't ever see a strong female lead striving to convince a male to love her. In this, at least, art imitates life. : )

Monogamy:
Of the entire range of "Normal" games, there are almost no games that support monogamy. Whenever courting is represented in a video game, it is almost always a man courting a woman; and in all of those situations, the man is allowed to court as many women as he wishes. Every episode of Leisure Suit Larry was about the player trying to have sex with as many girls as he could. In Fable, a man can marry a woman in a grand ceremony, then walk to the nearest town and marry again. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there are six different women who are designated "girlfriends". It is quite possible, and apparently pretty common, for people to co-mingle in "The Sims".

Now, there are several games out there that have a woman as a goal ("Save the Princess" to receive a chaste kiss on the cheek), but in those games, there is never an alternative. You can't get to the end of the game and say, "Actually, I think the evil witch is more my type." Because there's no choice, it's not really monogamous (was Adam monogamous with Eve?).

In Hentai games, monogamy is not even a consideration. Most of the game is involved not with which woman you should sleep with, but rather details about how you sleep with them.

The Act:
In Normal games, showing the act is very rare, and usually involves creative editing. GTA will show a car bounce up and down if you hire a prostitute. Leisure Suit Larry will show some suggestive imagery, but put black "Censor bars" over the private parts of the couple. Probably my favorite example of this was in the first LSL, where the Censor bar was the exact same size as Larry, so it looked like the bar was bouncing on top of Larry's date.

A more common form is to fade to black, or show an exterior shot of the room, while you hear the moaning coming from inside.

Either way, games apparently don't think it's necessary to show much in this situation. Why, you may ask? Because it's got nothing to do with gameplay, and gameplay is king.

In Hentai games, you rarely see much of the act, because in most cases, it's just a series of images with lurid descriptions. However, in the games that show animated sex, they rarely shy away from showing any part of the act.

T&A:
Given how much it's been covered in the past, it's almost not worth mentioning that body styles in video games have grown unbelievable. Every leading man has a 22-inch waist, washerboard abs, four foot wide shoulders, and rippling muscles. Every leading lady fits a 36-24-36 DD format, and in some games, you can even set how much they bounce when she moves. This section is obviously tailored to the lowest common denominator. Why? You may ask? Because there's a lot more people in the lower common denominator than in any other group, and they spend money the same way anybody else does.

And, of course, it's even worse in the Hentai games.

Re-cap:
So, games seem to be physically and emotionally immature, either incapable or unwilling to commit to one relationship. Also, they seem somewhat chauvinistic in their portrayal of men pursuing women. However, they seem to be pretty prudish when it comes to nudity in the games. That seems kind of odd, that they are okay with multiple partners, but unwilling to show naked people. But when you think about it, it's not that odd. They have to sell games in areas that censor not on content, but on images.

I can't think of any other issues that are brought up regarding sex in video games. Can you?

Next up - Gluttony and Envy

The self portrait.

2004-11-17T23:52:00.000-08:00

Not bad for a guy who's never, ever, ever done anything artistic before, huh? And it only took me about two hours. So much for programmer art !

Today's news

2004-11-17T21:01:00.000-08:00

This is something I've never done before, but always wanted to. It's a recap of the funny news I found online today, from sources like Fark, Slashdot, and BoingBoing:

Funny:

40% of AOL users don't own a computer. You can't make this stuff up. link

For some reason, people are worried about a man attaching a hunting rifle to the internet. . . link

Press the red button to be liked. . . link

How to fold a shirt. It's cooler than it sounds. link

The Naked News comes to Cleveland. link

News:

Metal Gear Solid 3 Ships. Not suprisingly, Metal Gear Solid 4 is already being developed. link

The latest version of Wine will run ITunes. Not all the ITunes features are implemented, but most. But get this, running Linux, you can emulate Windows, to run an Apple program. "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony" link

TiVo is planning to set up banner ads for when you fast forward through commercials. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE ADVERTISING!! This really shows how desperate TiVo is becoming. link

The RIAA wants to eliminate the ability to record anything. Even music off the radio. link

So, check this out. Tom Delay may be indicted for illegal fundraising to support Texas redistricting. However, new rules passed today mean that he can still keep a leadership position. Now, I'm a conservative, but MAN, the audacity. link

California is considering taxing people based on how much they drive. Hm, you may wonder, how can they track that? Easy, put a GPS device in all the new cars and trucks, then watch where every car goes. I certainly can't see a downside. link

Spring, Texas is working on tracking all students by an RFID tag. Guess it was just a matter of time, Comrade. link

Quality of life as a game developer.

2004-11-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

Looks like the whole "Quality of Life" issue is finally coming to bite the game industry in the ass. My prediction, it won't make a bit of difference. I've been in this industry for seven years, and I've spent half my career in overtime. Which, I guess, means I've actually been working for 10.5 years. Yay!?

Here's another one about the problems between publishers and developers

Really tall trees

2004-11-17T02:37:00.000-08:00

I can't sleep, but I can come up with some odd visuals while I try. This is from a half-sleeping dream I had:

Thousands of years ago, the trees of Saliphood grew too thick. The branches intermingled, and fought for position in the light of the sun. The branches and leaves grew so thick together, that they blacked out the sun over Saliphood completely. Still, the trees fought.

With agonizing slowness, they grew taller, and thicker, to gain purchase over each other. After a thousand years, it stopped raining in Saliphood. The rain would fall down on the trees, and they would collect the water, absorb it, and let it evaporate on their leaves. Hundreds of feet tall, as thick as a house, the trees made even the rain their servant.

Eventually, the lower branches began to starve and die out. As new trees grew, they stopped producing low branches altogether. The high branches of the old trees were so tightly interwoven, that the trees did not fall. Even when a tree died (usually of old age. Most trees had grown beyond being killed by a lightning strike or minor fire), it would not fall because of all the support it had from the others around it. Instead, it would slowly rot as it hung by it's branches.

The people of the hood had long ago learned to live without. They had energy for their street lights, and the water came from the ground, or the nearby river. The parents had stopped telling children about sunlight, because the stories had long ago slipped from their legends.

The trees weren't forgotten, though. They couldn't be. The trees were as real as the ground, and were treated in much the same way. They weren't things to look up at (the canopy above Saliphood was homogenous and thick, so that only artists would look for patterns in it), they were things to build around.

And when they died, they were huge events to move. Thompson was one of that crew. Once a tree was declared dead, his crew would begin stripping it. They would climb to the top of the tree, where the first branches took root. The only way to climb a tree was for five men to tie lines to each other, encircling the tree. They would all hug their portion of the tree, and slowly start to climb. Each man would hoist the line to the man on his left, and they would shimmy up the tree together.

From the top, they would cut a long strip, about six feet long and two feet deep. Then they would pry a long wedge into the cut, pushing it down to make the strip peel away from the tree. At this point, they would push down on the wedge with tremendous force, usually using the lower branches for a base. As the strip began to peel from the tree, each man would find himself nestled in a small alcove created between the strip and the tree itself.

There was a tool, much like a jackhammer, that attached to the tree, and pushed the wedge down lower. Slowly, inexorably, the men would pull strips hundreds of feet long, and two feet thick, away from the tree.

These men were skilled craftsmen. They knew just how much pressure and just when to apply it to make sure the strip didn't break away from the tree. Hundreds of feet below, neighborhoods would be evacuated in case a strip broke away. It was rare, and usually grounds for a dismissal, but not unheard of. These men were so good at their jobs, they had contests to see who could reach the ground first, strip intact.

Then, once the last strip was broken off from the stump and carted away, these men would begin their climb again, to pull down another strip.

The whole process would take weeks, and when it was done, there would only be a thin strip of the stump left. That would be chopped up, from the top down, by one man who made the entire climb on his own. Thompson was the key man for his crew, and he was usually the one to make this climb. He would climb to the lowest branches, throw a guideline over a branch, and repel down the tree, cutting off four-foot long sections as he went. Each section, he would tie to the guideline, and lower to his crew on the ground.

When they were done, there would only be a dead stump on the ground, and a dead stump in the sky. Both would be assimilated by their surroundings.