That Great Taste of Foot

This Hyper World

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:26:56 GMT

For a moment, flash back to 1987. Apple Computer releases its system software v6, and includes with it a curious little tool, a new conceptual program called Hypercard. This "stackware" program allows users to organize information, creating "backgrounds" with standardized containers and individual "cards" which hold the information. Sure, it's black-and-white (most Macintoshes were in those days), and the toolset is limited to fields, buttons, and some graphics, but still it manages to capture a lot of imaginations, and a lot of stacks get built from the coldly informational to the wildly entertaining.

And I'm serious about the entertaining part. Some might remember an exploration entertainment called The Manhole which was point-and-click exploration in this style. This style of presentation, if not the Hypercard application itself, was instrumental in the construction of another famous game called... oh, what was it. Must? Mint? Missed?

Hypercard was also a landmark in software development because its scripting language was so idiosynchratically English-styled it could be hard to tell the code from the comments. Given the appropriate parts, the phrase set the name of button id 1105 to item 3 of line (field "selection made") of field "fruit" would be valid syntax.

And it was yet another landmark because it was the common man's introduction to object-oriented programming. No, really. The programming of Hypercard was event-driven, and there were a lot of events to trigger. Clicking in a field to start editing, for instance, would generate an event. And if an event is generated, it can be handled. What's more, it could be handled at any level within the application: the button or field that first received the message, the card, the background, the stack, or the application itself. And there was a specific message-passing hierarchy, that if something didn't take the message, something else behind it would.

And then there's The Switchboard.

What prompted this trip down Memory Lane? Patience...

There were followers, too. Some might call them imitators, others might call them innovators building on established "standards."

Supercard was syntactically similar (but just different enough that after importing a Hypercard stack, you had to massage it to make it work), and sought to extend itself more furiously through additional effects. One of the bigger enhancements I recall for Supercard was a plug-in called "Roadster," which added online capabilities to stackware. Yes, your stack could interact with systems online, which at the time meant dial-up. So it was more novelty than anything else. It says something that at the time, you still had to get software on 3.5" disk.

And MetaCard, well, it tried to run with the big dogs, touting fancier development and deployment tools. There was a game or two made with that technology too, so I guess they really were extending the technology rather than sticking a price tag on it to make it more attractive to businesses.

And there was another, called HyperStudio, which tried to be more multiplatform. They aimed a bit lower than MetaCard, targeting the education market. Stackware for Kids! rather than stackware for Business! or for the Internet!

The Death of Hypercard? Really??

Apple stopped actively supporting Hypercard in the late 1990s, about the time they were making their first move to the radically new OS X. The old software would be slow and clunky on the new machines. It could still run, in Classic Mode emulation, but its days were numbered. And in 2004, Apple stopped selling it altogether.

I seriously hope someone at Apple is kicking him-, her-, or itself over this decision. Not because I liked it and it would have been nice to see its development continue, mind you (though that's certainly true), but because the concept refuses to die and they're no longer capitalizing on it.

I didn't link to it before, but there is still a Supercard. MetaCard was rolled into, and is now a part of Runtime Revolution, which has released a freeware version called RevMedia and a browser plug-in that allows you to view served-up Revolution content online. There is a website called TileStack (in one of those eternally free betas) which allows you to build and share stackware online.

And the straw that finally broke the blogger's resolve not to post any more whiny tripe for a while: HyperStudio is back with a new version.

I think it's unrelated, but...

This could come full circle in a truly bizarre way if someone were to create a Hypercard workalike for the iPhone or iPod Touch (the name "iPercard" should be obvious). And for even greater lulz, consider that such an application would be rejected by the App Store's reviewers because it's essentially a programming environment.

Books in Electrons

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:57:49 GMT

Lately, you know I've been going on about the twists and turns in a particular game. Well, this time, I'm ranting about how I cant rant about them this time.

First, let me point out that I've got quite a few games in PDF format on my laptop. I have Contested Ground's a|State, Cold City, and Hot War; Rogue Games' Colonial Gothic; Jack Aidley's The Great Ork Gods; Robin D. Laws' The Ecoterrorists and Fear Itself; Hero Games' Hero System 6th Edition, Vols. 1 and 2 (and that is a lot of book); Jared Sorenson's octaNe (yes, that's how it's capitalized); Wild Hunt's Orx: Nasty, Brutish, and Short (meaning yes, I have two orc character games); Atomic Sock Monkey's Truth & Justice, Evil Hat's A Penny For Your Thoughts; Box Ninja's Solipsist; and John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors.

First, it's galling that WotC slammed the door on any possibility of getting PDFs of the D&D series books. They would have come in handy for those occasions when you didn't want to travel with a library of twenty-some books in addition to the maps, dice, printed scenario, and miniatures.

Second, it's galling (and unfortunately just as well) that of all of those games I have on PDF, I have thus far only played octaNe with anybody. That's it.

Suggestions on any of these revolting developments, anybody? Continued silence will be accepted as an answer to the second point above.

Unflavored Gelatin Modular Attack!

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:10:09 GMT

And with a title like that, I could only be talking about ...D&D 4th Edition again.

See, I just started thinking about the system at a fundamental nuts-and-bolts level. I know there's no point to it, this is just idle conjecture on my part, and I know I'm never really going to do anything with it. But that doesn't stop me from thinking...

Break it down...no, further than that!

Let's start with the description of the system as it stands, and it is almost cubist in its modularity. In order to balance all characters, everyone uses the same advancement table, and gets a pick from column A (feats), three or four from column B (skills), two from column C (at-will powers), one from column D (encounter powers), and one from column E (daily powers). Keywords establish special effects and provide some level of differentiation between abilities, making some more apropos to certain situations than others. (i.e. Monsters are vulnerable to specific keywords. Yes, it's not about fire or ice or plant growth: it's a frigging roleplayng game. You're fighting using semantics.)

So, from there, break it down even further. Look at what each item brings to the party (the system in toto, not just the particular adventuring group). Attack abilities, without fail, have to pit bonuses derived from a particular attribute against an opposing critter's save number. If it hits, damage is done, and that damage will vary depending on the level of the ability. If it misses, either nothing will happen or something will happen (increasing its value).

What if you continued to break it down to its atomic level, so to speak? Break it down so that you have an inventory of keywords, attack attributes, defense attributes, individual and group benefits, etc.

And then start rebuilding everything in your image. Or something.

...combining the [advantages|disadvantages] of both.

What you'd end up with is something that I would once have considered anathema: it's a composite system, combining the flexibility of a point-based buffet-style power construction kit (see also GURPS and HERO systems) with a level-based epic-progression character advancement system (see also D&D ALLe or Palladium). Only now, since I've seen the pattern, it's starting to sound almost cool.

Characters start with a core suite of point-pools with which they can build their character's powers. Of course, the starting pools will be small, allowing only for a suite of weak powers. Daily and encounter powers will have slightly larger pools to play with owing to their limited frequency. And higher level powers will start with larger pools of points, allowing for more grandiose combinations of abilities, which is good because you have to earn more experience to get there anyway.

Races and classes offer an additional wrinkle, because each offers adds to attributes, adds to saving throws, and may add special abilities. If there's a semblance of balance between them, then this may not be so much of a wrinkle: Racial and class powers suddenly change from unique bonuses and advantages to other things that you can just buy off the shelf. It's just that these are more strictly defined, and everyone of a given race or class has that particular combination. While that sounds restricting, there's nothing to stop you from, say, creating your own world with your own races and classes and running adventures in that.

But will it play in Peoria?

As this whole notion of a point/level hybrid churned to life full-formed (or at least half-baked) in my head, suddenly I was seized by a philosophical question:

The mechanics would be identical to the current incarnation of D&D, down to the keywords, damage numbers, etc. If the numbers are set right, it should be possible to create characters so perfectly balanced that if you strip out the point costs on the different levels of powers and offered them up as a menu in the existing power scheme, the dedicated D&D player (the kind who talks about "4e haters" non-ironically) wouldn't notice the difference, and might even like them.

But show the math and that it's really just a derivative hybrid system that integrates well with the original, would they like it?

And then I ask myself: who cares if they like it or hate it? It's not as if it'll see the light of day, although it really should...

One Nerdgush, Inspired By Another

Okay, remember that rant I had a while back about D&D and downloadable content? And that the new system is making much the same mistakes that Magic: The Gathering made with its rushed presentation of new decks and series?

It's possible that I didn't make that rant, in which case I'm sorry and I'll get to writing that right away.

Anyway, think back to the original release. There was the Player's Handbook, the Dungeonmaster's Guide, and the Monster Manual. Add some dice, a character sheet, and a pencil, and you've got yourself a game.

Except, well, that PH2 adds some nifty new stuff. And DMG2 adds some new rules and explains how to do a few more things. And do you need more different creatures to throw at your group? Well, that's why you have the MM2. And the Power books—Arcane, Divine, Martial, and Primal—which add expansions to almost all of the original character classes so players have more variety (i.e. don't have to pick from just four powers at each tier).

Yesterday I'd seen mention of a PH3. And this morning on Amazon, I stumbled across a preorder link to Martial Power 2. I mean, seriously? Would it have been so hard to consolidate more of this information in each book before publishing the next chunk?

Who remembers 3.5e? Once the floodgates were open, supplements got published all over that added feats and classes to all parts of the system, turning it into a hairy, unkempt, hideously unbalanced beast of a system. Once it got to that point, they published 4e, and are now racing toward that point even faster.

A point-based system of some sort, which at least tries to regulate the powers that can be introduced at each tier, could go far to keeping the system level. Although they're having more fun publishing books and taking advantage of their fan base.

There is a line between "unskilled" and "gobsmackingly inept"

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:02:38 GMT

It's not a particularly thin line either, but it was likely a faint blur as my father blasted from one end of that spectrum to the other.

Here's the setup: my father has been going on assorted trips recently because an old boss of his wanted him to help out on some consultancy work. Specifically, he trains people and companies in process improvement, so they can take examinations and get higher certifications in things like the CMM. He'd been on a few different trips lately, and now it's getting on toward when he needs to submit his expenses. And that old boss of his didn't just want the receipts, he wanted scans of the receipts and an electronic form for reimbursement, namely Excel.

I scan the various paper documents into PDFs for him, primarily because I know how and neither he nor my mother do, even though they have a brand spanking new scanner. In that case, it's best that I handle the scanning for him.

But then he has to take that information off the receipts and put them into the spreadsheet. Simple, right?

He opens up the PDF and starts writing down the expenses, dates, and amounts. That's right, he's copying them from the PDF and onto paper. Why? Because he can't copy the information from one program to another, and besides, he wants to sort it first. So not only doesn't he know how to switch between applications quickly (command-tab or alt-tab depending on your operating system), but he either doesn't trust OpenOffice to sort the data for him or he doesn't know that it can do sorting.

And yes, he's using OpenOffice. Come on, given his skill level, would you buy Excel for him? I wouldn't.

He really needs to learn that there's something that can help him with some tasks like that. It's called a "computer."

It was his task, he had his own idea how it should be done. Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it accomplishes nothing and annoys the pig. That alone wasn't enough to warrant venting.

He's going to a luncheon tomorrow, not far from me. And he had a terrible mishap this afternoon when he failed to save the file with his expenses in it. (Something about being confused by the .oft file extension...)

But he did print it out first.

So tomorrow he's going to bring his printout over to me, so I can OCR it.

Problem: I don't have working OCR software. There was something that came with the scanner, but it goes down like a poleaxed steer as soon as I launch it. So what this means is that I'll be typing it in instead.

This also means that he's managed to work a second computer and paper—twice!!—into a workflow that could have been completed on one computer. And remember, he's a process improvement consultant.

The Nyarlathotep Syndrome is strong tonight indeed.

Slowly Warming to Slot-Car Racing

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:38:22 GMT

I feel just a little strange admitting this, but let me tell you about my weekend.

But first, let me tell you about the title of this line. It stems from my description of 4th Edition D&D as "that bastard child of roleplaying and slot-car racing." And I may have to revise that slightly. Or re-emphasize that the "roleplaying" aspect has not been completely removed from play.

Now what about that weekend?

It was the culmination of one thing leading to another. First it started with my "regular" gaming group becoming a) ossified and b) so irregularly attended that even a once every other week schedule is running into trouble (holidays are coming up). Then it came down to my seeking other gaming, looking to the local gaming store's second floor space for alternatives, sitting with a group, playing in a scenario that ran longer than the place was open one night, and thereby snagging an invite to a near-total-stranger's private residence.

Sitting in the home of someone who's characters I know better than the player says something, but not as much as you'd think because once a month I've been going to someone else's private residence to play another game. But that's a story for another time. That will be then, this is now.

The clincher is that we were there playing... well, you can probably guess. It was 4th Edition D&D.

It couldn't really be helped, since the RPG night at Games & Stuff is an RPGA affair, and the RPGA is so owned by Wizards of the Coast (the company that ate TSR and was later eaten by Hasbro but isn't digesting at all well) that they no longer have a page of their own as such. (G'wan. Try it. http://www.wizards.com/rpga will direct to another page within the site structure, and has no RPGA branding whatsoever.)

And it makes me feel strange to say .......it didn't suck.

A group that makes me feel mundane?

It could happen. Hell, it did happen.

Bear in mind that I have nine bookshelves full of various books. I am one of the biggest packrat of roleplaying games that I know. What could they possibly discuss that could make me feel less than gamer-y?

These, goddamnit.

Yes, Virginia, those are D&D-themed sneakers. Maybe I am less of a geek than I used to be, but I would never have gotten them. They seem too much like a media fen thing.

(Although, yeah, now that I look, I think these are damn clever. Unfortunately, I take a size 13.)

There was also some mention of the Jones Soda special flavors. However, I've also heard that Jones custom flavors can be somewhat, ah... hit or miss.

And the dig against the "4th edition haters"? Now, I don't really consider myself a 4th edition hater. GURPS has an outstanding fourth edition. And Hero Games had a fine 4th edition, except that was nearly twenty years ago and now they're up to 6th and the books should be hitting the stores Real Soon Now. It's not the 4th edition that I hate. It's whatever edition reduces the characters in the drama to a set of heavily abstracted attributes and allocations of abilities. Really. I'm not a 4th edition hater, I'm a 4th edition keeper-at-arm's-length-while-holding-my-nose-r. And that, not even so much any more.

What? Have you gone mad?!

Perhaps. Slightly.

Maybe it's exposure to so many different systems and an understanding of the game's roots—yes, I'm thinking about Dave Arnesson's further breaking down of a small unit into individuals whcih have very different abilities and different attitudes to different situations. Really, if you think about it, roleplaying got its start as a radical splinter of wargaming, which would explain the ancient rivalry between roleplayers and wargamers. And yes, this is relevant to the discussion.

But in the many years since, I've seen a lot of systems treat the players' characters in different ways, and of all of those, D&D is the first in a very long time to take that step backwards to treating characters with a wargamer's sensibilities, quantifying and disambiguating abilities to the point that miniatures and maps are mandatory. There's a lot to dislike about the practice, like how little variation there may be between two different characters of the same race and class. But under that system, no character starts out useless, and from what I've seen the process of running a game is given an order and structure that you can't help but admire. Yes, parts of it I despise, but I can appreciate why they did it.

It's given me another nickname for D&D4e: SPI's Revenge.

Would I play it again? Almost certainly. Like I said, no character is truly useless, and the game does allow for roleplaying as such. It's downplayed, but it's not out, and it's still possible to squeeze a good deal of characterization into play when the play isn't running at the coldly tactical level.

Would I like to try running it? I think I would. The published scenarios I've seen (read: played in so far) have that same wargamer's sensibility. The encounters, both combats and goal-based skill tests, are defined precisely and unambiguously, in a manner which might help me run other games (if I can ever build up the nerve again). In fact, the urge is rising to try writing a scenario or two for it just to get the handle of writing scenarios in that fashion, even if I never get to run them.

The Superior Conectivity Experience

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:27:19 GMT

I just had one... with my mother!

Backstory: I live in Glen Burnie. The parents live in Chestertown. The distance between us is about 30 miles direct, 64 miles by car, or about 100 years in grasp of technology. It has to be said, they're having trouble adapting to the modern technology. My mother can sometimes pick it up, but my father is completely and utterly conceptualization-challenged. If you give him a detailed set of instructions how to do something with a window, then resize the window, he'll think the set of instructions you gave him no longer apply, and will promptly forget them.

This is why Mac OS 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") was such a treat for me, and why I felt it necessary to upgrade them to it too. They've not been bitten by any bugs in 10.6.0, are already up to 10.6.1, and there's one thing that makes it mandatory, so absolutely necessary that any problems with 10.6.0 are overshadowed: screen sharing.

It's a feature of iChat, that if someone on your AIM Buddy list is available and also on Snow Leopard (and Leopard too, I think), you can elect to text chat, audio chat, video chat, or either share your screen with the other person or ask to share theirs. And this has been wonderful when they ask how to do something on their computer.

That's nice, but this is nicer

Tomorrow, my mother is having surgery. She's in her 70s and going strong, but she's having some hand issues, which are problematic because she's the church organist as well as the choir director. In case she's not feeling up to driving after the surgery (and we really don't think it'll be a problem, but we want to be prepared just in case), I wanted to meet her there, and she wanted to better understand the directions to the specialist's office.

So I closed out a few applications, offered to share my screen, brought up Google Maps, plotted the directions from her place, and showed her the relative benefits of two different approaches—the one suggested by the office would have her taking a big, wide zig-zag route which is okay if you're more fond of big wide zig-zags than you are traffic lights.

But even then, the directions started not making sense the closer we got. Service road? We couldn't see a service road. I had to use Google Maps (again) to locate one of the landmarks she was referencing. The second landmark, I couldn't find at all, so I brought up Street View and drove along the route for anything that looked like it might fit. It turns out that instead of "BBNT," she was looking for "BB&T" (or "BB 'n T"), and when I backtracked to the light she was told to turn at to get to the service road, it clicked: it wasn't so much a "service road" as it was a parking lot, and the landmark I couldn't make sense of her driving in front of on the main road, she was instead driving behind.

I did the navigating and showed her the route she'd be taking, while she looked over my shoulder and we coordinted from either 30 miles, 64 miles, or 100 years away. This is the sort of thing technology is supposed to do.

Powerpoint Methodists

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:36:08 GMT

The inspiration for this offing is my parents. <span class="coldly">Naturally.</span>

Sure, it may be prone to some grotesque sampling errors, but I have to assume that in at least some ways, my parents' church is a microcosm of the state of at least a small set of religions out there. And if that's true, then there are more than a few churches out there, if not religions, that are trying to adapt to the modern world in the worst way possible, quite literally.

In the old days, churches had only a few things to rely on: the charisma of the preacher/pastor/elder, the degree of reliance on the faith within the community (Peer pressure? In my religion? It's more likely than you think), and the value of the social mores or lessons espoused by said church. The trappings and gingerbread of the church (clean bright robes, fresh bibles, an impressive façade) also count, but the people brought in by the superficialities of the church tend more often than not to have a superficial belief to match; more likely they want to be seen going to church than actually go to church, if you know what I mean, so it'd better be a nice one.

Enter a new age. Digital projectors, sound systems, professionally (you wish!) created DVDs and presentations... All of the hallmarks of the modern office are slowly wending their way into houses of worship. And why not? Religion is, at some fundamental level, about selling a viewpoint. Anything that can help business sell a product or service could also help a pastor sell a faith, right?

Okay, here's why not

Most people absolutely suck at Powerpoint.

The most commonly accepted practices for the world's most popular presentation tool create utterly execrable presentations. Slides crammed with words and images, often amateurishly selected and crafted, and often read verbatim by a presenter who expects the program to do all his work for him: They don't jerk at the heartstrings so much as the eyelids, and done poorly they will work against whatever positive traits a church has going for it.

There are sites and books and documents which recommend against these "standard practices," and they are dutifully ignored by the general public because the jam-packed slides are how everyone just does it.

The bad, and the bad within the good

There are two ways I can see this going:

Poorly crafted presentations drive parishoners away from weekly services, or
The presentation becomes as important to the faith as any other trapping.

And to the rational person's delight, neither of these can end well.

Case #1: It goes poorly

Figure the first case. Presentations which fail to engage the soul fail to draw people to an institution which is ideally geared around engaging the soul. Fewer people mean that the role of religion within peoples' lives diminish as churches waste resources trying to build a bigger and better media center when it's actually the improper use of the media center which is driving people away in the first place. It's a case of people fixating on the tangible rather than the insubstantial, which is a deliciously ironic trap for a church to fall into.

Case #2: It goes well ...poorly

And the second case: Let's say a significant percentage of the faiths represented figure out how to use Powerpoint and professionally recorded DVDs with interviews/lessons/witnessing to more properly engage the congregation. If history has taught us anything, it's that people (or Americans at least) will focus on the finest, silliest minutiae when differentiating faiths. Thus, the title of this piece takes on an additional evil dimension.

Well, a guy can dream, can't he?

Flours for Algernon [sic]

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:20:51 GMT

It started, as it often does, with a shopping expedition.

Given my sad, simple existence, all I really needed to pick up were cereal and milk. And maybe salad dressing.

As a side-note, I need to point out that I had a stock of flours on hand before I was preparing to move in January. Rye, buckwheat, whole wheat, cornmeal... All those got thrown out because I hadn't made much use of them, and would have prefered to move without taking up that space.

Habitual readers should know the story: that house deal, the next house deal, and then my job all decided to shit the bed hard enough to drive a turtlehead through the box spring. (It's at least good to see my life is getting plenty of fiber, even if I'm not.) I have almost, finally, unpacked all the things that were packed up in January.

Today was one more step on the road to recovery: I've fully restocked my flour supply. Not only the rye (which I'd gotten earlier in far too great a quantity), but the cornmeal, buckwheat flour, whole wheat flour, and even a small bag of all-purpose white flour.

Now all I need is something to bake. Suggestions?

Tonight, you FALL.

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:28:04 GMT

Oh, Starilaskur, how you tease! Through two different editions of the books which mention you, you have received no love. So there you sit, in the middle of the map, a mystery set in a veritable crossroads of intrigue. Why is that? It's not fair. I want to get to know you. I want to use you, inside and out. And since nobody else seems to care about you, I shall take you for my very own.

There are two things about that quote which are hilarious:

I used a style attribute to modify that blockquote, and I constructed it purely from memory, so I got that going for my HTML skills, and
Of everyone who knows me on LJ, only one person will catch the reference, and it will still sound dirty to him.

I just realized:

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:07:41 GMT

Pan's Labyrinth : Grimm's fairytale-fueled paganism :: The Little Match Girl : Christianity.

Of course, that second item could probably be expressed more succinctly. Suggestions?

A little suck would feel nice right about now

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:10:20 GMT

And by "suck" I don't mean the action, I mean the website. And it wasn't a porn site either; suck.com was a source of daily commentary, usually strangely formatted and always laden (downright pendulous!) with snark. This was a website that sought the sacred cows because they make the tenderest, juiciest hamburgers.

The last peep was heard from Suck as Suck itself on June 8, 2001. It was a simple declaration, presented in a question-and-answer format: they pretty much said the market wasn't competetive, they felt the job was getting thankless (Burnout? Been there...), and they were going to take a little vacation.

It's now eight years and a couple of months later. That is some vacation. Enough of a vacation that people have gone on to different things. Terry Colon is continuing to make a name for himself as an illustrator with a style so distinctive it's like a thumbprint, and the editor then known as Polly Esther is doing her own blogging (and has been since a few years since the Suck vacation started).

Suck lay fallow through what could arguably be the crappiest eight years of recent history (where recent is somewhere between 10 and 60 years). Suck slept through 9/11. Perhaps that eased the transition: we had a distraction. Pity, because I expect the commentary on that could have been epic.

The timing kind of sucked (and sucked Suck too)

Another thing that the turn of the millennium had going against it was web businesses left and right shitting the proverbial bed hard enough to drive a turtlehead through the box spring. Most were founded on flimsy, poorly conceived business plans which were nothing more than harebrained schemes with the words "ON THE INTERNET!" written at the bottom in crayon. And venture capitalists lapped it up on the promise of being rich beyond their dreams of avarice (Their Dreams of Avarice, motherfucker!), at least until the phrase "burn rate" became common in the vernacular of the day.

Then they suddenly realized that the money they put out might not come back one thousandfold, and beside, all the smart people were investing in those cleverly bundled debt securities. Oh! And that new kind of energy company that was making money hand over fist in California. Who were they again, Enram? Enrong? Eh, check the financial pages. Those guys must be rolling in it by now.

In any case, the web portal was passé and the industry would require a thinning out. Ironically, Suck, which had little in the way of advertising by "modern" standards, had a reprieve and was at least kept alive on the server to preserve the content because it was a labor of love rather than a revenue stream. Oh, and please note that "modern" refers to 2001, when 30% of the page space taken up with megabyte-sized Flash-based banners. These days it's closer to 60% and the banners are closer to 3-4Mb each.

Even its successor survived, with no advertising to speak of. Just contributions...

Another short name from the web's early days

It should be pointed out, that Suck had a spin-off that has lasted to today. It went by the name of Plastic. It's a site for submitting links and sharing snark, not unlike Fark, but by comparison it's erudite. Fark is all of the meanness (maybe more) with only a few bare shreds of the intelligence.

It's still alive today, and it boasts over 50,000 members, but funny, I only see 20 or 30 names with any regularity. They also get some submissions, but not as many as they used to.

Coals to Newcastle

I dunno. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the site forum, where people can post comments in response to an article, are more common than dirt. It's a standard feature on the Wordpress blog system, it's a common tutorial in the Ruby on Rails web framework, and there are sites which provide no shortage of opportunities to shoot your goddamned mouth off.

I think I've had enough opportunities to contribute my insights to the issue. I just want to read the insights of someone who's worth reading.

I miss Suck.

Maybe I should build my own?

...and random acts of Butchery

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:27:06 GMT

Whether due to boredom or a desire to keep on top of stuff, I took advantage of a book deal mentioned previously and have been perusing it with gusto...which I suppose means I've been doing more than perusing. Even if it's just a PDF.

That book deal, by the way, is for the 6th edition of Champions. And yes, I picked up both book copies (which haven't arrived yet) and PDFs (yay instant gratification!). Why, I'm not exactly sure. Of the six players in my (primary) current group, I would only trust two others beside myself to consider trying it, and I'd still end up creating the characters for everybody because I'm sure I'm the only person who's invested in it so far. (johnprester, eager as he may be, might not have jumped on this particularly pricey bandwagon yet.)

That's okay, though, because in the meantime I can sit down with the books (on my laptop) and review characters I'd put together for previous editions (like 5th).

And one of the big problems is Character Inflation.

Previous editions of Champions had superheroic characters built on 100 points, plus up to 150 points in added limitations and weaknesses. This provided more points for the purchasing of more powers, and made for stronger characters (in certain areas, anyway) which would still have enough foibles that they wouldn't be über-efficient.

In 5th Edition, that limit was raised for standard superheroes to 200 + 150 (more base points for more powers). And this new edition, the 6th, really raises the bar. The "standard" superhero is built on 400 + 75. Yes, they cut back the number of points you could take as bonuses for giving your character flaws. Which really makes conversion interesting because you kind of get ...used to your character being some kind of screwball. Having to cut those points back was difficult because I didn't know what I wanted to cut.

From the title, those in the know (and I count precisely one of you, John) can likely guess which character I'm experimenting with.

Economic Fai—, er Tragedy

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:03:53 GMT

Company A has a deal where you can buy a book, one of their main products, in softcover for $55 and in hardcover for $60. The book contains 145 full-color pages.

Company B has a deal where you can buy two books, totaling about 800 full-color pages, with PDFs, for $80. I'm not sure if they're softcover or hardcover, but this deal makes Company A's deal look downright shabby.

So why do I pity company A?

Company A is a smaller company that company B, and is not as well recognized. Its product has its own value and quality (and has been reviewed positively in the past), but less capacity for sales. Company A could not be assured of selling all their goods, so they went with a print-on-demand company that does direct ordering, and I believe in the process they're getting screwed.

Meanwhile, company B is large, well-established, generic, and has a strong following. They could be assured of selling a goodly number of their product on their name alone, and while it's also quality, their size and previous success afford them some buffering against failure. They went with a conventional printer and likely got a bulk discount.

Does this mean company A is screwed? Not necessarily. The PDF version of their game is available for $16. That's a much more reasonable price for the number of pages. But for $55 or $60, it would have been nice to get the PDF to sweeten the deal.

When you see people who don't know that they know you...

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:00:20 GMT

...how do you introduce yourself?

When you're on forums, and you see nicknames you recognize but you don't think they recognize you, is there any good way to introduce yourself?

And what do you think of yourself if you find that you simply can't care, that reacquainting yourself with people you used to know is a waste of time? That old ties are better severed?

I'm sure Akira Tago would disapprove.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:33:31 GMT

So, I just got through a first run of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, and now I'm moving around and trying to pick up the pieces.

Perhaps you've heard of it? Nintendo DS game, sequel to Professor Layton and the ~~Furious Four Hour Erection~~ Curious Village? (Honestly, I have no idea why I call it that sometimes. The relation between Prof. Layton and Luke, his youthful apprentice/sidekick who travels with him everywhere seems almost perfectly innocent) Anyway, the game is presented in a sort of chance-encounter everyone-and-his-dog-Rex-has-a-puzzle type game. I called this type of game a "puzzle book" game originally, not surprisingly holding up Myst as the archetype.

Well, two games and three-hundred-some puzzles later, it's not hard to imagine that coming up with variations is tricky. Diabolical Box, for instance, has four variations on the peg-game puzzle, more than a few sliding-block puzzles (think "Rush Hour"), and the one which I feel is the most unfortunate of the bunch, the Knight's Tour. Four variations, and the only difference between them is the size of the board.

And the thing about "Knight's Tour" is that while some planning is possible, it's far more likely that you'll get part of the way through a solution, realize you mis-stepped somewhere, and wish you could backtrack.

Note that I said wish; the implementation of the puzzle doesn't allow you to step backwards. The only way to backtrack is to start all over again and repeat your earlier steps, which might still not have been right. There are a lot of possible solutions, but it's still hard to hit one intentionally.

So I got, shall we say, differently clever. The knight's tour is something I've programmed before. It is a recursive monster, which does proper backtracking when there's no moves left. It's brute force, sure, but I still think it counts for something that this program (in C++, in which I'm rusty) positively churns out solutions. It's found over 46,000 of them so far and it's still going strong.

Frankly, the game doesn't care where I got the solution, and since I wrote the code myself over the course of an evening, technically I did find the solution myself. I just used a tool better suited to the task than my brain.

Just sayin'. Or showin'.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:15:13 GMT

Advertisement seen elsewhere on LJ, with one small correction.

Artificially Flavored Bread-Like Snack Nuggets and Circuses

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:40:34 GMT

And the inspiration for this particular rant: Facebook apps.

I admit, recently I've started to explore and experiment a bit with Facebook. It wasn't necessarily for the friends, although I find I'm connecting up with people I haven't talked to in a while. It was originally because of the Unity game deveopment tool and more specifically this topic on the Unity3D forums discussing how to serve up a Unity-developed game as a Facebook application.

And sure enough, over on FB there are good-looking examples in beta test like Paradise Paintball 3D and Mr. Nik's Crazy Kart—

—what's so funny? Action games running in your browser aren't so new. Remember that ~~hoary old time-waster~~ classic Bejeweled started life in the browser window as either a Flash or Java app; it's been long enough I can't remember which. And contrast that with the recent release of Quake Live, the latest update of the classic first person shooter engine mashed down to fit into a browser plug-in. So Paradise Paintball is in good company. I still give little creed to the web-as-operating-system meme, but that's just a digression from the digression. Back to the matter at hand.

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Advertisers are from Uranus

Anyway, after a bit of experimentation with other existing FB apps, typically the ones my friends are involved in, I've come to a dismal realization: Most of them are infested with marketing. They don't simply contain marketing, they're not just full of marketing, the marketing has driven tendrils into the game's brain and is controlling it.

The one I've been mostly playing with: Street Racing. Now, that game has a few elements of fun to it, but play is mitigated by numerous constraints. Do you have enough fuel to run the solo events? Do you have enough adrenaline and crew to challenge other players? Bringing in more friends can give you more crew to overcome some of those problems, but if you need to fill up any of your reserves or bring in extra crew immediately, all you have to do is spend Favor Points.

And therein lies the rub. You start with a small pool of Favor Points. You get one Favor Point every other level you increase. (You get levels by gaining experience, by completing solo events, challenging other players, and helping friends complete their events. The serpent eats its own tail; see above.) You can, however, get a whole mess of Favor Points by a) paying for them directly, or b) giving patronage to one or more of their various sponsors, who will shower you with golden Favor tokens.

The moral of the story: Friends and patience are nice, but the most important things are lots of disposable income and a high tolerance for spam. Because you just know some of those companies will be classical Clueless Mailers.

Me, I don't have that many friends, I have a low tolerance for spam, and I don't want to inflict it on what few friends I have. This doesn't look like the game for me.

Sometimes the best jokes don't write themselves.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:24:14 GMT

Sometimes they're written by people who speak English as a second language.

How do I put this...

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 02:28:12 GMT

Ummm..... no?

Pretend I'm not posting this.

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:25:14 GMT

I really don't want to go here, because mentioning it makes me sound whiny and will make people jump to a whole series of wrong conclusions. Or maybe they won't, which is a good thing.

But let's entertain the notion of depression.

First, how do I know that I'm actually depressed, and not simply lazy? Listless? Apathetic? Miserable? And slightly prone to fits of crying for no good reason?

Why would a doctor be interested in my case, just because I say I'm depressed? Doesn't a willingness to get out and do something about it suggest that it's letting up? And isn't the diagnosis a little inexact, in that it involves measuring response to the mind-altering chemicals that they'd use to cure it?

Is there anything I should know about the side-effects of the happy pills du jour before I give someone the idea, however correct or incorrect, that I need them? A recent movie comes to mind for some reason.

And would would peoples' reactions be? Frankly, I'm not sure which sounds worse: that my problems are distracting others, or that they don't care one way or the other. Neither sounds good.

Isolation

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:17:59 GMT

The boredom is becoming oppressive.

In my current situation, the only thing that can really slow me down is a desire not to spend money. I have plenty at the moment and I have some support, but I don't want to spend myself down. The irony is that since my employment, I got disinvolved out of a lot of things, to the point that what's left doesn't fill much of the day.

Occupation: Mostly searching online during the day for available positions, but it should be noted that Maryland is possibly the only place where you can find fricking web design jobs that require full polygraph and clearance.
Gaming:
- Weekly, on Wednesday night for 3 hours
- Monthly, on Saturdays for up to 8 hours
Family:
- Weekly visit with parents on Saturday (trying to adjust this to allow for the second gaming)
- Daily phone call with MPU (male parental unit) that typically lasts less than a minute. Not so much a conversation as a hit-and-run

And presently, that's it. I don't get out much, and don't even see people unless they're on television or I imagine them. I thought I could get into LARP authoring again at some small level, but whatever enthusiasm I had last November has been subsumed by the feeling that I'd be trying to break into the community all over again, and that nobody would really accept me even though they have no reason to reject me.

The joy I felt once at living right near a game store has dimmed since I discovered that all they play there is 4ed D&D ("the bastard child of roleplaying and slot car racing," as I've called it) and M:TG. Meanwhile, I have close to nine bookshelves full of RPGs alone, many of which I haven't had a chance to play yet.

Nothing is happening, so it feels like there's no reason to do anything or go anywhere or see anyone. Or to make anything happen because come on, where can it possibly go?

It just keeps getting better! Okay, no it doesn't.

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:20:41 GMT

Last night, I had trouble sleeping. There was another problem associated with waking up...

My laptop, which half the time I keep running next to the bed and half the time running in another room (depending how much computationally expensive stuff I want to do before retiring to bed) (because it seems like it's always backing up)—

(Pardon me while I spend a whole paragraph on a parenthetical here. Obviously, it's to do with my laptop, you gather that much from the above. But while most people have an issue with not having a proper backup when crap breaks down for them, I have the opposite problem: my laptop feels like it's always backing up to the wireless hub, so much so that I feel afraid to shut it down and interrupt the process because hey, it's backups, fercryin'outloud. This is what technology does to us: it eliminates some problems and creates new ones. There was also a time when the VCR would be flashing 12:00 all night. With the advent of the time signal over some PBS stations, you can set your watch by it ...and have to because it never seems to agree with your VCR. C'est la guerre.)

—refused to wake up properly the next morning. Some careful examination revealed that yes, it was actually doing things sometimes, to the point that the fan would come on. The controls for the keyboard backlight worked, as long as it was dark enough in the room that the keyboard backlight needed to come on. The controls for the speakers worked, and I could make it make progressively louder and softer blop-sounds—

...now that I think about it, as many different programs as I have on my laptop which can make and edit sound, it really makes no sense to have the system beep sound like a guinea pig's wet farts.

Anyway, I verified that the laptop really was doing things, even though I couldn't interface directly with it. It's set to act as a web server, and sure enough when I started it, let it come to rest, and then hit it with a web browser, it served up pages. Even the wiki I keep campaign notes in was working, so obviously the laptop was working, but I was out of diagnostic tools.

So I had to have it looked at by a professional. Which I did, and he confirmed that the logic board which controls graphics had gone all breaky. So I'm 5-7 days without my primary laptop while they send it out for reconditioning, which means they replace the worn or broken parts on it, out of my pocket. And this is theoretically cheaper than just getting the one thing changed out, so it's a deal. In theory.

What this means is that for a while, I'll be without my primary computer. Yes, I have a secondary computer, a few consoles which themselves have web browsers, and no shortage of free time with which to do other things, like looking for work to pay for this repair, but it's still going to cramp my style.

To my other issues...

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:16:57 GMT

"irregular sleeping".

It's now 1:15 AM, you see, and I feel only a little tired. And it's the form of tired that gets in the way of my attempts to sleep.

Should I be concerned...

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:58:25 GMT

...that I saw a commercial for a childhood depression study, and I have almost all of the symptoms? Admittedly, the one about missing school may not apply.

Cooking

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:39:14 GMT

Zatarains Dirty Rice mix + Ground Turkey Breast.

Plusses: Most of the flavor, far less of the fat.

Minuses: The whole thing is beige. Unbelievably, unrelentingly, unforgivingly beige. So beige. So, so, so beige. OMG THE BEIGE!!!!11!!!1!one!!!! Can't sleep, beige will eat me (back).

But considering my situation at the moment,