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newer entries...
09-30-99 la la la
09-27-99 greks got riddim
09-26-99 let's pretend
09-24-99 I won't let you fall apart
09-23-99 aluminum: it does a body good
09-20-99 Limbocon
09-15-99 Confuseek
09-12-99 translate this!
09-09-99 the sky is falling/open season/good+evil
09-08-99 natural born roleplayers
09-05-99 Win 9X/NT( ) Mac( ) Linux( ) Fridge( )
09-03-99 Mr. Sandman
09-02-99 HTML for the style-conscious
09-01-99 Hack and Slashdot
older entries...
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la la la
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| 09-30-99 |
(Note: I started writing this yesterday and never got around to finishing it. Since
it's now posted, obviously the technical problems have been sorted out!)
Simu's been suffering some bizarre network problems the last couple days. Our firewall
is doing a great job protecting the rest of the world from being accessed by anybody at
the office. I'm not exactly going through withdrawal symptoms, but I do miss it, and
find myself just a little bit... lost. It's making me realize how much the internet has
become a part of my life.
Now before anybody starts thinking "addiction" let me remind you of television.
Probably most of my readers aren't big TV watchers, but we all know them. Being a fan of
a particular show is one thing, but a lot of people just watch TV out of habit or
whatever other reason. There's nothing on they are really interested in or care much
about but they watch anyway. Or they record at least two made-for-TV movies per day, not
necessarily looking for ones they really want to watch, but the best of that day's
possible choices. Having 100+ channels gives you the impression that you have a lot of
choice in what to watch, but most of the time people just settle for the best available
even if it's not what they really want. Rather like a presidential election.
I don't have cable or DSS, just an antenna. I get about 4 channels and most of them not
well. I spend probably an average of 3 hours a month watching TV and that's including
the occasional South Park tape at Steph and Jeff's. Not that I'm trying to imply any
kind of superiority because of it. I also don't read the newspaper and don't even check
"regular" news online very often, so I wind up not knowing about things like
wars and hurricanes and little stuff like that unles somebody at Simu happens to mention
it in passing.
But I always thought it was funny that my Dad, who is a big TV watcher, doesn't
(or at least didn't used to) understand how I can spend so much time in front of a
computer. Despite the fact that it's what I use to write, the way I communicate with
most of my friends, and the thing I use to get information. A tool for downloading,
creating and experiencing music and art. A game machine where I can play visceral action
games, tense and thoughtful strategy games, or imagination-excercising and socially
rewarding MMORPGs. A way to get the specs and reviews and complaints on practically any
product known to mankind, and then buy from the place that has it for the lowest price.
The "place" where I found my religion and where most of our meetings are. Not
to mention, my job.
La la la, okay, I've sung the praises of the net enough now. It's not a utopia. The
fact that things grind to a halt when a tiny little flexible wire made of glass
gets cut (which can happen if you step on it wrong or bend it too much, nevermind some
guy with a backhoe) is certainly one weakness. There are many others. It's a complex
system, which means there's more things that can and will go wrong.
But beyond the technical vulnerabilities, there's another problem: people. Spamming and
hacking and flaming and hate sites and password surfing and online stalking are all human
activities. And there's one other thing that I've personally felt the need to fight:
Bad information.
(Bad information! No biscuit.)
It's spread by people who don't know what they're talking about but want to sound smart.
It's spread by people who don't care if they're giving you the truth. And worst, it's
spread by people who know it isn't the truth and think their version is better
for whatever reason. Usually it's history that gets mangled in the name of political
correctness. Or simple shame or pride or hate, or dodging responsibility or justifying
their behavior.
It goes way beyond simple denial. How people can claim the Holocaust never happened is
mind-boggling. But it gets even more incredibly stupid. With Egyptian stuff in
particular there's a lot of "racial" silliness from those people who forget
that our race is not "black" or "white" but "human." People
deny that Egypt is African (look at a map, read about their historical relations with
Nubia, compare Egyptian religion with Yoruban religion, and get a clue). There's a
group that claims that black people could not possibly have been clever or hard-working
enough to build the Pyramids, so it must have been aliens, or some kind of superior white
culture that got mysteriously wiped out (along with any evidence that they ever existed,
of course). There's another group that claims that black people are aliens and
they taught whites all about civilization.
All that stuff is so blatantly stupid that most people recognize it immediately for the
BS that it is. I hope. But the more common breed of bad information is a lot less
obvious and more insidious. Fire up a search engine and look for Seshat for instance.
You're going to find stuff people wrote up for roleplaying games, people who use it as a
nickname for themselves, their servers or their pets, a lot of sites with brief summaries
and a few with a little more info. If you read them all you'll see some similarities in
the text and the claims that are made. Some of them are the same person's work on
multiple sites, others are partially or entirely cribbed from somebody else's site. If
you weren't familiar with the subject you'd probably be inclined to trust the information
that shows up the most frequently. You also wouldn't appreciate which parts of the RPG
info are actually representative of or inspired by reality, and which parts are made
up because they're just cool. So you'd come away with the wrong impression.
On Slashdot there was a
discussion
recently about using artificially intelligent agents to filter out information so we
got only what we could handle. In some ways a scary concept. But it'd be nice if
AI ever got both smart and knowledgable enough to rate the accuracy of the information
on a site. A pipe dream probably, but it'd be cool. If it worked well enough
to trust.
Meanwhile the only cure is to get informed. Check multiple sources, including books by
several authors and publishers as well as websites, newsgroups, public forums, magazines,
TV... the more types of sources you can find, the better. Online information can be
suspect because anybody can say whatever they want to, without editors to filter out bad
material and huge costs to discourage those that aren't serious. That's the downside of
free speech. Most books are okay, but there are a few publishers don't really care about
accuracy as much as they do sales. Video documentaries vary widely in accuracy. So use
the shotgun method, take everything with a grain of salt while keeping an open mind, and
use your own judgement.
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greks got riddim
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| 09-27-99 |
At least one of the cultures in Hero's Journey has got to have rhythm. Seems like all
the music I've been making lately has been percussion-oriented. I did a cool drum
loop tonight and started to add a melody, and it wound up sounding like Latin jazz. I
think I can use it if I go with flutes or chanting or something instead. But I stopped
hearing it in the style I was aiming for and gave up and came to the office instead. On
the way I found and lost another rhythm. I come up with more cool stuff by banging
and tapping on my steering wheel than anywhere else, and I never remember what it was
when I sit down in front of Cakewalk.
Luckily there's help. There are some Middle Eastern rhythm pages out there on the
web... my favorite is Jas's
which not only has a ton of rhythms and historical notes but actually has a page that
generates MIDI files from doumbek notation. Some of these are things I thought I
invented, like the "more common" Saudi variation.
Anyway, when I got in, Jeff was putting together a techno track in Acid Music. There's
no escape.
Maybe I never actually finished CStorm2 as TekWerks. I'm trying that now (with the money
cheat) and it's rough. They can only field four units (as opposed to a normal 6 or the
8 that some corps get), so you're pretty much forced to have the biggest, most survivable
grunts you can, and forget about speed or scouting. Which means you step on a lot of
mines, walk right into cloaked enemies and take a major pounding from turrets. Plus
they don't have the awesomely useful
Demon class
vehicles, so in the early to mid game, you have all this cool weapon technology that
nobody else has, but you can't carry it on the battlefield. And until you hit the final
tech level for Reactors, you're grossly underpowered and can't fire all your weapons
in one turn.
It'd be a lot of fun to customize a corporation, like you can do with factions in
Alpha Centauri. I'd love to have one that can field 16 units, but only gets tanks and
light to medium HERCs. Or to design units... while the customizability of each unit
is outstanding, it'd be really cool to be able to design your own chassis.
I've noticed an interesting coincidence in CStorm2 unit names. There's a
Lancer, a
Raider, and a
Talon: all Mitsubishi-built cars. But then there's
also a Viper and a
Stingray so maybe it doesn't
mean anything in particular.
Hey Steph.. palamino bug? Isn't that
from "Smells
Like Teen Spirit?" It's palmetto
bug. (Oddly enough, an Infoseek
search for "palmetto bug" hit the category "Baldur's Gate patches.")
I actually lived in Palmetto, FL when I was a kid. Mootown is definitely a step up.
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let's pretend
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| 09-26-99 |
I can tell winter is on its way because my steering wheel (just the wheel, not the
power steering pump or belts or anything like that) is making an awful squeaking/scraping
noise again. It doesn't seem to be entirely temperature dependent. It started when that
first bit of cool weather happened and the birds started migrating. It didn't stop
when it warmed up again. Hmmmm.
My host was down all day yesterday and most of today, shutting down my website
and email. It received mail just fine, but I couldn't log on and get it. So
my imagination, which doesn't know when to shut up, was
inventing ironic little scenarios wherein my mailbox filled up with email telling me that
my site was down. The idea of writing a "my host is down and I don't know when it'll
be back" entry for later posting had a certain appeal. Kind of like the Diary of
Anne Frank without the risk to life and limb. But they had to go and blow it by coming
back up.
My imagination has a habit of kicking in at just the wrong moment but abandoning me in my
hour of need. I can't say I've ever woken up seeing strange faces in front of me, but I
did have some weird moments as a kid. Nothing particularly scary, just bizarre
hallucinations. I'd see the little plastic velcro-tipped "darts" on my fuzzy
dartboard start to wiggle and gyrate all on their own. I'd see the ceiling start tilting so
it wasn't parallel with the floor. I'd see things on posters start to move.
It hasn't been quite that extreme in a long time, but I do start going off into weird morbid
what-if scenarios, until I realize what I'm doing and make myself stop. I will also, quite
often, dream that I've woken up, gotten out of bed, and started my day until I realize
something just doesn't make sense, then I really wake up. During Simucon I dreamt I got
up and tried to read the schedule in the booklet but it was written in
Tenctonese (remember Alien Nation?), so
I gave up and went back to bed. Then I woke up and realized it was a dream. Then I
fell asleep and had the same dream again.
When I need it most, my imagination stays quiet. Like when I try to finish this half-formed
alternate magic system idea I have that's based more on real-world magical beliefs, sort of
a mishmash of belief, willpower and authority, rather than the almost scientific magic
we see in so many RPGs.
Well. "The Fragile" is 23 tracks, not 33. Steph got it right on her page.
Another example of a weird anomaly I've noticed. It is an established fact that Steph
Hates Math (tm). And I'm the one whose spiritual
Mom reckons all things on earth. But Steph is the one who always figures out the
restaurant bills and tips and stuff while I'm still puzzling over the subtleties of
$3.75 + $1.50. Steph is the one who can look at a track listing and figure out that
12+11=23.
I did figure out how to adjust the EQ for CD audio on my sound card. But the Black Cube
of Death is the only thing providing the bass in that speaker set (the satellites are
too tiny I guess). It does a great job at loud, full and powerful. It doesn't
do quiet and subtle. It's all or nothing, baby. So my neighbors get to hear me blowing
up HERCs as I replay CyberStorm 2 (not to be confused with CyberStrike 2).
For some reason, I keep coming back to CyberStorm. I bought the first one in the bargain
bin for $15 a couple years ago, easily the best $15 I ever spent on a boxed game. I played
it for ten straight hours after I was laid off so I wouldn't have to think about less
pleasant things than a renegade interstellar AI that builds its own giant suicidal killing
machines. I bought CyberStorm 2 when it came out, played it as each of the eight
corporations, then played it some more with cheats. Actually just the "mega
credits" cheat, 'cause I like going through the research trees and experimenting with
different weapon combinations. There are a lot of really cool weapons, and the key to
success is not necessarily in using the biggest, baddest, highest-tech goodies but in combos
that will efficiently make the kill and not leave you too drained to run away afterwards.
Sometimes I wish it awarded style points for certain types of kills though, like killing
anything with a teensy Sensei or self-destructing a big expensive Apocalypse or killing a
Verminus with an ELF whip.
The Hero's Journey Vault really scares me sometimes. I
happened to mention that I, personally, am not into trade skills
(baking bread and fishing and carpentry and the like). Somehow, this got turned around into
"Simu doesn't like trade skills" and then "HJ won't have trade skills."
I'll let you in on a little secret. I have never been the slightest bit interested in the
Trader or Bard guilds in DragonRealms. I would never play either. Does that mean I'm
anti-Trader and/or anti-Bard? Heck no. I'm glad we have them. I'm also glad that I've
never been in charge of either of those guilds. It'd be unfair to me and to players if I
was in charge of a system I wasn't interested in.
THAT is how I feel about trade skills in HJ. I, personally, am
not interested. I also am not, personally, interested in working
on economic issues or player-owned homes or player-run organizations or unarmed combat or
any number of things that are definitely going to be in the game. So don't panic. :)
Then there's the quotation thing. Anything a Simu employee posts on the developer boards
is fair game for getting turned into a news item. I know Luxor's reasons for that but
it sure feels weird from this end of things. Sometimes I get the urge to just write
something utterly ridiculous, such as announcing that flying toasters will be a player
race, just to see where the threshhold is.
I guess it just bothers me that people have a much more inflated sense of my importance in
the scheme of things than I do. It's embarrasing, and I'm afraid they're going to hold me
responsible for something that I have nothing to do with.
If and when I get this magic system thing worked out and written up as a proposal, and if
and when I post it for public destruction and comment, that'll be another story. :)
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I won't let you fall apart
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| 09-24-99 |
I went to check some local stores for prices on digital cameras. Better off buying one
online. Hopefully the holiday/overtime pay will kick in on next week's check and make
it happen.
But I did get myself a new set of
computer speakers and
the new NIN album, "The Fragile." Killer
combination. That's not just a subwoofer with those speakers, it is a Black Cube of
Death. There's no way to independently adjust the subwoofer volume, the treble/bass
controls for my sound card don't seem to apply to
CD's, and despite the title there is nothing fragile about Mr. Reznor's bass lines. The
result is not just deep booming bass, but a whole new weather system. I hope my
neighbors like NIN as much as I do!
If they have any taste they do. I've listened to it nonstop since I bought it. (The only
reason this doesn't violate my rule of repeating music is it's two CDs.) This is easily
the best, most listenable NIN album yet. There's no lack of screaming and driving beats
and self-abuse, but there's something more to this one. There's times it's so funky that
anybody in the 70's would have killed to groove like that. There's times it's subtle and
almost quiet. There are 33 tracks here and no single one of them really represents the
album, but there's still a sort of common theme to it all. It's something we only
started hearing from him when "Perfect Drug" came out.
I once read a succint description of the themes of NIN albums:
- Pretty Hate Machine: I hate myself and I want to f**k
- Broken/Fixed: I hate myself and I want to die
- Downward Spiral: I hate myself and I want to kill
I guess you could say the theme of this one is "I hate myself but I like you, and
I'm not gonna let you be ruined like me." Which is really quite a departure for
NIN. Actually it reminds me of a certain well-roleplayed character in GemStone that
I knew, back when Eillie was disillusioned with House Phoenix and thinking about
joining... a certain other group.
Anyway. I didn't pick today's headline just because it's one of the lyrics that supports
my idea of what the album's theme is. :) It also applies to an issue a DR player brought
up on HJVault. I'm not even going into the specific issues, but the overall tone of the
post was "you have ruined DragonRealms with your tweaks, are you going to do the same
to Hero's Journey?"
Statements like that just boggle the mind. Anyone who can casually accuse me of ruining
the game is not going to accept anything I have to say anyway, so why bother to answer?
If I'm guilty of anything, it's pretty much the same thing many players are guilty of:
taking the game too seriously. Making too much of an emotional investment. Getting too
personally involved. Caring too much.
I want things to work right and make sense. I want the universe to be well-ordered and
smoothly run. That goes double for the game universe, since I have considerably more
influence and responsibility for it. So to me, if something is broken it should be fixed.
Being broken for a year does not justify letting it stay broken. Being out of balance
for a year does not justify letting it stay out of balance.
POLICY 15 in DragonRealms:
Simutronics reserves the right to make modifications to any and all game
mechanics and rules at any time, without notice. Players should be mindful of the fact
that Simutronics has a responsibility to preserve the balance of the game for the majority
of the players, and furthermore, to maintain a level of challenge that is adequate for
this type of product.
...Simutronics maintains a longer range view which may be in conflict with
short-term and character-specific interests, but Simutronics will always attempt to make
the best decision for the overall good of the game.
You can bet that we'll still have this policy in Hero's Journey.
However, on a personal note, I didn't design the DR magic system but I've had to live with
it and make it work, and learned a lot from it. Goals for all my mechanics designs in HJ
include ease of balancing and reducing the impact of tweaking when it needs to be done.
DragonRealms mechanics are very complicated, often overcomplicated, and given a set of
parameters neither Atrathien nor I could determine the result of a spell without looking
at the code and using a calculator. HJ will not be simplistic, but hopefully it will be
more predictable at least to the people who are supposed to know how the system works. :)
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aluminum: it does a body good
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| 09-23-99 |
Have you ever felt uninspired, uncreative, even a bit on the lazy and dull-witted side, like
somebody stole your mojo? Good, it's not just me then.
Today was kind of like that. And I think it's contagious. Steph wrote her latest Vent instead of doing the assignment for Java class which is due
tommorow. Jeff did his, but judging by the grumbling and cursing it was an uphill battle.
Thankfully I'd already done mine (we've had two weeks, though Simucon was in the middle of it)
and aside from the fact that the so-called "help" system in Symantec Visual Cafe is
about as helpful as a dull spoon in a firefight, didn't have much trouble with it.
I started on a cool treasure or auction item for DR (no, I'm not giving any hints as to what)
but only got the technical challenges solved, not the creative stuff. Jeff and I tried to play
Starcraft but repeatedly got thrashed by the computer. I started working on some wallpaper,
thinking maybe that would get the creative juices flowing, but I came up with nothing but trash
for quite some time. Of course the CEO happened by at just the right moment and saw some of the
worst junk I've ever produced in PSP. I eventually produced something decent but then forgot
the technique I used to tilt it that I used in "Your Puny Tile..."
Shift ended, Russ came in, I went home. Looked at the pile of dishes that's been there for
about two weeks on average. (Grunt.) Looked in the fridge, nothing there but sliced cheese,
canned mealworms (not for human consumption), and a mysterious ancient pasta artifact (ditto).
I don't have bread, and the pan for the bread machine needs cleaning. Threw a bag of microwave
popcorn in. Sat here and played Freecell. It made me think of the song "Zombified,"
which made me think of the goth compilation that's in the CD rack in the other room, but getting
up to put it on would spoil my vegetative state.
At some point the idea of updating my journal bubbled its way up through the thick ooze in my
skull and broke the surface. I kind of feel an obligation to update frequently, for two
reasons: these writing muscles need exercise, and I've been thinking about you. My readers, I
mean.
There are some web rings out there for journallers who update their pages on a regular basis.
While I may or may not worry about trying to qualify for them, they kind of have a point. With
some types of sites, quantity is almost as important as quality. I make near-daily visits to
some of the sites on my links page, and I'm disappointed when they're not updated. I really
wish Red Meat updated more often 'cause I love that twisted sense of humor. It's like a
favorite TV series -- it's a letdown when this week's episode turns out to be a rerun.
I aim to please. If I miss once in a while it's no biggie 'cause this web page isn't the most
important thing in my life. :) But if I don't pull the trigger once in a while I'm not going to
hit much.
While I'm on the subject of quantity, here's something I just can't get my head around: my
sister doesn't like reading. I read a ton, my mom reads a ton (mostly romance novels), my dad
reads the paper cover to cover daily and an occasional book (usually non-fiction, often
autobiographical adventures about hitchhiking across the country or being a park ranger in some
remote place where you see four humans a year and live on mice and ticks). My sister not only
doesn't read for enjoyment, she won't even read emails that are more than a couple paragraphs.
If she ever reads this, I'm going to give her a $20 (and no fair telling her I said that). I
just don't get it. Is there some bizarre recessive gene for not enjoying reading? Did she have
a traumatic experience with reading as a child that I'm unaware of?
I think divergently, rather than convergently. Does it bug you that I just go off on one
tangent after another instead of sticking to one topic? What if I started in on that digital
camera thing again? I did a little poking around on Pricewatch (great site) and found that the Jamcam is not the
only cheap one out there. There's one in the under-$100 range that, while it only does 320x240
normal (with enough RAM for 20 pics) or 320x480 high (10 pics), doubles as a CCD video camera
that works with a VCR or video capture card. There's also one under $200 that does 2000x1600,
does have a flash, comes with a 4MB card, optionally does JPG compression so it'll hold a lot,
got a 5-star review from BYTE in late '97 and has been improved since then. I'm thinking
about it. I haven't taken more than one roll of film since high school. I bet I was the
only GM at Simucon without a camera. But I kind of miss that, and I know you're all just
dying to see some gecko pictures, right? :)
Which leads to another tangent, and a well-traveled one at that. I tried to get Kalila to grab
a mealworm right from the tweezers instead of her dish. It didn't quite work out -- she went
right for the tweezers instead. Mmmmm, aluminum. I still haven't seriously tried to handle her
much and I'm not sure I will... if I really wanted a cuddly pet I'd have gone for a cat. Or a
chipmunk, like the GemStone player at Simucon had.
Speaking of Simucon... heh. That was going to be a joke until I realized there IS something to
say about it. I found out today that the Simucon99 site appears to be totally blank to Netscape
Navigator, though it works fine in IE. Microsoft may not be squeaky clean, but Netscape's worst
enemy in the browser wars is definitely Netscape. :P
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Limbocon
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| 09-20-99 |
Simucon's over. I've almost caught up on lost sleep, my puffy eyes have almost recovered
from the concentrated cigarette smoke, the new axe is hanging in my cubicle, and the secret
plans for world domination are back out of lockup.
It was weird for me this year. Not really a DragonRealms GM anymore, but hanging around
with DR people and wearing the green cord as a token gesture. Not having an official title
relating to Hero's Journey but a strong interest and intent to be heavily involved with it
as soon as we reach a phase where I can be. Being asked questions and not being
able to give useful answers. Knowing some stuff I couldn't even tell other GMs.
I'm sort of in limbo, and I don't like it.
Admittedly, I helped put myself there -- when the announcement about Hero's Journey was
made, I tied up my loose ends and backed off from my involvement in DR. Particularly once
the reorganization happened and we got new job titles. But maybe my expectations were
naive. I figured I'd need to make sure the DR magic system was in good hands (which it is)
and that I was free to spend nearly all my time working on HJ. I figured I'd be knee-deep
in design and that we'd be well into implementing GM tools so the actual game building could
commence.
Instead, the business negotiations have taken a lot longer than I expected. There are
projects to keep us busy in the meantime, and I haven't been a stranger to DR... but
Simucon has reminded me how much I miss being in the thick of things.
Also I'm not a big partier... crowds bug me and I usually don't see the point of just
sitting around in a noisy smoky room getting wasted. Not my kind of thing.
But I'm not saying I didn't have a good time. It was great meeting folks again and I wish
we could just hire all our GMs onsite... they're neat people and I wish we had more than one
week per year together. It was good hearing players talk about good times they've had in
the game, and finding out the things they don't like and trying to come up with things we
can do to fix it. I listened with an ear toward HJ design and heard a lot of things that
made me think. And I'm confident that DR is in good hands, both the GMs' and the
players'.
On another note, my sister sent me a scan of a cool painting she did for art school. I
swear everything she sends is twice as good as the last. We have a guy here at Simu who's
convinced that where it comes to artists, education doesn't matter as much as results. Maybe
that's true, but education brings better results than talent alone. Anyway, once I get
organized I'm going to put her stuff up on a page so you too can gaze on her works and
chortle. All her stuff has a strong sense of humor that makes it what it is.
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Confuseek
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| 09-15-99 |
I've been playing Final Fantasy VIII a bit. I thought for sure I'd fall for Rinoa, 'cause
it's always the brunettes. Maybe they remind me of Eillie or something. But noooo, this
time it's the blond, Quistis. To quote Information
Society of all people, "She's got attitude..." She's like a librarian with
a whip. How cool is that?
I'd be playing it more, but Simucon 99 is getting
underway. Atrathien got in Monday evening, and at dinner he admitted to not having
seen FF8 so Steph and I had to drag him off to see the cool spell effects. And of course
visit the gecko and Steph's cat.
Kalila kind of showed off, in a laid-back gecko sort of way -- which is not spectactular,
but at least she didn't hide or sleep the whole time. :)
(BTW, I will be getting a digital camera... probably the
Jam C@m recently mentioned by Geeknews. It's a
cheap one, and there is definitely a difference between its results and a full quality
digital camera -- but for the price it's not bad at all. Soon, you shall have to suffer
through "family" pictures. Until then,
here's a page with the most
insufferably cute leopard gecko pictures I've ever seen.)
More GMs arrived Tuesday, some got their first view of the Hero's Journey demo, and Alnilam
and Royce both got rides in David W.'s Acura
NSX.
Me, on the other hand... I drive an '89 Dodge Raider. I was searching for
pictures
on the net to link to. (Mine is red, with badly faded black stuff and some grey stripe
decals, and some funky bubble-shaped plastic mud guards for the windows that I hade to take
off 'cause they have a habit of catching the wind and making the truck sail off in some
odd direction at high speeds.) So I went to Infoseek and looked for "Dodge Raider
pictures." It suggested several unusual topics, such as:
Sexual addiction
Sexual abstinence
Professional wrestling photos
South
Park 3D images
The great thing about search engine humor is that the results don't need any embellishment.
| "Gouda cheese" | ·Animation & comics |
| "cow tipping" | ·Biology for kids
·Restaurant tipping
·Public art |
| "laser tag" | ·Beanie Baby accessories |
| "that special feeling" | ·Global warming
·Chupacabra
·Bats |
| "a little to the left" | ·Maternity leave
·Liberal opinions
·Herbal tea |
| "they might not be giants" | ·Dog barking
·Varicose veins
·Dental sealants
·Amiga software support |
| "moose anvil" | ·Humorous gifts
·TV dramas |
| "you are still stunned" | ·I Know What You Did Last Summer series
·Self-defense for women
·URL redirection |
| "You were born on the 11th day of the 10th month of Nissa the Maiden in the year of the Emerald Dolphin, 334." | ·Iron Maiden
·Andy Warhol |
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translate this!
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| 09-12-99 |
If the fantasy is really "Final," why are there 8 of them so far?
Not that I'm complaining. It's just one of those things I've wondered about. Like maybe
it's supposed to be "Ultimate Fantasy" and was mistranslated. Squaresoft is
a great developer but is not known for its multilingual perfection... :)
Speaking of which. I've had way too much fun playing with
Babelfish. It's especially fun if you
translate from English to German and back. Check out what it did to this room in
DragonRealms:
| before: |
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after: |
[Warrior Mage Guild,
Foyer]
Slate grey walls span the tower interior, faint reflections fading in and
out of its glassy sheen. A long steep staircase has been cut into the walls, spiraling its
way up the tapering interior. A set of gleaming ebonwood doors lead out, flanked by two
gruesome and fierce-countenanced dvarapalas. Resting beside the Guildmaster is a small
stand the same blue-grey marble as the perch of his red-banded hawk familiar. You also see
an air elemental, Guildmaster Gauthus, a guild proclamation, a small plaque set above the
staircase and an announcement board.
Obvious exits: none. |
|
[Zuenft, entrance hall WarriorMage]
Span grey
walls of the slate the essay, which, which are weak reflections inside, which fade in and
from its glassy banknote. A long steep stairway was cut into the walls and wound its way up
the zuspitzende inside. A set lead shining ebonwoodtueren out, bordered by two gruesome and
fierce countenanced countenanced dvarapalas. Standing still beside the Guildmaster is a
small location the same bluish gray marble red along as the bar of its a tape provided
Hawkvertrauten. They see an air, which are elementary, being adjusted also to Guildmaster
Gauthus, a Zuenftproklamation, a small plaque, those over the stairway and announcement a
board.
Obvious outputs: none. |
So it's a little weird. But Babelfish must know the Moon Mage guild leader well, 'cause
"Zuenftfuehrer Kssarh" really suits him.
Anyway. I'm sitting here with a copy of Final Fantasy VIII next to me and my shift
still has 6 more hours to go. I. can. hardly. stand. it.
It's a good thing Homeworld
isn't out yet too, because the demo rocks. It's one of those games that's so unique and
so cool, that you can't help but start building a wish list. I want to be able to give
more complex orders, such as "attack the worst threat to my formation." I want
to know at a glance which ship is whining about being low on fuel (though assigning them
to groups and making sure no single group has too many ship types helps). I want to be
able to rotate the main tactical map and navigate that way rather than using the
shift-drag thing to change the Z axis. I want to be able to control everything from the
tactical map, telling groups to intercept a particular enemy group instead of telling
them where to go. I want a "suicide run on the enemy mothership" command. I
want small craft assigned to defend the mothership to dock automatically when they're too
damaged or low on fuel. I don't want a group of ion frigates that's sitting in sphere
formation, pounding the daylights out of the enemy mothership (and getting pounded right
back by its defenders) to inform me after 3 minutes of combat that they have enemy contact.
That's the mark of a great, in-depth game -- it has such high potential that you can
think of all kinds of things they could add to it, and it's so much fun that the lesser
problems stand out. If it were a poor game or a shallow game, there wouldn't be a wish
list 'cause nobody would care enough to come up with one beyond "I wish this didn't
suck."
Blech... between that last paragraph and now, several hours and some major technical
difficulties have passed. I hate having to page people who are out trying to have a
good time. I also don't like it much when I lack some critical piece of knowledge that
would have let me fix it myself. Like, uh, how all this server stuff works. Anyway,
I was pretty much done with my entry anyway so I'll just go ahead and upload it...
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the sky is falling/open season/good+evil
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| 09-09-99 |
I'm writing this on the day the Sega Dreamcast was released in the US, as well as Final Fantasy
VIII. If you dig Nostradamus, either the Earth was smacked hard by a massive comet or the
Antichrist put in its first appearance, or both. Perhaps this is why some programmers in the
60's used today's date as a special flag. If the world's being destroyed nobody cares about
getting their paycheck on time anyway, right?
I must have slept through all that destruction. But I'll get my chance Monday. September 13,
1999 is the date when the Moon is supposed to be hurled right out of the solar system by a
terrible nuclear accident, according to an ancient sci-fi TV show called Space: 1999. Hey, I
watched it when I was a kid. I guess that will make some readers feel old while others wonder
what the heck I'm talking about. But really I was more of a Star Blazers fan anyway.
We're entering Game Buying Season. I've bought just 3 games this year: Half-Life, Brood Wars,
and the out-of-season Episode I Racer. But now I'm looking at FFVIII (and action figures),
Homeworld, Wipeout 3 (and/or Mag 3), Diablo 2, and room for something off the wall like Black
And White or Evolva, and whatever surprise hit game that folks at the office go crazy over this
winter. So what are the chances that I'll actually finish FFVIII?
In high school I had an American History teacher with whom I locked horns a couple of times.
One of them was pretty silly, but the other was a philosophical thing that still bugs me today.
He wanted everyone in the class to indicate whether they thought people are inherently good or
inherently evil. A question to be chewed on for quite some time, but he wanted a snap answer.
And he didn't accept my answer, which was "neither," or another popular answer,
"some people are good and some are evil." It was pretty frustrating, and I couldn't
believe that somebody who knew as much about the reasons for wars and alliances and treaties and laws as
he did (there is no culture in American History) could take such a naive stance on
human motivation. I think I eventually said "good" -- in a contest of wills he could
stomp my sorry butt any day of the week.
I still think the best answer is "neither." I think behavior and ethics are
situational, though different people have different threshholds overall. Somebody who is more
willing than average to put themselves through danger, pain, effort, etc. for the good of others
or for principles is generally seen as heroic; someone who is more willing than average to put
others through that danger, pain, effort, etc. for their own sake is generally seen as
villainous. Most people are, by default, somewhere in between.
I can babble about this all night and not get anywhere. But I wanted to write something about
the practical application of this... how one's philosophy affects how one actually deals with
people, or maybe the other way around.
I've said before that in a massively multiplayer game, what players can do, players
will do. They don't act in the best interests of the game, but they'll do what they
think is in their own best interests. A colleague called this "the shortest path to the
cheese."
Most people will resist the temptation to cheat, some won't. But even without cheating, there
are ways to use the mechanics to your own benefit that can result in game balance problems. The
generally accepted wisdom is that the developer should have foreseen it and designed it out or
designed everything else with it taken into account. I don't disagree, but the problem is that
a player population in the thousands or more is a heck of a lot better at finding these little
anomalies than a handful of designers is. Which leads to tweaking, and the backlash against
tweaking, and so on.
Game developers have to realize ahead of time that players will exploit everything they can. This
doesn't mean that players are evil -- we just have to prepare for the lowest common
denominator. There's a saying, "A person is smart, but people are
dumb." Maybe that can also be applied to ethics in general: the average person is pretty
honest and decent, but people can be pretty rotten?
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natural born roleplayers
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| 09-08-99 |
I got an interesting email from an old friend the other day, and she wasn't 100% sure that she
was writing to who she thought she was. She ran some stuff past me about who she was and who
she suspected I was. (I hope I haven't lost anybody yet 'cause I'm just getting warmed up.)
Another friend remarked to me that having a public journal (like this one) can be frustrating at
times because of the things you can't talk about. Which was something I'd encountered many
times; there are things I'd ocassionally like to write about work and can't, or deeply personal
realizations or admissions or wishes, or major religious experiences. This journal might give
people a view into my life sometimes, but it's through a tinted window. It's an excerpt (I knew
there was some subconscious reason I named it that).
I actually have two other journals for the other stuff. One is an actual paper journal I write
my prayers in, the other is a personal journal I started in April 96. Most of the older entries
embarrass me (the only reason I haven't deleted it is it shows me how much I've changed), so
there's no way I'm showing it to anybody else. :) Actually I've kept some form of journal or
other since about 1983 but I've lost the oldest of them. I don't think I want to know what I
was writing back then because it's not relevant to who I am now.
So I was thinking about how we present different faces to the world, depending on the social
group and the situation. It's not dishonesty, it's just how we fit in. And of course that
makes me think of all the stuff I wrote and deleted about cliques and popularity in schools.
Maybe my analysis was all wrong, and the difference between school and the so-called "real
world" is simply a layer of politeness?
The point I wanted to make originally though is that we're all roleplaying, nearly all the time,
and we're all really good at it. This is the reason people seek solitude at times, whether it's
just going out for a walk or becoming a total hermit -- so they can spend a little time
not roleplaying.
So why aren't we all good at roleplaying in an actual game? Some people just seem to be
projecting themselves into the game world, or treating it in an abstract way -- their character
does not seem to be more than a marker on a board or Pac-Man in his maze. Some people just like
manipulating the stats and making accomplishments. Some people are the other way around, and
will set up a whole elaborate scenario in their minds even when playing a simple arcade game.
(For Wipeout XL, a high-tech racing game, I had this thing about being a Human competing for the
honor of an Elven noble house that had fallen from its former glory, because I thought its Lady
deserved better treatment than the other nobles were giving her. Since I was a Human I had to
be twice as good as the other racers to earn any respect at all, and when I'd beat their best
racers they'd want to kill me. So I ran as the weaponless but fast team, and let them try. I
admit, it was a weird, stupid "plot" and had nothing at all to do with the actual
game... but it was fun.)
But I think in a lot of cases, it's unwise to assume that somebody isn't roleplaying just
because they're into the hack and slash aspect of things. I've observed a definite clique of
people who consider themselves "real" roleplayers, too often with the implication that
other people aren't, and I think they're missing something. A character who goes out, kills
things, sells the loot, and repeats, without stopping to hang around a particular spot in town
and talk and sing songs and joke around, may actually be played quite well. You may never get
to find out where he grew up and what started him adventuring and other details about his
background, but think about how people interact in the real world. They keep to their own
friends and family and coworkers and people who share common interests. They don't stand around
outside the grocery store telling stories about their childhood. They go in, do their business,
and go home.
I'm not saying that it's bad to play the highly social type, just that it's not the only valid
way to roleplay and shouldn't be treated as such.
As for blatant out-of-character behavior... it happens all the time in tabletop RPGs and in all
but formal circumstances in the SCA. But it's discouraged much more heavily online. Online,
the player has no physical presence, and the potential for the illusion that the
character is the only one there is so strong that it's a shame to ruin it by talking
about TV or GMs or other out-of-character things. We are all natural born roleplayers, so
seeing someone mess it up is like watching a great songwriter do Mentos jingles.
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Win 9X/NT( ) Mac( ) Linux( ) Fridge( )
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| 09-05-99 |
Yesterday I wrote a long rant about the Columbine High School shooting, how the backlash of
banning trenchcoats and scapegoating music and games and the internet can only make things
worse, and how the root of the problem is the completely messed up values in our schools. I
went into how K-12 is a hostile, alien environment compared to the rest of American society,
how most adults couldn't take the kind of daily abuse from their peers that high school kids
have to go through, and how much different things might be if schools encouraged learning
and creativity, rather than popularity and conformity. And other things.
But
writing it left a bitter taste in my mouth and reading it afterwards left an angry lump in
my throat, so instead of uploading it I deleted it. That's not what this journal is about.
Anyone who wants to dive into that subject, can read "Voices from the Hellmouth,"
"More Stories From the Hellmouth," and "The Price of Being Different" on
Slashdot and the hundreds of comments replying to them.
Instead, I want to tell you about a marvel of modern technology: the
Electrolux Screenfridge.
It's not just a fridge, it's a family communications center. And it's about the goofiest
thing I've ever seen. This even beats the electronic chef's fork at Brookstone. From their
website:
Screenfridge is also equipped with a TV and radio receiver. Just imagine getting
rid of that bulky tv-set in the kitchen and watching the morning news directly on the fridge
instead. You can also connect surveillance cameras to your fridge to monitor your back yard
or maybe your newborn.
The possibilities are endless. One DragonRealms GM suggested, "You could have a camera
in the fridge, so you wouldn't have to open the door to see what's in there!" Another
was curious to know, "What are you doing storing your newborn in the fridge?"
But the fun doesn't end there!
In addition to sending video messages to family members, you can also use the
Screenfridge to send and receive e-mail. Family members have their own mailbox where both
e-mail and video messages are stored. And yes, you can surf the web too.
Great. Along with WebTV and the next generation net-enabled Game Boy, our customer service
department is going to have to explain to people why they can't play GemStone on their
refrigerator.
What I want to know is, what are you supposed to do with your collection of refrigerator
magnets?
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Mr. Sandman
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| 09-03-99 |
So here we are at the new site. Ain't it purty? Hopefully it works on everybody's
browsers (I'm not so sure about the AOL broswer -- are you seeing this in Verdana, or
in Butt-Ugly Italic 6?) and doesn't look invisible to the color-blind. If there are
any major problems lemme know and I'll see what I can do.
I had this weird dream this morning about a Y2K New Year celebration in... well, it was
supposedly Times Square, but it looked more like Gotham City, Walt Disney World and a
cyberpunk Tokyo all mashed together. A simple lighted ball wasn't flashy enough, there
had to be this big rotating Tesla coil thing studded with spotlights and lasers and
gargoyles and long pointed blades. Lots of loud pumping techno, and for some reason,
low gravity and wind currents, almost like it was underwater. I was tagging along with
this cool samurai chick with really long black hair that kept floating into peoples'
faces and making them sneeze.
Real life should be just a little bit more like that.
So with that bit of weirdness in mind, I got up a little early and decided to clean
Kalila's tank. The paper towels curl up on both ends, and she had actually decided her
"defecatorium" would be behind it, so she didn't have to look at it.
Of course that meant it was smeared all over the glass. Not terribly attractive. So
I decided sand was nice. (I don't remember the brand offhand, but it's a particular
type of sand particularly for reptile terrariums - they can eat it and it won't
cause intestinal impaction.)
I knew she wouldn't be too happy about going back in the deli cup while I cleaned up,
and she wasn't. But I didn't realize the extent to which having a new floor would
freak her out, when all the other things were in the same places as before. A human
walking into a room with a new carpet would know exactly what happened, probably take
off their shoes and try to enjoy it. A cat would notice, maybe sniff at it, but really
not care. A dog would be totally oblivious.
But Kalila figured she was in a whole new environment, one where she didn't feel safe,
and had to check it out very thoroughly. She tasted the sand. She walked through her
water dish several times, then took a drink and remembered what it was for. She
climbed up and over and under and around her hidey-log several times. She walked right
through the pile of worms on the food dish without stopping for a snack, intent on her
exploration. She did a slow lap around the edge of the terrarium, bumping her nose on
the glass to figure out the boundaries. She sat in the corner, pressing her face
against the glass, giving me a pleading look: "This is all very nice Dave, but
I want to go back in my home now."
Well, nobody said a critter with a brain the size of a watermelon seed would be quick
to figure things out.
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HTML for the style-conscious |
| 09-02-99 |
I couldn't resist one more update before moving to the new site, which should happen today
or tommorow. I've learned a good bit about the proper use of style sheets, and
some JavaScript goodies, and more than I wanted to about Netscape's oddities and quirks.
As NN users can hopefully see right now, finally I found why it didn't like my style sheet.
IE inherits TD style from TABLE, while NN does not. IE also lets you wrap an entire table
or set of tables in a DIV or SPAN and inherits the style from its class, while NN does not.
After a lot of screaming, hair pulling, and defining classes called "ihatenetscape" I
finally found somebody's style sheet that defined a style for TD. And it all suddenly made
sense.
As for the Javascript mess on the wallpaper page, I finally found a cross-browser solution
that's better than the old IE one. It opens a new window, where you can watch the image as
it loads (so you don't sit and wonder whether it's working or not). When it's fully loaded
it uses the image as its background, so you can see how it tiles. Ideally I'd have liked to
do that in the main window but this is good enough I can stop worrying about it.
So aside from NN's lack of support for a:hover (which can look really cool but isn't
strictly necessary) and its refusal to allow margins of 0, the new site should look very
similar in the two browsers.
But I still prefer IE. :)
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hack and Slashdot |
| 09-01-99 |
Lately there have been a couple of hacker stories in the news. (Or cracker or whatever. I
tend to use "hacker" because where I came from, a "cracker" is either a Florida native or a
derogatory term for a white person, depending on context, and no matter what, cracking is a
kind of hacking anyway. :P)
One was the exploitation of a hole in Hotmail security, which the hac... crac...
instigator, rather than helpfully and politely informing Microsoft of the problem, decided
to laugh in their face by posting a web page where any bozo could access any Hotmail
account without the password.
The other is the arrest of Chad Davis, a key member of the hacker gang Global Hell. This
group has attacked the web sites of the White House, Department of the Interior, the
Senate, and the state of Virginia, and the FBI itself. Most recently, Davis vandalized the
US Army web site and was caught trying to cover his own tracks -- 3 weeks after the FBI
questioned him about the group and about his activities and confiscated his computer
equipment. If convicted he faces several years in prison.
These stories are making the rounds of Slashdot, Geeknews, and other sites, even
Customize.org. And I'm truly amazed at the attitude some people have about it. People still
think that (A) it's the site owners' fault for not having perfect security, (B) this sort
of thing is funny and harmless, and (C) it's beneficial because it results in better
security.
Well... my apartment door has a deadbolt, which is really good at keeping people out.
Unless they're determined. It won't keep out somebody willing to break the door down, or go
through the windows, or whatever. Is it my "fault" if somebody uses one of these methods to
break in and then spraypaint some stupid slogan on my wall, for not having better security?
Are they doing me a favor in showing that I should have steel bars on my windows,
reinforced concrete walls, etc.?
It seems to me that Geeknews in particular has a pro-hacker bias. I wonder if their minds
would change if their site got shut down or their main page was replaced by a picture of
Barney?
I continue to link to them because of the interesting tidbits of technology news... but I'm
just saying, I don't approve of trashing other peoples' property, violating other people's
security, or breaking the law. I don't think it's right to go poking at somebody else's
site to test their security in the first place. One doesn't walk up to strangers' houses
and try picking the locks and testing the windows. It's just a matter of respect.
From the reptile department (you knew I'd get back to this): Kalila is not only eating,
she's become quite the little pig. I'm told this is normal and I should just give her as
much food as she wants. But it was weird going from 2 worms one day to 10 the next. This
afternoon she had about 7 or 8 between when I woke up and when I was ready to head out for
work. She's also a lot more active and responsive in general.
She doesn't just eat worms, she strikes them. Watches for a moment (even though their
wriggling days are long past), lashes out, grabs one from the side, and chomps down to
"kill" it before getting it turned around and swallowing it. That's one more reason to be
glad you're human and not an inverterbrate of some kind.
The new site is up, but I'm still working on the pages so I'm not ready to give out the URL
yet. So far, though some of the fancy stuff was prototyped in FrontPage first, all the
finished pages are hand-coded HTML. Very sparing use of images, but there's a lot of fancy
table work and the whole thing relies heavily on the STYLE header, even more so than this
page does. Before I make it live I'm gonna have to check it with older browsers and see
just how ugly it turns out to be. And I'm going to look into alternatives for the wallpaper
page while still trying to keep it low maintenance -- as a fallback I'll just allow HTML
access to the directory itself (which I haven't been able to do on free hosts yet but I can
on the new one).
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regulars:
moo
third
chat
kimbered
logic
shades
on a whim:
orisinal
bilbanan
smurf
bang
lobster
yugop
skin
wood
rhythm
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