Asteroid L

Lalos: uma unidade de medida para a realidade

2009-09-18T14:32:42+00:00

(An English version of this will come soon. I hope.)

Essa conversa tem mais de um ano e meio, mas hoje a outra pessoa me lembrou dela e nós concordamos que ela devia ser blogada, compartilhada com o resto do mundo que claramente precisa desse conceito.

(03:15:48) Lalo: joinha aí? :-)
(03:16:01) Preciosa: na medida do possivel..
(03:16:30) Lalo: qual é a medida do possível?
(03:16:58) Lalo: femtômetros ou UAs?
(03:17:51) Preciosa: por favor me explique a pergunta
(03:18:09) Preciosa: femtômetros ou UAs?
(03:18:40) Lalo: ah, eu tava aqui pensando que o Sistema Internacional / ISO devia ter uma unidade de medida pra cobrir "quão real" é alguma coisa
(03:19:10) Lalo: extremamente útil em física quântica
(03:19:11) Preciosa: ja tentei fazer isso, mas as pessoas nao entedem
(03:19:51) Preciosa: e alem do mais nao achei um nome legal p/ a escala
(03:20:56) Lalo: como as unidades SI geralmente são definidas em termos de outras unidades
(03:22:24) Lalo: podemos definir "1 lalo" como o grau de realidade/surrealidade de uma barra de medida de um metro, que por acaso tem exatamente um metro
(03:23:06) Preciosa: na verdade nao tem mais
(03:23:17) Preciosa: diminiu alguns milimetros
(03:23:18) Lalo: como tal coisa não existe exceto em caso de extrema e improvável coincidência, esse seria um valor bem baixo
(03:24:02) Preciosa: lalo eu tou me sentindo meio lora
(03:24:15) Preciosa: vc ta pensando muito rapido... abaixa a rotaçao
(03:24:38) Lalo: 0 seria algo que nós podemos imaginar mas não existe: teleporte, Superman...
(03:25:15) Preciosa: mas nos podemos pensar em quase tudo
(03:25:38) Lalo: pensar != imaginar
(03:25:40) Preciosa: ou seja, a escala na maioria das vezes ficaria em 0.alguma coisa
(03:26:14) Preciosa: preciso de uma quadro branco
(03:26:24) Lalo: imaginar literalmente implica ter uma idéia mais ou menos tão real qto vc tem de algo que vc realmente experimentou
(03:26:47) Lalo: nah, 1 é um valor baixo, representa uma coincidência muito improvável
(03:27:08) Lalo: pelas minhas contas a vida cotidiana de uma pessoa "normal" oscila por volta dos 10 lalos
(03:27:34) Lalo: coisas como leis da física vc pode medir em quilolalos
(03:28:36) Lalo: e valores negativos podem exprimir idéias como um gosto vermelho ou formas de vida bidimensionais
(03:28:54) Preciosa: conversa de bebado = a qntos lalos?
(03:29:11) Lalo: depende da pessoa... entre 2 e -20
(03:29:19) Lalo: e do tipo de álcool consumido
(03:29:31) Lalo: essa conversa, por exemplo, eu estimo em cerca de -1 em média
(03:29:45) Preciosa: depende de p/ onde ela vai
(03:30:02) Preciosa: eu voto em a gente fazer um grafico a la indexed
(03:31:28) Preciosa: proxima vez eu conseguiria qntificar meus dias como produtivos ou nao pela escala lalo
(03:31:50) Preciosa: acho q meus dias estao muito solidos... to ficando doida c/ isso
(03:32:10) Preciosa: excesso que realidade esta me matando
(03:32:24) Preciosa: acho q tem haver com as pessoas que eu estou convivendo
(03:32:28) Lalo: ou melhor... acho que uma pessoa "normal" estaria lá pelos 50... "dull dull dull dull dull" (como diria Monty Python) seria cerca de 100...
(03:32:45) Lalo: minha vida variando entre o 5 e o 23
(03:32:52) Lalo: com seus dias de 0.5
(03:33:45) Preciosa: acho q estou nuns 20 25
(03:34:14) Preciosa: acho q estou sobria demais
(03:34:28) Lalo: vc poderia medir vidas em decalalos e teorias em centilalos
(03:35:48) Preciosa: na verdade o potencial desta escala p/ mim é
(03:36:33) Preciosa: algo como "objetivo do dia: baixar a realidade em volta deste ambiente em 10 lalos"
(03:36:47) Lalo: \o/
(03:37:02) Preciosa: acho um bom objetivo... é mensuravel, simples e divertido

It's OK To Be Blue

2009-09-09T21:12:36+00:00

(from the smash-hit Xavier School Musical)

Words and lack of music by Lalo Martins and May B., after a concept by May B.

Archangel and Beast created by Stan Lee, Nightcrawler and Mystique by Chris Claremont

(if the formatting is too messed up for you to understand it, try to read it here)

Archangel (who was just recently transformed by Apocalypse) is sitting alone pouting in a corner. Nightcrawler and Beast walk into the room.

Nightcrawler: What's the matter, mein freund?Archangel: I'm just feeling blue.Beast: I take offence to that word. It's insensitive.Archangel: But that's exactly my point, don't you see? I was beautiful! Rich! Everybody loved me! And now--Nightcrawler: But you should know better than care about people who like you for your looks.B: Us sapphire-hued persons--A: Sapphire-hued???B: Well, I thought--N: No, Hank. Just no.A: What I need isn't a politically-correct term, Hank.B: Far from me to force one upon you then, my blue colleague. Still, Kurt and I have come to ...

Lalo's kitchen: dishwashing tips

2009-07-23T01:07:17+00:00

It seems at least half my friends have ADD. And most don't own a dishwasher. From the ADD-free, a significant portion are just plain lazy. Yes, you know who you are. ;-)

So most of us know that ugly monster: the pile of dirty dishes. It's gross, it's an eyesore, it attracts bugs, and it's a vicious cycle — the larger the pile, the harder it is to motivate yourself to wash it. Eventually, you run out of clean stuff and fall into the shameful “maintenance mode” — when you need dishes, you wash what you need, use it, and throw it in the pile again.

My advice? Well buy a freakin' dishwasher. If you can't afford it, however (and I can't right now), here's my top-secret-well-not-really-actually-not-secret-at-all technique to tackle it.

First and foremost: make “maintenance mode” your usual mode. The question of whether you have clean dishes shouldn't even be in your mind; the better question is whether you have dirty ones. If you find this strange, or if you find it hard to motivate yourself to do this, think this way: isn't it great to eat in freshly-washed dishes, that didn't yet have time to accumulate dust or get walked on by insects?

Once you program yourself into that habit, your pile will grow less and less fast. But that's not what you want; you want it not to be there, of course.

So here's step two. Every time you need dishes, wash twice as much as you need. For extra feel-good points, wash twice as much plus one item.

A common variation of this technique, good for people who have discipline, is to wash what you need, use it, then wash it again. Don't even try this. Come on, if you had any discipline you wouldn't have a pile to begin with.

The truth is that it's much more easy to get motivated to wash before eating than after. It's an immediate need, to begin with; you're freakin' hungry. And after you eat, you're usually feeling contented, maybe even sleepy — or alternatively, if you had a light meal and it's still in your productive hours, you'll be feeling motivated to rush back to work.

One last thing: moving stuff to the cabinet. If the reason you get a pile is ADD or disorganisation (or laziness), then you probably also forget to take the clean dishes out of the drier and into the cabinet. You probably only remember right after washing, at which point they're of course wet (even the ones that were already clean before will be wet because you spilled water on them when you put the new ones there). What I do is, I “edited” my morning routine to add the dry dishes. If you're a coffee person, that's the ideal time: while you wait for the coffee, get everything in the drier and put it in the cabinet. If you're not a coffee person, I'm sure there's some other slot in your morning routine where a brainless manual activity would be welcome to help you wake up.

Cheers and happy clean kitchen! ;-)

LNH: 58.5 #49: Cannon Fodder Triumphant

2009-04-06T04:47:49+00:00

[One day -- maybe -- I'll remember I can't post from pan
*before* trying. *sigh]

"What now?", asked Pantra, holding back the door to the storage
room they had just reached, after a fierce battle.

Fodder was busy going through their stuff, which, as Pantra
promised, was in that room. He held his Secretary Box
triumphantly. "Here you are!"

"That's not a weapon", observed Pantra.

"No. But it can open a Bang Path back to Looniearth."

"Fodder, we don't need reinforcements. If we can't take them,
...

Teach a man to fish

2009-04-01T00:13:02+00:00

Mostly a note to self... a thought that is pertinent to my issues and goals. Maybe a company motto can be extracted from this somehow.

Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Set up a fishing business and make it look harder than it really is, and you feed yourself for a lifetime, or at least until people figure your scam out.

It's my opinion that the basic business model of the whole software swindle is predicated on this premise...

LNH: 58.5 #48: Warning, Giant Marshmallow Puppies Inside

2009-03-31T13:04:34+00:00

[great. Pan still has the bug, and Thunderbird is timing out. Let's try to post from Google then...]

April 404. Washing.net.ton DC.

"Oh my, oh my, those are some LARGE puppies", said Fan Boy.

"An average 50 meters from paw to shoulder, large enough to cause considerable damage simply by stepping on things", Analytic analyzed.

"They're so adooooooooooooooorable!", squeed Bandwagon Chick.

"They're a klick away, but I can feel the sugar rush from here. And the smell is overpowering", said Contraption Boy. ...

LNH: 58.5 #47: Iz In Ur Sequelz Swechin Ur Baytz

2009-03-11T20:01:42+00:00

This issue is drawn by an artist heavily influenced by Alan Davis, so when I describe a scene, imagine Alan Davis drawing it. Here we go then.

Earth 308.

We're in a beach; there's nobody in sight. I'm not talking about the gorgeous entertainment spots that the word "beach" evokes for most people, in most places, especially California Hawaii, or the Caribbean; I'm thinking more along the lines of the miserable gray-ish sad places you'll find, for example, in the British coast. There's way too many little stones in the sand, and the sea is a bit too dirty to swim in.

Now. You know the BANG sound you get when you pop a balloon or ...

Dongmen again

2009-03-05T23:51:22+00:00

(“Again”? Well, I could swear I blogged about it last time :-P anyway, Dongmen is a mind-blowing area near “downtown” (or “downdistrict”) Luohu which I discovered in December, the thing looks like one gigantic mall, you can walk in it for hours and find pretty much anything you can imagine.)

So Dongmen continues to blow my mind. I was walking around yesterday, looking for something to eat, when I walked into a real, honest-to-Raiden... Arcade!!!

Like pretty much everything in Dongmen, it was supersized. Aisles upon aisles upon aisles of (what I'm assuming to be) the newer stuff (since I don't actually go to arcades since 2002ish), side by side with awesome vintage stuff from every generation this side of space invaders. Stuff I grew up with, which pushed (pun intended) all the right buttons.

When I decided my senses were overloaded to my satisfaction and I would take a quick look at the sports section before leaving, I discovered that behind that, there was still another room O.o

I love the sound of arcades. Dozens of different tracks of loud music superimposed over each other plus game sound effects and people talking...

I almost gave in and played some flight sim... but I looked at the machine, the machine looked at me, and I knew I wasn't going to last 8 seconds there, so I decided not to waste of money. Maybe some other day :-)

And btw, yesterday it rained (heavily) all day. I even went out in the rain and got wet. What, me complaining? Absolutely not! After 4 years of Beijing, it was a relief! Go Shenzhen!

LNH: 58.5 #46: I Can't Help It, The Characters, They Just Keep Coming

2009-02-28T19:07:15+00:00

[trying once from Thunderbird to see if the issue is with Pan]

No recap this issue; if you want to know what's going on, pick up #45, it's all recap. Well, not really, but pretty much.

In an universe two floors down and a little to the left, most net.a.human (or "enhanced", as they call it) activity is centered around a large city in the Northwest coast of the Union States of Columbia, a sprawling urban wonder called-- Manhattan.

Facing their Central Park, on the West side, there is a large building in classical style, a monument to "enhanced" heroes past and present, the "Mansion of Justice", headquarters to this world's premier enhanced hero team: the Old School.

...

Why Alan Moore is right, and why he's wrong

2009-02-28T08:23:00+00:00

Excerpt from Alan Moore's interview at Wired:

One thing is that with the comics medium, it has been proven—I believe by Pentagon tests in the late '80s—that comics are actually the best medium for imparting information to somebody in a form that they will retain and remember. That's not just me saying that, that's the Pentagon. I personally feel—and this is just pseudo-scientific hippie bullshit—I feel this might be because the unit of currency of what used to be called our left brain is the word. Our left brain is what goes about speech and rationality. The unit of currency for our right brain, conversely, would be the image, because the right brain is preverbal.

So perhaps it is because of the combination of words and images in a readable form that comics does have this unique power. Now, of course, movies are a combination of words and images, but they have a completely different structure and completely different way of working. With a movie you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames a second. With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier.

You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons' brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they'd be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details. Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie. Even if they did, it would have zipped past far too quickly. Because the audience at the movie theater is not in control of the experience in the same way somebody reading is.

One of my big objections to film as a medium is that it's much too immersive, and I think that it turns us into a population of lazy and unimaginative drones. The absurd lengths that modern cinema and its CGI capabilities will go in order to save the audience the bother of imagining anything themselves is probably having a crippling effect on the mass imagination. You don't have to do anything. With a comic, you're having to do quite a lot. Even though you've got pictures there for you, you're having to fill in all the gaps between the panels, you're having to imagine characters voices. You're having to do quite a lot of work. Not quite as much work as with a straight unillustrated book, but you're still going to do quite a lot of work.

And I have to agree. Comics are comics; you read it at your own pace, you analyse the details like it held the secrets of the universe, you enjoy the little hidden things both in the art and story, and you fill in the gaps. That's what makes it great, and that's why, no matter how well the movie is done, the comic will always be better.

(Well. In normal circumstances at least. I've seen mediocre books or short stories become great movies, but that's a separate story altogether, and to date I haven't seen it done with comics yet.)

On the other hand, I think dismissing the flick like he does is a waste of good entertainment as well. Time to quote from Dave Gibbons' interview in the same issue:

The most bizarre thing was to actually be inside the Owlship, you know? As I kind of implied in an earlier answer I've always loved drawings and measured plans of things. I went to a lot of trouble to make the Owlship convincing and make room for everything that we saw inside it. So, to actually be inside this thing—the thing that had been inside my head, I was now inside that. It felt exactly like the space that I'd felt when I'd done the drawings. I think that was really the strangest thing, to sit in the command chair and play with the joystick and press the buttons and watch all the lights flash on.

And that's where the magic really is. That's why those geeky movies are so great. It's like, well, going to a theme park, except usually with higher quality results. These things have lived in our imaginations for years, and now we get to see them there, big and real-looking. It's, well, fun.

Another important thing missed there is that movies can be a social experience. Comics, by the very merit of being read at your own pace, are solitary; you can get together with people to read comics, but you don't actually read together — well, you can, but it kind of ruins the experience. That's what is (well, used to be) so great about Heroes; it's kind of like reading a comic book, only I do it with my girlfriend, and we react together.

Short version? Absolutely do go watch the Watchmen, but not if you haven't read the comic yet. :-)

LNH: 58.5 #45 Who Cares If Anyone Reads This, I'm Going To Finish It!

2009-02-27T17:09:14+00:00

April 385th.

The New Misfits looked at the dead, blackened forms of the Acla Fright, as they fell, lifeless; but Smoke Ring Girl's stood still where they had last seen her alive, still kneeling over Forbidden Lore's dead body, hands clenched where the other girl's neck used to be. Wally made a movement towards her, but then she crumbled to thin, grey ash.

"Holy ~&*&#$#~", said Pantra.

(BANG!), made something in the back of the room. The New Misfits who were conscious and alive snapped to attention, expecting another surprise attack.

...

How to use bzr-svn with SourceForge

2009-02-17T20:58:00+00:00

Some projects I work with haven't yet abandoned Subversion. I try to tolerate it as much as I can, but sometimes (if I need local commits, or if there is heavy merging involved) it just won't do. Thankfully, I have bzr-svn to make my life less miserable.

The thing is, though; how to do the initial branching (“checkout” for those still stuck in svn terminology)? Because bzr-svn tries too hard at being atomic, and we all know SourceForge's Subversion server is made of purest fail. If the server decides to disconnect you in the middle of the operation, you lose all the (potentially hours of) work until that point.

After much frustration, I figured out the way to go with that.

First, branch from revision 0: bzr branch -r 0 https://crossfire.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/crossfire/server/trunk server-svn-trunk. Now you have a local branch that is already usable (well, usable as a branch, there will obviously be nothing in the working tree). Here lies the greatest trick, because while getting revision 0 doesn't actually pull any revisions, it makes bzr-svn do most of its hard mapping work.

Then get inside the branch, and pull the revisions in batches of (in my experience) no more than 500: bzr pull -r 500 && bzr pull -r 1000 && bzr pull -r 1500 etc. If something fails, you don't have much left to recover from.

You may be asking, if it's that painful, why do I bother? Simple: because it's only painful in the initial branching. After it's all up and running, it will be a lot less messy than dealing with svn, especially if I have non-trivial merging to perform. (Which, in this case, I do.)

The Muse: Bipolar disorder type 2?

2009-02-13T03:15:00+00:00

Here's my latest archeo-neurological or archeo-psychiatric theory: “muse” is really an old term for bipolar disorder type 2.

It is my impression that old artists would sit around (or walk around) for days, weeks, doing nothing remarkable, or sometimes doing the hard, mechanical work of polishing up their creations. They would wonder where their “muses” are, why their genius is dormant.

And then one day, without warning, they feel that creativity, that exhilaration, that burst of awesome ideas, and a touch of insanity, that we've come to call genius; and they would attribute its less-than-constant presence to an invisible entity, the “muse”.

I believe, in our age, we call it hypomania, instead. A symptom of bipolar disorder type 2, a very common affliction that is frequently found in creative people. Paraphrasing Wikipedia, it's unknown whether creative types are more prone to be bipolar, or bipolars are more prone to be creative, or both are caused by a third, unidentified factor. What we do know is that the overlap is too great to be a coincidence.

Why is this interesting? Well, bipolar 2/creative people also tend to be romantics. So if you don't mind, I think I'll start referring to my hypomania as a muse, thankyouverymuch. It just sounds so much more desirable that way.

A reflection on game styles in CRPGs

2009-01-15T05:20:00+00:00

This is an attempt at a taxonomy of style choices I've observed in CRPGs (I still refuse to call the game genre “RPG”; a game is not an RPG unless it in any way involves playing a role). This is based on “old-school” games I've been playing most of my life, on “massively social” games that have been popping up recently (and a nod to those that aren't CRPGs as well), and on second-hand accounts of MMORPGs, which I personally haven't played enough to form opinions on.

Special attention is given to how these choices affect the design of Crossfire 2.0, and other future projects I have planned.

If you first need an introduction, refresher, or fact-checker about the “scene”, I'll make a somewhat heterodox recommendation: Sluggy Freelance's Years of Yarncraft storyline is an in-depth, insightful, and accurate, if not serious, look on the whole thing. It doesn't cover the “massively social” phenomenon, but I hope I will do that in the article.

Player styles

I'll start with player and playing styles, because I believe understanding how people play a game and how/why they enjoy it is necessary before you can even discuss the rest.

Bear in mind, like most taxonomies when applied to people, most of my classifications below are talking about primary traits; most people will be a combination of different types, either by combination, or over time (like, on different days you may be an explorer or a role-player).

Primary activity interest

A very, very long time ago, people who played actual RPGs (nowadays relegated to being called “tabletop RPGs”, sigh) first classified players in two basic camps: the hack-and-slash camp, and the roleplay camp.

Over the years, and as we got acquainted with CRPGs and adventures and computer strategy games, this was refined, expanded upon, simplified again, and distilled. Today, while there are many ways to make this distinction, which are certainly valid in their own ways, I believe a simple split in four groups is the most useful, in terms of understanding and designing games.

So I call players either: gamer, hack-and-slasher (H&Ser), role-player (RPer), or explorer.

Hack-and-slashers are in it to fight. Nowadays, that doesn't necessarily mean actual in-game fights; rather, H&Sers like to win. They get fun from the game primarily by enjoying the rush of victory and superiority. In a classic CRPG, the easiest and most rewarding way to do that is by combat.

The key aspect to please H&Sers is challenge/reward: it must be relatively easy to find something that challenges them, the challenge can't be too easy, it can't be impossible, and the reward after winning must be proportional and appropriate, in order to trigger the reward pleasure centres.

You can alienate H&Sers with limits. If, for example, they can only run so many fights in a day, your H&Sers will probably just create second/third/fourth characters, or abandon the game after a short time. If they defeat everything you throw at them and then there's nothing more to fight and they need to wait a day, or three, or a week before there's more, they will probably not log in at all during this period, and there's a chance they will have discovered something else in the interval, which means you lost the player.

Role-players are run by imagination. They want to “be” someone else and do things they wouldn't do in real life. They really care about the character. They also form a mental opinion of the character's personality and preferences, and try to make choices according to that.

The key aspect to please RPers is believability: they must be able to suspend their disbelief when they start playing, and stay in their imaginary world until they decide to leave. Anything in the game that pulls them back to the real world is a disruption to that “flow”. Believability is not the same thing as realism; realism is just one of the ways of doing it, but it would be boring if all games were realistic; many (most?) RPers go to the games precisely in search of some “believable” fantasy. My personal “three pillars of believability” are internal consistency, depth, and detail; I'll expand on another post if there is interest, but I think it's pretty self-explanatory as it is.

You can alienate RPers (other than the lack of the above) with simple discouragement. RPers are a relative minority, and many other players think they are a bit weird. Every time you remove a feature that benefits RPers, or add one that hinders them, their interest will wane. If players are allowed to openly discriminate against them, they will leave. A good strategy some games adopt is to offer separate, RP-focused servers where RP is mandatory.

Gamers see the whole thing as a game. Which, technically, it is ;-) A gamer enjoys looking for edges and tricks to optimise the character, the overall strategy, battle tactics, economics, party/guild workings, everything.

The key aspect to please gamers is strategy: there must be cool, useful, and difficult to find tricks. There must be a wide range of possible strategies. But to avoid alienating the other players, it must be possible to play the game without them. It's also a good idea to “shake things up” occasionally; change the rules so that some strategies get nerfed, others spring up, and the gamers have to look for the new ones. They'll complain, but it won't be sincere; while they do have an attachment to their painstakingly-develop tricks, they have more pleasure in finding new ones than using what they have.

You can alienate gamers with ephemeral rewards. For example: say you offer a way to greatly improve weapons. Say it's either hard to do, or expensive; and say it's relatively hard to find. That's the kind of thing gamers love. But then, after a lot of effort to improve his sabre, he discovers that your game mechanics require changing weapons every few days. So now, all that effort is wasted.

Explorers want to see your game. They want to see everything, try everything the game has to offer. There are subgroups, of course; some want to see the whole world, some want to play every single last quest, some “collect” items, some want to understand the underlying story, some want to play many times with every possible class (or profession or whatever the equivalent).

The key aspect to please explorers is rich content: this one is a no-brainer :-) the more there is to see, the more they'll like it. But it has to be interesting; if every town looks the same, they'll stop by the 3rd or 4th.

You can alienate explorers with too much or too little obstacle. If I can simply create a character and explore the whole world, I'll have fun and maybe even write you a good review, but I will also drop the game after a few days. On the other hand, if I can't explore anything new for a whole week, I'll get bored and leave as well.

An interesting way to put it is that each of those 4 groups “plays with” a different portion of the brain. The H&Ser plays with the instinctive pleasure centres, the RPer with the imagination, the gamer with the intelligence, and the explorer with the curiosity.

Finally, there is of course a fifth group: those that aren't interested in the game itself, at all. There are many possible cases here; some people play MMORPGs and “massively social” games primarily to “meet” new people, or to chat. Others like looking at the game, because it's cute or cool or whatever; although those either don't stick around for long, or evolve into a specialised sort of “explorer”. Some play because they like the setting; this is especially the case for games that are adaptations of known fictional settings. Again, those players either leave after a while, or drift into one of the other categories.

To quest or not to quest

Good quests are one of the best tools of the trade. It's what turns a game into a medium for interactive storytelling. However, the plain, harsh truth is that some people don't really care about your story! Some people want to be able to enjoy the “regular” things to do in the game, and stay away from the quests, or do them just as much as absolutely required. Again, it's a spectrum; on one end, some players completely avoid quests, while on the other, they play for the quest and only do other stuff in order to “support” the quest requirements.

Wait, what? Some people like doing the day-to-day character maintenance more than quests, or even to their exclusion? It's easy to fall in the trap of assuming the day-to-day stuff is boring; but in reality, people are different and have different tastes. True quote from a real person in my tweeter feed today: “I hate when my routine gets disrupted. Life without routine is totally boring and not worth living.” I was amazed at first, but upon reflection, it just proves my old core belief that people are different; and it matches my observations of game players. Some really do come back every day for the maintenance routine, and find quests a disruption.

Worker vs. fighter

In the “massively social” CRPGs that are popping up online recently (I'll offer Travians as an example that I actually like playing), you have other things to do than going around bashing people's teeth in.

Now, on many MMORPGs you can do other things as well. The stories of “gold farmers” in WoW are a famous example; real-life sweatshops with people connected to the game making in-game items in an in-game sweatshop. But in most games, those activities are second-class; you can't be a level 70 tailor or miner, for example.

To explore the case of Travians, it started up not so much as a CRPG, but a kind of RPG-ified “The Sims”; just like “The Sims” was originally a toy to spy in more detail on the life of citizens from Sim Cities, and later grew to oversell its “parent” game by far, also Travians grew out of another game by the same company, called Travian (yeah confusing... but the company is German, and in German Travian is called Travian, but Travians is called Travianer, which is... well, slightly better). Travian is a strategy game, a kind of massively-multiplayer Catan/Civ. Then along came Travianer/Travians, where you get to play one of the actual citizens.

The funny side-effect of this story is that, although there is fighting aplenty and a quest, the main focus of Travians is not to fight, but rather to be a productive citizen. You harvest one of the primary resources from Travian (clay, wood, ore, or grain), or you process them into secondary resources (bricks, boards, coal, iron, flour, bread). Fighting doesn't reward you with money, only experience; to get money you need to work. (But if you really, really want to be a bum, you can live off of digging up treasure in the swamp.)

This experiment (and the success of Travians) brought a realisation: some people like doing things other than fighting. Some people like putting the character to work, or figuring out the complexities of trade.

And frankly? After the success of The Sims, we really should have figured this out earlier.

Simple vs. rich (or, dull vs. complex)

Complexity in a game is a tough issue. Complexity comes in all levels: quest, rules, user interface. Make it too simple, and many players will be bored; and, of course, you won't attract any “gamer” players. Make it too complex, and many players will be bored, or confused.

Personally, I'm a follower of the school of making complexity optional. Offer a very simple version; the easy-to-find quests, the basic rules, the default UI. But also offer layers and layers of extra complexity the player can opt in to: extra quests or side-quests that, preferably, tie into the main quest and enrich its story; additional corner rules for special, rare items, or for advanced classes, or something; optional elements in the UI that can be configured.

And then there are wizards. This is complete guesswork on my part, but from observation, I believe people who prefer to play magic-users, also prefer a little more complexity. It makes sense; understanding large spell lists, with the reward of having more options of action, as opposed to getting a weapon and bashing stuff — that's clearly a complexity choice.

The trade of trading

Trading is a human pleasure. Like most human pleasures, some people abhor it, others can't live without it.

In most CRPGs and CRPG-alikes, some form of trading is required. In Crossfire, WoW, or even old-school Diablo and Ultima, you'll get random stuff from questing, stuff that you don't want but that is worth money; on the other hand, some items you'll never find, or you won't find often enough, so you'll have to buy instead. In Travians and others, you need to actually produce and sell things in order to make game money.

But from that, sprung a funny tangent: some people like doing it. Some people enjoy looking for the best price, or even finding ways to make profit out of buying stuff in one place and selling it elsewhere.

I'm told in the Korean MMORPG Ragnarok Online, playing a trader is actually an option. It's still somewhat limited, as you still need to fight in order to level up; but it's an added choice, and apparently, lots of people actually go for it. I'd like to see a CRPG where fully playing a trader is an option; your goal is actually to make profit, and you level by making good deals. Or rather: I'd like it even more to write it ;-)

Game model styles

Time is money

A trend that is integral part of the “massively social games” phenomenon is limiting how much you can do based on time. Generally, that's done using some sort of points that regenerate through time, and which you spend to do some of the things in the game; Travians has “occupational points”, and Imperial Galaxy has “command bandwidth”, for example. There are ways to get bonuses to produce these points faster; in Travians you get more OP if you sleep in better beds, while in Imperial Galaxy it's basically a matter of keeping your “home sector” clean.

Strategy and building games use more resource-centred techniques; in Nile Online and Travian, your limit is how fast you can harvest resources that are needed as materials to build stuff. Also, each building takes a fixed time to build, and you can only have one construction going on (per city) at any given time; so if my current palace upgrade takes 12h, that means I can't build anything else on that city for the next 12h.

The purpose of these limits seems to be twofold. On one side, you want to avoid giving compulsive players that have no lives a very big advantage, because that drives everyone else away. But also, these daily limits are an encouragement for players to come back every day and do a little more.

This is a hard choice to make. And personally, I think there's an enormous risk of limiting it too much and becoming annoying; everyone I know who plays Travians agrees there aren't enough OPs in a day.

In some games, the limit can also serve to encourage players to explore other aspects; in particular, the more social aspects. But doing that well requires your limits to be partial (not affect the social aspects — Travians fails in this point), and more importantly, it requires the other aspects you want to emphasise as an alternative to be well-developed and interesting.

Specialise or balance?

This one has been an ongoing argument in Crossfire for as long as I can remember.

Some games strongly encourage you to build an all-rounded character. In Travians, for instance, I tried to ignore the combat aspects at first, but quickly found myself unable to complete quests. Then, still unwilling to split my (limited) attention, I decided to focus on combat; but after a few days, weapon upgrades became too expensive for me, and now I need to spend a few more days upgrading my tools. So their system essentially forbids focusing.

On the other side, MMORPGs usually encourage teamplay by giving strong benefits to cooperation between differently-focused characters; the typical successful WoW party requires (at least) one or two tanks, one or two damage-dealers, a spell caster, and a healer. (The typical D&D party adds to that recipe one trap finder and one leader.)

In Crossfire, focusing is good on lower levels, but the usual complaint is that pretty much all level 100 characters are identical (or possibly, can be divided into dragons and non-dragons).

It's all about choice

There are different kinds of players, with different preferences and styles. Do you try to allow all styles, or do you focus your efforts on pleasing one category? Both are valid choices, especially if development resources are very limited.

If you think this section is too short, feel free to re-read the first section of this post, Player styles, and reflect on all the game model choices hidden in there ;-)

Starting from zero we've got nothing to lose

In Years of Yarncraft, Pete Abrams pokes fun at this aspect, by having Torg's character start the game armed only with a stick, and having to kill a bunch of salamanders as his first quest.

How low do you want characters to start? The traditional answer, until relatively recent times, was that a starting character had to be reasonably capable, enough to entice and interest the player. But now, the trend seems to be starting very close to zero. And if the game offers a lot of choice, that may actually be a good thing, because then you won't have to make some of those choices until you have a better understanding of their effects.

Of particular interest to this aspect is the trend of making the first few quests a tutorial of sorts, teaching some of the most important things in the game. Travian plays this card heavily (possibly a little too heavily; you don't want people to feel patronised).

This also ties in to game mechanics choices (which I'm covering in the next post) about character growth and the meaning/algorithms of attributes and skills. It's common in simpler games to start all attributes at 0, which means normal human average, and then simply add to them a number of points per level, without any real final cap.

Those pesky economics

All RPG-like games must include some sort of an economy. In single-player games, that's traditionally just a question of making sure more powerful items are more expensive, while at the same time your ability to acquire game-money increases as you progress. Additionally, different items would be available for sale in different areas of the game world.

Then, simulation-heavy games and procedural content came along, and it became fashionable to try to achieve a “real economy” in the game world. I have personally not played a game that does that, or even seen positive reviews about one, so the benefit seems questionable.

But there's something better than a simulated “real” economy: a real real economy. Travian, Travians and Nile Online have all succeeded in doing that, Nile to a much greater extent. Quite simply, if most (or all) trading is with other players, and you have a sufficiently large number of them, soon real market factors will emerge, and in a way that players can understand without too much effort.

Maybe the ideal best is a mixed, real/simulated “real” economy, where player purchases have a strong (primary even) influence, but where items that players aren't really interested on can also fluctuate, as NPC demand for them grows and shrinks due to simulated or player-caused events. But the reason those web-based games have succeeded in creating an actual economy is one that may defeat this point: simply, those games have staggering numbers of players — thousands upon thousands online simultaneously at any given moment — which is enough population to simulate the economy of a small village.

On a side note, someone linked a very funny (but true) article about RPG economics to #crossfire earlier in the week. While the article is about D&D (and other “tabletop” fantasy RPGs), it mostly applies to CRPG as well.

To be continued

All right... I ran out of time and brain power :-) and I'm afraid nobody will bother to read this if it gets any longer than it already is. In a few days time, I'll write about game mechanics styles, and story/setting styles.

Metaphor argameddon: Christmas and comics

2008-12-24T17:06:52+00:00

[00:32] <someone> Whatever your timezone can be...............my Best Wishes for Happy Christmas Holidays to you all :)
[00:33] <guy> no spoilers please. We're still in the "eve" over here in Canada
[00:39] <me> that doesn't spoil the christmas... sheesh... seriously if you haven't heard about it from the previews and solicitations and hype and last-page blurb and gossip then you don't really read comics!
[00:39] <dude> spoliers
[00:39] <dude> fXXX
[00:39] <dude> I dind't know it was Christmas
[00:39] <dude> does Santa come back?
[00:40] <me> it's about what's going to happen in it, especially what presents you'll get
[00:40] <me> but everybody who's paying attention already knew the next cross-over was going to be christmas
[00:40] <me> sorry, I'm showing my age, it's called "event" these days
[00:41] <me> dunno if Santa is going to be in it... hope so... haven't seen a good Santa story in two years
[00:41] <dude> man
[00:41] <dude> Santa hasn't been the same since they killed the original one
[00:43] <me> at least he's fat again. *That* was bizarre.
[00:44] <dude> no kidding

Automagically-translating chat thingy

2008-12-19T22:23:00+00:00

Usually, I have to communicate with the people in the building's management office via Google Translate. It works, but it's awfully painful to be constantly flipping the language drop-downs back and forth. (It's two drop-downs, one for source and one for target language.)

So I wrote a little javascript gadget that does the hard work for me, and also keeps a “log” of the conversation. You can peruse it at http://lalomartins.info/transchat.html

(Attention though: this is not a chat app, not in the modern sense. It's “chat” in the old-school sense, of actually talking to a person that's in front of you. It's... an interpreter widget, not a chatbox :-) enjoy and spread if you wish...)

Instant non-instant coffee

2008-12-06T12:18:31+00:00

Just saw the niftiest idea on Jusco (the local hypermarket): Instant non-instant coffee.

Say what?

Well, I tried to take a picture, but it wouldn't have helped at all, unless I bought and opened the thing, and it was a bit too expensive for my budget.

In short: it's “normal” coffee (ground, roasted), in the quantity you'd use to brew a jar, sealed in an airtight bag, sealed inside a second paper bag, of the same paper you make filters, and shaped like a filter. So you rip open the paper bag, and the lower half that remains is your filter; then you open the inner bag, pour the coffee on the filter, and from there you proceed like when doing normal coffee.

Eh, what's the point then? Well, it's portable. You carry one or two in your purse/backpack/trenchcoat pocket, and you won't want for coffee.

Except, of course, that you'll need a filter holder (or a 1 yuan funnel) and a jar or thermos bottle and... oh well, forget about it, silly idea. ;-)

The Trading of Jackasses

2008-11-22T17:13:51+00:00

My cousin, who is a lawyer, just spammed part of the family with this very illustrative and educative story, which explained to me something I always had a lot of trouble understanding. I'll translate it to the best of my capacity, for your own edification.

Once upon a time, in a countryside village, a stranger showed up, announcing to the villagers he'd buy any and all jackasses for $1000 each. (Read that as dollars, marks, francs, pounds, yuan, whatever is appropriate.) The villagers, knowing there were a lot of wild jackasses in the area, started their hunting. The man bought hundreds of donkeys, for $1000 each, until the villagers, happy with the extra money for so little effort, relaxed their efforts. The man then announced he'd be paying $2000 per jackass, so the hunting efforts were renewed.

Soon, the donkeys started getting too scarce, and the villagers started giving up. The offer then raised to $2500, and the jackass population got so small that nobody wanted to hunt anymore.

Then the man announced he didn't have all the donkeys he needed yet, so he'd pay $5000 each! However, he had to go to the city to get more money, and until he came back, he'd leave his assistant taking care of buying the animals.

As soon as the boss was away, the assistant confided to the villagers:

“You see all these donkeys my boss bought from you? I can sell them to you for $3500 each, and when the man comes back from the city, you sell them back to him for $5000.”

The villagers ran home to get all their savings, and bought all the animals from the assistant.

And they never again saw the man, the assistant, or their money, only jackasses everywhere.

And this, my friend, is the story that finally helped me understand how the stock market works.

Lalo's Kitchen: Tuna salad spread

2008-11-20T06:01:32+00:00

Ok... Melissa and Suzy both asked for the tuna salad spread... here it is. (Seriously this is too simple to be called a recipe, but if you insist...)

Clarification on terminology first: this is the “fancy” spread, which I call tuna salad spread. The alternative, which I call tuna spread, goes basically the same, but no frying, and less veggies — only onion, or spring onion, or Chinese spring onion which works best.

So yeah. You want:

1 or 2 cans of tuna. You can use tuna in oil (easiest to find), in spring water (healthier — but don't add the water to the spread, drain it first), or in spicy oil (delicious!).

edit: This can I used is 227g; it was not enough. The HK batch was two smaller cans. So I guess I recommend between 300 and 500g... tune (no pun intended) to your taste.

1 large (700ml) jar of mayo or “miracle whip”. Or three small ones, I guess :-P
Vegetables of your choice, chopped very small. On today's batch I used:
- Two bell peppers (one green and one red), the long kind with stronger taste
- Half a carrot
- Half an onion
I like to add a bit of garlic too, but it's optional.

Stir-fry (preferably in a wok) the vegetables in the order that's most effective. (Garlic is always first, peppers of all kinds should fry longer than most other vegetables to bring up the taste.) Here's what I did today: first the garlic, just for a few seconds, then the peppers, fry a minute or two, then the onion and carrot, fry about 5 min.

Crush the tuna very thoroughly with a fork. You can do that in the can or on a plate. Then add it to the veggies, stir-fry until it's all well mixed and the tuna is dark-brownish.

Turn off the fire and add the mayo or miracle whip. Mix well until it's uniform; the mayo/whip should have absorbed the oil and look a yummy light brown.

Store as much as you can fit back into the mayo/whip jar. It will keep in the fridge for about a week, but it rarely lasts that long ;-)

Lalo's Kitchen: Cookies

2008-11-19T07:04:49+00:00

Well ok... I know there are literally thousands of cookie recipes on the 'net... but this one worked so well for me, I want to preserve it :-)

1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup softened butter or margarine
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups (350cc) semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)
or 1 to 2 cups something else chopped small (optional)

First sift in the soda, salt, and flour together. In a different bowl mix the butter and sugars until uniform; then add the vanilla; then stir in the eggs one by one until uniform; then GRADUALLY stir in the mixed dry ingredients.

Finally, after it's all homogeneous, add the extras — chocolate chips, chopped nuts, dried fruit, whatever you like in your cookies. It may look like that's too much chocolate chips or nuts or fruits, but the cookies will grow a lot when they bake, and the chocolate/nuts/etc won't.

Shape the cookies in a baking tray, leaving good space between them, and between the cookies and the wall (remember they'll grow). Size is a matter of personal taste and experimentation, but I like to make them about 5cm, which makes for a really good size after they grow.

Pre-heat oven to 190C; bake for about 8 minutes or until nicely brown. Note if you never baked cookies: when you take them out, they should still be soft! (And it's the best time to eat them ;-) with coffee or milk...) They only get hard later after cooling down.

Shenzhen notes from day 2

2008-11-09T17:18:05+00:00

Shenzhen seems to have pretty much the same “vibe” as Rio. It also has a lot of personality and “soul”, for a city this young.

Seen more overtly gay people on the streets in two days than in 4 years in Beijing. What's up with that? Maybe the Beijing gays are more afraid of coming out? Or maybe they all join the army? (j/k j/k j/k)

Oh, dumpling-based fast-food chain = win.

On the last few years I've seen a number of anecdotes about buying deodorant in China, topped with a post by Chris about the product apparently being “seasonal” (srsly?????), and lived a few myself. Well, this morning I beat that one. I asked my guide/real estate agent about buying some. He couldn't understand the word. I got my dictionary. He read the definition, shook his head knowingly, and told me he never heard of the concept. He later took me to a large, fancy, “laowai-friendly“ market, as we would have described it in Beijing, where I did indeed find the product. Then I left for the cashier, while he remained behind studying the shelf in anthropological fascination.

I realised I had never actually seen a border. It's weird to be in a highway and look out of the window, over a fence, and think that on the other side, people speak a different language (well, dialect), follow different laws, don't have their internet and movie theatre selection randomly censored, and drive on the left side of the road. Gives you a new appreciation of how arbitrary the whole thing is...

kill -FKOFFDAMMIT 25208

2008-11-09T07:23:00+00:00

You know, we (Unix-y people) need a new signal, stronger than SIGKILL. As satisfying as it can be to type “killall -KILL firefox” (we just know that's the actual reason you still love the command line), there are a number of situations where that will still not get rid of the damn process; for example, if it's in the middle of some syscalls, specially nfs (grr!) or swapping (which is precisely when you need to kill it). So I'd like to propose a new signal which, let's say, waits for half a second, and if the process really doesn't respond, then gets rid of it for good, regardless of what else it was doing. In the middle of your quality toilet time, with pants down and all? Who cares, just get out. (If the process does respond, then I suppose do a -TERM... or rather, the other way around; send a -TERM, wait half a second, and if nothing seems to be happening, then bring out the ultraviolence?)

Here's a list of suggested names for the new signal.

SIGFKOFFDAMMIT
SIGKTHXBYE
SIGWITHCRUELTY
SIGNUKE
SIGLEAVENOTRACE
SIGCAPISCE
SIGNOSRSLY
SIGEXTREMEPREJUDICE
SIGGETTHEHELLOUTOFOURGALAXY
SIGCHUCKNORRIS
SIGEXTRACRISPY
SIGHULKSMASH

and my personal favourite:

SIGGOBACKINTIMEANDSTRANGLEITINTHECRIB

On going

2008-11-08T13:57:15+00:00

As planned, I did some pretty decent writing on the flight.

But I didn't write the chapter(s) I planned to write.

Predictably enough, I found myself writing about Edward's feelings and trepidations as he leaves Calcutta to establish the Hyde Park house. How obvious is that?

So maybe that's not entirely autobiographical, as, after all, for him it's a return to the country of his birth... and his feelings about the move (as I discovered when I wrote them) are a lot different. But:

He lived in his home country all life without any thought of leaving, then suddenly uprooted himself and went to Calcutta.
When he got there, he was planning to stay less that he ended up staying. Then a few months later, he had made up his mind to stay “forever”. Neither thing ended up happening.
The move from Calcutta was also very sudden.
And after this move he started the best, most pleasant, and most important phase of his life. Let's expect this one comes true for me as well ;-)

Last Times

2008-11-05T16:52:58+00:00

Ok... I feel a little guilty writing this, since I should be putting all my writing mojo into NaNoWriMo... but I have to get it out of my chest.

Whenever I'm about to leave a city for good, destiny likes to take me through many of the places I used to frequent, that meant something to me. It's a strange feeling; sometimes just passing by it on a taxi, and thinking “wow, I had forgotten the good old Tuanjiehu McDonald's, guess I'm not eating there again. Wow, my old bank got renovated again, cool.”

Other times it's more, well, interactive. The last Writers Group, and last visit to the Bookworm. Last purchase at Jenny Lou and April's Gourmet. The last visit to the bank to get my salary. The last Futurists Meeting. Last time walking through Sanlitun, last time in my favourite DVD store. (Dang, I should have had a last Paki curry-chuanr!)

Then there are the people. Bridget and Justin I plan to keep in touch and cross-visit, but of course “plan” doesn't mean “will”, so there's a small chance this was the last time I saw them. Others, like Rui, I'm quite certainly seeing for the last time. Tomorrow I'll see most of my co-workers for the last time, and make one last visit to the place that has faithfully been feeding me electronics for the last four years. Friday, last Beijing chuan'r and last time I see a bunch of the Bluggers...

And then, Saturday, a final goodbye to Norman, a last look at Hujiayuan and a few other familiar environs, a final trip through the Beijing subway (if I don't get lazy and decide to pay a taxi), and a last departure from the Beijing International Airport.

Oh well...

On open phones, part II

2008-10-28T13:29:03+00:00

(Re: On open phones)

Dear Google:

Good try. But after one year, Android is still shite. Srsly, Java is just not the way to go, for anything. No matter how cute your UI is, if I can only code for it in one language. Plz refer to www.openmoko.org.

KTHXBYE

Goodbye, Norman :'(

2008-10-27T09:52:25+00:00

After two years in this apartment — more than I lived anywhere in this century — it's finally time to move on. I knew that; I've been anxious to go to Shenzhen as soon as possible. But now we actually told the real estate agency that we're not renovating the contract, and it somehow feels... real. Eva will be here until the end of November, and I will only be here another 10 days!

Goodbye, Norman. I will miss you. With all your quirks, you were a true friend, and we went through great times together. You won't be forgotten.

Liberated by disappointment

2008-10-25T18:03:05+00:00

I had a liberating experience last week. I went through such a wide range of feelings about it, that I thought it would be best to express the “conclusion” in writing.

When I finally got feedback on my writing, last Monday, my first (reflex) reaction was of anger and disappointment. I couldn't help it; what I was hearing was overwhelming. But I'm not one to dwell on reflex reactions. I immediately started to put it in context and think about it.

So my next reaction, or the first reaction that I allowed myself to act on, was of excitement and relief. See, the problem with my writing is that I very rarely got good, usable feedback, ever since grade school. I had an editor who would change anything he didn't like, without ever telling me why. I had a partner who would read any %(*&#% I'd give her and say it was great. I had another partner who was “hypercreative” like me, so she'd get carried away on the creative possibilities, and the proofreading would metamorphose into a brainstorming session. I did get some minor useful feedback with the LNH, but those guys generally have better things to do with their time than improve my technique. So now, finally, I had concrete, objective weaknesses pointed out to me; clear points where I could improve, and better, I believed I knew how to do it.

I left the meeting very excited, ready to start a novel or rewrite something I already had.

Then, the next day, it hit me.

I have big plans. I have stuff I want to do. And I have a roadmap of how to get there. Writing isn't really an essential part of these plans.

In this light, is it fair to myself to spend so much time on it, seeing as, clearly, I'm not as good as I thought I was?

There's something about that logic that doesn't feel right, though. It feels a bit negative, and I'm always on my toes with negative thoughts, because they may be the depression speaking. So I was cautious. But looking inside, I didn't feel negative about it; the feeling was still one of excitement. So, what was missing in the picture?

I thought about it. I talked to people who know me and whose opinion I can respect. And that good old feeling that often tells me the best path to follow was only getting stronger: forget writing, at least for now. Keep it as a hobby, if you really want, but only if it's sincerely, really fun.

Then for a day or two I tried not to think about it at all. I filled my head with other stuff. That's usually the best way for me to make a serious decision.

Today I finally got it. It's about freedom.

Here's the problem: I had an excessively inflated opinion of myself as a writer. Maybe the truth is that I'm great at making up stories, and lack technique to tell them? Most of what other people saw, and gave me feedback on, was story ideas, or plots; and the feedback was almost always positive. Maybe that's what made me think I was better than I was. Or maybe not.

See, some people might think of an inflated opinion as mostly-positive; it would keep your ego up, inflate your self-worth, specially for someone with depressive tendencies.

But for me, it was a cage.

I was permanently uncomfortable with myself about it. The way I see (saw) it, I have this skill, and I'm not using it. If I'm so good, why is it that I'm not using it? I should be publishing. I should be writing novels. It's a waste. What, I have other plans? Better ideas and opportunities that don't involve writing? All right, but it would be a waste of talent! I have to fit writing in those plans somehow!

But now, I'm just another amateur. I write because I enjoy it. I don't have an obligation to myself or the world to publish it, to improve my technique, or to make money out of it. And that frees me a lot of time that — let's face it — I'm going to need desperately, when my other evil plans start to mature.

It's good to be free.

XML considered harmful, or, <arghdiediedie/>

2008-10-25T17:37:00+00:00

I have, on a number of occasions, stated that XML is harmful, and should be taken out and shot. So here I am today, to explain why I think that, and offer alternatives.

Not good for humans

The main problem is, of course, that XML was never intended for humans. It's not designed so that we can efficiently write it, read it, understand it at a glance, or maintain it. But many tools that use XML today tend to forget that, leading to hours of wasted time and lots of frustration. (XML for configuration files, anyone? Zope's ZCML and .Net's configs and all those Java frameworks?)

Then, of course, that's not XML's fault; it was never designed to succeed at that task. The fault lies with developers who misuse it. Well, yes and no. The reason people misuse it is because it's overhyped; XML is the new peanut butter (or garlic butter, according to Pete Abrams) — adding it to anything makes it taste better and sell more. (I don't even like peanut butter.)

Not good for machines

What it was designed for is communication between programs; an unified, extensible format for data transmission. By having libraries to handle it in most languages and environments, you'd make it easy for developers to deal with it, and as a consequence, to make their programs communicate.

However, after roughly ten years of working with it, it is my informed opinion that XML fails at that, too. I'm not saying it got supplanted by better technology which we invented later. It did, to be fair. But what I'm saying is that it was wrong from the beginning. And if it's not good for us and it's not good for our programs, why are we still using it? (Peanut butter, I know.)

So let's try to break out of the hype and prove that it's bad for our programs.

The perceived problem with XML can be summarised in one sentence: XML is costly to parse. But that's too superficial; let's go deeper, look at the specifics, and the flaws in philosophy/design that lead to this perception.

Parsing XML: layers

I usually tell my co-workers that there's two “layers” to parsing XML. While that is true, it's only true in the context of our data; if I were to make that statement more generic, I'd say: there's always at least two “layers” to parsing XML.

The first, the “bottom” layer if you want, is syntactic parsing. This means reading XML itself: tags, entities, attributes, comments, CDATA, PCDATA, white space, the works. The input to syntactic parsing is a string or stream of bytes; the “output” is an API — SAX, DOM, ElementTree, you name it.

On the opposite end of the stack, the “top” layer so to speak, is semantic parsing, or extracting the data you're actually interested in. The “input” here is a generic API; in the typical case of two layers, the API from syntactic parsing. The “output” is a domain-specific API or, more commonly, a collection of structured data (usually objects, nowadays).

An example where you may have more than two layers is when you're using something else built on top of XML; the most common case being feeds. So at the bottom layer something will parse XML, then another chunk of code will parse that as RSS or Atom, and then your semantic layer will actually extract the data. At work, we initially made our data available as RDF; so we had a second, “middle” layer (we actually used a JavaScript RDF library) which would parse the RDF, and then we did our semantic parsing by using the RDF library's API. That made our code a lot simpler, but it also made it a lot slower; so we later switched to ignoring the RDF and simply treating it as XML. (Even later, we switched to a JSON format.)

Syntactic parsing: too much structure

Syntactic parsing is what XML is supposedly “all about”; the point being, you don't see it. In our case, at work, it's done by the browser (which gives us DOM with a touch of XPath). In pretty much any other case, it will still be done by your environment (the browser, in our case; JBoss and .Net are other examples), or by a standard library.

Well, that's great, right?

It is, yeah. But it hides the fact that those libraries (even if it's “hidden” in the environment, it's still at some level done by a library) tend to be huge and ridiculously complex. The XML syntax is designed to cover an enormous universe of cases that your program will concretely never encounter, and yet, you have to pay the complexity cost for them.

Semantic parsing: not enough structure

XML shines on xHTML: a markup language for text, where you have arbitrary streams of text sparkled with special instructions about it. Some of those “instructions” are really containers, which have more text and instructions. XML does that really well.

It shines a little less on something like SVG, where it represents arbitrary streams of heterogeneous objects. Some of those contain other objects, and XML does help there.

But the truth is that, for representing your program's data? It probably sucks. Its model is very different from the object model of most (all?) popular languages and frameworks today. In the end, we find ourselves designing our data structures as many as three times: once in the language in which we're actually writing it, one in a relational database, and one in XML. The mappings between them are often poor, since the semantics of the three models are so poorly matched.

Sadly, it would be relatively trivial to pick a lowest-common-denominator model that would fit all of today's popular languages. But XML didn't even try.

That's not the whole of my objection, though. Due to the MASSIVE FAIL in the syntactic layer, we get a semantic layer that's only marginally simpler than it would be to parse a DSL (domain-specific language); maybe less simple, if you use a good library for your DSL. There are about half a dozen XML APIs in wide use; smart people are frequently getting annoyed at the ones already there and coming up with a new, better one. And although a modern offering like, say, ElementTree can be light-years ahead of SAX or DOM, it can't help being clumsy and feeling unnatural to the language; at the bottom line, what it's doing is dressing up a rotting corpse.

Conclusion

Here's a better phrasing then, for the problem of XML as I see it:

XML has too much structure where it doesn't help, and not enough where it matters. One of the reasons I love JSON is that it's not designed to mark-up text, or to transfer “streams of data”; it's designed to transfer objects (JSON means “JavaScript Object Notation”), which means it maps nicely to my code on both ends, whether that code is JavaScript, Python, C++, or even C. (It maps nicely to Java as well, but who cares.)

Alternatives (existing and ideal)

Right now, for real-life code, most places where you're using (or thinking of using) XML would probably be better served with JSON. A few more complex cases may justify a DSL, but I would hesitate a lot before going down that route.

Ideally, I'd like to propose a new format; an “active” derivative of JSON, inspired by the modern practise of “JSON with callback”. Essentially, I'd like to replace JSON's “flat” object notation ({'attr1': 'value', 'attr2': 'value'}) with something which looks like a Python constructor (MyClass(attr1='value', attr2='value')). The pseudo-classes (or pseudo-functions if you're looking at it from C) would play the role that tag names play in XML elements, which would make it even more straightforward to map this data to actual objects on each end.

This would, of course, lose the benefit that “JSON with callback” can simply be executed in a browser. But then again, “JSON with callback” is not formally correct JSON anyway, so we already sacrificed some portability for that ability. “Real” JSON is usually converted to “JSON with callback” by a simple routine on the server side. A similar transformation could convert the format I'm proposing into JavaScript; the fragment above would become: MyClass({attr1: 'value', attr2: 'value'}).

Mental Exercise of the Day

2008-10-23T14:55:51+00:00

One of the three basic premises of modern science, as I see it, is that the "laws of nature" are constant over space.

What if they aren't? What if the "laws" we observe here are an effect of a very specific set of features, say, of our galaxy?

Can you imagine that? Can you conceive that another galaxy, just "over there", has a different speed of light? Or that "their" atoms are not held together by electromagnetic force, but something else?

Take a moment to fully believe this. Try to come up with at least 3 more ways in which it could be different, and yet that we'd be unable to perceive from here.

Did it?

No seriously, did you really do it? Did you really believe it, at least with a part of your mind?

Now tell me this: what would happen if "your" galaxy were to "collide" with the Milky Way?

Mental Exercise of the Day

2008-10-20T03:32:28+00:00

(well ok, this is "daily" in some alternate universe)

In our universe, the spatial dimensions intersect at a 90 degree angle. If that doesn't immediately make sense to you, think about it for a moment. A line has one dimension; a plane has two. If you trace lines that "define" those two dimensions, they'll have a 90 degree angle. OK? Follow?

From this angle, flow a huge number of properties. The angles that form regular polygons, for example.

Can you imagine an universe where dimensions cross in a different angle? How does that work?

Mr. Mxyzptlk claims to be "from the 5th dimension"; anyone with a scientific background knows this doesn't make sense, though. Maybe what he means is that he's from an universe where dimensions cross at a 60 degree angle? And does this paragraph even make sense?

Weirdest reason to download music?

2008-10-20T03:18:50+00:00

What's the strangest reason you downloaded music? I guess this applies to going out to buy it as well, but since downloading is so much easier and quicker, I figure it opens the way for much odder motivations.

Recently, a pr0n flick reminded me of an ex-girlfriend. Well, this ex was an early-adopter mp3 collector — her hobby was to spend much of the night on IRC trading files, and burn categorised CDs... and... I suppose our relationship kind of started because of a song. I mentioned I liked it but didn't know the name or artist. She (probably already interested in me) made me a CD. Cute. So I'm here musing and I realise I didn't have this song anymore. Well, the piratetubes are your friends, and now I do again.

Sexy business plan

2008-10-18T18:31:21+00:00

Typical Web 2.0-era business plan:

do something
do something else
???
PROFIT

Sexy (read, my) business plan:

do something; PROFIT
do something else
do something more; PROFIT
???
singularity

If it's not immediately obvious to you how much this is better...

Review: Sanctuary

2008-10-07T02:23:00+00:00

This weekend I watched the first double-episode of Sanctuary, the new series in the Sci-Fi Channel. If you're a self-respecting sci-fi geek, you probably know that Sanctuary was created by one actor, one writer, and one producer of Stargate: SG-1, and that it started off as a web-based series. The double-episode is, in fact, the first “season” of the web series, with the tiniest bit of re-shooting and, dare I say it?, “re-post-production”.

The writing isn't bad, the acting is decent (great in some cases, but unfortunately not the lead), and the special effects are pretty good.

Still, I give it a “FAIL”. Sorry, but it's just not interesting. There's nothing new, there's nothing that happens there to keep me interested. Supernatural creatures living in secret in our world? Yawn, that was cool in the early 90s. What, so the big secret of the “mysterious” Doctor Magnus is that? Sorry, that was already old in the early 90s when the rest of the premise was cool. Also, you just ruined the “mysterious” part by revealing it so soon.

It's also too slow on the first half, lots of talking heads and little plot progress, with the second half having too much action and little plot progress. In fact, plot progress tends to happen in “bursts”, which is, sorry, not good at all.

Good try, but I won't be coming back for the next one.

Now please take your hands out of my neck

2008-10-02T02:12:59+00:00

Had this huge fight with someone I love... over money. Not going to say who, because it doesn't matter, as it will become apparent once you finish reading this.

I had promised to give her $500. I meet her a few days later. She wanted the money, I said I already had given it, she didn't remember getting it, things got ugly.

Well. Now that things cooled down, I want to say I'm not mad at you, and you know what, we were both right.

How is that possible?

Simple: it was a dream. In dreams (well, mine at least), reality is not solid and everything is possible. That's how I met you in the "wrong" city, living in a place you never lived (and IMO never would) -- yet, the Friday prior, I had met you (and given you the 500) in my granma's old house, which my subconscious mind insists on putting on pretty much every dream. At least this time there was candy.

So yeah. I not only "dream-remembered" giving you the money; I had also actually dreamed of giving it to you earlier on, so I definitely was telling you the truth. On the other hand, if you swear you don't remember getting it, that's probably because you didn't get it. Dream stuff, go figure. And since you're really a dream creature, existing only on that dream, and I'm now awake, then I have no idea who I'm talking to, since you clearly don't exist anymore.

Oh well. At least there was candy. (Citron, for some reason, not sweet potato or even pumpkin... but whatever.)

On a tangential note, I'm kind of happy with my subconscious mind. Yeah my strange dreams still "have" to be in São Paulo and involve my granma's old house, but at least this time the money was RMB. (I'm not sure I even remember what BRLs look like.)

Freedom for Whom?

2008-09-24T19:50:00+00:00

I think I've seen this argument for the first time in a Slashdot comment, years ago. I've since adopted it, refined it, and used it a lot myself; but now in light of the Android release, I think it's worth mentioning again.

The big problem I see with “Open Source” is that there are, in fact, two groups there. Fortunately the same is not true of Free Software, but even our arguing that it's about freedom still doesn't help... well, read on.

The thing with “Open Source” is: who is it open to?

Arguably, Open Source, as a vague, undefined thing, has existed for decades. But as a conscious, named movement with its own marketing, it spun off from the Free Software movement in the late 1990s, after the “open-sourcing” of Mozilla and the publishing of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. (Or, according to some, it spun off a few weeks later, when RMS noticed those guys were talking about something else and split off from the Open Source initiative.) Still, in hindsight, one can say things like the BSDs, and even the original Unix, were done more in the spirit of Open Source than of Free Software.

Now Free Software, with all its GNU/FSF writings, has always been very clear about its goals. We're here for the freedoms of the user. If you get a piece of software, you have a bunch of inalienable rights, rights that aren't being respected by most software, and which we intend to uphold and defend. Nice, eh?

Open Source people, on the other hand, seem to be a little confused about this. It's like watching two madmen (or drunks) arguing, each founding an argument on an entirely different premise. Some, perhaps still in touch with the “origins” of Open Source in the 90s, believe it's about being “open” to the users of the software. Others have adopted the belief (from BSD maybe?) that it's all about “openness” to the developers.

(More importantly, some of them don't realise Free Software ≠ Open Source, and mistakenly argue this in even more confusing terms; like the old fallacy that the GPL, and viral licenses in general, are bad for Free Software because they give “less freedom” than BSD-style licenses. They do, if you're thinking of other developers, who will then have the “freedom” to “steal” my software and use it in their own closed software, and not give back to the project in any way. I don't care the least about those; I'm writing software for the freedom of my users, and those have their freedoms enforced by a viral license. Now are viral licenses bad for Open Source? Honestly, I couldn't care less.)

The Android platform seems to be firmly planted in the latter camp, sadly. (Or maybe not so sadly; I rejoice with every Java-based product that fails.) It's “open”, first and foremost, for handset makers and network operators, and a distant second, to application developers. “Openness” for the end-user doesn't seem to even be a consideration. Now of course, both things are pretty much incompatible; being “open” to the operators means, really, “open” for them to “close” it in whatever ways they want; so yeah, no VOIP.

Oh well. At least I don't need to be conflicted about whether I want an Android device, whether I can stand Java long enough to actually like the OS. Clearly, that won't be a consideration, and OpenMoko — or, if they fail, someone else, probably using LiMo or FSO stacks — will be the mobile phone for me. Eventually :-)

Zorro and the Lone Ranger

2008-09-15T23:05:01+00:00

Still get Zorro and the Lone Ranger mixed up? Never fear! Print this handy cheat sheet and never be confused again, kimosabe!

What	Zorro	The Lone Ranger
Costume	Black, loose	Grey, form-fitting
Queer accessory	Cape	Red scarf tied around the neck
Hat	Black Andalusian hat	White cowboy hat
Where	Los Angeles	West, mostly Texas
When	Early 19th century	Late 19th century
Name	Don Diego de la Vega	Reid (first name unrevealed, probably Dan or John)
Weapon	Rapier, occasionally bullwhip	Pistol with silver bullets
Trademark attack	Cutting a Z on the enemy's clothes	Disarming with a shot
Behavior	Witty, cunning, "fox-like"	Honorable and mysterious
Sidekick	Frei Felipe	Tonto
Horse	Tornado	Silver
Talking to the horse	Long loud whistle calls Tornado from anywhere	"Hi-yo, Silver, away!"
Genre	Gentleman thief	Mystery cowboy
Likely inspirations	Arséne Lupin, Robin Hood	Zorro, pulp Western books
Influenced, notably	Batman, The Lone Ranger	Bill Cosby, a number of Marvel Western comics, the X-Files

Creationists, I feel your plight

2008-09-15T09:46:00+00:00

You know what... I do understand and respect a family's right to believe any idiotic nonsense they want to. Who knows; it's a seriously messed up universe we live in, they could even be right.

But whether or not they're factually right is not what matters most in my book (which is not a holy book). Rather... their theories are grounded in a larger belief system, which has at its core a moral and ethical code. Telling the children in absolute terms that their parents beliefs are wrong, understandably, undermines the whole system, which in turn undermines the code.

(I'm not saying American creationists have a great code. Those are often the same people who are racists, xenophobes, or quick to judge someone by the bank account. But it's built on a good stem of what Americans call "work ethic", and arguably, it's better than no code at all.)

At the root of the argument is, in fact, a completely different wrong, which is the one I actually wanted to address in this post. The problem actually does lie with the (majority of) science teachers, who fall for the trap I call "the religion of science".

Good, respectable scientists almost never talk about facts. A fact, or rather an absolute rule, is anathema to good science; the only facts useful to scientists are the results of their experiments, everything else is theory.

What about bad scientists? Oh, those are frequently 100% sure of obvious truths, like, "the atom is indivisible" and "heat is a fluid" and "there's no such a thing as a memristor". (They're particularly eager to label things "impossible".)

The pattern here is: an open mind is the first pre-requisite for science, even more important than genius.

But in school -- and not only America, but many other places -- you only start hearing this kind of talk in college, or if you're really lucky, high school. Basic science, the teachers who were supposed to be giving children the basics of science and awakening potential future scientists, generally fall for "the religion of science". They "teach" absolutes; this is so, because that is so. Which is specially funny since some things they teach in basic school are known to be untrue, like Newtonian physics.

We wouldn't be even having this argument if school science teachers could behave like good scientists and formulate their teachings like, "evidence suggests that..." and "it is believed that..." and "apparently, ..." and, often, "this and that evidence points to the conclusion that...".

What, actually teach creationism in schools? No, now you're pushing it. Come on, the other parents also have the right to keep their children safely away from your nonsensical idiocy.

Spore: Epic Fail

2008-09-10T17:00:00+00:00

On paying for games, pirating, platforms, etc

Up until last Friday, I was pretty sure I'd be buying Spore shortly after its release. Of course I'd play it first to be safe, but based on what I knew, it couldn't go wrong.

Now, why would I buy any software at all, if I believe software should be Free, and proprietary software is morally wrong? Well, to begin with, there's nothing wrong with buying Free Software; my first Debian was installed from a CD I bought by mail. Second, I (still) make an exception for games, because in my head, the moral/ethic argument for Free Software doesn't hold; games are, as I see it, a new form of art, and for best enjoyment of it you don't require the ability to change, fix, and port it. Now, I still prefer games to be Free Software, because they still have bugs and they still have to be ported — if Spore was Free, I'd buy it despite everything I'm writing in the rest of this article. But no, they don't have to be Free, not in the same way that something critical for me such as my web server or desktop environment needs to be Free so I can fix it.

That said, I never buy Windows games. My OS does need to be Free, and therefore I don't run Windows, and I'm not installing it for a game. I can has a GNU/Linux version plz? Failing that, I do buy Wii games (even though the Wii is Eva's), and since I wasn't following the news too closely, I thought I'd be buying Wii Spore about now. But no; Wii Spore doesn't even have a release date yet. (Oh, and the DS port, which I also planned to buy, is only Creature. No thanks.)

Still, I wanted to try it out. So thanks to someone who does (still) run Windows and did download the cracked version of the game, I played it a few times — a total of about 30 hours now, alone and with Eva, and through all stages. What did I find?

A pack of mini-games

I've seen a number of Wii products that pose (and sell) as a game, but are actually a pack of mini-games. Usually some are fun, some aren't, and none will entertain you for more than a few minutes.

Spore feels like that. Each of the five games — yeah, I'm going to call them what they are, not “stages”, because they're hardly even connected — could have benefited from more development. The whole thing doesn't fit together so much.

For example: you'd think spending a lot of effort in the Creature game to make your species fast, lethal, and possibly flying would give you a big advantage in the Tribe game, right? Well, it doesn't. Having more life helps, but everything else barely makes a difference. Then you go to Civilisation, and wow, now it doesn't make a difference at all; it's straight to trash. You'd think a flying species would have different cities at least? Yeah, only if you design them that way. The fact that walls are entirely pointless isn't even considered by the game.

Cell and Civilisation

I'll get those two out of the way first, because it should be quick.

How can I best put this... well... one word says it all: YAWN.

Swimming around in 2-d eating things? Really? People spend time doing that? And pay for it? I don't think so, sorry.

(BTW, the fact that the iPhone port is only the Cell game, in all its boring glory — and on the iPhone, one of the hottest gaming platforms of the moment — yells FAIL at me.)

Now Civilisation. Yeah I played this already, in a number of incarnations, all better. Please go away now, KTHXBYE.

Tribe

This is, of course, an RTS. But different from Civilisation, a simplified RTS is actually a good thing, maybe. I usually don't have patience for the genre because there's too much complexity, and it usually boils down to knowing the trees backwards and clicking insanely fast. Tribe actually works. It's moderately fun to play, and if you actually did play from Creature to Tribe, it gives you a minor fuzzy to see your species walking around, fighting, dancing, and chatting.

The game is, however, not compelling. You get to it from Creature, you play it, you enjoy it. But I don't imagine myself ever launching Spore to play Tribe. I don't imagine myself ever wanting to play this, or even remembering it exists unless I'm having a Spore conversation. (And possibly even then.)

I do appreciate casual gaming. I play a lot of We Ski, and the reason I do is that each time I do, I can spend 5 minutes or 5 hours, my choice. However, it's essential to the success of a casual game that, if I do choose to spend 5 hours, I won't be bored to death. We Ski accomplishes that by having all the fun little mini-quests, by unlocking new wardrobe, and by having a bunch of different things to do (slalom, moguls — which I haven't mastered yet, air tricks, cruising and appreciating the scenery, or just going really fast). Tribe... I can't imagine playing it for too long. In fact, the one time I played it, I was already bored by the time it was over; it was the only game I didn't stick around in after I had unlocked the next one.

Now, different than all others, I have no idea why Tribe doesn't work. It just doesn't. Maybe it's not that it has a reason to fail, but that it doesn't have any reason to win. Hunting wild animals? Yeah, well, that's what Creature was about, no? Killing or converting rival tribes? Again, nothing new there... in fact, it plays as a simpler, less interesting version of Creature, only with a larger pack; which is really bad since at this point, you just finished a game of Creature.

And speaking of which...

Creature

This one is entertaining enough. Enough to pay for it? Well, maybe not. But close.

It certainly appeals to me personally to wander around the continent exploring; I always liked to do this in many different kinds of games.

Customising your creature again and again is fun.

But fighting or impressing other creatures is only fun for the first few hours. And again, I don't mean in a casual gaming way, as in a few hours each time. No; after a few hours, you probably won't ever enjoy it again. It becomes just a medium to test if your customisations were effective, and “landmarks” for your exploration of the world (if you're an explorer type like me, otherwise you won't care). Oh, and a way to earn DNA and parts.

So essentially, the game is about customising the creature, which requires unlocking parts and earning DNA; and for a segment of people, exploring.

This already smells a little odd, since I just said the methods of acquiring DNA points gets boring fast. So it's really grind grind customise grind grind?

Then you fall into the major failing of the game. Here it is, brace yourself: customisation is mostly fake.

It's a race to get the parts that give score 5 for whatever moves you want. Which ones you'll get, what shape you make them, and where you stick them, is not at all important. Items with no score (ears, noses, antennae, and extra eyes apart from the mandatory one or pair) are pure decoration. Painting is completely cosmetic. Body shape doesn't matter at all. Scores don't add up, so an item with Dance 2 and one with Dance 3 mean you have Dance 3 and a superfluous body part.

Sprinting and speed are useful to catch prey (if you're aggressive) or run away from predators (if you're social). Flying and jumping don't really seem to make a difference. (I still get them anyway because they make exploring slightly faster, by jumping over chasms and whatnot.)

What, you don't believe me? Still think you have to design your creature reasonably, in order for it to survive? Ok then. Witness the Thingy. This lovely (!?!) omnivore has conquered the hearts of almost all species in planet Majig, and evolved sentience. QED.

Free candy if you can identify the parts I used. Heck, I challenge you to even figure out which side is the "front".

(Why yes. I did go for the less viable thing I could design. And sorry if you have nightmares with this thing.)

Space

Finally, the most enjoyable game in the pack.

Again, it falls in the already played this trap, if only partially. The terraforming part is fun, but you can't play it much, because it's expensive and you need money... so lots of boring other things to do in order to get money.

Although my civilisation (the Caffeine from planet Capuccino) was aggressive, I started out playing peacefully, as it wasn't readily apparent how I could possibly do otherwise. Only later I found that out, but too late — now the enemies are much stronger than me. I wonder if I'd have enjoyed the game more if I had from the beginning played the Caffeine as the aggressive bastards I know they are deep down, and conquered those whiny neighbours instead of establishing trade routes.

(I'm sorry, did I say that out loud?)

Now this is a game where I see some potential. There's pretty much always more stuff to discover, and contrary to other similar games (like Elite and Vega Strike), you don't get bogged down in the details of actually piloting the ship. (Which, don't get me wrong, are actually fun in Elite and Vega Strike, but a little too difficult, and it does get old.) Maybe one of the reasons I played the Caffeine as traders for so long is that I'm actually enjoying figuring out planets that will pay decently for each colour of spice.

(Perhaps I'll try playing with the Thingies once. I'm sure they'll either scare the aliens to death, or confuse them to inaction. But if I run across one of those species that follow the Books of Order, they'll probably wipe me out at first sight, on principle.)

It does help you enjoy the game once you realise you don't have to respond to all the stupid distress calls. No, the pirates are not going to conquer your planet. That also makes the game slightly less involving, but I suppose it's an acceptable tradeoff.

Do I find any serious fault with the Space game? Well, like many others, there's a bit of a tutorial track, constantly limiting what you can do in the first few minutes, even if you've already played this game dozens of times. (I'm guessing here, as I only played twice, but if the tutorials haven't disappeared on the second time, they wouldn't disappear on the 30th, right?)

And once more, it's a bit disappointing that everything else I did before (I mean seriously, I exterminated every single non-Caffeine species on my continent in Creature, and stomped through everyone else in Civilisation) doesn't have any bearing at all on Space. But I may be repeating myself here.

Finishing thoughts

As someone else said, it's ridiculous that each of those games have a completely different user interface, in particular the camera controls. And there's no control customisation. Please EA, you know better!

Really, I've seen lots of reviews saying it has “innovative gameplay”. Can someone please point out where? I couldn't find it.

And then there's the stupid, ridiculous DRM. If you do decide to buy this game-pack despite all I've said, do yourself a favour: keep the box closed (get only your serial number), and play the cracked version you can find in a number of places online.

New Nintendo portable -- now on IGN

2008-09-04T22:06:00+00:00

One more to agree with me :-) http://gear.ign.com/articles/907/907463p1.html?RSSwhen2008-09-04_103600&RSSid=907463

Mental Exercise of the Day

2008-08-24T02:30:12+00:00

(I'll be posting those more or less every day, until I grow tired of the idea.)

MEotD: can you conceive an universe with a different value of pi? How does that work?

Nintendo's next portable should be around soon

2008-08-15T03:58:00+00:00

The Nintendo DS came out in 2004; the GBA, in 2001; the GBC, in 98. See a pattern? The next Nintendo portable should be around any time. My guess is, it probably was already designed by late last year, and they aborted the whole process, to incorporate what they learned from the Wii, and hopefully the iPhone.

Here is what I predict it will look like, in no particular order — I'm privately calling it the “Nintendo DT”.

Two screens, like the DS, but both multi-touch, either 512x320 (more likely — that's “computer widescreen”, 16x10) or 512x288 (“true” widescreen, 16x9, might be chosen in order to make the device just that little bit narrower).
No physical buttons, except for power, and possibly L/R. All controls are via touchscreen (and accelerometers). Or maybe it's too early for that, since haptic tactition emulation isn't usable yet; in that case it may keep controls similar to the DS Lite, making the bottom screen smaller (4x3 — 384x288). Possibly an analog nub. Two, if they really really feel like one-upping Sony.
Video codecs and player built-in so you can watch your movies on the go (a must with the widescreen).
Camera either built-in or sold as an add-on.
Probably no stylus at all.
Definitely no GBA compatibility. (But the homebrew scene will have an emulator — VBA probably — up in weeks.)
Better Wi-Fi; at least 802.11n. And Bluetooth.
Browser built-in.
More built-in storage, maybe an SSD or even HD (hope not); WiiWare is making a lot of money, and for watching movies you'll need space too. Maybe an SD or MicroSD slot?
Maybe music player software built-in as well. (Can anyone say MarioPod? Or is it PokéPod?)
I wouldn't be too surprised if it uses Cortex CPUs.
“Slave mode” where it basically becomes a souped-up controller (with extra display area) for the Wii. Hacked in two or three months to become a “slave” to a Linux machine; practical application for the hack doesn't arrive for a long time, if ever.

Oh, and I'll probably buy one, install some Free Software, and use it as my “netbook”. Sounds great for media and writing on the go ;-) Unless, of course, the Pandora arrives first...

Olympics (and other sport nonsense) considered harmful

2008-08-13T15:21:00+00:00

People who know me are often amazed at my lack of interest on sports, specially during the Olympics. The question of “why” does arise occasionally, although not as often as you'd think. So I figured, hmm, that's a reasonable topic for a blog post.

First, I don't like competitive sports.

The idea of physical activity for fun or pleasure, I can relate to. You feel exhilarated when you bike, hike, or row up a hill? Good for you.

And the concept of wanting to “improve” your body, stretch your limits, is to be commended. I think.

But competing for the feeling that you're “better” than your (often arbitrary) “adversary”, on account of some extremely abstract, and usually completely pointless accomplishment, like running a ball through a loop? That's just ridiculous. It's understandable, since it appeals to many of our baser instincts, but it's not the kind of behaviour I'd encourage.

In fact, maybe that's the point: encouraging. Many sports activities — in fact, generally the most popular ones — are really updated excuses to engage in many kinds of behaviour we really, really should be working harder on leaving behind. I'd even go so far as saying, in my opinion, the love for sports in our modern culture is one of the (admittedly many) roots of the predatory, every-man-for-himself mentality which is perhaps the greatest obstacle to our evolution into a fairer and, well, more reasonable society.

And there you go, we segue nicely into the Olympics. The whole thing is, as I see it, hugely hypocritical. Its proponents, like many supporters of sports all over the world, try to pass it as a symbol of union and brotherhood; but at the bottom line, it's all about “my” country getting more medals than yours. It's not only a barbaric competitive tribal war, it's also a reinforcement of nationalism, which is another thing we're overdue getting rid of.

Feel free, if you want, to invite me for a hike, or biking, golfing, or even, if I'm in the right mood, a baseball game. But please, please, don't invite me to watch sports; while I understand and share the pleasure of doing it, I really see no point in watching it. And above all, don't ask me about the Olympics, unless you really want to hear how strongly I don't care.

Sun-Chained-in-Ink

2008-08-06T16:43:58+00:00

DC's Trinity #10 has a villain called "Sun-Chained-in-Ink". Pronounced "All reasonable names were taken". Come on, DC, really?

Mass unblocking in the Great Firewall of China

2008-08-02T14:13:00+00:00

Seems a batch of sites got unblocked. Wiki.edia (marvel as I blog in regular expressions) is accessible (again), Wikibooks, Reuters, CNN, and a lot more.

Still blocked: blogspot, livejournal, wordpress (no surprise here -- lots of political blogs), BBC, certainly more; most importantly, Sinfest and CRFH :-( (why the f* is CRFH blocked? Zombies? Satan?)

Also, the web feels slightly faster in general!

Asteroid L

Lalos: uma unidade de medida para a realidade

It's OK To Be Blue

Lalo's kitchen: dishwashing tips

LNH: 58.5 #49: Cannon Fodder Triumphant

Teach a man to fish

LNH: 58.5 #48: Warning, Giant Marshmallow Puppies Inside

LNH: 58.5 #47: Iz In Ur Sequelz Swechin Ur Baytz

Dongmen again

LNH: 58.5 #46: I Can't Help It, The Characters, They Just Keep Coming

Why Alan Moore is right, and why he's wrong

LNH: 58.5 #45 Who Cares If Anyone Reads This, I'm Going To Finish It!

How to use bzr-svn with SourceForge

The Muse: Bipolar disorder type 2?

A reflection on game styles in CRPGs

Player styles

Primary activity interest

The social spectrum, for the player

To quest or not to quest

Worker vs. fighter

Simple vs. rich (or, dull vs. complex)

The trade of trading

Game model styles

Time is money

Specialise or balance?

It's all about choice

The social spectrum

Starting from zero we've got nothing to lose

Those pesky economics

To be continued

Metaphor argameddon: Christmas and comics

Automagically-translating chat thingy

Instant non-instant coffee

The Trading of Jackasses

Lalo's Kitchen: Tuna salad spread

Lalo's Kitchen: Cookies

Shenzhen notes from day 2

kill -FKOFFDAMMIT 25208

On going

Last Times

On open phones, part II

Goodbye, Norman :'(

Liberated by disappointment

XML considered harmful, or, <arghdiediedie/>

Not good for humans

Not good for machines

Parsing XML: layers

Syntactic parsing: too much structure

Semantic parsing: not enough structure

Conclusion

Alternatives (existing and ideal)

Mental Exercise of the Day

Mental Exercise of the Day

Weirdest reason to download music?

Sexy business plan

Review: Sanctuary

Now please take your hands out of my neck

Freedom for Whom?

Zorro and the Lone Ranger

Creationists, I feel your plight

Spore: Epic Fail

On paying for games, pirating, platforms, etc

A pack of mini-games

Cell and Civilisation

Tribe

Creature

Space

Finishing thoughts

New Nintendo portable -- now on IGN

Mental Exercise of the Day

Nintendo's next portable should be around soon

Olympics (and other sport nonsense) considered harmful

Sun-Chained-in-Ink

Mass unblocking in the Great Firewall of China