Wits Intact

You know your marriage might be in trouble...

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:40:00 +0000

When your wife actually accuses you of being willing to edit Wikipedia just to win an argument.

Yes, this actually happened. (Last night, in fact.)

No, I don't think my marriage is in trouble :-)

Saw things so much clearer...

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:25:00 +0000

This will not be one of your shinier, happier blog posts, so you might want to skip this one, six people who actually subscribe to this thing. Still, it's a weird and unique state I'm in, and insofar as this is the only form of journal I keep anymore, I believe it's important to record how I'm feeling right now.

At this very moment I should be packing. My family and I are leaving at 4 AM to catch a flight to upstate New York, where my dad is soon to die of cancer. It's weird to say that, stating it baldly as a fact like that. As though it was merely something you read in an encyclopedia, sanitized, no emotional freight attached whatsoever.

It's weird to be packing. Feels like I ought to be doing something more... spiritual. Metaphysical. But I'm putting stuff into a bag. Things I must remember, that I'm likely to forget: toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving gear, power cords for electronic widgets. (I'll be up there for some time, and will be working from there. Must bring all the parts of the laptop.) Clothes, of course, but only a week's worth. We'll do laundry and wear the same stuff each week.

I was thinking, as I laid all these items out, of my earliest memory of my father. I was perhaps five years old. We were living in our house on Spa Drive in Saratoga Springs. My dad had a bike, a big old blue Schwinn that must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. I remember it had a horn button on the frame. We would go out riding, he and I, with me balancing on the frame, or maybe the handlebars. This one time, he took us down a slight grade -- I want to say a side road, or a logging road; my Texas brain says frontage road, but that's not possible. It had rained, and we took a spill. I bawled my head off, both of us were covered in mud. And I remember how he took his handkerchief and wiped the mud off my face.

When we found out in January that he had cancer, I knew that it was the end for him. His overall health has not been great these last few years, and I didn't think he had the fight in him to lick it. I made my peace with it then, with some difficulty. I haven't felt affected much by his recent downturn, because I believed I had come to terms with it.

I have always thought the place we crashed was over by Yaddo gardens, but I can't think of a spot that matches my (admittedly fragmented) mental image of it. It occurred to me that soon -- probably already; by all accounts my dad is not lucid -- I will no longer be able to ask him. All of a sudden, I was overcome with a profound sadness. Stupid grief. It won't fight you like a man, gotta be sneaking up when you're not looking.

Then I wrote this down, and I felt a little better about it.

I'm not the first person to say this, but if there's any good to come from a person leaving this life, it is to remind us to cherish the people we hold dear, and make sure they know how we feel about them every day. In all too short a while, one of you will be gone.

Classic Aidan

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:43:00 +0000

So I'm lying on the couch just now, watching a show. My son Aidan comes over and climbs under the blanket I'm using.

Me: No, go away. If I wanted a small boy I would have come and got one.
Aidan: Well, you had to help Mommy make me, so you're stuck with me.
Me: You don't even know what you're talking about.
Aidan: I really don't. I don't have a clue.

For Todd Bailey

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:14:00 +0000

Whose blog usually supplies me with the best Flash games, here I am returning the favor:

Effing Hail.

Also appropriate to the weather today, which has been rattling my windows and chasing the dog under my desk all morning. From Warren Ellis, of all people. (Warning: if you don't know who Warren Ellis is, beware that his blog is often not so much Not Safe For Work as it is Not Safe For Any Humans, Anywhere.)

Feed the Beast

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:09:00 +0000

It's late, and I'm quite tired, but I decided (in the car on the way home from gaming, if you must know) that I must blog. And then I had a thought, very clearly: "have to feed the beast."

I found that supremely interesting. I know a lot of writers have this mental image of a small voice inside them that tells them stories. Laura Mixon even talks to hers; she had a name for it at VP, but darned if I can remember what she called it.¹

Suddenly I realized, nothing small about my inner voice. My inner voice is a snarling, slavering thing that wants nothing more than to slip its chain and tear some shit up.

So I write to feed the beast. Which made me think, hmm, if writing is feeding the beast, what does it eat?

Whitespace.

¹ Just remembered: she called it "her beast." Dumbass.

Happy Valentine's Day!

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:42:00 +0000

If you're into that sort of thing. Likewise, if you're so inclined, happy belated Darwin Day and 1234567890 Day.

In writing news, got a really nice bit of feedback on "Road" from one of my fellow VPers who won't be participating in the Skype discussion (tomorrow! yikes!). She liked it a lot, and gave me some very specific things that tripped her up, which will go into the "fit and finish" pass I do after the Skype call. Unless my other fellow VPers find something critically amiss which necessitates taking the piece apart and then gluing it back together.

1700 words last night, late, on a new short tentatively called "Chain-driven." (Which, if you happen to live in Austin and are aware of a certain slice of society, you might recognize as a sly wink to a local landmark.) This one seems like it might end up being crazy but fun.

Oh, and "Lost Luggage?" I pulled it up after the second draft of "Road" was done and discovered I had already rewritten it. The ending isn't what I want it to be; I'll probably get it critiqued and rework it. It's not my best piece ever, but it has what I think is a truly original central conceit, and I should be able to make it sales-worthy. And hey, at something like 2500 words, it's in a rare phylum: a complete story by me under 50 pages!

Finally, I have decided to go ahead and hold onto "Nayda" until Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day (April 23), when I may be able to get some linkage via my VP instructors who participate.

How to REALLY back up like a pro

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:02:00 +0000

Over at Jay Lake's blog, he has written an entry on how to do backups like a pro. I cannot whitewash this; this is sheer poppycock. What Jay describes is absolutely the safest way to back up your files... circa 1990. The IT industry solved this problem years ago. It's over, done. And the software you need to do so is in the "cheap," "free," or "already paying for it" category.

That's an audacious claim, so let me start by debunking the notion that this baroque sequence of events is actually safe. There's one fundamental problem with it, and that is it relies on humans to not make errors. There are a lot of steps in there. And I don't know about other people, but after I've just spent a couple hours pounding out a few thousand words, I'm not at my most mentally keen. Should you really be willing to bank your security on habitually executing all those steps correctly under those circumstances?

In a word, no. Going through these motions is tantamount to thinking that the TSA guys who make us take off our shoes, and restrict liquids to no more than 2 oz (so we can't make a very BIG bomb?) are actually protecting us from terrorists. They counter what Bruce Schneier calls "movie terrorist plots"--threats that seem large, but in fact are not very likely--while against the real issues, they protects us little, or not at all.

An example, you say? Well, have any of you ever done any of these?

Saved a backup file with the wrong filename, so you can't find it later, or you accidentally overwrote a version you wanted to keep?
Had your email account hacked? For example, by a spammer, who gets your gmail account permanently shut down within a matter of hours?
Sent your backup dvds to the wrong relative, or had the right relative not correctly file them, making them impossible to find should you need them?

Et cetera, et cetera. "Impossible!" you say, "because I really CARE about my data." Consider this article from 2007, which cites a researcher who discovered that human error is the most common cause of security breaches.

"So, Mr. Smarty," you say, "You are not really being part of the solution here." Fair enough. Safely backing up your stuff requires two systems to cooperate:

Revision control (also called version control or source control), and
Off-site backups.

Revision control is software that is designed for tracking changes to program source code. No reasonable development shop works without it these days. It works thus: when you make changes to a file, you push those changes over to a revision control server (this is called "committing" the file), which remembers ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER DONE TO THAT FILE. In the blink of an eye, you can revert to an older version, without destroying the data you've subsequently stored in your revision control system (hence, RCS).

Couple this with off-site backups. The best way to achieve this is to run your RCS on your internet hosting. When you save your changes, you tell the RCS to push the changes to your repository of files on your ISP. (Yes, there are some risks in doing this. There is no such thing as "no risk," only "manageable risk," and it's wise under these circumstances to get someone who knows about such things to advise you when first setting up your RCS, to mitigate this risk.) At any point in the future, you can restore every single file you've ever stored there, to any version you've ever committed.

Meanwhile there are guys who work for your ISP who get paid to do nothing but think about how to keep data from being lost. They use RAIDs, which protect systems from drive loss. They do regular tape backups. Some of THEM do multisite backups, automatically mirroring your data to another node in their network to protect against catastrophic failure.

If you can't see how that's better than gmailing yourself all your files, I have failed at this argument.

Other benefits
Not only is this a solid backup strategy that requires minimal manual intervention, there are several side benefits it gives you for free.

If you are working on a project collaboratively, how does your collaborator know they have the most current revision of the file? With revision control, you push changes up to your revision server, give your partner access and let them pull the most current changes using the same software. Unlike email, this works in real-time. You can even lock your files to show that you are working on them, so neither of you stomps on the other's changes.
Every checkin to revision control allows you to add a comment. So when you are looking for a particular past revision of a file, you can read "Road Trip: Changed protag from a man to a woman" instead of digging through a bunch of files called "RoadTrip_v132.doc," "RoadTrip_v133.doc" and so on. Additionally, the system automatically tracks commit times and revision numbers, so even if you don't add comments, it's no harder than looking through a pile of hand-versioned files.
If you work on multiple machines, like I do, it's a snap to keep them in sync: on your desktop, push changes up to the server, on your laptop, pull them down.
If you must have multiple backup sites, revision control makes it painless to keep them in sync, as well. You can even configure one revision control server to automatically push changes over to another (though this takes a little black magic; however, there are plenty of people who will gladly help you set this up for not very much money or free--including me).

All right, enough of my ranting. If I have even cracked your resolve on this, I encourage you, not to take my word on it, but do more research. Talk to your programmer friends. Google for some of the terms I've thrown around in this post. Go look at the web sites of some of the systems I'm talking about; the one I personally recommend for people getting started with RCS is Subversion. It is free, it's widely-adopted throughout the open-source community (lots of people to answer your questions), there are a number of easy-to-use clients for it (such as Tortoise SVN), and it's pretty easy to set up. (In fact, some ISPs that cater to developers, such as Joyent, the one I use, actually have a control panel that will greatly simplify the process.) I used to use Subversion, but if you're feeling ambitious, you might have a look at Bazaar, which is the RCS I use nowadays. (Word of caution: it's a more complex piece of software, so don't let that sour you on the whole RCS strategy.)

Lastly, if you're interested in hearing more about this, please comment. I will be happy to reply privately or answer peoples' questions here.

TimK
Saving the world from arcane backup strategies, one writer at a time.

"Road" second draft completed

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:04:00 +0000

On-time and everything. Of course, although I posted it to the crit group's files area at 11:59, within 30 minutes I had found two egregious typos I couldn't let stand.

13, 108 words total. I managed to rewrite the climax (not the ending, as I said previously) and find it to be MUCH more satisfying.

Now to start reading what the other folks have posted in prep for Skyping on the 15th...

And hey! Now I have no excuse, and must go write the end I thunk up to "Lost Luggage."

Ye Gods and Little Fishes

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 07:40:00 +0000

It's late, and what a week it's been! Draft of "Road" is due tomorrow (scratch that, today). Revised up to page 36 in the original draft. Now at 12,398, not a radical increase (200 words); though I wrote a lot, I cut pretty aggressively too.

Fourteen pages to go, plus the ending could really stand to be rewritten. Though I'm getting to the point where I could probably workshop this draft -- my first drafts tend to be cleaner toward the end, because usually by the time I get that far I've actually worked out what the heck I'm doing. It's at the beginning that I have to remove entire characters, locations, scenes, etc. that were written when the story was going somewhere completely different.

On the Road Again...

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:21:00 +0000

Rewrote the aforementioned scene, added the scene I said I needed to add. 12,178 words total; that's about 500 words that are mostly new. Still roughly p. 19 of the original draft though, darn it!

Must... revise... by... Saturday...

Speaking of OpenID...

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:55:00 +0000

I have now enabled it. Feel free to comment like mad, three people who wanted to comment but weren't going to create a Google account just to do so.

Evil Overlord progress

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:24:00 +0000

I'm about 40% of the way (page 19 of the 50-page first draft) through revising "Road Stretched Into Darkness," my Evil Overlord story from VP. 11,558 words, according to Scrivener, up from 10,500 or 10,700, something like that. (I could roll back to the commit of the completed first draft and check, but it's late and I'm lazy.) I've reached the part where [redacted] gets to the [redacted] Historical Society.

This makes me realize just how much I'm going to have to hustle to have a draft ready for February 1, the date that I set for uploading work to the critique group. That means I'm probably going to have to punt on the notion of doing a short piece as a palate cleanser. Which is a shame, because earlier this week, I finally thought of an ending to a piece I wrote last year called "The Bag" (which will probably become "Lost Luggage" by the time I'm done with it).

On the subject of titles, I don't know if "Road" will stick. I love it, but I'm not in love with it. It mostly came about because the homework assignment required us to use a certain word in the title. (Mine was stretched, in case that isn't obvious. Could have been worse. Claire got laundry.)

Had some other good insights, including the beginning of realizing what the story is about, how important getting the tone right is, and the need for a scene that hasn't been written yet. And I got to use the word zoetrope, how cool is that?

Work-in-progress excerpt, which is probably going to look horrible in my blog theme:

“Normally that wouldn’t help you,” said Mary-Agnes, “since poor Clara only passed about fifteen years ago.”

“Did you know her?” Sophie said.

“Oh my yes,” said Mary-Agnes. “You live in a town of this size for any length of time and you’re bound to know everybody at least a little bit.”

“You said ‘poor’ Clara?”

“Yes, by the time she was my age, all her local kin were gone. Just the occasional visit from out of town relatives. And of course, she never married or had any children of her own. I don’t believe she favored the company of men, if you know what I mean.”

Sophie stifled a vulgar remark, coughed to cover, and nodded.

Writing Objectives For the New Year

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:49:00 +0000

A while back, I mentioned that I wanted to turn this into more of a writing blog than what it's been, which is largely a dumping ground whenever I need to go off on a hyperbolic rant about whatever video game is currently pissing me off. (Speaking of which, to whoever designed the entrance to Queen's Tower in the new Prince of Persia: I suspect you believe that your work is so awesome it warrants having to play it 37 times. You are mistaken.) I've struggled with that, obviously, because while my thoughts about writing are interesting to me, I'm not convinced they're interesting to the other three people that ever read this thing.

Well, this is the year I suck it up. Writing is the most interesting thing (to me) that I'm doing in my life, and if I don't write about what interests me, I won't write at all (Q.E.D.).

2008 Recap

Writing-wise, here's what I feel I accomplished last year:

I finished (which is to say, did enough drafts on to feel that I was comfortable letting other people read) two short stories: "Burning Man" (which was not so much a short story as a novelette that I crammed down into 8k words to fit within the Viable Paradise application guidelines), and "Nayda," a flash piece I wrote for the Apex Halloween contest.
On the bright side, "Burning Man" worked and I got accepted to Viable Paradise, which, as early career achievements go doesn't totally suck. I applied because two of my favorite genre authors/bloggers (John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear) were teaching, and as a consequence got to meet them (as well as several other awesome pro writers, editors, and VP alumni), hang out, and have them tear my work to shreds. It was awesome.

Things I did not accomplish:

Didn't really make a serious effort at NaNoWriMo. This was largely because of my sudden change of employment -- the new job demanded a lot of my attention, and I felt I couldn't afford to devote the time I needed to put in to crank out 50K words in November. This is really just a bullshit excuse, but the experience was very useful: I am starting to grok the idea that I need to partition off time to write if I want to get anywhere with it, rather than just doing it whenever I have free time and am not overwhelmed by the desire to play World of Warcraft.

Next up: 2009

2008 was a pretty good year for the writing career. For 2009, one of the things I am going to do differently is have formalized goals. That way, I can check back throughout the year, see how I'm doing, and apply effort as needed to any neglected initiatives. Then, in 2010, I can measure how well I did!

Here are my goals, in (roughly) priority order:

Finish my "Evil Overlord" homework assignment from VP and find somewhere to send it out. For those who know nothing about VP, this is the major assignment from the week-long workshop. You are given certain parameters and asked to write a 5k word story within those parameters. My Evil Overlord story is currently 11K words and about halfway through second draft. Anybody know of a good market that looks at unsolicited genre novelettes?
Critique at least 3 pieces every month. My VP class has more or less bonded for life, it seems, and we regularly swap stories to crit. I have been a little remiss since early November, though I critted a bunch of stuff the other night. 3 stories or partial novels a month doesn't seem too arduous. This might be a softball goal, in fact, but since this is my first year doing this, I'll let it slide.
Write at least one more piece of flash fiction. Short fiction is hard. I have a natural tendency to sprawl; a short story about a guy in a fish market is apt to bloom into a deep examination of his perception of his place in the cosmos. All well and good but I also need to develop the chops to write to length, and to tell a complete story that fits into a smaller box. Fortunately, I already have an idea for a "prose poem" style flash story that I will probably start while rewriting the VP homework story, just as a palate cleanser.
Finish 2-4 short stories of reasonable length and send them out. And by reasonable length I mean 1K-2,500 words. Possibly as many as 5K. Again with the "learn how to tell a story inside a small space." Jay Lake claims he used to write a short story a week, so even I should be able to hit this mark.
Write the novel I was going to write at NaNoWriMo. It seems like a good first novel to write, since there's a high likelihood that the first novel I finish won't be the first one I sell, and it's not one of the Big Ideas I'm so attached to that I'm paralyzed trying to write them.
Speaking of which: sell something. Anything. For the love of God, Montressor! I'm how old now? It ain't like I've got a lot of time left to HAVE a fricking career. Better get the ball rolling.
Put "Nayda" up on the site. Not a lot of markets out there for election horror flash fiction, so I reckon it's a good candidate for starting the free story bank. (Maybe I should hold off and do this for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.)
Volunteer at ArmadilloCon. One of the things I learned this year, which I really never quite understood, was just how important fandom is to the industry. I mean, hey. I'm a geek. I knew there were cons, and I knew people went to them. I just didn't comprehend what they were for. Having been to 'dilloCon '08 (and WFC the year before), I now recognize that I need to get more involved. Speaking of which, it would be nice if I could get to at least one other con, maybe one of the bigger ones (WisCon?) that isn't in Texas. Not going to make that a formal goal, though, because I'm iffy. (FlyCon, alas, you do not count.)

Notice how one of the goals is not "update the blog more." But if I end up using this space as my journal, to keep track of progress on all these goals, that should just happen. We'll see.

Non writing related goals

What the hey. "Not the most important" doesn't necessarily mean "not important," so I'll throw in a couple of other things I'd like to see happen this year.

Move the blog over to WordPress. I mean, seriously, Google, isn't it about time you embraced OpenID? I guess I can let people use it to login to post here, but I'd sure like to use it to login to my own account, and whatnot. Plus, WordPress will give me a host of other options. Besides, all the cool kids are doing it.
Publish a !@#$% card game. Billionaire or Infected, I don't care at this point. POD has gotten cheap enough that for a couple hundred bucks I can print a few dozen decks to give to friends, sell through BoardgameGeek, in local shops, at cons etc. etc.

Yet another reason why I love Python

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:41:00 +0000

Or perhaps in this case, why I hate Lua:

All I have to say is...

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:51:00 +0000

Thank goodness. Because I know nothing about the process of applying for political asylum.

I voted early, and so can you

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:31:00 +0000

Texans have been able to vote early since Monday. Thinking I was being crafty, I went at the end of my lunch hour; surely no one would be taking advantage of this opportunity! Much to my surprise, the line at the Cedar Park Public library was out to the parking lot. I decided to punt and come back the next day.

Yesterday I went at the start of the lunch hour. The wait ended up being about 40 minutes... a lot less than it will be on November 4th, I guarantee.

If you live in a state that supports early voting, like Texas and Florida, I urge you to find out where the early voting polling places are, get out there and vote early. You'll thank me, I promise you.

Worst. Game design. Ever.

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Imagine, if you will, playing for seventy-odd hours through a fairly kick-ass game. Now imagine that that game ends with a forty-second cut scene, followed (with no transition) by a button that you have to press within roughly half of normal human reaction time or you die. And then have to sit through the forty-second cut scene again to get another chance.

Well, you don't have to imagine it! In fact, God of War II gave us this lovely experience a couple of years ago. It just happens that I am only now getting around to playing it.

Everybody say it with me now: A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE ONE-BUTTON PHYSICAL CHALLENGE WITH THE DIREST OF CONSEQUENCES DOES NOT MAKE YOUR GAME "HARD." IT DOESN'T MAKE PLAYERS FEEL "HEROIC." IT MAKES THEM FEEL (and of course, I'm projecting MY feelings on the gaming audience at large, here) LIKE DRIVING DOWN TO THE SANTA MONICA OFFICES OF SCEA WITH SOME LARGE IMPLEMENT OF DESTRUCTION. Like a bulldozer, or maybe a very angry bobcat. I mean, seriously, what the hell? I have literally played this scene dozens of times now. Even sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for it, I have successfully hit the first button once. I even sucked it up and let them switch me to easy mode, something I've resisted for the entire game. Alas, easy mode only affects "combat" -- aka, it does nothing for the button-mashing games.

It wouldn't be so bad if you just jumped into the button-mashing directly, but having to sit through the same forty seconds of complete bullshit just to die instantly? You people are bloody sadists and I hope you enjoy the special circle of hell you will be roasting in shortly. (Escaping is easy! Within the next 100ms, just press... triangle! No, square! Hahaha! Maybe next-- triangle! Still too slow!)

I realize it's hard to design an endgame experience that doesn't feel like a cakewalk (I'm looking at you, BioShock) yet isn't so challenging you want to throw your controller through your TV screen. So hey. Let's pretend you're professionals and that you get paid to do your job, and not punish your goddamn customers by gating your endgame with a stupid, impossible bit of torture.

Want to be a part of Heatwave?

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:12:00 +0000

No, we're not hiring people -- not just yet. But we've started the process of assembling our "player advisory council," a group of volunteers who will have access to and offer feedback on our games while they are still in development. If this seems like something you'd be interested in, here's the article, with a link to the application form.

EA Store: You Just Don't Get It

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:33:00 +0000

I know, shocking.

Here's the sitch: some friends have picked up Crysis and are enjoying it. I thought I might join them. Then I remembered that EA has that Steam-like downloadable store thing that should, in theory, let me buy the game digitally. Sweet! No more having to remember where I put the damn DVD. I decide to check it out.

You might notice that when I chose a digital download for my delivery option, they added a little something to my cart automatically. It's that $6 line item there, with the unfortunate acronym EDS (hint: a little Cialis will clear that problem right up, EA Store).

What might that be, you may wonder, as did I. Let's click on the little "what is this?" link, shall we?

Whoo, check that out! For only an extra $6 (and let's not even start on how EA is making out by selling me this thing digitally, because they keep 100% of the retail price and don't even have to print a BOX), EA will "keep my game on file" for 2 years. Uh, no thanks. If you do this, you are an idiot. They're going to keep a copy of the game online whether you get this or not, so they can sell it as a download in the future. You are literally handing EA free money. It's like the extended warranties you get at Circuit City (again, only if you're an idiot). Here's a clue guys: if you buy a game on Steam, you can reinstall it at any time in the future by simply re-downloading the Steam client and logging in. Not for 2 years, and not at some price premium -- forever. Likewise, if I want to play Galactic Civilizations 2, I just install the Stardock client and download it. Forever. Those guys clearly get it.

Some marketing bleeb came up with this genius idea to soak the credulous for a few extra bucks. Don't reward them for this behavior by taking them up on it.

While this may seem like my usual ranting about greedy corporate etc. etc., it's really not that. I was honestly interested in the digital download alternative, but this clause makes that untenable. Genuinely disappointing.

Welcome, Wired Visitors

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:41:00 +0000

Back in September, a fellow here in town who works freelance for Wired interviewed me for an article. Unfortunately, that article got morphed into something else & I lost track of it.

Apparently, the morphed version of the article finally got posted a couple of days ago. The interview I did got cut down to a one-line quote -- but more importantly, it linked back to this blog. So for those of you out-of-towners visiting courtesy of Wired: welcome! For your amusement, here's a link to my post about the AGC talk I did (including a copy of the slides), which is what started this whole ball rolling.

Gears of Screw You, Epic

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:58:00 +0000

Ever since I finished Half Life 2: Ep 2 I've been looking for another good shooter to play. And then I heard that Gears of War was going to be available for the PC. I've been wanting to play GoW for a long time, and simultaneously not wanting to buy an Xbox 360, so naturally I ran out and bought it. Alas, Gears of War is not what I was hoping for.

It's allegedly a tactical game, though you have no control over your squadmates -- er, squadmates? Let's not be afraid to call a spade a spade -- "bait," is what they are, as their job is apparently to run in, immediately be cut down by a hail of gunfire and for the rest of the level, lay there panting and moaning for you to come "revive" them -- I put that in quotes because, really, if you do run to [deadliest point in level] and revive them (which you apparently can't do from cover, for some reason, so you have to expose yourself to massive damage for a few seconds), all they subsquently do is repeat the running-into-hail-of-gunfire algorithm ad nauseum.

Your weapons, which have enough recoil to prevent you firing more than three accurate shots in a row, do not have enough impact to stop enemies from routinely charging directly at you, leaping over your cover, and chainsawing you in the face. Meanwhile your own melee attacks take about twenty . . . no, that's hyperbole . . . they take a few seconds to execute, which is not fast enough to respond to the guy chainsawing you in the etc. etc. Not only that, but the number of times you have to hit an individual enemy to bring them down is INSANE. In one place I had a guy above me and across the way popping up from behind a wall. The only place I could hit him was in the head . . . and yet it took me a couple hundred rounds of ammo to drop him. Even allowing for a 25% hit ratio, that's still 50 shots to the head. To take out one opponent. Ye gods. Apparently the human race HAS fallen on hard times, if this is the best tech we can muster.

The cover mechanism, while cool at first, proved very dicey in the heat of actual combat. Oftentimes, when I didn't have a clear shot at an opponent, I would detach from cover and stand near the other face of the obstruction I was hiding behind, hoping to get a better angle. Then hit the "cover" key . . . only to NOT attach to cover, but to dive straight into an onslaught of gunfire and die instantly.

This would be an endurable frustration were it not compounded by an UNENDURABLE one, namely, in porting the game MS have not bothered to add a "save anywhere" feature. No, really. On a PC game. I know, right? You would think they would have learned their lesson from everyone bitching about Far Cry. So in this one place (I'll call it "the last bit of Gears of Torture I will subject myself to in this lifetime") you've got three Locust that you're trying to kill with your little nerf gun -- a guy with a cannon, a spotter for the cannon guy (the aforementioned dude in a loft across the way), and a roamer. About fifteen times I played through this section, often killing the observer, sometimes killing the roamer. Finally, I managed to get behind the guy with the cannon so he couldn't instakill me, at which point it became apparent where they spent the AI dev budget they saved by making your teammates a bunch of slack-jawed monkeys. The guy abandoned his post to jump over my cover and chainsaw me in the face. It sure would have been nice to quicksave before that happened, so I didn't have to kill the same two guys another fifteen times in a row, since doing so is not fun. I know, it's crazy talk and I'm sure the designers at Epic have felt the etheric ripples of my heresy and are even now experiencing a twinge of irritable bowel syndrome.

This feature -- er, lack of a feature -- reduces the game to a sort of series of mini-vignettes in which you have to learn the correct sequence of actions the designers wanted you to do and execute them perfectly before being allowed to go on, such as the area where you have to close five emergence holes and they give you six grenades. No, really.

In short, Gears of War is a stunning looking game that only a certain type of person would enjoy, and that person would be someone who has never played any game but Halo and thinks Master Chief is the deepest, most well-developed character in the history of games. Unless your tolerance for suffering is greater than mine -- and remember, I have kids -- I would give it a miss. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back and play through Episode 2 again to get this filthy taste out of my mouth.

The Results Are In

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 19:08:00 +0000

By all accounts, my Austin GDC talk went very well. I was in one of the upstairs rooms, seating -- at a guess -- between a hundred and two hundred people. It was packed, and since I don't think I know a hundred to two hundred people, there must have been quite a few who were there just to see the talk.

Had a moment of terror when I realized, ten minutes before the presentation was to begin, that the video connections in the conference room were VGA and my MacBook Pro only had a DVI out. I called the conference organizer, who dispatched an A/V tech to my room with a DVI to VGA cable, and managed to start on-time. Although I was annoyed that I didn't have a volunteer in the room with a walkie (they gave me someone, but she was just for the "A" in A/V, and she bolted not long after introducing herself), I was pleased with how quickly and efficiently the problem got solved. Still, after the show I bought a DVI-to-VGA adapter, which now permanently resides in my notebook bag.

I did a small Powerpoint to use while setting up the video that said things like "This is not the talk. I am just setting up the video." That got a chuckle. Must remember to save that for future talks.

My metrics for how well it went were:

Only a couple of people sneaked out during the talk, in spite of the fact that it was right before lunch and people generally like to leave early to get a good spot in line.
About 60% of the audience stayed for the Q&A.
They laughed at most of the jokes.
People kept coming up to me throughout the rest of the show. Some just wanted to say "good talk," but many had questions that they weren't comfortable asking in a room full of people or didn't think of until after the talk was over. Either way, they were clearly engaged, so I'm happy about that.

I finished right on time, which was amazing considering that (given my off-the-cuff style) I hadn't really rehearsed it.

CMP recorded the talk, but they haven't told us yet where or when those recordings will be available. In the meantime, you can download the slides. (Note that these include some minor edits made the day of, including text animations. As such they are marginally more up-to-date than the ones you can download from the AGC website.)

Finally, note to self: transactions are a good way to help prevent dupes. Forgot to add that to the duping slide.

BioShock: Copy Protection Tipping Point?

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:33:00 +0000

I finished BioShock, and have been meaning to do a post comparing it with F.E.A.R. However, the whole copy protection "rootkit" saga has me so captivated, I feel compelled to talk about that first.

Note: I generally like to keep it family-friendly hereabouts (why? I don't know. Perhaps out of fear that my kids will one day come across this and have to make a radical reassessment of their mental picture of their Parental Unit). However, there's a little NSFW language in here, because I just can't get around it. Proceed at your own peril.

I once read a book called Racehoss by a guy named Albert Race Sample, who gave me the book when I was briefly his neighbor over off Metric Boulevard. The man went on to become a celebrated City of Austin civil servant, but the book details his life as a young man, including the time he spent in prison. One of the scenes that has stayed with me from that story was his description of the prison mule, which had been fucked so regularly by the prisoners that she simply raised her tail anytime anyone got near her hindquarters.

I bought BioShock the day it got released, and I played the crap out of it. Pretty much every nonworking nonfamily noneating nonsleeping etc. etc. moment for four days was devoted to completing it. It's a great game, one of the few I've ever bought where my expectations were high and were still met. And the copy protection issue didn't really register for me. So I saw all the furor about it, and I wondered: why hadn't it bothered me?

Ah, but as I pondered this question, I realized: it had. In retrospect, as I was installing it, it had bugged me. But this was a game I had been planning to buy for a year. I was really jonesing to play it. Yes, the copy protection was obnoxious, but I wanted to play that game.

And that's when I realized: I had just raised my tail. Sure, I'll keep the DVD in the drive, in spite of the 4GB of hard drive space I just donated to your opus. Sure, you can install a permanent windows service and some undeletable registry keys. Sure, I'll connect to your authorization service and accept my first activation (of a paltry two).

And now that I've seen the forest for the trees, I'm hopping mad. Because inch by inch they are making me not want to play games on my PC ever again. "It's only a small requirement," they say, and "we have to protect our investment." Like they are doing us a favor by releasing the game on the PC in the first place.

Why am I even thinking about this, instead of just enjoying what a great game BioShock was? I am starting to understand why Richard Stallman is such a zealot. Seriously, if I went to the store and bought a hammer, then brought it home, started pounding away, and then got a security alert stating that I had driven in too many nails, that hammer would get planted right up someone's ass. So why is this acceptable behavior for software in general and games specifically?

Look, I'm no bleeding heart. I kinda sorta work in the industry, and I'm an aspiring fiction writer, so I'm very much in favor of people profiting from their intellectual property. I'm not saying "software wants to be free," I'm saying, "look, retards, your inability to see what's directly in front of your face is resulting in no harm to the pirates you're targeting, and lots of harm to the people that want to give you their money." I'm saying "there's a better way -- and more enlightened souls have known it for years."

I'm hoping this incident is a wake-up call to the industry. After all, no one ever said, "Here's some money -- please inconvenience me." Surely, hundreds of pages of outraged posts in the 2KGames forums will get noticed, right? With luck, the situation will inspire someone to pick up the ball and run with it, to the ultimate betterment of the situation for all parties. Maybe even me.

W00h00!

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 05:03:00 +0000

I got this email today:

Hi Tim - Just a quick note to let you know that although the polls officially close today, we're confident that your submission will make it into the People's Choice track. We have it scheduled for Thursday September 6th from 11-12.

Thanks to everyone that voted for me!

Oh, crap, now I actually have to finish the damn thing . . .

P.S. Also? My D&D character came within millimeters of horrible, horrible death (was infected with zombie disease, knocked down to -9, had to stabilize within 1 round and was 5 rounds from standing up and attempting to mack on my group's brains). Pulled it out of the fire, just barely, so woohoo, team!

Deathly Hallows & Me: It's Like I'm Some Kind of Frickin Genius

noreply@blogger.com (MrTact) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 11:58:00 +0000

I wanted the final Harry Potter book; wanted it now, stamping my little foot exactly like Veruca Salt. But standing in line for three hours at midnight, surrounded by the berobed, bespectacled and be-wanded? Not so much. My dignity was at stake. I'm umpty-ump years old, and those people are nerds.

(For a movie? Sure, that's an inherently social experience, and standing in line only adds to it. But standing in line to get a book that I'm then going to take home and read by myself is just moronic.)

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. I would just go the following morning when the bookstores reopened. I know they'll have ordered eleventy-hojillion of the things, so availability wouldn't be a concern. However, this wasn't really an option. The morning of, we were leaving the house at 7 AM to go to SeaWorld for the day, followed by a Cub Scout overnight in the park. I resigned myself to having to go and do the midnight thing after all; no way was I going to wait until Sunday afternoon, allowing some jackass to ruin it for me.

Then I had an idea. It remained my plan up until July 19th: go to Wal-Mart. Surely there wouldn't be long lines there -- nobody's that dumb! (Except me, I guess.) Only there was this niggling thought in the back of my head -- too obvious. Sure enough, after the fact, I found out that (BIG SPOILER ALERT) it would have been a bad idea.

So I concocted a new plan: I learned that my local Randall's store (a Safeway-owned grocery chain) would have copies of the book at launch day, and they would be open at 6. Ah-ha! I would get up early, go to Randall's, buy the book and some dramamine, and read it in the car on the way to SeaWorld. Brilliant! I would get the book a mere couple of hours later than the schmucks who waited in line

The alarm went off at 6 AM. My wife, already awake (prepping for SeaWorld, remember) said "It's 6:00". Redundancy, that's the key to a successful plan. I leapt out of bed; I am not a morning person at all but if a new Harry Potter book came out every day I'd never be late to work.

Drove down the street (more or less) to the Randall's (drive drive drive), pulled into the parking lot and what did I see? About 5 cars. Yes! Brilliant! I jumped out of my car and ran to the door, and as I entered the store I saw that it was practically vacant. Brilliant! I crossed to the books area, up front near the register, and what did I see?

Not one copy of the book.

I am thrown by this, but not all the way off the horse. OK, it was early, I could see they were stocking stuff, maybe they just hadn't cracked open their inventory yet. I decided to give them a few minutes to get to it before I started kicking someone's ass . . . maybe my own. I went to grab the Dramamine. Inevitably it takes me ten minutes to find whatever I'm looking for in that place anyway.

Next stumbling block: no Dramamine. No motion sickness meds of any kind whatsoever. And I need it, too. When I was a kid, I could read Dune (the old paperback edition with about a 30 degree bend to the spine and little tiny cramped type) with my head bouncing off the metal frame of the school bus window. Nowadays? Read one article in the paper and bleaugh!

I was frustrated, as you might imagine. But undaunted! I had just made up my mind to go talk to someone about where the hell my book was when I spotted generic Safeway motion sickness stuff. Score! Then I had another genius insight: the door I came in was the side door, not the main one. If they were going to have a display of the book, they might have put it at the other end of the store.

Indeed, as I ran down there, I saw they had about 20 copies of the book in the middle of -- get this -- a giant castle made of Coke. As if I was going to look at the book and go "That's right, reading is thirsty work. I better grab a case of Coke Zero." I picked up my copy of the book, skipped the Coke, checked out and headed home.

Total round trip time: 30 minutes. I would call the plan a success. I read roughly the first 150 pages on the trip to Seaworld, grabbed a few pages here and there during downtime in the overnight program, and finished it reading by booklight at 1:30 the following morning, tucked away in my sleeping bag in the shark tank at SeaWorld.