News

23 December 2009 - Angry Letters to the Editor

What follows is a letter I wrote to letters@washpost.com a few minutes ago. Enjoy.
At least two distinct pages of the Health&Science section from Dec 22, 2009 display callow, hastily assembled, and poorly-thought-out columns untoward for the gravitas of the Washington Post, and inappropriate for the apprehension of the reader.

Allow me to direct the reader to page E2 (for the purpose of example only, as the nature of the gaff calls into question any edification to be had from reading for content), the column "The Checkup," the article "Do neti pots promote sinus health?" The article sets the framework for a statistical debunking of the health benefits of nasal irrigation using a neti pot. "...scientists reasoned that daily, long-term use of neti pots can strip the nose of its...defenses"
Great. Excellent piece of reporting, even if the proof itself is a little premature. Nothing at all wrong with the article.
Now I direct the reader to the top left "Winter can bring cold comforts." The last bullet point in the article "Rinse your nose with salt water," you guessed it, recommends the use of neti pots. While each of these articles is on the same page, any human editor responsible for the section clearly is not. I can only surmise this gaff, assembled with all the context of an internet advert and all the forethought of a puerile ox, was the result of a competent, hasty staff rather than what it looks like: the green staff of a small town amateur newspaper worthy of late night talk show mocking.

That foolishness is the lesser offense of the E section, as I direct the reader back to the front page, and the garish apostasy of "Christmas Perils."
When one makes a list, for example in a sentence, the items of that list will naturally have equal weight. To put items in a list is to demonstrate literary equivalence. So when I see a list of cautionary tales about the dangers of holiday activity, I am naturally curious to learn what the writer values as equivalent events, each worthy of the same few inches of article space in the finest newspaper in the country. And it is with my own abject horror that I read "Drunken Driving" juxtaposed with "Package-opening Injury," "Holiday Plant Poisoning," or "Weight Gain."
Drunken driving is way, way, way, vastly, impossibly way more dangerous and important to make note of than the rest of the "perils" listed on that page combined and multiplied by 10. To list it along with the others belies the sadistic satisfaction of Hell's editor: equating the tragic misery of losing a loved one to a drunken driver with that of putting a band aid on the boo boo of little Timmy Packageopener.

I only wish I had a band-aid capable of patching up the Health&Science section; staunching the hemorrhage of reporting integrity. I suppose the trash can shall simply have to do.

-Charles Staniunas concerned healthy person & scientist of Chantilly, VA

02 November 4707 - Less Tea and More Aye

Boy this all looks archaic.
As near as I can figure it, I get this sense of things at about this same time every year. I do not have a word to accurately describe this sense of things. I can tell you what it makes me feel like doing, though. First and foremost, this sense of things makes me feel like manipulating every bit of text, border, and box on this website.
Perhaps even throwing it all to the wind and making something else. I've kept up with traditions that are certainly archaic. My own personal sandbox built upon and used, and after a million or more words hallowed into some wondrous and hollow dome.
I do not mind a dome, indeed, any cathedral has plenty of detail within it to mark upon while you are looking at it. But no one thinks of a cathedral as all the clever details it has.

It has a word.
To have a word is very good—and most important—so when I say that my current sense of things lacks a word, you may better know exactly what I mean.

There was a period of days awhile back where I sortof wanted to fill out a more article-length thought and post it here, perhaps during the months of September or October of this year. Presumably I had thoughts during those months; all of which got shoved into tight little boxes in the form of tweets, or off into full-fledged forum posts in one of the two internet forums I actually post in.
Any remaining effort to affect an internet presence grew out of my few events through the LP community of forums-I-actually-post-in number 1. It made more sense to foist all of my ideas and effort into those places. It still makes more sense.
But me poor derelict website here no longer connects. That doesn't make much sense. It needs grooming and constant attention, criticism, revision, and most importantly: garbage collection.

So what would I change about this little corner of the internet that is my home?
More Modern Code Yeah, this is the big topic, and one I'm the most reluctant to change. My shit always displays the way I want it to in the browser I like the most, making me reluctant to modify the way I make it. I want to believe in the ultimate acid test of the real. Basically no, I'm not going to change the way I code for this little website. I may add things, though, as it is annoying to specify style definitions more than once.
The Colors Bah. By now I more or less am married to the color scheme around this place, although I may change a few things gradually. Even though the original reason is long lost, and even though I certainly despise conventions that are kept despite antiquated, obsolete or foolsih, the colors are harmless on the whole, and now serve as a tiny piece of individuality.
Dates in a Calendar No One Keeps I had the best public speaking professor there is or ever was. For fun (as it was only profit to current students of his and I was former), I participated in a parade and learned what year it was. This was back in 4701, or early 2003. No other reason, really. The exceptionally odd behavior I've devised from this is to mix the Gregorian Calendar months with an ancient Chinese year. I'll probably relax on this point, but don't expect me to forget what year it is.
Archaic Categories I'm fond of the number of categories I have, and I really like the titles, but enough is enough. Crafting bins of equal size is a histogramographer's craft, and I was that at some nontrivial point in my life. I didn't make business cards for it or anything. At the same time, I'll be able to link to more current activities of mine. Like those I've actually done in the past two years or so.
Topical Opacity My older brother once told me "Opacity is a virtue if we're talking house paints," to discourage me from becoming too opaque with words I meant for other people to read and understand. I'm a steganographer at heart (something you can't usually go out and tell people), and oft a poet in practice, so I don't think I'll ever be finished with hiding meanings in things. What I can do is stop from making the practice so much of an M.O. that I need to issue decoder rings in boxes of cereal I may or may not have had a hand in designing to exist as a pirate captain in cereal-response to Captain Crunch just for people to be able to understand what the heck I'm talking about. This whole tirade has been pretty transparent, barring the occasional whimsical choice of phrase, and is what I expect of myself for any other million words I deem worth putting here.
Storage I didn't used to have the kind of storage space I have now, and because of it there's plenty of files stuck on the server here that I would never make links to. Well, okay, never is going a little far. I should make use of all this lovely storage media that gets left around the office, though. And maybe at the same time recategorize my stuff. Fabrications and Questionable tend to overlap a bit much.
Frequency The other big 'un, left for last. I honestly don't know where the time went that I used to spend exclusively at my website. I don't know when it's coming, either. And for much of what I plan to change, really the changes should be invisible. Except.
Annotations An alternative to scuttling the whole ship is to put a modern mark on it. I have no idea what I was thinking for a lot of it, but it certainly was me, so I should bother to explain it. I'll make a wee box with wee text next to things I feel need a little more explaining. This will run in line with the transparancy bit I mentioned earlier. Also will be a reason to be a snark.

So there you have it. Something of a series of resolutions about this horrible mess. I may also keep only a single current entry here and let everything else fall away elsewhere in lists of links...or I may make them all into a single, incredibly lengthy page. Hmm.

16 August 4707 - A Captive Audience Lacks Levity

It's a puzzle maker who imagined that secret societies and hidden symbols mask the truth of the matter, whatever that matter is. I've sat down and solved crossword puzzles before, so I know about how much truth may be hidden in them; a subset of that that could be known to begin with. I've even had a fun time building puzzles of various kinds, and often found myself incapable of stopping miself from handing out clues and hints at how to solve them.

What I learned from that is that I love the moment where someone realizes what I've done, and can step back and appreciate a new meaning from the first one they understood.
That feeling is what makes me a steganographer, or if I cannot be professionally so-called, what makes me hide little easter eggs in just about everything that I make.

Stories would be foremost among those things, if I had been more vigilant in crafting them so far. The time I usually appoint for crafting articles like this one has been filled recently with making some goodies for the Let's Play subforums of SomethingAwful: a Secret of Evermore LP. Doing so taught me just how much time can go into making these underproduced pieces of kitch entertainment, and it also taught me that I have, as I imagined I have, the stuff that it takes to make them. Most importantly, a love of the games.
I wanted to start off with an offbeat and unheardof title in Dragon View, but after a pilot and some coaching, I put that aside in favor of a new appraoch to Secret of Evermore. The important difference at first was my own capability. I had to go through many more steps to capture the screen of my emulator than to record the screen of a television hooked to a device I posses and that some of my pirate crew and I refer to as "the Game Barge." And if you can find a cart of Dragon View, than I would be frankly impressed (and then probably smack you for spending so much money on a dated, marginal game). With all the SoE videos recorded (and available for your viewing enjoyment as I update them here), I feel I'm ready to step up to the LP I really wanted to do. The game that made me decide that the purchase of a PS2 was justified. The game that I purchased and played to completion well before I owned the console to go with it. You could say that I really like this game.
A man named Brian Alden introduced me to it. He's off in California now, doing whatever it is a weeabo does with his time in an office environment from what I can gather. But his facebook updates tell me that the soul of a warrior that pulses in him has not died off. That spirit is what caused him to try this game on, and for me? What can I say? It has the perfect mix of story telling, graphics (for the era), game controls, and obscurity that I find most appealing in games. It was produced by two companies no one had ever heard of. Capcom produced the (poorly done) sequel years later. It has no voice acting, only a grunt track.

Way of the Samurai.

For the LP, I can use the same method that I did with SoE to record gameplay and voice commentary. The key difference is that I need more of a plan. With SoE, I already had played it a bunch and got stuck and started poking around every corner of the game until I found a way out. This was back in the days when I could approach a game without the intent to play it to completion and get an ending and everything else I expect of a whole game. I played everything then like I play Pokemon now. I knew a great deal about SoE, which translates into pretty good commentary when you just pick it up and play to show your friends on the internet or whatever. To exhaust what I would want of a comprehensive playthrough of WotS, by contrast, would require in incredible amount of effort, most of which would result in some less-than- entertaining sequences of mostly the same-as-before story lines, but this time with a different sword!
I need a plan. A way to produce videos a little more quickly than I release them so I can reasonably respond to user requests (or at least bring them up and ignore them). I'm open to suggestions, but mostly I need a sounding board where I can get all my ideas into text and read over them a couple of times before taking steps toward making the videos.
First, understanding the game itself.
In WotS, you play as a guy with a sword who talks to people and gets in fights with other people for two days until some nation-changing catastrophe happens and the world order changes somehow because of it. From this, six different endings are available, based on how many of the game's title characters are left standing at the end of it. Paradoxically, the only way to get an ending without killing anyone yourself is to get the "bad guys win" ending in which it is implied that all the title characters die (including you). You can carry up to three swords at a time, you learn moves as you go along, and can even improve the power of the sword by taking it to the smith (or with some pickups). The plot is short, but you are expected to play through it many times until you've seen all the endings and all the clever interactions that the characters can have.
What all this means is that the larger story is that of the sword itself. How it is a being stuck in a bizarre time-loop, linked through arcane magics to its owner, who is oblivious of what is going on, and blithely spouts the same dialog options when presented them. The sword compels the man to action. I would want to make the story about the sword. This is bushido, after all.
You can get a lot of swords in the game. Really, a lot. Your bank holds 63, and I think you can get about 60 unique swords in the game (without using a cheat code to get hidden ones, then there's like 70). I cannot hope to obtain all of them. I can obtain the notable swords, and a plurality of the obscure-but-good swords. Ah, but how?
Well, the general idea (and one of the reasons that I love the game) is that if you see someone with a sword, you can kill him and take it. If the man is hard to kill, the sword is hard to get, but ah, as we learned before, the skill is more a part of the sword than the man, so if you win a hard fight, your reward is similarly great. You get to keep the sword you came in with, and two more that you find along the way, and one extra one if you pay a fee and have it delivered to the bank (this also protects it from the next paragraph).
And if you die, you lose any swords you were carrying. Poof. All that work, killed right there. Oh, sure, the man can come right back, but the sword is lost forever. Still think the story is about the humans?

This is the story of a sword.
So far, my idea is to create a narrative structure where the swords are spirits and the humans are just so many idiotic drones playing out the same events over and over with no knowledge of it. The story would be that of a messenger or harbinger who is looking for another, one with the power to ascend to greater heights (difficulties) and assemble the council (the game's gimmicky non-sword weapons).
It could be a logical end then, because without such a structure, with a foreseeable conclusion, I would never stop playing this game and recording it for everyone's enjoyment.
For the sake of the game's other cool components that don't come through as well in the narrative structure, I would produce "bonus videos" that have the regular kind of commentary where I would be able to have guests and everything a normal, great LP should have.
But I'm posting this here so you may leave comments for me. I get the impression that this will be better if I get input from as many sources as I can. Those who do not feel qualified to give me suggestions about how to LP may become sufficiently expert by watching only a few of them (as long as you don't get your examples from youtube, which carries a stigma for collecting the worst of LPers).
Savvy? I have my own ideas about where to go and writing this all out was a big help. I think I'll bring this up to the writers on Thursday. Which reminds me! I need to tell James that I'm interested in going to that! See how helpful this is.

29 June 4707 - All Aroundside

A fantasy writer spends a lot of time trying to imagine how people would live under circumstances that are not, those that could be, and those imaginary. For everyone else, our language becomes colored, tempered by our experiences until the metaphors we chose and, indeed, the means we use to express meaning come out in terms of what we know. In terms of what we like to talk about, are interested in, or are good at.
So I ask your forbearance when I begin the topical matter of today's article with understandings that I learned from reading about Magic card design.

Now that I have that forbearance or not, the idea I mean to put center stage is the notion of the card with no downsides. I had read about this practice and later even observed it for myself: the idea that a card needs to have some drawback or that designing cards with downsides is more fun or leads to more fun experiences for the players. Fledgeling designers like making cards with built-in drawbacks.
The problem with designing cards this way is that there's a huge gap between what is fun to design and what is fun to play with in this case. Players do not like their cards to have downsides. Players do not like their cards to have downsides. Players do not like their cards to have downsides. Imagine the emphasis shifting around in that sentence, and it forms three or four meaningful sentences. The game of Magic has a built-in means of balance called the "mana cost," and figuring out the appropriate cost compared to the benefit of the card is part of the art of developing the game of Magic. The chief use of the drawback is to shift the function of balance from the mana cost to some other cost. A creature may be any two of the three qualities of: large, all upside, and inexpensive. Hence a creature can be both large and cheap, but then it needs to have a downside.
Magic as a game needs to severely limit the number of cards it lets by that do have downsides, simply because these kinds of creatures are by and large not fan favorites, and that, dear reader, is exactly what Facebook is going through growing pains to bring about starting, oh say today-ish.
The big idea is this. The most interesting notion of that article to me was the idea of the "sentiment sniffer," which they all but came out and called it, and I would be upset to have coined the term miself. I always chuckled at the idea of the sociological study, and further at the idea of Sociology in general, as it in all cases comes across as the bastard child of opposing ideas, from which no good science (or art for that matter) may spring.
Let me back up a bit. Sociology is merely okay as a science. People get degrees in it and if they have any idea what they're doing, then they understand that they're trying to pin numbers on things that have a nasty habit of being unquantifiable. This practice brings about understandings because of the absence of precise meaning: the kind of information Sherlock Holmes or Spock is talking about when he says "all that remains, no matter how improbable." We can learn about humans by observing what facts about them we cannot precisely measure. By contrast, a sociologist who thinks he's better at figuring things out than a statistician (who understands what trends make data actually meaningful) or than a psychologist (who builds up an understanding of the human mind from its baseline) is fundamentally deluding himself.
The same way that anyone who went to Transformers 2 expecting anything but an enjoyable B movie was deluding himself.
I once took a look at pictures of scatterplots, as an example of what trendlines mean at different levels of "fitness" characterized by a number called R-square. An algebraic function, all of whose points fall on a straight line exactly has an R-square (call it R2) value of 1, for instance, and as a scatterplot becomes more and more disperate, the R2 value gets less and less. These were snapshots of what various values of R2 could look like. Of course we started with 1, which is always exactly a straight line. If you get a correlation like that, you're not measuring a physical phenomenon, but a planned function.
Then there were a couple in the 90s. Then some in the 80s and so on. Starting with the 70s or so and on down the line to .25 or so, the plots all started to look more or less the same. The prof then handed us a heavy understanding, indicating that the plots on one side of the page came from observable phenomena, and the plots on the other side were generated at random. Fabricated. This meant that at almost all levels of meaning, there was the capacity for a set of data not generated by any underlying behavior to look as though it had been. Even correlations as strong as the 90s could be faked. Anything less than that was right out the window unless you had some other reason to suspect there should be a correlation.
Sociology outright hinges on numbers in the .25 range and below. A correlation of .50 (which, above, I tried to make clear should be read as "loose at best") would be stone-solid proof.

And I would imagine even a sociologist would turn up his nose at the idea of a sentiment sniffer. What Facebook has done is unleashed an army of robots, all of whom are keenly interested in what you feel, but not you precisely, about everything and anything. By making information default to public, Facebook allows sentiments sniffers to get at what they want. And what I'm saying is that this information is fundamentally useless. I'm putting the ethical implications and the moral outrage of the matter on the shelf for now. Honestly I think I'll leave it there forever. What you can take from this if you wish to be outraged is that the key benefit in the cost-benefit analysis of this decision is fallacious. Ephemeral. Foolishness. Bad Science. Whether or not they've upset the fanbase in exchange for some gain: that gain is worth nothing at all.
By sniffing sentiment, Facebook-scouring robots are attempting to perform a sociological experiment without checking the validity of that experiment. Then they're drawing correlations based on a simple plurality of data. 80 billion messages or so, if they all indicate something, can't be lying, right? Wouldn't you be surprised to learn that there's this thing called science and that there are methods to it? The big drawback of science is that you can't just make it up, you have to prove it. Statistics is the only valid means of proving it. If you didn't record data and crunch the numbers, you don't have a scientific law or principle: you have a science-fair project. A scientist can make sure the data will be meaningful one way or the other by carefully crafting experiments to produce meaningful data, and therein lies the economic meaning of statistics. Two experiments will have the same cost to you, one of them will give you better data, you can use this tool to know which one is better, then you design the experiment.
If you go sniffing sentiment, that isn't an experiment you designed. It is just noise. You may as well go sit in the middle of downtown with a microphone and a seismograph and try to figure out what people are feeling based on the squiggles. You can reasonably know a crowd's reaction to a show. But that's not Facebook's fundamental nature. We facebook posters are not a crowd watching a show on stage. We're just folk, shooting the shit with other folk. By now, we don't even have a single demographic. The adjacent facts about the person, age, sex, location, political views, religion, are a farcical facsimilie of a sociological survey.
No, anyone opening Facebook for that benefit does not have a leg to stand on. Sentiment sniffing is bad science. The methods marketers have used to measure interest in a thing for nearly a hundred years has not suddenly become obsolete, and never will be: what are people buying? Measuring this is more direct, meaningful, and indicative. And anyone trying to sniff sentiment (unless that person is Adrian Veidt) is selling something, and thus interested in what's buying.
So unless the only messages they sniff out are the one's saying "just bought an iphone," then they're deluding themselves. And even at that, there are better ways of getting receipt data.

The second lesson to take from designing downsides is that as much as Facebook and other sites based around social networking may claim to the contrary, you cannot craft your friends. Even going as far as trying to craft a circle of friends is a largely pointless and possibly painful activity. There are lots of pitfalls and hidden downsides to doing so. Some call this "social engineering," but let me tell you, there's no good engineering science in that, either. Engineers observe a need that could be satisfied by a device, then imagine what the device would look like and then design it. What need is getting satisfied here? One's own vanity alone, doubtless. And why go so far to satisfy vanity? The mirror is right there in the other room, isn't that easier?
I take personal exception to the use of my word for that practice. A social engineer is neither sociologist, nor engineer.
There's a flipside to not being able to craft one's friends: being able to choose them. Being stuck with them. When you lay the honest truth on your friends, they are going to hate you. But when they fail at what they're doing and then wonder why no one told them, they are going to hate you more. So what now?
I wish I had an answer, but what I have are more questions. After two lengthy and meaningful conversations with Gitta long ago, I decided to fall more on the brutal honesty side of that dilemma. At the time it was a change with the intention of impressing her, but since then, I have learned both that impressing Gitta is in fact impossible, and that the idea of brutal honesty has its own merits that line up with other principles I already believe. There are levels, though. So when I warn a friend of mine about a conversation I want to have with him about the role of creativity and how to be creative, and later in the week he links me to this, I decide it is high time to talk publicly about how no matter how much you may try, being friends with someone is going to have drawbacks. That's as far as I'm willing to go toward publicly citicizing a peer. Praise should be public, and criticism private, else you really will ruin all your relationships. So when one event correllates with the other, and I appear to ruthlessly criticize one friend for being unimpressible, and another for being harmfully uncreative, and use each as tools to construct an understanding of some silly article topic, it all amounts to so much smoke. I put the link there so that anyone who reads this could simply click and read and evaluate for themselves, not to rag him out publicly. I've dropped Gitta's name here three times now not to characterize her as an emotionless gorgon, but to put the ideas here into the context of my own experiences. I really do mean no harm, you two. And being friends is worth the downsides, or else I would have left long ago.

But there are always drawbacks. 's just part of what it means to be human. Stuff like the above makes me wonder what I am doing that is absolute shit that I don't know about. How many of the many projects I've taken on in my life have been pointless from the start because of criticism that I never got? For how long and how much am I going to have to sniff sentiment out, rather than just experiencing it, or hearing about it? How much of what I deserve am I going to get, and how much am I going to get that I just don't deserve?
In a way, I regret the need to sniff around for it, but then, every now and again, I get a waft of a flavorful aroma.

10 June 4707 - Up Lowdown

My father told me not to bury the lead: Kaz is more than a little fucked up right now.

Let me put a preamble on this. I don't usually do this kind of shit. But if I don't get these ideas out of my head, I will go mental, or break down, or wake up dead from grief. If you don't want to be saddened, you don't have to read this and shouldn't. What I do need to do is write it, and since anything like a "private journal" would be wussy and non-functional, yes, I'm spouting this awful diatribe on the internet, searchable to anyone in the world (imagine a Jeremy Clarkson level pause in there). Not even my parents know how to handle me any more when I get this way, and they have mastered the corralling of a moderately-functioning autistic asperger's patient in my younger brother while raising the other three sons of us simultaneously.
Oh yes, dear reader. Family ties are a helluva thing, and for who I am, there's an extra-special twist.
I don't even know how to handle me when I get this way. So I'll phrase the whole thing in terms of a review of the movie Up. This review includes plot spoilers, so that'll be another clever way of me keeping people from reading this in spite of the obvious attention I want by writing it. I mean to be bitterly honest with the entire review, so if you think I'm hamming it up, that's fair. You would also be mistaken to so think, because where I am, all I have left is honesty, and the only direction I have to look is

Up is a three-D movie about a kid with a balloon. I can only imagine this is a loose literary callback to "The Red Balloon" (despite the balloon of the movie being visually blue, grey, or particolored depending on the scene).
The first sign I got that I was in for a shitfest was the fact that the cross-polarized glasses made my eyes feel a little dry and achy, and prevented me from rubbing them at the same time. This was a kind of tenderizer leading up to the opening montage of the movie, which as warm-up acts go was more than adequate. It is important to hit-confirm in Guilty Gear, for instance, and only combo off when you know you have your opponent wide open for it. So in a way I just got comboed.
The montage itself had me in tears in seconds. The force of ocular vomit I felt was dizzying, a paroxysm of the worst puking fits I've had in my entire life, only full of the force of emotion spilling out of my core through my eyes rather than the force of physical bile and water and stuff spilling out of my core through my mouth. The difference is that the core is inexhaustible, whereas eventually (usually pretty quickly) the stomach will empty of whathaveyou. If you didn't catch the smell of the miscarriage scene from the wedding snapshot (i.e. beginning of the whole shit), then you are dumb and should go read some books or ask your girlfriend how to describe your feelings in terms other than how wavy the lines coming off the radiator are. She'll like that, by the way.
This movie made me pray profanely for God to give me a heart of stone. The first seventeen minutes were two dimensions (thanks, vomitous threeD effects) of abject torture. I was watching a pair of beautiful lives become one shared life. Taunting and spurning my existence. I watched human dreams manifest in a mockery of the photoreal form on a massive, painful screen. This was more painful than watching ritual suicide in film. This was more painful than having my girlfriend dump me all those years ago after I had spent twenty hours isolated in an airport with nothing but Natsume Soseki's Kokoro to keep me company, and huge, empty, stale Syracuse airport lighting. What I'm saying is that watching Up is like being stabbed in the brain, heart and stomach. Fucking Up.

The montage finally and gruesomely ended with the wife losing the unwinnable battle against senior liver cancer and dimentia, leaving my sense of pathos still cracked to 11, having my needle pegged something like seven minutes beforehand and not letting up.
The letup is watching the now depressed widower grizzlely slump into his bed-minus-one, breakfast- table-minus-one, living-room-chair-minus-one, et cetera, et cetera. Apparently the couple shared every conceivable sharable aspect of human existance, to the point that I expected the old coot to sit down at a journal and pen a two-thousand-word stanza in nostalgia for his menopause before letting the audience forget about the fact that his life together had been a replacement for each of their childhood dreams, and even the excitement of having a child together had taken a backseat to getting us, dear reader, us to this initial fucking plot point. Thanks exposition montage. Thanks for reminding me that the first quarter-century of my life has been a fucking waste, and that the simple lives of two square-featured cartoon people can be rounded off to seventeen minutes of hell more grim than a Faces of Death video short. I appreciate it.

We rejoin the rectangular protagonist in the fight of his waning life against land developers who are building skyscrapers comically around his precisely-chiseled patch of property. The opening montage served only to expose the fact that the cornersome coot was now supernaturally attached to the childhood house, the idea being to put it on the peak of some distant impossible place from the movies the two of them met and bonded over. Indeed, the wife became the house and the house the wife. The stoic ninety-degree-angle sporting octogenarian is finally crushed by circumstances, is forced to abandon the house, and lives out the short remainder of his life a babbling derelict, a beautiful man broken in every possible way, likely pooing himself some rectangular bricks.
In fact that is a different movie, and because of the opening bit and my innate sense of sequence, the one that I watched. Instead a bunch of balloons pop out the chimney and the whole wife lifts off into heaven where ol' rhombus jaw is assumed and given a glorified body to replace his with'ring earthly cubiform.
In fact the movie goes on past that scene, too, all this movie-length-plot used as mere jumping off point for the odyssey of the bizarre that is Up's bread and butter. Seriously, if you're showing this to kids, start with the part where we're already aloft. It will still be ninety minutes and then your kids can use their active and vibrant imaginations to craft what series of circumstances could have led this annuated bulldozer jaw to simply float away.
I must say that the sense of majesty and wonder at the voyage itself just didn't reach me. It flew off and left me behind in the cold ground of the real. He takes a little boy scout with him, why not, and they quickly and stormily land on the movie's main setting, which I can only guess is a reimagined landscape of MacAfee's Knob. The similarities were eerie. The differences were cartoony, as the setting took a turn sharper than the protagonists clavacle off into Tazmania, circa the Porky Pig plus Dodo Last of the Dodos. We spend about forty-five of the movie's impenitrably armored succession of minutes in this space, exploring what it would be like if we the audience largely ignored the theme and direction of the movie up to the point and rewatched plagiarized looney tunes reruns, each themselves outright theft from early twentieth century comedic theatre, which is probably all riffs off of Ezra Pound and Oscar Wilde anyway. So what I'm saying is the middle of the movie felt like sharing a snifter of cognac with Oscar Wilde in his retro-future martian home's scenic antechamber.

Out of this, a plot develops, the movie finally finishes introducing more and more bizarre and untoward characters with something like twelve minutes left to go, and I'm finally watching a meticulously coreographed venture brothers episode. Oh, but before we go full-swing into this realm, we need another montage where boxmaster prime relives his pathos-addled past in yet another paroxysm of grief. This serves to screw-up his courage to finish us off team venture style or something. I admit I can't evaluate the movie's conclusion as well as other parts. I was a little too screwed up myself with largely the opposite of courage to be able to accurately recount what year it was, let alone what should happen next. It was an egg-shaped boy floating floating by balloons guided by a leaf blower past a window into a room of dogs with speech-collars betting treats in a game of poker. That is, the movie insisting that it is art. You had me sold on that 80 minutes ago. Shit. If it isn't art that moves a man like that, then there is no such thing as art. This was a simple pun, and indeed, the entire conclusion almost makes the movie look like a century-long preamble to a series of shaggy-dog story level visual puns. So sneakily places are they, that when everything's over and they take off in a modified pre-war zepplin full of dog-chefs, every last bowser and bitch of them is sticking head out of window, in the most massive parody of life possible. It lasts less than a second, is an excellent joke, and seriously what the fuck is this movie?
They fly away home, squareface devours little eggman's deadbeat eggdad and takes his place, and I swear to God if anyone comes near me with grape bottlecaps on safety pins I will punch you in the face.
Cue credits full of scrapbook pictures playing visual puns with the maker's roles (for instance, a photograph of golden rectangle god making shadow puppets on the wall for eggboy posed next to the "shadowing graphics supervisor"). I did finally discover in the credits that the life story-turned exposition for the movie is based on two actual human lives with the note "you inspired us."
Everyone who lives in California today and up to five years ago had a hand in making this movie, including many dogs who all only have one name each. The producer's children did some of the movie children bit-part voice work. The last credit sequence worthy of as much credit was for HP3, and this left it behind by miles and miles, soaring in the sky above the clouds.

It's actually an excellent movie, and fully the only artistic thing that lasts more than five minutes to ever come out of pixar. Everything else they did has just been building up to Up. Yes, even Monsters Inc. (on the Ed Asner > John Goodman principle, a.k.a. the Granny Goodness inequality). You can take that to the bank.
Where you're following me, I cannot say, but we're not getting there very fast. Certainly not on my wings, which now are all but a more-than-total-loss on my original investment. There is no such thing as a titling service, at least not one that men who themselves deal and title motorcycles have ever heard of, so the thin chance that I will ever be able to own the three hundred pounds of metal on my back porch rests on the liklihood that the DMV of a worlds away state is worlds more helpful to me than the one I can walk down the street to get to, and I have no valid way of demonstrating to them that I really bought the damn thing, secondhand or otherwise. Sometimes you crap out. The above mentioned man-in-the-know gave me lots of other good information today about a maybe later investment of mine in fivefold as much of a new ride. Including the daunting figure of interest rates in the double digits. My stomach turned, but I had to be polite to the man, he was doing his job splendidly and telling it like it is and dammit, I wanted a ride. My father had taken me there as part of his visit today. He thought going would be a great idea and anyway he's been a newsie all his life and can't help but get all the information he can about the most important parts of my life. Of course he already knew where this ride was headed, so it was my pleasure to treat him to any information at all that was a surprise.
To wit, the fact that I am sick of being blamed for everything. Yes, I fucked up. I shouldn't have bought the thing. I shouldn't have spent the money to learn. I shouldn't have felt alienated by circumstances enough to force myself to in he first place. I shouldn't have done things that made people react strongly enough to alienate me. I shouldn't have even been there, or ever loved anyone. I get it. I'm supposed to have a materialistic stone heart and feel nothing but mild satisfaction or disappointment for the rest of my natural life, affording those massive extremes only in circumstances of sexual climax.
I get it. I also know that because of who I am, that is never going to happen. I will not ever be able to have that heart, because it just isn't mine. This is the same feeling of grief I felt when, as a child, I watched Jesus die and got too choked up about it to hear about the part where he comes back and forgives everybody. I was a tenderhearted crybaby then, and be damned if mere decades have changed a damn thing about that.
The facts are these:
Cosmically, each of the seven major changes to the Magic comprehensive rules coming in M10 targets a deck I either built, cherished, or both, like having my own game stolen from me.
My parents never gave me a car. Not complaining, just stating. They gave me life and love and this tender heart, and they still do. I wouldn't trade it away for the ability to apparate, let alone the ability to drive.
Everyone expects everyone else to have a car around here. Especially those who never had to buy one. By extension, my needing a vehicle is a need forced on me, and I am met with derision and scorn because of it, now matter how much or how well I try to compensate.
One of those ways was buying a used cycle off of a citizen from craigslist. I was wary at first but he cut the price down to five centuries from eight and offered to deliver it to my door if I took it without the title; he assured me a titling service would do the trick.
There is no such fucking thing, based on information from, you know, the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles and some other people who deal in vehicles I have met.
Because I now have this hunk of scrap and because I got disheartened about it, I get shit for it.
I have always felt things in place of others, through others, because of others. Strangely and impossibly. The connection is strongest where other connections lie. My mother, for instance, has a smaller slice of the same pie and can call and know when I've caught a cold. When you feel, I feel. It is involuntary at this point.
My father is stoic.
My father has two sisters, one buried brother, one brother who disowned the family, and four other brothers. Also two miscarried siblings. He is the eldest.
My father has an emotional wealth that has been ripening for half a century, the depth and likness of which I cannot fathom with my deepest knotted rope, nor imitate with tonight's rain shower.
Concurrently, my father's father died recently. Old age and liver cancer. I told some people about this already, but it wasn't real to me until tonight I guess.

And really, that last one is the only real one. The transportation puzzle is one without an answer, is vital to my life, and is a charicaturistically vivid exemplar of personal injustice. But when my father comes to town, now he's bringing everything with him, and I simply cannot handle the sheer magnitude of what that makes me feel. Nevermind the real grief that I feel on my own, from my loss. Now here is his on top of it, with it, through it. I lost my own father, and I'm watching him. All those years of stoicism crammed into one night of this feeling. I have not lived long enough, nor ever awoken early enough to be able to deal with this. There are a handful of you who saw a preview of this effect on me in action once when I read a letter he had written to me. Now imagine how much more potent it could be if he had been the one there reading it to me. That is the beginning of an understanding of this.

Ceteris paribus, I do feel a little better. I can once again breathe without choking, and the physical pain has subsided to a dull lingering ache behind my eyes. I'll be right as rain for work tomorrow, so long as there's nothing else like an Up to come along and uncork me.
Rain on me.

26 May 4707 - Busses, Books, Bars, Boys

I did almost everything I had set out to do this weekend, including chortling for no small length of time at all the suckers who thought the day would pass with sunshine and perfect barbecue weather. Hah! The old owl has his desired Monday.
And really, yesterday is the day I'm talking about if there had been any weekend at all.

But it is a little unfair to my gaming self to cut the Ancient Cave out of the weekend. Once, dear reader, there was a game called Lufia 2, and inside it lived an Ancient Cave. This cave has 99 floors, strips you of most of your arms and armaments on your way in, and reduces you to level 1. It randomly rearranges itself everytime you enter, and has stairs leading down but none leading up. If you find Providence, you may leave and take anything blue with you. Anything red (which is everything else) stays behind, and you are restored to where you were. The big idea is to dive the dungeon and collect blue items and leave and repeat until you have enough to challenge a full run.
This weekend, I did have enough swag to swing a swoop, and deftly dove to the dungeon's deepest depths. Diving the whole 99 takes no small amount of preparation and quite a bit of total time. The greatest challenge lies at the bottom, the tricky ancient slime himself, who takes three turns doing nothing, and then runs. Tricky jerk. The challenge is therefore to squeeze enough damage into those three rounds to fell the mighty gelatinous beast, and is what requires all that prep.
Well I had made the necessary preparations (mostly a couple years ago while I had been into the dive) and set upon him after fighting past the dungeon's nasty multitudes of monsters. Uh, the kind who actually fight back and are not gimmicky.
I had learned of the power of death attacks in this game, and used it to my advantage. I couldn't help but feel I was missing out on something, particularly with the metal dragons in the last 20 or so floors of the dungeon, who ordinarily pose no small threat to your wellbeing, and under certain circumstances may spell death no matter how powerful you are. Except I never let those circumstances (read: getting surprised by two gold dragons) come to pass, and moreover, I had the power of instant death on my side in three different ways, and they all fell to it.
All of them.
This means a dozen or more encounters, maybe 30 monsters all told, simply done in by death attacks in the later stages of the plunge. Maybe I'm shortchanging myself.
I tend to think of it as vindication for the first time I got the idiot notion to make my first dive my last and went in headlong and underprepared to face metal dragon number 1, let alone number 30. And so a grim satisfaction accompanied every scratch of my multiple Fatal Picks: this is what you dragons get for scorning me once.
It is most satisfactory to reach the bottom of the Ancient Cave in Lufia 2, and I admit that with a slightly different take on it, the journey could become much more of a challenge. Honestly, almost a foolishly difficult challenge.
For example, the game supports a mode of play where you do nothing else but spelunk the Ancient Cave. Okay, that's fine. And even really fun, as you get to assemble your party from any of the games available companions, making combinations that cannot happen otherwise, and further exploring the game's mechanical depth. Now, you also have the option of choosing no one at all, or anything short of a full party up to that, as well as selecting a full four. That's novel and all, but a fool's errand to be sure. I'm not exactly sure what the big idea is, but depriving yourself of an entire character makes combat significantly more painful. Nevermind going it alone.
I read a bit on gamefaqs about what these various challenges may be like. Taking in three, for instance, appealed to me for a sense of challenge. That seemed about right. Yeah. Let's see what it might be like with three instead of four. I kept reading. The faq had descriptions all the way along for the various challenge runs where you go in with intentionally less than the norm. Now.
I read only a little more before scuttling the whole idea, and leaving the faq writer to his own devices. He had clearly gone mad at some point, perhaps once too often been wiped out after going a long way down. His madness came out in his description of what he felt the challenge really was: to do all these challenge runs without using the blue items. That is, as if it were your first time going in. Well what the hell? That's the whole freaking idea is to go in multiple times, gather your strength, and then get enough to make it further down the next time. It's built for that! Apparently, this is akin to cheating because using these powerful items circumvents the need to know your opponents and garner an advantage that way.
Now. That's a fair sentiment. In a game that sports even a fair amount of mechanical interest, one can apply knowledge of enemy behaviors and weaknesses into a tactical advantage that gets you further along than someone who doesn't know about it. In that method lives a way to apply your knowledge to your problems in order to succeed. That's a pretty cool idea, and one that plays out best in a game like Fire Emblem. You know. A tactics game: one that advertises that behavior and lives or dies in the realm of being able to apply knowledge and strategy in order to advance. This is Lufia 2, which raises some problems with the notion. These are they:
First: enemies have weaknesses in six different ways, but only strengths in two. They use magic attacks or they use physical attacks, and that's it. There's no mechanical depth to their attacks at all, so there is thus also no mechanical depth to your defending against it. Hem and haw all you want: in this game, there is no interesting feature or way to apply knowledge to your defense. Second: Alright, attack then. Sure. Of the six things that enemies can be weak against, it is possible to figure out what they all are and always attack for super effective damage ala pokemon. The problem is that to do so with magic is inherently wrong because your ability to deal magic damage is very low compared to your ability to crush them with swords. And figuring out which swords have which of the six properties is at worst left to guess-and-check based on what you imagine the baddies are weak to, and at best left to reading a faq to discover the exact nature of the weapon and the enemy. But if you're doing that, then you aren't applying your own knowledge to the situation, you're following already established fact to get an advantage. And if it's going to be that, then again what's the point? Third: Following the second, clearly the ideal challenge would be to forget about looking up weapons and enemies in a faq and figuring it out yourself. Well...there isn't a method built-in to the game for finding out what enemies are weak to or even finding out what nature your weapon has except guess-and-check. Careful cataloging. Okay, well, what about keeping track of the names of things? Yeah, after all, a thing named Fire Sword ought to deal fire damage, yes? Ha ha! You only wish things had intuitive names like that. Or even complete names, correctly translated. Leading to point the fourth. Four: The game is unfinished. Buggy. They left in glitches. Some of them graphical, most of them having to do with the awful, awful names for things. Mad Gorem (supposed to be Mud Golem btw)? Seriously? The tranny team just plain didn't finish, and I'm supposed to deal with this by figuring out how each enemy was mistakenly named in order to apply regular logic? Huh-uh. No no no. Even worse, many of the enemies, even some of the more powerful ones, have glitches whereby they are not weak to something they are supposed to be weak against. Just no. A system this flawed does not deserve to be explored. The very idea that this game possesses a "mechanical depth that simply doesn't come out in the regular game because it is too easy otherwsie" gets shot to hell as soon as you apply even the slightest analytical rigor to it. Yes it is a shame that you never discover some of these enemies weaknesses because you are powerful enough to ignore it. No, as it turns out there isn't all that much to explore there, and even if there were, you would probably spend most of your time dealing with outright bugs.

So, yes. Some of my weekend.
The other postworthy topic is my yesterday, spent preparing for and later going to busboys and poets to read poetry in front of an audience. That's right, Poetry Pirates is back, baby! And this time in a venue that supports people reading poetry in front of others, even encourages it. I've written plenty of words before about how good it is to experience poetry pirates. What I can spend the rest of this post relating is the specific nature of this venue, what happened there yesterday, and speculation as to why.
The venue itself is a bookstore. Really, it is more of a bar. Actually a bistro. Certainly it is a bistro. Honestly I'm not sure at all what it is, because it is all of these things: bistro, bar, bookstore. It seems to me that the finest thing a man can do in this place is sit in one of the couches by the books, order and drink a coffee, and do homework of some stripe on the computer that he brought with him. I do not imagine it is an ideal place to sit and eat a dinner. But you can if you wish, and if I had to come up with a tagline for this location, "if you wish" would be a pretty good one.
Thompson and I found this place and sat, waiting for the open mic event to begin. We took the place in and, because the situation called for it, wrote short poems about the experience. This is easily a more hipster place than I had been to in a long time, perhaps ever. I mean, I'm a moderate person, and because I'm usually surrounded by hyperconservatives of every flavor and dimension you can imagine, I tend to imagine myself as liberal and hip. But only by comparison is this even the beginning of factual. No, I'm no hipster. Not compared to this place. And yet.
And yet the host himself for one-fourth of the open mic nights, his name Norman, accepts all comers and in an even-handed way promoted the idea, to me at least, that his corner of the venue did not take sides. Was not aggressive, accusatory or bellacose. Indeed, by contrast, did take all sides and all comers. Come on.
What did we have? Well, there were some scrubs: the young man who disparaged his youth, the "I've just been raped" girl who in all liklihood is reacting to being dumped, not raped; the earth-mother girl whom I called "Wolf Girl" and whose name may actually have been Wolfe, and the performance poet who had clearly been around the block a few times. Each of these was the worst act of the night (except maybe mine, I'm not a good indicator of how well I've done) and at that, was a better act than the average one at Writer's Block; our Saxbys Poetry Pirate venue. The worst there was better than the usual average elsewhere.
Performance poet lady deserves a few sentences of her own. Her first of two was her saying "breaking news" thirteen or fourteen times in a row with slightly different delivery and ending with "the news is broken." This made me want to swat her over the head with a rolled up newspaper, but skip it. Her second of two was more honest, and included "two mice running in amazement" as a neat construction, but I think the subject matter was about getting back at her ex-husband for the divorce. Bah. Keep on going around the block, maybe you'll find someone who hasn't been steeped in bad internet humor and can appreciate being shocked in this particular way, and then maybe he or she can help you look after your kid. An uncharitable opinion of a perfect stranger perhaps. Perhaps even a mean one. So be it: she was the closest performer of the night to getting on the mic with the desire to offend everyone. This isn't the right audience for that: I told you it was cool.
Who else? Honestly I was surprised Norman didn't read himself; he did bring a huge notebook full of it, and had that Friday treated everyone at Writer's Block to some of it. Hoom.
I was the lead off. I read the poem I wrote for the venue, then my pirate poem, then I introduced and read the exchange I had once with Marian McLaughlin, which I have recorded here before. I thought that exchange was rather neat, so I told everyone about how it happened and the names involved. Well scupper me if further down the list later in the night at the open mic, there wasn't a Marian McLaughlin. She got on the mic and sung a lilting pastoral Irish diddy. Then she left. She hadn't been there to hear me mention her name and read something she wrote, and she wasn't there by the time it was my turn for round two through the list. I'd like to think it is the same person. Probably oneathose _destiny people_, likely also with a pendant that serves only one, plot, purpose (she had been wearing a pendant).
Basically what the hell? My life is pretty freaking weird, fine, I get that, but I never get used to the expressions of that weirdness.

Clearly what this means is that next time I'm on the mic, I'll have to mention the name of some person whom I wish to appear before me. And then minutes later, there she will be.
Now which to choose?

30 April 4707 - With the Top Down

Now that the rain has passed, one may put the top down and enjoy the chilling spring breeze.
It strikes me as dishonest of me to fail to update my site here for an entire month of time. I have a hard time deciding sometimes how much I should put into my facebook notes, twitter, livejournal, and here. Naturally each of the others gets a link back here, as there is no better way of exploiting one's internet-vanity than to send out links to a private web space. Each leading back here. Leading from the top down.

Crossword puzzles, custom card creation contests, raising my pokemon, and exploring just how much abuse I can take from a romhack of snes zelda (called Parallel Worlds in case you wish to avoid it). Have all occupied my free time of the last month. Okay, and some of my work time.

So now you're up to speed, dear reader, and can fully appreciate where I've been today as you read from the top down.
Awhile ago, I can't recall when precisely, Thompson comes up to me and tells me he's in despair about his game design project, and how no matter which one he chooses he will have to implement a game concepted by fools and designed by milquetoasts in the Ahhts program here at the U. Gee, I say, what can ye do? Cowboy up and you'll do fine regardless, it can't be all that bad.
He's not really in despair, but then comes up with a clever idea. Kaz, he says, you have lots of ideas for games that you might want to impliment, and having minions in my class do the grunt work for you because they are forced into it would be great, and having an option to impliment something excellent (i.e. some idea of mine rather than some idea of scrubs) would be better for the poor game design kids, himself included.
Well I couldn't turn back time, and I couldn't revise some professor's syllabus, myself a comparative stranger, and I suspect there are even more overt reasons I'm missing for why the idea, as pitched, was a total wash. Since it was pointless, I of course followed through on the idea, and spent that afternoon or the one after generating an idea for a sprite game and spewing it all on paper, thanks to my having huge leftover posters available to scribble on at the time. I spent maybe a solid minute imagining what I wanted the final product to look like, and had enough of an elaboration to satisfy my ability to scribble about it for twenty-four or twenty-five inches. In game design (from what I've read about magic card design from Mark Rosewater), this is called top-down design. You take a final idea and build the card around it. In Magic cards, this usually applies to flavor making the card. A red creature gets to fly simply because it is a dragon. You know what dragons are like so you should design the card to fit the flavorful idea of a dragon.
While I was scribbling, I thought of my own process (the little bit that I did think about what I was doing rather than thinking through doing it, mind) as one neutral to the flavor in the end. I didn't have any clue of what the colors would be, or character design, terrain shape, story; nothing. That was top-down stuff that I didn't like. I should qualify that I generally dislike when a Magic card gets to have mechanics that don't make sense with respect to mechanics and do make sense with respect to flavor. Then again, I haven't felt compelled by the flavorful aspects of the most recent sets, so probably that's simply a miss for me based on the flavor not being good enough for me to accept a top-down design. There was one outright violation from a recent set that got me grumpy enough to talk to the internet about it, and given how rarely I talk to the internet on my terms, you can imagine how much rarer this is: talking to the internet on its terms. My point is that I didn't feel myself as a top-down designer, even though today, that's exactly what I was.

I don't really know why I wanted to talk to Thompson's game design prof at this point in the process. I had, by now, completely abstracted the original reason for putting pencil to huge paper and spilling my mind into medium. But I did have that scroll. And some idea that I should talk to this prof, Graham Morgan, about it. So I did. In fact I attacked his office in three stages. A few days ago (Friday maybe?)I explored the new building where he had been recently moved. It was a fun exercise that involved two missteps: once I opened a door that, for no reason, sounded an alarm that is exactly as loud as you can imagine a loud noise to be in a small hallway, and once I stepped into a hallway that simply hadn't been finished. New buildings have obivous bugs, you see. At the end of my quest, I found the CompSci office and one of the random typists told me to explore yet another, higher floor and find the office of Professor Graham Morgan.
Found.
Not there. Fine, Thompson and Keegan had told me he was randomly there favoring yes rather than no, let's call it a uniform distribution over business hours, odds better than even. So I had a good shot at successful surprise attack (Tora! Tora! Tora!) if I simply kept at it. I used the one hour that I have between getting here and going to work to this purpose. Yesterday, I went once more, and found the prof in his office. He told me he had three minutes until he needed to be elsewhere and rescheduled me from random-attack to today at 11.

And so today at 11, I went.
The short of it is that I have to harken back to my days as a hypercard programmer and import what I knew then into what I know now about flash, and hash out some of the bottom-up bits of what exactly my game is. Because I had imagined the finished product. I had a copelling vision for where I would be at the end. I had a goal in mind. What I had comparatively no clue about is what that snapshot of an end result actually is. What is the game?
I was flattened. Not put-off, mind, not offended, not annoyed. Flattened. Surprised. There I sat, ordinarily poo-pooing aspiring Magic card designers, say, who have a flimsy idea that all card designs should be top-down, and ascribing to myself and my likes those elements of a mechanics-first, ground-up approach. Fix it in the flavor text, I thought of my own designs.
And in fact, that is how I design magic cards. I will nine times out of ten (and I know, because I've designed 300 or so at this point) design a card from a mechanical standpoint, and come up with the name, illustration concept, creature types and other things sometime later.
That wasn't how I had approached my idea. I was simply mistaken about something I had done; about the way I had done something. What else could I be wrong about, I wondered. What else am I doing differently than the way I think I'm doing it? This is a huge and non-specific question, so I probably sounded like a nincompoop.
Eh. I didn't have a lot of the answers. The question remains, what is this game? Well, start from the beginning, forget about guns and fighting and graphics and exploration. Distill everything down to what you can put in a Nash equilibrium. You've been playing too long in unsolvable games (vis a vis Magic the Gathering being a few orders of magnitude more complex than chess, itself inexhaustible given finite rules). The idea is to take each element and add a layer of gameplay until the product resembles what I had imagined. Mechanics-up.

So, first, exploration.
The nature of exploration, at its simplest, is that you have an object under your control, and the goal is to move the object from where it is to some other place, a marker point. In my game, the object will move in two dimensions, although that may be a given because of what moving to a marker point in one dimension would be like. That's exploration.
You can complicate this by putting static obstacles in the way until it becomes a maze, or the obstacles can move, or the marker can move. That's evolution of the exploration idea. Move the white dot to the green square.
Next is dodging.
There are blue dots. Move the white dot to avoid the blue dots. You are still trying to get to the green square, but unlike obstacles before, if the white dot touches a blue dot then the whole stage resets. To start out with, like obstacles, the blue dots don't move. Then they do move. Then they move toward you. Then they move toward where you're going, maybe. Combine these with obstacles and exploration and that's a game by itself. There's plenty of depth to explore and tweaking to be done, but I'm not satisfied with this level of sophistication as an end product. At each additional level of complexity, I can make a complete game, and I do intend to take a crack at coding these up in flash and seeing how it plays at each additional stage, but I have more in mind because I still have my top, still have my imagining. But still, you explore, and you dodge.
Next is blocking.
So there's a goal, and there are existing obstacles and existing baddies. Now in addition to moving the white dot, the player can also draw red lines that act as obstacles for the blue dots. Maybe it is also an obstacle for the white dot. Or perhaps even simpler than that, the white dot has a facing, and there is a set distance that the red line rests away from the white dot, and the player can change that facing to block from a certain direction. This can have the same kinds of complication that the previous scenario can have: more complex obstacles, more blue dots, different behavior of the blue dots. It needs to have some complication or at least intensity that wouldn't be appropriate for the previous scenario, though. This scenario has accorded the player an additional tool, another method of accomplishing the same thing. Get to the goal. Here, this will help. There's a lot of tweaking to be done at this point. How far away should the red line be? Should it be a shield at a set distance or walls that you set and move around yourself? How large should it be so that it isn't just trivially easy for the player to use? I can't answer these, and I don't think there are general answers. I do think there are good answers, and that a little play-and-see would go a long way toward answering the question and toward seeing a first compelling fun element of the end goal that I have in mind.
Next is shots.
There's a goal, there are baddies. You can move and aim and fire shots. Take the goal out of this equation and what you have is a simpler version of asteroids. With the goal in, you have an extremely simplified version of, say, Blaster Master. Even within this simplified version, though, there is some gameplay decision to be made. For example, in Blaster Master and Asteroids, the direction you were moving and the direction you were aiming were the same. In my imagining, the white dot's movement and facing would be independant, simply because I imagined that that would create the most interesting and unique environment. But for the sake of experimenting, I should really conjure up versions of each.
Bringing it all together.
Any layer of complexity beyond this point is too far afield to test on paper, though I do imagine that I will include many more gameplay elements that emerge based on what I see and the kinds of game states that I want to support. Primarily, the Prof warned that including the blocking and the shots in the same game may make it a competition between the two, and if the player discovers that one method is easier or more direct, then they'll do that and nothing else, essentially cutting out half of the game, and if that's the case then you should have designed only the one that they're playing. I can straightaway think of a few reasons to keep the capabilities combined, but before I start in on those, I should build little flash versions of a few of the games I've described above. Even within these simple levels I can think of variations that create 12 or more distinct games. I've simply selected the one I want to make along the way leading me here.
In short, you move, you shoot, you can create barriers, and you have a destination. Where this takes me remains to be seen. Most important to this process is that I do create something. Something complete. Something that can stand on its own. Maybe not something that I'm satisfied is finished.
On my way, I'll certainly still be thinking from the top down.

30 March 4707 - Mother of Challenges

For starters, I'll call home a little later tonight to wish my own mother a happy birthday, and congradulate her on her recent coup of the band boosters (I have honestly never known her to enact such ambition, hence coup).

And I know that I myself am a challenge to deal with a lot of the time; a fact I try my best to mitigate when working with friends and amplify at all other times. Learning how to wear ski masks and ninja gear helps with this, as does an unscrupulous vernacular.

I expect precisely none of my enemies to read this, so I choose to make this site (usually) a talking-post where I can ease the difficulty of the great challenge that is dealing with me, and what better way than to talk about pokémon?
Well, the big idea is that I'll be more approachable if I present a totally honest and innocent side of miself, and apply my earstwhile incisive and analytical mind to altogether silly problems. The dread seriousness itself isn't all that serious.
Unless it is...(looks from side to side).

Let me get on with the Battle Tower.
Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, or now Platinum offers the player rather little challenge on the whole. From start to finish of the game's plot, there isn't a single stock trainer in the game who tests your limits the way you might expect to be challenged. Essentially each one that you meet is balanced against a team of six that likely includes one rather powerful poke, two average ones, and three recent catches or blanks. So most of the trainers you meet along the way will have a less- than-full count to take down, and the pokes they do have will be significantly weaker than your one powerhouse. The idea is that you should be able to take on and defeat many trainers without exhausting yourself between rest stops. Even as a game for kids, I feel Game Freak overshot the mark a little bit, as any player with even a loose understanding of the game will be able to play through the entire plot, defeating every single trainer without losing once, and perhaps never feel pressed for resources or challenged. That would be an average task. Take a player who has a firm grasp of the game already, and I would be astonished to hear about even a single unexpected loss.
A little of the game's challenge comes out in the final stages of the plot, where one must defeat the Elite Four and become the champion of the Pokémon League. These fights are what I would consider average challenge for an experienced player, and average-difficult challenge for a beginner.

But then, Game Freak knows how fanatical some of their players can get about the game, evolving the very idea of "competitive pokémon" and taking it to every corner- case and extreme that the community can muster (speaking most specifically about sites like Smogon or pokegoons). Had Game Freak failed to include some element that appeals to this subset of the audience, Diamond et al would have been a provable failure of a game. But then, all this is mere preamble to the tirade I'm about to let loose about this very element that they did, in fact, include.
The mother of the game's challenges: the Battle Tower.

The tower is designed to marginalize the player's most powerful strategem for gaining advantage over potential encounters, and reduce the equation to one of competitive acumen. In the tower, you can select from various styles of battle, but in each, the following rules hold:
1. Each poke on your team is level-capped at 50, and lowered to this level if they come in at a greater level.
2. You cannot use items on your pokes.
3. Your pokes are restored to full health and power between battles, and any held item they spent is also restored.

What this means is that you have a whole different ballgame. Rather than simply having more powerful pokémon, you need a team that both works together well and can handle a wide variety of situations and strategies. Oh, and the other thing is that you only get a team of three.
This is huge.
Most of the strategy talk I read regards pokes in terms of level 100 and teams of six. From considering a three poke team, considering six feels like an act of wanton gluttony. Basically, I'm even more restricted strategically than every forum I read, making the equation an even more compelling one to approach creatively.

What I've chosen to do is take three tanks into the field. A tank is a poke who can deal and take average damage. They are good at being versatile in the dimensions of both strategy and damage type. They also generally have a resistance to being outright foiled by a strategy. So I'll have no natural prey and no natural predators. We'll see how well this serves me as I climb the tower, where the game's actual final boss awaits.
The tower master challenges you after a certain point in your streak of consecutive wins (the only way to advance, by the by), and he sets his Dragonite on ye. The question at that point becomes "do you have an ice move on your team" and if that answer is "no" or "yes but Dragonite will kill him first," you will lose that fight to that one punk.
And because Dragonite takes 4x damage from ice, I don't really want to use him myself.
My point is that this is another restriction on what kind of pokes can go into my team. As it stands, my plan is to take in these three, with some explanation for the sake of those who know what the hell all this means.
Drapion: Poison-Dark is an excellent type to be, leaves him with a single weakness, and simply prevents two different move types from even affecting him. Beyond his typing, Drapion gets an exciting ability (this being why I'm choosing him over, say Skuntank, another Poison-Dark poke) called Sniper, which makes his critical hits more powerful. He could also have Battle Armor, which prevents the other guys critical hits, but I went for Sniper for excitement. The moveset I've chosen is: Cross Poison, Scissor Cross, Night Slash, and either Ice Fang or Thunder Fang. I'll probably go with Ice Fang on this one because my guy is pretty fast and having a plan B against that Dragonite is rather worthy. This guy can survive and hit hard.
Togekiss: Formerly a joke, this guy is huge and only gets more huge with training. Togekiss has great special attack and defense, a wide move pool, and an ability that makes added effects (like flinch or burn chance, say) twice as likely as before. Being Normal-Flying is nothing terribly special, but it means that I'll get a lot of free switch-ins when they try to use Earthquake on my Drapion. Also in general I'll switch him in when toughness in the field of special moves is needed, and by the same reasoning trade him out against strong physical attackers.
The moves I've chosen for him are Aura Blast, Flamethrower, Water Pulse, and Air Slash. All pretty good moves; all take advantage of his special attack stat. Each one covers something that Drapion doesn't.
Donphan: This guy is actually the next best thing I could come up with when I decided that my Hippowdon often did more harm than good in the fights I took him to. The hippo would cause a sandstorm with his mere presence, then be summarily executed by something, then I would take damage from the storm while my opponent always had a ground, rock, or steel poke in there to laugh it all off. Sometimes they even had their own sandstorm team and I would be helping them out. Well Donphan had almost all the same moves that I used on Hippowdon: Ice Fang, Thunder Fang, Fire Fang, and most importantly, Earthquake (seriously if you don't have one guy with Earthquake, then you are a fool, it is a really good move). Donphan had all those except Ice Fang: that thing I was going to use to kill that damn dragon. To my surprise and approval, Donphan can get the move Ice Shard, so I figured he'd be a pretty good replacement, elephant for hippo. In point of fact he gets the Sturdy ability, which makes death attacks fail against him, and another move called Rapid Spin that can ruin certain strategies.
I picked Rapid Spin, Ice Shard, and Earthquake for him. I'm hung up on the fourth move here. I could give him either Thunder or Fire Fangs; I have fire covered already with Togekiss, and at most Thunder Fang would only really help against Gyarados, who even then I probably don't want to come at with my elephant.
Another contender for this spot is actually Natural Gift. Now, the tower is the only place where the berry that you throw will come back every battle, and it can have anywhere from average to good power and any damage type depending on which berry I give him to hold. I would go for a grass move here, as there are some choice annoying pokes who take 4x from grass and are weak to nothing else. In fact, let's say I'm going for that because it is rather wacky and when I faint a Gastrodon or Milotic in one hit with Donphan's impressive attack stat and goofy move, I'll feel rewarded. Who knows, I might ice a Starmie with it, too.

So that's the team. I'll be trained up and ready to go soon, and report on my forays and how the strategy plays out.

28 February 4707 - Remanded Command

I had been sitting on some news for awhile, and had told miself that I was going to keep sitting on it until the story really broke. I had also told miself that I wouldn't post anything here until I could spill the really great story.
Part of being principled is knowing exactly when to sit your principles down to rest. It is therefore the most important thing when acting on principle to make your deepest guiding principle the mark of the skeptic. Be willing to question. Be willing to re-evaluate, and be willing to remand.

Basically, be flexible. This is very important.
Unfortunately, it took an asshole to remind me of this fact, leading to my remanding the command I had placed on miself. But let me begin at the beginning

Every time I go to the gym on campus, something bitches it. I've been directed to the proper use of equipment, kicked out of reserved rooms, stalked, spied on, robbed (not of anything worth much, mind ye), worn out, let down, heckled, and harassed. I don't care what I have to go through. I feel entitled, either modernly where I have to pay admission price to get in, or before where I paid the price of tuition instead. And if I'm entitled to activities and want to do them, I'm not going to apologize and I'm not going to back down for anyone else's opinion. That's in general.
More specifically, the most frustrated I had been with the gym staff (before Friday) was the time they asked me to go to the Registrar's Office to go get proof of my enrollment in the form of a transcript. Registering to vote was not this complex, and they certainly didn't need the fucking Registrar to tell them I was legit. I was pissed.

That was nothing compared to this.

There is a man who works at the gym as a manager. He's my new special friend, and in the coming days, I'm going to get to know him rather well. His name is Haile Eyob Nessibu, and his boss' name is Connie Grunstad. You can look them up at www.gmu.edu if you like.
I'm going to be taking a more personal approach. And I'll have notes for when I do.

In fact, Haile's (pronounced hey lee) trangression was slight (heh). Thompson and I had entered and changed and were ready to rawk. We found a hole, did some reps on a device, and I went to wipe it down after with nearby materials left for the purpose. I don't trust the staff to be on top of this act, and anyway it is part of my civic duty to clean up my sweatiness in a semi-public place. Also if you don't, you are really gross.
And when I was done with my civic duty, I was treated with the news that I had to leave.

What the fuck?

Right. Well. Haile here was walking up the stairs, looking back at Thompson and saying that that was that. He had a moment ago, at Thompson's telling, indicated that Thompson was wearing the wrong shoes to be in the gym. And I'll admit, they be a fine old pair o' cobbler's cob, but he had been in the gym with them earlier. That same day. On the treadmills. With no problem.
Now maybe that's because no one else had noticed. Or cared. Honestly, seeing the poorly posted gym rules and the general deportment in the room led me to agree with Haile's judgement. They were, in fact, the wrong shoes.
What I don't agree with is his ultimatum, his demeanor, his authority, or his station. So what I'm going to do is get to know him very well. I found and asked his name. He offered his boss' name as well, and I imagine I'm going to have an interview with them. And everyone who works there who has some interaction with him. It will take awhile, but I have the perfect time slot to fit these interviews into my day. Every day. Like a second job. I am going to find and test his credentials and habits. If he so much as forgets to wash his hands after using the washroom, I'll find out.

But why? Being the subject under the microscope is uncomfortable, and unless I'm superlatively congenial, I may make some of the other interviewees uncomfortable, too. And I'll do my best, but really, I expect I'll raise a few pulses in my work. What has he done to deserve it? What have any of them done?
Systematic denigration. Predjudice. Hatred. This act represents an attitude that I am sworn to break. This man has become the puppet of a spirit of hatred that it is my duty to banish. Oh, so I come in the place with my mate and we're skinny and wearing glasses and that means the building isn't for us? I don't even need to have my specs on to see that I'm being bullied like a callow high-schooler.
But here's the thing, I've been bullied by way tougher prats, and menaced more unjustly by more legitimate authority figures. I have stood my ground against bigger monsters, so it is only fitting that in the hour before my work starts in the morning I head over to have a few polite and systematic conversations. An excellent breakfast.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Thompson.

29 Jan 4707 - Oxspicious New Year

Okay, so the new year was actually a couple days ago. All the same, I had some champagne and chocolate to celebrate the occasion, and bickered a little with some fellow deck designers about the best way to craft a deck around some questionable combo pieces.
This year promises to be the greatest year of mankind's rule over the Earth. Greatest.

And I could tell you, if I were looking, which among an array of trees was the largest.
But not which the greatest.
Or among books, which was the most insightful.
But not the greatest.

And so what is greatness that is some superlative quality without category?
No, I dare not say what greatness is, but there comes a time when some event or object comes along and you simply know that it is the greatest. Well that is this year, folk. That is 4707 to 4708. I have clues as to why this may be, and I don't mean to say that other years aren't good. Even other years with the power of an ox, say, are fine years. You will live many more years that are pretty good, perhaps even excellent.

But none will be the greatest, unless you are living in this year.

And so, formally, I apologize to all who died before this year, as you could not have lived in the greatest year. And I apologize to all who will be born after this year, as you too will have missed out, and further, may have to live among those who have lived this day, this year. This greatest of years.
I'm not talking about the president or the economy or the climate. I'm not talking about the butcher shoppe or polite chewing or digital television. I could go on about what I'm not talking about.

So I shall.
Dungeons Ampersand Dragons returns to me this year, once again I attempt to be a simple player, accustommed as I am to being the Dungeon Master. Nowadays all of us have jobs and obligations that occupy a lot of our days, and the session length has withered to a mere four or so hours, which if I had my way, would be as long as any session ran. I know that whenever I was a DM, I would get fatigued after about four hours, and my quality would reduce after that time. There's no time to be grumpy while DMing, though one really, really wants to be.
I regret some of the decisions I made about my games in the past. I really had intended to keep a running log of where the players went and what they did, but after awhile, I no longer had the time to devote to transcribing written records, and many of my records were lost, besides. I regret not picking back up where I left off after a certain time. There was just a semester or so when I was gradually letting go of every aspect of my life. I did, at some point, let it all go. For a period of fifteen or so seconds in the summer before last, I simply had no ego, and no desires. Of course, that is a silly thing, so I quickly made new ones from dreamstuff and started casting spells again. I've never turned back. What it means today is that I'm buying a new book of Dungeons And Dragons, this time the fourth edition, and shall continue to play with my friends into the foreseeable future. (Okay, I can foresee quite a great deal beyond D&D as it turns out, but the sentiment is the same, yes?)
I hope the weather turns around soon, because there's another article that I should have been writing at this time that I shall instead write later, and I need the weather to turn around before then, so hoom.
I've been eating yogurt again, and fruits travel rather well and need no preparation, so they've come along, too. I'm finding it a little difficult to resolve to eat less acidic food. I've stopped drinking quite so much coffee (adrenaline suffices, no I didn't harvest any), but beyond that, I had no idea how much really acidic stuff I ate. Carbonic acid is the next candidate for scrubbing, and not so hard. Citric, though? Tomato sauce? Oranges? Limes? I can't live in a world that contains no limes. I guess I can stop eating the rinds...
I actually have tears in my eyes at the thought of no longer eating the rinds of my fruit. Those rinds and I have been through quite a bit, and like all nostalgia, the memories they bring back are mixed and vexing. And some other things with lots of exes in them.
Seriously. Lots of xs.

What else? Ah, yes. I have a newspaper now, so I've been doing lots of crossword puzzles, often even completing them, which I'm rather pleased about as I'm honestly only entry-level good at solving the great and terrible grid.
For me, the best and most exciting things are soon to come.
This is the greatest year.

17 Jan 4706 - Tabula Rasa

I once picked up a leaflet that said "Tabula Rasa" at the top, and it struck me as rather queer.
On the one hand, you have the colloquial phrase from the subset of Latin or Latin-ish that every Anglophone ought to know. And like Weni Weeni Weechi or Avada Kadavra, Tabula Rasa simply means "clean slate" applied this way.
When you're designing a newspaper, though, or a circular like a newspaper in this case, the phrase doesn't really apply. Was the newspaper born into this world free of any taint or bias (what they were going for)? What I concluded was that the head editor hated his job and the circular, and lobbied for a hugely ironic name that would slide right under the radar of whatever management entity decreed there should be such an awful piece of dross in the first place. So we end up with tabula rasa, which means "blank page" or "lacks any content."
Reading a little of the paper itself supported the second conclusion rather than the first.
So we learn that while English has lots of borrowed phrases that you should know if you want to speak it, you should still bother to (as ever) think about what you're saying before you say it, and think about it seven or more times before you print it.

On my slate today is (hopefully) meeting a perfect stranger in a far off land, and getting home in time to do something tedious for about an hour so I can then do something I really hate doing. If I'm lucky, I'll be home by midnight. So much as I would prefer it, I'll have to save the "voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?" for another time.
This is why I would be the greatest JET instructor ever: imagine wee Japanese kids learning Latin and French phrases. Hah. I could make my final exam a crossword puzzle.

Oh, and the vagueness is because I only like telling people I'm going to do great things after I've done them, rather than build up to a huge goose egg.

04 Jan 4706 - Seeing Decides Epiphany

The realization by man that God had sent his son to Earth. Quantifiably the greatest epiphany to have ever happened, and the event we celebrate on January 6, two days from now, as Epiphany. And ye thought ye were done with me wee Christmas lessons.

But lo, Christmas used to be rather unimportant compared to Epiphany, the same way that birth dates used to be unimportant compared to those of baptism. Sorta like how you know when Shakespeare was baptised but not born exactly. Although that had to do with recordkeeping more than anything. Hrm.
Ah, yes. Epiphany. That holiday (hey, holy day, no?) where you're supposed to take down all your Christmas decorations. But before Christmas was a secular juggernaut, something to be planned around, there was a celebration of a realization. Specifically, the realization by all non-Jews (or Gentiles, if you will) that hey, here's a Christ. Here's a Christ.

This event got juggled around over the years. Sometimes an eight-day feast. Sometimes the beginning or end of a season. Sometimes another day to give gifts (hah! I'm still in the clear!).

For me, this year, Epiphany is a time to realize a few of the upkeeping activities I need to do around the house, and in my room here. I'm not even fully unpacked yet. And by that I mean unpacked from moving into this place, not unpacked from my stay with my parents for the holidays. Er, well not all the holidays, as I am clearly outlining.
The rest of my upkeep is getting all of my gifts to whom they belong. I fancy that will be easier if I tell everyone what to expect. Even if I am sortof relying on everyone reading this and obtaining that realization. But hey, I believe in epiphany.

And I will continue history lessons until I've delivered them all, so here goes:

For Gitta: 8.5 by 5.5 by 0.025 inches. A card of some merit.
For Stephanie: 9 by 13.4 by 2 inches. A box of speculative contents, wrapped in Batman wrapping paper.
For Maranda: 8 by 18 by 24 inches. Not square in all dimensions, also wrapped in Batman wrapping paper.
I know you said you never liked presents. So think of it merely as something I need you to unwrap and keep.

As for everyone else, you may come claim your cookies any night of the week. And I suppose I would have to bake cookies for Gitta, Steph, or Mandie if any of them stopped by, too.

*cackles*

01 January 4706 (2009) - How to Begin

How to begin?

I unflinchingly return to my parents' house for the holidays, and it always means a renewed understanding of their foibles, an appreciation for the sanity I yet cling to, and adding perhaps five pounds to my body.
Home, here, changes much more gradually than anywhere else, even more gradually than the city it resides in: a time capsule of humanity. Or origin, rather. I like the idea that it is not humanity but origin that keeps me coming back. Factually speaking, it is dining that keeps me coming back. Since coming home for the holidays, I have dined with my family on gourmet mexican, leftover chinese, homemade pizza, take-out pizza, steak, a feast of ham, turkey, stuffing, Yorkshire Pudding, creamed turnip greens, crab cakes, mashed potatoes and Gran Spumante, and once, at my asking, there was tuna and salmon, which only I took raw: the others demurred. I have eaten chocolate truffles, dark and milk chocolate miniatures, chocolate pie, chocolate cake, gourmet hot chocolate (the best treats come in your stocking, mates), chocolate peanut butter cups, and bananas foster chocolate bites.
There is coffee any hour of the day I wish (which as it turns out is most hours of the day that I am awake). When a stray available moment in front of the television presents itself, there is my younger brother's Wii Fit balance board to stay active. It was, by the way, the thing that indicated to me I my have put on five pounds in three days, although I'm sure the new blue jeans had a little to do with that, too. This is all food I don't pay for.
Well not with dollars, anyway.
No, I pay with my sanity, an ailing quantity, departed by my own volition and mixed lack of care and care. That is my first younger brother. I shall not go into the reasons why living with my younger brother means putting sanity on the shelf day by day. Oh no. That is a discussion for its own time and topic. Apart from that, there is a kind of efficient madness about the place. A shattered understanding duct taped to apprehensive clarity; the natural outgrowth, I fancy, of a mating of well-read professionals from different disciplines who share hobbies.

Soil.
I tried to tell my older brother while he was on the phone that there is soil in this place.
I know our parents garden, and they let the cat do as he likes in the dirt outside, and there is some soot that the vacuum simply will not pick up. But ennui for the state of the carpet has set in at last, and my devisive parents keep a layer of soil on the floor that darkens my socks if I walk around on it for too long. I guess you would just have to know my past as I do to understand the simple madness of soil on the floor in here. Maybe I've made it sound as if there is an inch of peat moss on the floor, and there isn't. But if I walk around here for a day, the soles of my socks will be a medium brown by the end of that, and matey, that will not do for a place to live in. It makes me want to get a little crate where shoes can go that I may put in the entryway to my own apartment, and in place of that I may come down a little and ante up a welcome mat instead. Although, if I really had my way, I would have had the presence of mind to snatch up that "go away" mat I witnessed once in Pheasent Lane Mall of Nashua NH when I was there for the half-day leading up to my entry into the world of college.
No, the soil will have to settle for now, and the cat can have it, I savvy.

About two years ago (a little less), my parents took in a neighborhood stray who had been at their door on and off for several months, playing with my second younger brother, begging for food and water, and generally catting around. Only yesterday did my father take the animal to the vet for a checkup (they had done so once previous to check for rabies and ticks, I savvy), and discovered that the kitten they had dubbed "Melody" for her determined catsong, was in fact a neutered male, and that his missing tail was more likely a natural growth than an old injury.
I guess I had taken for granted that the cat was coccyplegic from trauma given the contellation of smaller injuries he sported all over his face and ears, whose stars would blink in and out.
Vet knows better, I suppose. Easy to lose sight of, as he's black. Cautious, and thinner than before: now fit enough to jump onto chairs and the arms of chairs. Perhaps six years old, they say. Middle-aged. He'll beg for food from the fridge, lick it a little and then look up, asking where the real stuff is. For the sake of my stay here being visible and breathable, my parents stock up on anti-hystemines before my arrival.
I'm sporting this lovely new fleece thing, too. It reminds me of one I decided against buying some time ago. It fits and is fitting.
I own a motorcycle helmet now at my father's prerogative, and an impact driver at his enabling.
This year, the twelve cans of Big K Cherry Cola came too me wrapped individually, each with a label saying "To: Kaz" with various phrases or not there on the "from:" line. So I decided to keep them that way, and a few remain here in the fridge still wrapped. I leave them mostly wrapped while I drink them.
Though not a gift per se, I did watch the third season of Battlestar Gallactica on DVD, my pulpy sci-fi guilty pleasure, where guessing cylons is, in the end, like guessing horcruxes.
And socks. Merino lambswool socks (if you ever don't know what to get me, get me these).

I feel muted.
I accomplished what I wanted to do here all too quickly. The only remaining tasks are either simple, recurring, or impossible. I can't summon up the gumption to do the simple ones (updating my web page is one of them, or else I'd have five entries instead of one long one), I do at length and by days accomplish the recurring ones (I could stop doing the daily crossword any time, mind ye), and the impossible ones are very hard. Okay, yes, harder than that.
For example, now that my second younger brother has a Wii, I mean to expose him to all the great things about the generation of nintendo console that he skipped: the Gamecube. I started with Metroid Prime and Mario Kart Double Dash. I tried in October to give him my copy of Paper Mario, Thousand Year Door, but to my surprise, it had long vanished. I renewed that attempt this Christmas with an unopened copy of the game, only to discover that my efforts of indoctination were stymied utterly. He hadn't been playing the gamecube games.
Well, he sometimes played Mario Kart, but he couldn't do time trials.
Hoom. Now they're just messing with me, right? How could you play and not be able to do time trials? Well, the controller's up-down analog stick axis did not function. I'm amazed he was able to do as much as he did, but I don't like to learn that I've been stymied, even if I don't particularly know what to give him once he finishes Paper Mario (seriously, what else was the cube good for? Was Pikmin good?). I should get him Prime 2.
First, though, I'm going to get him a new controller, because I've examined the first device here and determined the point of failure to be the plastic collar that translates motion from the stick itself to the angle sensor. Apparently this collar connects up by means of a plastic pin about the size of a large grain of salt. I do not like the prognosis of the superglue as a fix, and thus should get him another damn controller, which I guess means another trip to Starland. I'll attempt repairs a second time tonight. But again, I don't like the prospects, and this boy should play Thousand Year freaking-Door. I kindof want to play it again miself.
I've been tear-assing through Lost Magic, though. After picking it up and after deciding that playing Grimoire of the Rift on hard mode would be an exercise in infuriating myself over months of time, I took to scribbling furiously on my touch-screen (this is the only way to form kanji and the only way to cast spells, therefore have a dispell ready for anyone who can form more than a few characters: that person is certainly a wizard). What I mean is Lost Magic makes better use of the touch screen than any game I've yet seen. To move, you click on your guy and then click on a place for him to go. Oh, and you can capture monsters and bring minions with you into combat (hmmm). And you cast spells by bringing up the drawing pad and drawing one, two, (or three, bugger), characters on the screen. Then you either indicate a direction, center, line, or center and radius for effect of the spell. The game is in real time, even while you're scribbling your spell, so speed is of the essence. It reminded me of Warcraft III, except without the resource gathering (and tech trees and pathing and sophistication, etc.), so I loved it right away.
It takes getting over an initial difficulty hump at about the fourth or fifth mission, afterwards you have enough potent runes to be able to damage or heal more than one unit at a time, and can thus mitigate most of the advantage your opponents have on you in time (wizardly opponents take zero time to cast their own spells). Speaking of runes, the game has six categories of magic and three levels of each, for 18 total runes. Each has an effect alone, and a different effect when paired with another rune or with itself. Hence there are 18+18²=342 unique spells. If they allowed combinations of three runes as well, it would be 5850 spells, but I think there are only six trio rune spells, for a total of a mere 348. They could easily tailor the system to be an additional 18 or so possibilities, making 18*(18+18)+18=666, and given the nature of the plot, it wouldn't surprise me if they had done precisely that. All the same, I'm going through combos to fill out my spellbook now, and they time you on missions and random encounters, too, so I can't just dilly dally and puzzle them all out at once. This is why four hours vanished last night when I was thinking of sitting down at last to type out all this.

I suppose on the balance that makes me a happy person. I've done all I needed, some I wanted, and none that I could do bloody well without. I've spent ten times as much on those who asked me for things as on those who told me they didn't want anything. I've even shaved (it itched too much).
The most important thing my parents have given me this holiday, as they always do give me, is peace. Precious, ephemeral, and yet automatic, easily-flowing from this place.
That another year passes and a new one begins: meaningless.
What I did for the holiday: valueless.
That I was sitting here when it happened: priceless.

So who wants to get together come time for me to celebrate my new year? Can't hardly wait for 4707.

17 Dec 4706 - Gifts This Time

Ancient cultures take a long time to die.
A really, really long time.
So long in fact, that many have simply adapted to live on forever cleverly worked into icons of other cultures. An extremely modern culture would thus have all the hallmarks of all the ancient ones, their spirits living on in some of the most improbable places.

You can identify these places wherever you can find cultural artifacts (yes, even of your own culture, sillynoodle), and you can know an object or practice is a cultural artifact because of its superfluous traits. Culture is what happens when a plurality of consciousness manifests a repeated decision whose outcome is irrelevant.*

As far as engineering is concerned, people don't need most of what they get. The art of engineering design is the marriage of physical capability with subjective human aesthetics in a device or practice that solves a problem or satisfies a need. This science has given us the wheel. This art has put baseball cards in the spokes of that wheel, and stickers on the uncomfortable banana seat of the bicycle attached to that wheel (I'm guessing the bike itself came from somewhere good, too).

But the man who gave you that bike, if you were a kid in America, was probably Santa Claus. The mutant with more origin stories than creation itself (which is a wonderful diddle of language by the way: the means through which a subset of something can have more of a quality than that other something. I think there's a topological surface that can do the same thing with math). A man named Thomas Nast drafted a cartoon character by the name and image of Santa Claus in 1863. More and more advertisers adopted the icon and it became a staple of American culture by the 1920s. From there, Santa spread to other nations (who had, as it turned out, been celebrating Christmas for a long time), where each came up with a version of where the jolly elf had come from (or at that, whether or not he was himself an elf or any other minutiae). There are simply too many origin stories to cover all at once, so I'll probably sprinkle them in at the end of some of my other articles.

Today, we'll learn about Saint Nicholas.
He is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, and children. He is said to have saved the lives of sailors, and that shipwreck survivors would offer up pieces of the scuttled ship's sailcloth to the Saint in thanks for their salvation. The connections to children and archers? Dunno.
Merchants? Well that is an interesting story. Saint Nick heard about a poor man who was too old to work and had three daughters. He didn't have enough money to marry them off, so everyone expected they would become prostitutes (the only available line of work for them). I imagine that out of the three of them, at least one would have pretended to be a man and become apprenticed to some craftsman, but what do I know about getting a job in Turkey in the 290s and 300s?
Nikolaos heard about the poor man and secretly left him three sacs of gold so he could marry off his daughters. The story has a couple different tellings but the same elements are always there. Niky pities the man but doesn't want to publicly pity him. The man discovers Niky after the first two times, and Niky tells him to thank not him, but God. Some merchant figures out from this that maybe he could lend money as well in exchange for some valueable (with no interest because usury is a sin), and he becomes a pawn broker. Then the three sacs of gold from the story become the universal symbol of the pawn shop.

As to whether or not any of this led Thomas Nast to fabricate a character, or others who adopted Nast's character did so out of blending it into the story of Saint Nicholas and the poor bedaughtered man, it is hard to say. Certainly some spirit of the Saint remains today in our memetic entity of Christmastide gift giving, whether by intended transfer and evolution or retroactive retconn shoehorning. And really, for the sake of a fictitious character, is there any difference between those two methods? Or...

is he not fictitious?

*This seems to suggest that culture itself is irrelevant, being based entirely on series of decisions that do not matter. That is wrong. Culture is important, and it is precisely because decisions that don't matter are the very ones that matter most. You can learn more about a person or a people by looking at the irrelevant decisions than the relevant ones. Relevant decisions have objective criteria. There is some goal in mind or some transparent purpose for the choice. In this way, people are all the same, so you can't use those decisions to learn diddly squat. Further, intentional robbery of that information is an act of aggression and ire for no personal benefit (technically speaking, a dick move). I knew a girl who made decisions this way (that is, actively not ever deciding on the unimportant ones). Cup or a glass? Mustard or no? Socks? Toe socks?
It was maddening. Never do that.

12 December 4706 - Yo, Saturnalia!

Chrismasial origin stories can take you all over the place, and there are many facts, even facts as leading evidence, as to why you give gifts to each other on Christmas day to this day (or rather, to some thirteen days hence this day). In matters of literature and history, I deal less in facts than in truths, preferring to be more a scientist of science (or madness) than a scientist of history: to wit, preferring to be more historiatrician than historiologist.
Science deals in facts.
The truthes, at least some of the truthes, are these:

The Roman holy day of Saturnalia comprised common gift-giving and festival-throwing, as well as many other acts and practices. Your gift-giving spirit lived there, you see, and can still remember what it was like. Saturnalia was the feast day for Saturn, god of the harvest, given this day (or week or more or less) on the seventeenth or nineteenth of December (it needed two more days in it) after the farmer was done in the fields. With no more farming to do, what is an agricultural culture to do but feast and festival?
They would untie symbolic bonds from the statue of Saturn and have feasts. Slaves were allowed to gamble with dice, wear caps as though freed, and act irreverently toward their masters.
People gave each other candles, and other small tools and gifts. And they ate to excess, but hey, when in Rome, right?
Apparently what you do is visit your friends in the big city. Estate owners would have guests over to feast, and respectable guests would bring house gifts (or the other way around maybe, or both).
The candles may have also been symbolic of the lengthening of days following the winter solstice, or they may have been a handy gift for the guy you know who already has every tool that there is, and plenty of slaves to use them.
Things were easygoing on Saturnalia, and really, with the winter the way it is, what are you really going to do apart from celebrate?

With the service economy of today, and heavily industrialized agriculture and, well, culture, we have different needs, and fewer days when simply nothing is going on.

Saturnalia (or solstice or Opalia) is, yes, one of the pagan origins of Christmas. Some historiatricians of history took this as a sign of degeneracy in the church. Some of them also thought anyone who celebrated his own birthday was a pagan.
Keep that in mind the next time you wish anyone Happy Birthday.

Archived News
I'll only keep my two or three most recent entries here. Anything older will go to the archives. With sour cream on a baked potato.