Requiescat in Pace, Geocities

You have probably heard that Yahoo! is shutting Geocities down. Unlike most people, I don't have especially strong feelings about Geocities. I know that my personal experiences with sites hosted there haven't been the best in the world. They have been glittery, certainly, and generally pink, but they've not been terribly good. But I don't loathe Geocities with a great and terrible passion, as some seem to. Geocities taught all of us a very important lesson: no matter if the information on a page is the truest and most dependable in the world, nobody will take it seriously if the layout looks like sparkly, puff-painted ass.

They also taught us that hit counters are kind of tacky, regardless of the content preceding them.

One valiant fellow, though, is endeavoring to archive Geocities, which seems to me to be a Quixotic effort both in scope and purpose. He is storing it away for posterity, which I suppose is as fine a thing as anyone can do, nowadays. Though I can't imagine the sort of historian who, two hundred or three hundred years from now, will be willing to unplug themselves from the full sensory cavalcade of their immersive Hypernet (wherein textual data synaesthetically tastes like bacon), fire up a Windows emulator, and say, "I'm going to dig through thousands upon thousands of these ancient Geocities pages in order to piece together a view of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."

I further am unwilling to imagine what sort of historic viewpoint such a trawl through those archives would present. At best, we'd look to be a culture forever obsessed with meaningless ephemera and punching monkeys to win twenty dollars. At worst, we'd look to be a culture forever obsessed with Comic Sans.

Anyway, for his efforts to archive the sociological leavings of the past decade and a half, I have to salute Jason Scott. Geocities was a vital step, in its own way. Without it, we probably wouldn't have marvels like Facebook and Blogger kicking around.

That would make for one lonely Internet. RIP, Geocities.

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"Does nineteen work for you?"

Nothing Up My Sleeve...

As I'm sure is the case with a lot of you, the idea of procedural generation of content has also fascinated me ever since the release of Spore last year, which allowed players to design truly bizarre creatures and then puzzled out precisely how they moved just on the basis of the creature's form (among other things).  While I have yet to actually play Spore (as I have a relatively low-end computer), I am still duly impressed by reports of how it manages this sort of thing.

For those of you who have never heard of Spore and consider the Wikipedia article I linked to about procedural generation a tl;dr situation, let me see if I can sum it up for you: procedural generation is the creation, by way of an algorithm in a computer program (in this case, a game), of content that did not exist at the moment the program was run.  In the Spore example, the procedurally-generated content is your creature's walking animation.  There's no way that the programmers could account for all possible permutations of the various bits and pieces of the game's creatures, so they wrote a chunk of code that allows the game to create the animation on the fly.

The most impressive example of procedurally-generated content I have found thus far is a game called .kkrieger.  Here is the gameplay screenshot that is featured in its Wikipedia article.  Click on it for a larger size.

A traditionally-created game--one that has independent files for models, textures, and animations that are referenced by a core program--that looks like this one would probably occupy a few hundred megabytes of disk space at least.  Plenty of games out there run into multi-gigabyte territory (Halo and World of Warcraft are just a couple that spring to mind--my gaming is a bit dated, admittedly).  But .kkrieger occupies only 96k.  That's it.  I've seen Word files that are bigger!  All those pretty things in that screenshot?  The models, textures, animations, and even music are all generated during the game's hella long loading time.  None of it is hard-coded or included in separate files.  It builds itself from the ground up every time it's run.

Given, it takes a PC with some pretty hefty processing power to play the thing, but the fact that it works at all is fascinating to me.

Other examples of games that use procedural generation can be found in the Wikipedia article about it.  Right off the top of my head, I know that Dwarf Fortress uses it to create entire worlds, including their histories and legends (pretty spiffy), and a lot of the games over at Java4k use it to keep their file sizes down at the 4k maximum size for the competition.

I'll warn you, though, those games at Java4k can be damned addictive.  Enter at your own risk.

Anyway, this was just something that I thought was awesome and consequently wanted to share.  You may all go about your lives now.

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"The Tao did not wish for him to pass."

Running the Gauntlet

As much as I've bitched and bellyached about grad school, I think it has done me some good. I've gotten some of the best literary exercise I could possibly imagine during the past two semesters, and I think it was exercise I sorely needed. As much as I really, really hated writing sci-fi and fantasy when every other person in the bloody world seemed to be writing realism, I think it was the best thing that could have happened. It forced me to pay as much attention to the human aspects of the story as I do to the fantastical parts.

I think I'd really, truly managed that in only one story up until I started grad school. And that story is still my absolute favorite of everything I've ever written. It was one of those that was like silk off a spool, right from the very beginning. At least, it feels like that, looking back on it. And I knew I had something special by the time I was even partway done. I just didn't realize why until much, much later. It was because, deep down at the heart of it, past the wizards and the royalty and the fantasy bric-a-brac, the two main characters were absolutely human, and they acted it. And their personal realness extended out to the rest of the story, despite its fairy-tale-ish trappings, to make the world they occupied real.

So I guess I understand what was going through Christian Bale's mind when he initially turned down the role of John Connor in the new Terminator. True, special effects are awesome. And that's what a lot of the trappings of fantasy and science fiction are: special effects. That is in no way meant to belittle them, either. I love the conventions of fantasy and sci-fi. They're great fun. And you can build a fun story based on special effects alone. It's absolutely possible. You get the literary equivalent of a popcorn flick, which runs on sheer enthusiasm in order to get its paper-thin protagonists from one plot point to the next. The problem is that, unless it is particularly uninhibited in its exuberance, few people are going to remember that sort of thing two days after they've read it. Just like with a movie that's all CGI flash and zero storytelling substance.

So if you really want to fill out a story, to give it genuine weight, to make it memorable, then your characters have to be people. In all their beautifully ugly glory. And that's really all there is to it.

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We were going to use the time machine to prevent the robot apocalypse, but the guy who built it was an electrical engineer.

Well, Here I Am

I return! It's six months later, and not much has really changed. Time marches on, as does entropy. We're that much closer to the eventual heat death of the universe, and I still haven't gotten my fucking copy of CthulhuTech. But such is life, and so it goes.

I have gotten a copy of the Sailor Moon RPG put out by Guardians of Order in 1998. For, like seven dollars. Why yes, I am a huge nerd. Was there ever any question? I was actually surprised at how well-assembled it was. I got it for a chuckle, but now I'm seriously considering running a game with it.

That, though, will have to come after the Serenity one-shot I'm going to run in the next couple of weeks, and the Exalted 2e one-shot I fully intend to run sometime after that. It's been way too long since I've had an Exalted fix--since I've had a tabletop roleplaying fix of any sort, really. But that'll be rectified soon.

During my absence I've done a ridiculous amount of writing (some of it good, some of it bad, some of it poetry). My most recent endeavor has been in league with a friend of mine, and it is a webcomic called Fancy That. There's a big friendly banner for it in this blog's sidebar now, if you'd like to take a look. It updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday, like Penny Arcade, which I love so very much. Unlike PA, though, Fancy That suffers from, to borrow a phrase coined by Jerry Holkins, dreaded continuity. I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.

I'm going to try to keep this blog updated on a fairly regular basis. There are no guarantees, though the possibility of there being a post any given day will probably go up sometime in May. Just because. I'm also going to try to keep this blog closer to its stated topics. I was rather lax about that in the past, but no longer. If it's not about writing, gaming, or geekery, it will not appear in these hallowed pages.

I'm sure you'll sleep better at night knowing that.

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I'm going to run away to the lesbian circus!