The End of the Line...For RPGs

I realized something earlier today. It was while I was grinding for levels in Final Fantasy XII, a game that I still have not beaten despite having it in my possession for going on two years now. The realization was simple.

"I don't have time for this shit."

"This shit", specifically, refers to the various console RPGs that require enormous investments of time to make any progress in. I am currently over fifty hours into Final Fantasy XII. I have spent fifty hours of my life that I will never get back on this game. And what am I getting from it? Am I getting epic shit that makes all the effort worthwhile? Are there enormous throwdowns with monstrous beings that warp reality and time and whatever? No. I'm grinding levels in an effort to make it through a fucking cave that is mostly populated with imps. IMPS. And in case you didn't get it that second time, let me re-reiterate:

Imps.

We are talking minor goddamn demons, here. At over fifty hours into a game I should be in a position to punch Beelzebub in the balls, not have to go toe to toe with a frigging gargoyle with a pitchfork and lose half the time.

Investment in the story can only carry me so far. Once upon a time I really wanted to know what shit was going down in Final Fantasy XII. I really did. I knew the names of the kingdoms, I knew the purposes behind the protagonists' actions, I even could recall the backstory of the major characters. Now, returning to it months later, I am simply doing things because the mechanism of the game says it should be so. And doing for the sake of doing is the silliest thing there is.

So I have come to this conclusion: the games I play and enjoy most are brief and to the point. The Sands of Time Trilogy, Devil May Cry, Shadow of the Colossus, these are games that were fucking awesome, and all of which I played to completion (except for DMC, where I'm still stuck on the final boss). And I was able to play them to completion because they maintained my interest enough and were compact enough that I was able and willing to fit them into my daily schedule.

...I think that's enough of a rant from me, for now.

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"I have two children!"

A Revelation

I have long been pondering on the existence of Flash games--specifically, what particular niche it is they fill that the glut of modern video gaming technology we are surrounded by is unable to touch. I was just moments ago struck with a blinding realization while poking around Armor Games, and I'm still having a little trouble seeing, so let's work forward from the start of things.

First, what manner of interactive entertainment is covered by media outside of Flash? Take for example, gaming consoles and computer gaming software. What do they offer us, as individuals in search of the alleviation of boredom? Most of the time they offer a high-end product, costing anywhere from twenty to sixty dollars depending on the format and the hardware it's supposed to run on. And for that twenty to sixty dollars you can get damn near any experience you care to find. Want to play at being a guitarist in a rock band? Check. Wanna be a mushroom-addicted plumber rescuing a princess from a lizard man? We got that. Want to slay demons as you carve a swath of divine fury through Hell itself? Sure thing. Want to save the world from the forces of darkness? What kinds of dark forces do you want to save it from? We have options. Want to commit deicide, over and over again? Three times yes.

Do you want to play a game of fucking tennis while sitting on your couch? Because we can do that. You can even play it by barely twitching your wrist, if you want to look like a complete tool.

So traditional gaming experiences run the gamut from the simple to the complex and have touched on just about every major mythic arc that exists. Whether it's Street Fighter or Devil May Cry or Ghostbusters, there's something for just about everybody. So where do Flash games fit in to all this? Obviously it would be nigh-on impossible for them to try to compete with professional developers directly, jockeying for consumer attention by producing Flash-based rehashes of RPGs and fighting games and so forth. Major developers pour thousands to millions of dollars into game development and wield cadres of professional, beret-bedecked artists and wild-eyed, unwashed programmers to bring their digital behemoths to life. Which is why I'll choose Starcraft over any goddamn Flash-based tower defense game in the history of forever for the rest of eternity.

Seriously guys, tower defense was new and interesting two years ago. We've gone from beating a dead horse to actively slicing it open and sexually assaulting the resultant holes a la the Marquis de Sade. Let me make this clear: you have become sadists. So let it go. But I digress.

You'll notice, though, that the lack of professional development on a Flash game is a double-edged sword. While it is a format that necessarily limits the length and scope of the games designed for it, it also allows unparalleled freedom for its designer--meaning that the weird, the experimental, and the flat-out surreal are able to make it into the final product without worry, because the game is not being developed to the tune of several million dollars in order to appeal to a commercial market that has the power to bankrupt the game's parent company if said game fails to garner attention.

And that's why you wind up with things like ImmorTall, The Company of Myself, Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar, and You Have To Burn The Rope in Flash format--because that's the absolute best use for that particular mode of expression. They can't compete on a point-by-point basis with the other games that can arrest our attention with flashy graphics and big explosions, so they must transcend them by doing things large production companies are simply unable to pull off without major (unwanted) financial risk. The quirky, the unusual, and the off-balance are the calling card of great Flash games, and that is how they will survive in a world dominated by texture-mapped polygons and particle effects.

By being wonderfully, sublimely odd.

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"We're all mad here."

Sweet Dreams

It occurs to me at this late hour that I really ought to've gotten more product to put in my hair on my way home today. There was the pressing concern of my bladder to take into account, though that will do little to ameliorate the deleterious effects of a bad 'do come tomorrow.

On an unrelated note, I can only assume that snow on the first official day of spring is no more and no less than a harbinger of doom. My brothers and sisters, we are in the icy grip of Fimbulwinter, and it will only end when Loki sets sail in his ship made of the nails of dead men and the twilight of the gods has come to pass. At which point we are, of course, duly fucked. In the light of all that, my hair situation seems considerably less dire.

To blog about blogging is to metablog. So if I were to compose a blog about blogging about blogging, would it become even more meta? Would it increase exponentially in power, its hair turning gold and its muscles bulging as it roared its defiance to the dark gods of the Internet? Or would it push it so far forward that, due to some bizarre Einsteinian quantum nonsense, it would come back around from the other side as simply being another blog post? Perhaps it would burst free of the shackles of definition entirely, and in its Escheresque self-referentiality achieve sentience?

What if the box the corporate brass wants you to think outside of is labeled "Sanity"? How long would it take for terrible, squamous beings from other planes to usurp the company infrastructure and begin reaping a bumper crop of human souls? Worse yet, how long would it take people to notice?

These are the things I wonder about before I go to sleep. It makes life dreadfully interesting.

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-Me

Rube Goldberg Is Green With Envy

As I type this blog post, each press of a key sends an electrical signal surging along a cable that is linked to, by one detour or another, the central processing unit of the computer, which in turn communicates with the laptop's BIOS, which has a chat with the operating system, which passes word along to Firefox, who eventually turns to the text field on the page and says for it to display the goddamn characters, you lazy twat, or I'll strip you down to your component bits and scatter them in the raging inferno of the Internet, which will be the closest thing to death you will ever have the displeasure of experiencing.

The text field says okay, I heard you, jackass, and updates, and that update is caught on the next timed screen refresh an imperceptibly short amount of time later. An electrical charge is run through a handful of cells of liquid crystal, rendering them into black pixels that create a shape recognizable to the human eye.

The letter "A" appears on my screen.

Does that strike anyone else as completely batshit insane?

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"Inconceivable!"

Concerning 4chan

I'm sure we all know of 4chan. It is regularly thought of as the cesspool of the Internet--the lawless West of the Web, manifest as a looming tower of undulating porn with horses in, a place infested with memes and assholes where sanity goes to die. In short, not generally a favorite of most people. If you make yourself known there, you're going to be met with mild disinterest at best; at the worst, you'll get the kind of open hostility that can burn the Teflon off a politician's back and send him crying home to his mistress. Complete toss-up. Such are the ways of Anonymous.

Which is why it always surprises me that in 4chan, the land of C-C-C-COMBO BREAKERS, ultimata concerning the prompt exposure of tits, and one of the premiere stomping grounds of some of the world's greatest trolls, every once in a while comes across as so very...humanist.

I present as proof this image, conveying their reactions to various Christian Fundamentalist assertions. I don't generally give a fuck about religion, honestly--so long as folk don't go trying to foist their beliefs on others, I'm fine with them. If a person thinks that the world is only 6,000 years old or that DNA is a confabulation meant to perpetuate the lie of evolution or whatever, but doesn't try to convince me of it and/or call me a blasphemer every few minutes, then I'm okay with that person. Faith is a personal thing. I happen to have more faith in people as a whole than I do in anything else, and that's my own deal. But when your personal beliefs begin impinging upon the rights of other people, that's when we have a problem.

Anyway, this post was mostly meant to be an exercise in...curiosity. 4chan--racist, misogynist, misanthropic, schadenfreudean 4chan--wields surprising principles, considering its bizarre little society.

Food for thought, I suppose.

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"FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-"

Pierce The Heavens With Your Prose!

I've been exercising my capability to write in the epic mode, recently, with varying amounts of success. My endeavors in this direction were prompted by the fanfic Shinji and Warhammer 40k, which chronicles the events of Neon Genesis Evangelion if Shinji had been...more confident, shall we say. It carries us through Shinji's adolescence all the way through the events of The End of Evangelion, and you realize that it has somehow become something undeniably epic when you realize that our hero is facing down an unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosity formed by twelve similarly unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosities that have combined, while piloting a giant cyborg that has had both its arms ripped off, his friends and Enemy Mine fighting alongside him as companions in battle, and you're wondering precisely how they're going to pull victory out of their ass this time. Also, the only people who have gone batshit insane are the bad guys. Which is rather a bit different for Evangelion.

Anyway, the fight scenes in this particular fic...the whole thing, really, when you come right down to it...are incredibly well done. The city that most of the story takes place in actually feels vibrant and functional, and wartime heroics somehow still manage to shine through the unavoidable carnage and debris. And I was hoping to capture that in the project that I'm currently working on. I might be succeeding, because the first honest-to-goodness battle scene that I've written in ages has already shown up and is currently occupying ten full pages of text.

I've basically learned that taking a cinematic approach to writing is Not a Bad Thing, regardless of what creative writing teachers will tell you. It's okay to split a reader's attention among three or four things going on at the same time, so long as those things are clearly delineated to avoid confusion with each other. A few paragraphs of action here, a few paragraphs of action in another location, let's check in on these characters over here, and so on and so forth. If pulled off properly, it gives a sort of sweeping effect to the proceedings, granting an impression of the bloody chaos befalling the characters without having to go into massive, explicit detail concerning the larger picture--though that is nice too, every once in a while.

Also, I've learned that just letting rip can be the best thing to do. I've been so concerned this past year with writing good fiction that I've not really had the presence of mind to write fun fiction. And to me, a story being fun is a lot more important than it being Literature. That was a difficult lesson to learn, and it's even more difficult to put into practice. But I'm getting there.

I would much rather entertain people than crank out yet another American Classic that will be ignored by prisoners of academia for the next three hundred years.

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"A hero strikes when least expected! The enemy of all that is good, the one who wants to destroy this world that is made of love! And peace! Will never escape from justice! Specially in the moment that he feels safe, he will know! There is nowhere to hide! The name for this! IS DYNAMIC ENTRY!"

On Deconstructions

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of genre deconstructions, especially if it's a genre that I like. I've read Watchmen multiple times over, and I sat through all twenty-six episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion plus The End of Evangelion. Just with Evangelion, we're talking about something like thirteen hours of raw mindfuckery, which I watched directly after the sublime hotblooded heroism of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The mood whiplash was something akin to going out for a night with the guys, and when you get home your cheery, adorable wife is wearing a black leather corset and crotchless knickers, wielding a riding crop. You're not quite sure what's going on, but you have the sneaking feeling that you're going to like what's to follow.

So anyway, it felt necessary to establish my fondness for them, as I'm about to discuss yet another deconstruction, this time of the traditional anime magical girl: Sailor Nothing, by Stefan Gagne.

Completed in 2001, it is the story of Shoutan Himei, a girl who has the secret identity Sailor Salvation, a bishoujo senshi in the same vein as Sailor Moon and her cohorts. Except, unlike Sailor Moon, Himei has been at the game for five years, and is more than a little bit shellshocked by the bleak, unending labor of her given task. In the first chapter, Salvation flies into a berserkerganger rage and tears apart the Monster of the Week with her bare hands. This leads tangentially to her having her title stripped from her by her guide and mentor, Magnificent Kamen. Except she's stuck with her powers, and she still gets crippling headaches each time a new monster spawns. If she doesn't answer the call, she'll be responsible for dozens of horrific, bloody deaths. If she does, she'll be plunging straight back into the nightmare she tried to escape.

Basically, our heroine starts off suicidal, and it all goes downhill from there.

It sounds brutally depressing and more than a little angsty--the bit of artwork above does the atmosphere justice, even if it's not technically the best--but (like Evangelion), it's the sort of thing that you have to see through to the end if for no other reason than raw curiosity.

My initial response to most of the twists and turns the plot took was...not overwhelming. I realized along the way that, if you view/read enough deconstructions, and if you are familiar with the genre, you're pretty much going to see all the author's tricks well in advance. Just imagine, "What could make this psychologically-scarring and full of squick?" And that held true for me up until the last chapter, which was pretty much chock full of "holy shit" moments. The best, it seems, was saved for those last thirty-some pages. Pages that are proof that, through all experience, even a jaded consumer of culture such as I can be surprised.

Anyway, if you're looking for a good read and are particularly stout of psyche, I'd recommend giving Sailor Nothing a chance. Though I would suggest copying it off of the website and into a plain text document or something similar--teeny white type on a black background spread across the full width of your web browser can be murder on your eyes.

...Perhaps that was the point.

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"My name is Shoutan Himei. I'm sixteen years old, and I'm very tired."

Concerning Television Programmes

So here I am, back again after yet another unpalatable interval. Felt the urge to call up the old blog and have a go at it, though I'm not sure what about just at the moment. Guess things will come to me as they will.

I've decided that I really must own Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'm not content having simply viewed it through once. I feel as though I need to go through it again, seeing if I can spot hints of the what-the-fuck to come in earlier episodes. And perhaps make a bit more sense out of the what-the-fuck that I know of already. Because it really isn't enough to only hear once about a guy who's pressed into service piloting a Lovecraftian abomination clad in the most advanced armor that the planet can offer by his emotionally-distant father and is then joined in battle by one young woman who is a single iteration in a long line of clones and another young woman who has serious mommy issues and attaches all her self-worth to her skill piloting a horrific alien cyborg engine of destruction, and how they all three spiral into self-destruction and the annihilation of life on Earth as we know it.

That about sums up the show, even though I neglected to touch on the emotionally-crippled adult cast and the mind-raping creatures spawned from a cosmic horror hell-bent on scourging the Earth of all beings to make way for its own brand of existence. It's all good times. Really.

On a much lighter note, I've been watching The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, a show that apparently did so poorly that it is only available for further viewing by way of illicit piratical dealings on the Interblag. Which is a terrible shame, because it features steampunk cyborgs, airships, and vampires with jetpacks.

Did you get that last part? Vampires with jetpacks. If that doesn't sell you on a story, then you have no adventure in your soul whatsoever. You just sort of need to ignore the fact that the titular character is a whingeing, gullible idealist and pay attention to the Foggs, Phileas and Rebecca, who kick so much ass and take so many names that they run out of paper in the process.

Now you'll have to excuse me, as I must investigate the strange keening, ululating noise outside my house. If I don't return, call Miskatonic University. They'll know what to do.

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"Screw the rules, I have money!"

Holy Shit, A New Year!

What do you know.

Now that I've owned up to precisely how long it's been since I've written anything of value (hell, anything period) here, I guess I can move along to other things. Thing is, I'm not entirely sure what to move on to. I suppose that's what comes of having a newspost to occupy with your thoughts three times a week. There become scant few thoughts to occupy other places (like, say, a blog). Or even, dare I say it, my head.

This is probably for the best, as ideas that hang around in my head for too long have a tendency to become deranged and manic. I'd post some of the things I've written in the weird fiction/horror vein, but I'd rather like for the public at large to continue thinking of me as a rational, healthy-minded person, so I shan't. Let it simply be said that a few of them are...disturbing.

I should probably have some set of goals or another for the year ahead, but I've always been full aware that I'd never be able to maintain Resolutions, so why even bother making them? I have a difficult enough time getting from day to day without having to worry about little things like "saving money" or "managing my time wisely" or "not killing people".

I'm a little stunned that Fancy That is still going strong after almost a year. We've certainly had our hiccups and missed updates and the like, but the fact that we're still here and doing it after all this time speaks volumes. It's perhaps the longest that I've maintained a project (aside from the novel that took me three years of my high school career to write and in the end turned out to be generic and foul), which is something I feel proud of. Our eightieth actual strip just went up, which is a milestone in and of itself.

Ubuntu has continued to serve me well as my operating system of choice. It is sleek, efficient, easy on my aging laptop's faculties, and doesn't tie me down to either of the major OS magnates out there. The only reasons I've had to boot into Windows since I did a permanent install of Ubuntu on my hard drive is to sync my iPod with my music library and to scan the comic (because Lexmark is staffed by bitches who refuse to play nice with Linux). Other than that, I work exclusively in Ubuntu.

If you want to see a website whose design coding was done by yours truly, you can skip on over to http://www.oktagagency.com and have a gander. They've fiddled with my code, so it's actually less pretty than it originally was, but the basic structure is still intact. So far as I'm concerned, they paid me $300 to do the code, so they can do whatever they like with it. It simply isn't my problem anymore.

And so...on with the new year!

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"You know why I joined this cult? All the unprotected sects. Heyooo!"

Ubuntu - Preliminary Thoughts

So I've just finished tinkering around with the most recent incarnation of Ubuntu Linux (version 9.04, or "Jaunty Jackalope" as it was referred to in development), and being both a relative newcomer to Linux* and a complete newcomer to Ubuntu specifically, I've got a few things that I'd like to get down before they leave my head.

First off, the Live CD that I ran the operating system from was relatively easy to assemble from scratch, and I appreciated that.  All I had to do was download the ISO disk image, burn the image to a CD, and that was that.  Then I shut the computer down, started it back up, and told it to boot from the CD in its drive.  All very simple, if a bit nerve-wracking for someone who doesn't do this sort of thing very often (like me).

I tend to avoid screwing with operating systems in general.  I think of tinkering with OSes as the digital equivalent of attempting neurosurgery with a rusty screwdriver and a copy of The Human Brain for Dummies.  I just don't think of myself as someone capable of wielding that sort of expertise.  But here I am trying anyway, because I've gotten so bloody sick of Windows.  The boot from CD was very smooth, in any case.

Now, the actual desktop environment of Ubuntu, once it started up?  Lovely.  As compared to the way my cluttered Windows desktop looks (which is, admittedly, partly my fault), the wide open, empty spaces of Ubuntu's working environment are incredibly Zen.  Just take a look at the screenshot (borrowed from the ever-helpful Wikipedia) above.  As in the various incarnations of the Macintosh operating system, application shortcuts are not automatically relegated to the desktop.  Applications are instead clustered rather appropriately in the "Applications" menu at the top of the screen, and are further divided into submenus such as "Internet", "Office", and "Games".  I don't know how well the menu would hold up after I added the approximately eight million other programs that I would invariably download, but it shows promise.

The "Places" menu contains shortcuts to various sections of the hard drive--"Documents", "Music", and so on--making it fairly self-explanatory.  The "System" menu is rather a lot like the Windows Control Panel--again, pretty obvious.

Now for something that may not be immediately evident from the screenshot above: Ubuntu 9.04 moves fast.  It may just be that I'm used to the plod of my five-year-old Windows XP installation, but shit.  Firefox started up considerably faster than I've ever seen it manage on Windows, and that was just the first session with it.  Subsequent reopenings of the application came up in a flash.  The image and PDF viewers also opened up very quickly, and the whole experience just felt smooth.

Ubuntu didn't seem to have any complaints about my hardware, either.  Sound and display both worked, and it even responded to the volume controls built into my laptop.  All I had to do to connect to my apartment's wireless network was choose said network in a drop-down menu and enter the key--Ubuntu had already recognized my wireless card and put it to work.  And on top of all this, I'm pretty sure it causes less heat buildup in my laptop than XP does.

Now for the things that I'm less than satisfied with.

First off, I tried to play some .mp3s and .flvs, among others, and found that I couldn't.  Out of the box, Ubuntu's media player doesn't support those formats.  I understood when it refused to let me play a .wmv--that's proprietary Windows shit right there--but it seemed especially odd that it would deny me the pleasure of listening to an .mp3, considering both .mp3's incredible popularity and the fact that the .mp3 format is not proprietary.  The program helpfully offered to search for codec packages that contained the above formats, but since I was running the whole shebang from a CD I couldn't very well install plugins.  So I had to pass.

On a related note, Ubuntu can't run iTunes--not even in an emulator like** WINE--and there is no suitable substitute for it at this time.  There are some applications that work similarly, and some that can even manage my iPod, but none do everything that iTunes ever-so-tidily does.

One of the big hangups I had was that, while Ubuntu immediately recognized my HP Laserjet 1012 printer and allowed me to print to it, the margins came out consistently wrong.  It seemed to assume that the actual physical pages in the printer were of a longer format than the 8.5 x 11 size that I had specified, and so the margins were all off.  After a bit of investigation, I couldn't find a way to fix it, so I moved along.  It was a sticking point, for sure.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Ubuntu, having tinkered with it for a few hours.  Overall, I had a good experience with it, I think.  The big selling point for me was the elegance of the interface and the overall speed of it.  Wikipedia warns that running Ubuntu from a Live CD can cause performance loss because the computer has to load applications from the disc, but if there was any performance loss, I certainly didn't notice it.  I can only imagine how it would run without the CD.

I'll probably be working in Ubuntu on and off over the next few days, just to get more of a feel for it.  It's a honeymoon period right now, for sure.  If all goes well, I may deign to clear out enough of my laptop's hard drive that I can do a real installation, and dual-boot my PC like a true geek.

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* I've never used any of the graphical, Windows-style incarnations of Linux, only the bare-bones networked command line version furnished by my computer science classes at university.

** Silly me.  I did some research, and turns out that Wine Is Not an Emulator.  It's a translation layer.

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!

Homosexuality != Edgy

All right, folks, I'm gonna lay it out right here and now. If you write a story whose entire existence revolves around the fact that a character is gay in a transparent attempt to be oh-so-avant-garde, you have written a bad story. I think we passed the point a long time ago where guys having sex with guys and women having sex with women were enough to make any given narrative "edgy".

Do we have an understanding, Internet? There is no edge.

Writing about characters who happen, by some stroke of coincidence, to prefer sexual relations with their own gender has as little bleeding-edge art quality to it as writing about characters who have bottle-blonde hair or work on farms for a living. It's just an aspect of character. If you're straight, does it dominate your entire bloody existence? No. It's just something you happen to be, just like you also happen to be an insurance salesman or an astronaut or The Goddamn Batman.

Batman never gets laid. Does anybody give a shit? No, because he's too busy going out and being awesome! His sexual preference is almost entirely incidental*. Can you imagine Batman manufactured as a character solely for the purpose of being an exemplar of straightness? How fucking boring would that be?

So here's the thing. It's all well and good to write gay characters. I do on a regular basis. But you can't let what gender they get hard/soggy for be the only thing that defines them. Gay folk are people, not sexual preference incarnate. It irks me especially when a writer does something like, say, write a story in which a homosexual man is married to a woman for no good reason. Ostensibly to hide his sexual preference, but from who? The only people who give a shit anymore need a good hard smack upside the head anyway. Everyone else on the planet just goes with it. Unless you are extremely personally religious there is no need to deny yourself like that in this day and age. And at that point you are the one who needs a smack upside the head.

Just thinking about that story makes me want to punch someone in the throat.

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You guys don't know what it's like to be straight. It's horrible.

* Which is not to say he shouldn't go ahead and get it on with Talia al Ghul. Because rrowr.

Stargates and Dentistry

I went to the dentist yesterday. The hygienist who cleaned my teeth was incredibly cute, and had really pretty eyes. She also didn't harangue me about the caretaking of my teeth, as the other hygienist I've seen used to. All in all, it took a lot of the terror out of going to the dentist. Just thought I'd make a note of that. Considering my rampant flirting and all.

I'm finding myself becoming ever more fond of Stargate: SG1 and its Atlantis spinoff. First off, there's Claudia Black, pictured here. I think she's gorgeous. Secondly, both series have a sense of humor, which I find as something that is sorely lacking in most science fiction shows. The genre has a tendency to take itself so goddamn seriously. Thirdly, the shows seem to be a refuge of sorts for good actors fleeing from their own canceled series. Claudia Black, for instance, played Aeryn Sun on Farscape for some time, a show that I enjoyed the few times I watched it. Recently I caught an episode featuring Morena Baccarin of Firefly fame, and Jewel Staite (also from Firefly, and another personal favorite of mine) has a recurring role as a doctor on SG: Atlantis.

Overall, though I haven't any honest idea about the overarching metaplot of either show, I just enjoy watching the characters interact. There's a bunch of gobbledegook about ancient weapons of mass destruction and suchforth, but I can hang on to the plot of the current episode just fine without having to know what precisely it all means. Shows that are exclusively metaplot-driven--like The X-Files in its later years--drive me crazy, because if you miss just one episode all of a sudden you're completely out of the loop. Characters die, secrets are revealed, people have sex, and when you tune in the next week you're sitting there going, "Why the fuck is the T-1000 suddenly in the FBI?"

It's refreshing to not have to worry about that sort of thing.

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"Looks like we have a John McClane here."
"...What're you talking about?"
"Die Hard."

Portrait of Grad School as a Catholic Schoolgirl

I'm going to start completely off topic by addressing a commercial I just saw on USA. This commercial (for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest--which is to say, for the last good PotC) muses on the subject of the "fairest pirate of them all". It notes that Orlando Bloom has the hair (fair enough), that Johnny Depp has the makeup (affirmed by the shot of him in full cannibal-god facepaint), and that Keira Knightley has "the chest".

I adore Keira Knightley (now that there's a year or so of distance between me and the debacle that was At World's End), but nobody is attracted to her because she has boobs. Because she doesn't. The girl is in the same category as Natalie Portman. She's practically concave.

Don't take this to mean I have something against small breasts. I just think it's kind of ridiculous that Mademoiselle Knightley is being advertised as having something that she clearly does not.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I spoke to my short story prof earlier today. I'd tried once before and failed miserably, and damn near missed her this evening. I caught her just as she was leaving, though, and we had what I think was a fairly productive talk. It basically came down to her apologizing for pressing the point so hard in class, that she was just trying to get me to branch out into different things. Which I can understand, but I also explained to her that writing fantasy and horror is when I have the most fun, and that I find literary fiction to be rather boring, in all honesty.

That led to kind of a strange place, wherein she compared my seeming inability to like literary fiction because of my fondness for high-energy and plot-centric genre material to her inability to like jazz because her musical realm of choice has always been rock. Which makes sense if you squint a little bit and try not to think too hard.

Then things returned to normalcy, and she pointed out that everyone has a tendency to teach to their strengths, and that perhaps she doesn't know enough about the fantasy genre to really help. When she asked for a recommendation for a short story collection, I said I'd bring around Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman and a couple old issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction for her reading pleasure. She seemed to take well to that.

Anyway, the main thing she told me was to not worry about the thesis, that what I write will work for it. Or that they'll make it work, or whatever. The main thing was that I would be able to construct my thesis out of the sort of stuff I like to write. So I suppose I'll hang about for a while and see how things go.

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"So I figure I'll dally with graduate school for a while longer, make out a bit, see if I can get her to take her knickers off, and if she won't...I'll go find something else to do."
"An easier girl, you mean."
"Yes."
"Men. You're all alike."
"Hey, y'know, sometimes the penis just asserts itself."

This...Might Be A Problem

I'm aware that I haven't made an update in quite some time. There's a perfectly good reason for that, and the reason is this: school started. I've been up to my neck in the beginnings of grad school for the past several weeks, and I can't say I'm altogether fond of it. Things didn't improve today when we had our first workshop session. I wrote one of the pieces that was workshopped, and while the class seemed to think highly of it in general, the professor didn't like it near as much.

Her major beef with it was that it was a genre story. Urban fantasy, specifically. She seems to think that the science fiction and fantasy genres are used as crutches by younger writers, especially those who feel insecure enough in their skill that they want to have something stable (like, say, genre conventions) to shore up the weak spots in their storytelling. She thinks my writing is better than that--which I'm afraid I can't exactly say is flattering, per se.

But that's all well and good. Her opinion is just as valid as mine, which in turn is just as valid as that of the next guy in line, particularly if the next guy in line happens to be an unmedicated drunken schizophrenic. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and she just happens to opine that genre writing is "lower class".

The problem of the post title is her assertion that one cannot piece together an MFA thesis with "this kind" of writing--by which I assume she means genre writing. This is a problem because I write nothing else. I'll do some moderately realistic/literary stuff when I'm writing for the stage, but beyond that it's all Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. We spent a whole class period in this short story course talking about knowing what our material is, what we work best with and what we like to write...and my material is Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. That's pretty much all it comes down to. And if I can't compose my thesis using those kinds of stories...I guess I'm not going to have a thesis, then.

So it would seem I'm at an impasse. The main thing that baffles me is that this woman, who was on the selection committee for the program, seemed to think that genre writing was not my standard schtick. Even though the story that I offered up as my writing sample was comic fantasy. It had a thief, and a princess, and a tower with a wizard in it! I can't fathom how it could have come off any other way. Aside from which, I included with the application the required letter talking about myself as a writer. Here is a direct quote from it:

I have a distinct leaning towards genre stories, especially fantasy and speculative fiction. I think that it is in the extreme conditions that these genres so often present that the best, most exciting, and most illuminating stories can be found.

...Does that sound like genre writing is not my standard schtick? I'm beginning to think that someone wasn't paying attention when they accepted my application.

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It's like when you're watching a play and someone walks on stage naked. You get used to it eventually--it just becomes another costume--but until then you're just sitting there going, "That guy's naked."

Look Who's Back

Well, the wedding was absolutely lovely, even if the call-and-response liturgy was entirely unexpected and gave me the crawling heebie-jeebies when it happened. I've never been to a church service, have never even been that terribly spiritual, and to suddenly find myself in the midst of over a hundred people droning back a monotone reply to the minister from memory was, quite frankly, terrifying.

The sad thing was that I had just started to tear up a little bit from how pretty the whole business was when that happened. After that I sort of disconnected, probably for fear that something of the sort would happen again.

The reception was also quite nice, and I got to run into a friend of mine I hadn't seen in quite a long time. I also discovered that a single glass of chardonnay is enough to put me severely off my balance if I haven't eaten anything. The solution to that was simple, though: eat summat, then drink another glass. It tasted like gasoline, but at least it was chilled.

The rest of the night was fun, frivolity, and ridiculous gyration that may or may not have been construed as dancing by those present. There was supposed to be an after-party, and a couple friends and I waited at the appropriate hotel for a time, but there was a mix-up with the wedding party's limo so it didn't get started until quite late, by which time we had already given up and decided to get some sleep.

So all in all, the whole business was successful, and I did not forget my pants.

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"Anyway, you didn't look in there, so you don't know. Nobody knows. It's like Schrodinger's Wolfman."

Countdown

So in about ten hours I'll be taking off for the wedding, and I'll be pretty much incommunicado until Sunday evening. You know what that means. That's right, I'm leaving my laptop behind. My precious laptop. Why? Because I have Pepper, and she can do all the things I'd be doing with my laptop anyway (internet, email, music, etc.) while still fitting on my belt. Talk about convenience.

Unless, of course, the hotel doesn't have WiFi. But honestly, the piece of crap hotel I stayed in earlier this year when I went to the regional American College Theatre Festival in Texas had WiFi, and that place was practically falling apart. It was seriously awful. Their idea of a continental breakfast was cold cereal dispensed from weird tupperware nozzles, a styrofoam cup of a strange juice cocktail with fruit chunks floating in it, and a slice of bread that you had the choice of rendering into toast before smearing it with peanut butter or jelly. Classy, right?

Also, before I forget, I mentioned The Accidental Survivors recently, and a couple of the guys from the podcast, Rob and Fraser, actually came through and dropped a line. That is, in my opinion, quite classy. Fraser was also kind enough to offer a slight correction as regards the Survivors group makeup: "While it is true that there are four Canadians (though we are trying to get Chris deported), Chuck is very, very American."

So it would seem that my alien theory has been debunked. Oh well. I should probably get some small amount of sleep here soon, lest I find myself too groggy in the morning to pack. That would be bad, as I might forget to include something important.

Like, you know, pants.

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"I am going to make this pencil disappear..."