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-"

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!"

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."

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!

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."

A New Look

Things are looking positively 16-bit around here, now, I must admit. Similar, just 16-bit. Part of the reason was because I wanted to see if I could do it. I'd always been kind of sketchy at spriting (and both the d20 and the katana are indeed sprites, just blown up without any sort of sizing algorithm to keep their pixelated look) and I wanted to see if I was any better at it with a direct reference.

That's a fancy way of saying that I wanted to see if I could trace a picture with a computer, I suppose.

The other reason was that I had picked up those images from elsewhere on the interweb, and I figured maybe it was time to make them completely my own. I'm sure whoever took those photos would much prefer to keep them for their own use, and who am I to argue? Also, you have to admit, there is something intrinsically geeky about not only having a d20 for your profile picture, but a 32x32 d20 sprite. And I kinda like that.

In any case, I'm happy with the new look. It came out much better than I expected.

Another addition to the page is on the right-hand side, directly below the Delectable Webcomicry section, Ye Olde Podcastes. Ever since I got Pepper (the name of my iPod Touch, so called after Iron Man's Pepper Potts, even though it has a picture of Kaylee Frye* as its wallpaper at the moment)--an incident that coincided with the release of the Penny Arcade game in the Dungeons and Dragons Podcast--I've been listening to podcasts nonstop, and I figured that it was about time to share the wealth.

The D&D Podcast is precisely what it sounds like: all D&D 4e, all the time. I tuned in to it for the joint Penny Arcade/PvP introductory game, which was all kinds of hilarious even if it wasn't precisely my style of gaming.

Horror on the Orient Express, at www.yog-sothoth.com, is an actual play podcast of a group of very British folk playing through the Call of Cthulhu adventure of the same name. It certainly has its moments, though I'm only one episode in thus far listening.

Master Plan is one that I've recently picked up. It's a podcast about game design, and all the pitfalls and trappings thereof. To its credit, it gave me the idea for the game (no, this is a new one) I'm working to make on the side. I'm actually working on two at the moment, though my experiences as a fledgling game designer will have to wait for a different post. Anyway, the actual episodes of Master Plan are quite short, the longest coming in at thirty minutes.

The Accidental Survivors is four Canadians (at least, I get the impression that they're all Canadians--they might be aliens) sitting around having a drink and talking about gaming. Their topic changes from episode to episode, but it's almost always informative and entertaining.

The X-Play Daily Video Podcast differs from all the rest of these in that it actually has video, which is kind of nice. I always found X-Play entertaining (perhaps the last entertaining thing on G4...that network needs to die) but was never able to catch new episodes. The ability to watch their reviews on the go is a definite plus.

So that's pretty much it as regards updates. If I can, I'll be back later to talk a bit about my thoughts on tabletop game design. Because I'm sure you'll be wanting to hear.

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* If you don't know who Kaylee Frye is, you should be goddamned ashamed of yourself. She is only the most adorable mechanic to ever grace any screen, big or small. Go watch Firefly. NOW.

"It's Splug!"

Of Iron Men and Pepper Potts

So I've just recently returned from my viewing of Iron Man, and I have to say I was surprised by it, for the following reasons specifically:

1. It didn't suck.
2. It was awesome.

Let us be honest for a second. As much as I used to be a Marvel fanboy (now fully reformed and on the DC side of things), Marvel movies don't have a habit of turning out that well. Stop and think for a second. The Punisher. X-Men 3. Daredevil. I haven't seen Spider Man 3, but I understand that it sucks pretty spectacularly, too. So needless to say, I didn't have the highest of hopes for this one. I was never even particularly fond of Iron Man--I just happened to pick up some of his trivia by way of tangential geekdom.

What I discovered when I saw Iron Man was a film that was structured very tightly plotwise--every scene had a purpose to it. There was no meandering, no tedious exposition on superpowers and the place of heroes in the world. You start out with a "hero" who's a weapons manufacturing magnate with a blood alcohol level high enough his bodily fluids could be used as jet fuel, and you damn well go from there, holding on to the plot by your fingernails as it swerves periodically into oncoming traffic.

The other thing Iron Man had going for it was Virginia "Pepper" Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow and pictured above. I now have a serious fanboy crush on Pepper, because she is adorable. I suspect that I am also a big Gwyneth Paltrow fan as a consequence, but that's fine by me.

The world could use more 5'10" tall pretty.

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Let's face it. This isn't the worst thing you've caught me doing.

At A Touch

So I got a new toy a few days ago as part of a package graduation present (which also included my first very own suit, in which I look rather like Adrian Monk, but I digress). Said toy was an iPod Touch (pictured at right), which basically amounts to an iPhone without the phone. I've got almost my entire music collection on it (which doesn't quite come to two gigabytes with 424 songs), an episode of Firefly ("Out of Gas", if you're wondering), three audio podcasts (the Penny Arcade D&D 4e game as released so far), one video podcast (the most recent X-Play one), and five photos (in order: Jewel Staite, Keira Knightley, Zooey Deschanel, Emmy Rossum, and Natalie Portman). With all that, I haven't even broken the halfway point in terms of its eight-gig storage. It is a glorious bit of gadgetry, one that I have resolved to carry with me at all times. I even bought it a dapper leather case with a screen protector and belt clip to keep it from physical harm.

I'm also able to plug a little FM transmitter that I got years ago with my first MP3 player into it so I can listen to my iPod over the radio in the car. It's like a PDA that on which I just happen to be able to listen to music, watch videos, and access the internet through a WiFi connection.

Honestly, with gizmos, who needs girls?

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"Ship like this'll be with you 'til the day you die."
"Because it's a deathtrap, sir."