Author: keithjr

This is bullshit.

If your electricity provider is anything like mine, you’re getting notices like these too. Back when it was just Stephanie and I, we tended to sit squarely between the green and blue bars. Not anymore. Now we’re the long bar. I’m surprised with how much the gamification aspect of my power bill bothers me.

Let’s set aside the fact that I’m fairly sure my “efficient neighbors” either have solar panels or are just vacant houses. We should be doing better. We use cold water for most laundry, air dry it, have LED bulbs everywhere, the works. Even with two kids, you’d think the picture wouldn’t be so stark.

So, I want to know where this energy is really going. But I don’t want to drop hundreds of dollars for a “smart meter” or “smart breakers” to give me this information. Fortunately, there’s another cheaper, maker-project-savvy way.

Exposition time!

So, a long time ago, the power company decided it was dumb to send people walking up to everybody’s power meters to read them. So they put radio transmitters in the meters that blast out your consumption information into the aether.

So now the meter reader guy/gal just has to drive by with an antenna and slurp up the readings. Great for them, and convenient for us. It provides us with a means of reading our power meters with a computer.

What I Used

• A computer that’s on all day. I just so happen to have one, serving up this web page among other things.
• A USB radio antenna based on the RTL2832U chip. According to Amazon, the one I used is no longer sold, but this should work just as well I guess?
• This software  This is a lovely little github project that provides a means of controlling the above antenna via Software-Defined Radio to listen at the specific frequency used by power meters. I can’t understate how important this was.
• A script to run rtl-amr and process the information. I used Perl, GnuPlot, and LibreOffice Calc when I couldn’t figure out how to make GnuPlot do what I wanted.

I thought that setting up software-defined radio was going to be the hard part. But I was wrong. The rtlamr sources were easy to build, the dependencies well-defined, and the executables pretty much handled all the nitty-gritty details of setting up the antenna. Once I isolated my meter from all the ones in range, it was all just a matter of collecting data. If you’re curious, ask me and I can explain the process in more detail.

Results

I installed the module and set up a cron job to run a single-shot sample every minute for a full day. I got this lovely graph from an average Wednesday in May.

The first thing that jumps out is that most of the big consumption periods are when all four of us are awake and in the house. I’m sure this seems obvious. But I was half afraid I’d see that my computer and the TV were chewing up tons of juice after the kids went to bed, and we’d be reduced to playing board games by candlelight to save power. It actually looks like that the post-bedtime power usage is about twice what it is in the wee hours of the morning, judging by the general slop of the line. Not bad.

Now, let’s present the data differently. Instead of a running sum, let’s subtract each sample from the previous one to get the difference between the readings every minute.

Most of the entries in this data set are 1 or 0. We just don’t have the resolution to see fractional deltas. But check out those spikes in the middle of otherwise idle time! Those spikes, I’ve figured out, are caused by our furnace turning on every few hours to keep the forced hot water at a baseline temperature, even though it was very warm this particular day. So, there’s one lesson: turn off the furnace when it’s warm enough to not need heating.

There’s a fun data analysis lesson here.  Without looking at the deltas graphed out like that, I doubt I would have noticed how sudden those jumps were (you can see them in the previous graph, but they just look like slightly steeper slopes).

Well, Now What?

So, where do I go from here? Unfortunately, this is the most resolution I can get out of this system: showing me how quickly I’m consuming power, house-wide, at any given time. There’s a real limit on what I can do with this information. But it makes a nice start, and I’m pleased with how easy software-defined radio turned out to be.

Well, if I manage to utilize this new tool to produce some sort of epiphany, you know where I’ll post it.

One of my resolutions this year was to post more. Well, you can tell by the date stamps on my last few updates that this has not been a goal well met by the end of 2017’s opening quarter. I could say the life of a parent is too hard, it’d be more apropos to say that lounging after a hard day is too easy.

But you know what happened this year? The same damn thing that happens every year (except maybe not next year, but I’m getting ahead of myself). PAX East happened. And I always post about PAX. So what better way to hop back into the WordPress saddle then a PAX East wrapup post. But for the sake of brevity, I’m going to hold off on the general round-up, and focus on a single takeaway: I probably won’t be going to PAX East 2018.

Nitpicks

They didn’t seem to even bother with the swag bags this year. Literally nothing in there but fliers. I don’t feel like I’m entitled to free stuff, but at this point why even bother having them? Just hand out the guides at the entrance and save some plastic.

The no-alcohol policy remains in effect. And when it’s perilously cold outside, the prospect of bar hopping is awfully unappealing. So these were some sober evenings.

Catalyst Game Labs, current stewards of the BattleTech license, apparently skipped the convention. They appear to be as committed to not making money on this excellent and under-appreciated franchise as ever.

Panels this year seemed stuffed with marketing teams instead of community members, and were not as interesting. Traditional staples like OC Remix were absent. Extra Credits was still awesome. But they can’t carry hard enough.

Free Play was Broken

The Tabletop area is always popular, busy, and crowded. This year, it was smaller. But still just as popular. Math tells us this is a bad combination. It meant that it was impossible to get a table in the Tabletop Free Play area until very late.

Moving on to PC gaming, I think this picture sums up the problem with the PC Free Play area.

I count 30 open seats, and a giant wrap-around 45 minute line. Are those reserved for tournaments? No, there’s a separate PC Tourney area. Are they just…broken? Or are they just having trouble getting butts into seats? These are both preventable problems. We didn’t bother stopping by this area this time around.

And the Classic Arcade Free Play area? Gone. Wasn’t there this year. So that’s three free-play areas that were inaccessible. If I can’t play games…why am I at a gaming convention?

Chills and Checks

So it was a little cold. As in, if you stayed outside for more than a few minutes, your joints would seize up where you stand, and your frozen corpse would thaw out some time in July. I know PAX can’t control the weather, and it was bad luck that this convention fell on the coldest weekend of the year. But this is an avoidable problem. If you’re holding a convention in Boston, maybe don’t pick early March. Several problems stemmed from this poor date choice and unfortunate temperature.

James and I arrived 45 minutes after doors opened and still got stuck waiting for over half an hour in said line, outside, while it was snowing. I can’t imagine how anybody in a costume with exposed skin was feeling. That’s messed up.

And by the time we got in, every coat check was full. So now we’re lugging around winter coats all day, too.

Oh, and we missed events we wanted to attend in the morning, because of the aforementioned bag check line. How the hell can you get to a 10:00AM panel when the doors don’t even open until 10:00AM? That’s physically impossible, even without the massive line.

Break Time

Everything I’ve listed up at the top of the post represented annoyances or disappointments. But this bag check policy is the real sticking point. It serves no purpose. It makes getting into the convention a royal pain in the ass. It renders the hours of the convention inaccessible. And in inclement weather, it’s actually dangerous to attendees.

If the security policy doesn’t change, I’m not going next year. I could use a break, anyway. At this point in my life, the opportunity cost of losing a weekend is takes a lot to justify. PAX is no longer clearing that bar.

I think I found a way to summarize how frustrated I feel at times when it comes to board games. A visual method. Excitements! To LibreOffice!

So, two axes. Vertical axis is a gauge of interest. Horizontal axis is experience level. Not skill level, per se. This isn’t a measure of talent. Just understanding of the fundamentals.

I did an example scattering of a few games I play, and one (Waterdeep) that I haven’t.

Those that know me probably see the pattern or understand where I’m going with this. Those that don’t, well, this picture isn’t that important. I decided to name the quadrants.

Specifically, I wanted to delve into that one in the upper left. Yeah, that aggravating one. Where you know you want to play the game, but you don’t know how to play it?  You might recognize it from the name of this post.  Subtlety is my middle name.

There are several factors that can lead to landing a game in this quadrant.. Complex rules and mechanics make it harder to learn new games on one’s own. Long play times create inertia to even start. Niche or unpopular games make it harder to find players.

I decided this would be worth all the effort of a blog post when I realize that this is a problem unique to board and tabletop games. Video games do not have any such gap. There are two reason for this.

First, the barrier of functional entry into multiplayer is reduced to nill thanks to the internet. There are varying degrees of learning curves before some games are really fun or engaging, but that’s a different issue. Nothing’s preventing me from playing a single player game except possible technological issues, and mutliplayer just requires a few other people out there, somewhere on the globe, to exist and want the same thing that I do.

Second, there’s no burden to leadership because software curates the game procedurally. A strong working understanding of the rules is not necessary to start a video game; it only helps you master it. The game will enforce the rules and apply the mechanics for you, perfectly. With board games, humans must take on these tasks, and may do so imperfectly.

After further thinking, I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a three-dimensional problem, with the third dimension being Free Time. But I don’t want to beat that dead horse any further. Y’all get it. I’m busy.

How does this gap wind up persisting, perhaps indefinitely? Well, there’s also a problem of a certain circular dependency. Which I’ll get into in the next post.

To Be Continued…

 

It’s about time I created something noteworthy, after joining a Lowell Makes over two years ago.

Like most DIY posts nowadays, I’m leading off with the finished product: a mostly functional arcade control panel!

I had a ton of help in basic woodworking skills from a few members in the makerspace.

• Jack Walsh – How to cut shit on the table saw without murdering myself
• Bill Taylor – Jigsawing for dummies
• Steve Birmingham – More tablesaw tutelage, plus making my mitred edges actually fit
• Chris Donius – Helping me put the damned thing together
• Castro-Yves Arboite – Helping me with pictures and general artistic guidance

I sourced the parts from all over.

• Birch plywood – Home Depot
• Buttons, Joysticks – Sparkfun
• Track ball and plate – E-bay auctions
• T-molding – T-molding.com

With the aid and advice of my fellow makerspace members, this was built almost entirely from scratch.  Here’s a quick rundown of the build process.

I tested the button on cardboard.  I don’t remember why I thought this would be important or useful.  But I did.

My initial plan was to trace out the guide for the top panel layout on cardboard and cut out the holes.  But it turns out cutting a straight line on corrugated board is fucking impossible and I just gave up and went straight to pencil on the wood.

I was told later that I could have made the process easier by tracing a guide and then folding it over halfway, seeing as it’s symmetrical.  Oh well.  Live and learn.

Finished top panel.  Everything was going smoothly (pun intended) but then I bungled the trackball hole jigsawing, and got mad splintering everywhere.  Yeah, that again.  A little putty should patch it up.  It’s getting painted (or maybe even laminated) later, so I’m really trying not to sweat it.  The Forstner cuts for the button and joystick holes came out gorgeous, though, didn’t they?

The sides all meet at “mitred” edges, with the intention being to show no end grain wood.  This worked, but was a gigantic fucking pain in the ass because to fit this together, the angles need to be almost perfect.  Like, to the millimeter.  You can see I didn’t get it quite exactly right, but settled for a level of imperfection that’s invisible to the user (messy insides).

The panel needs to be tilted towards the player.  So the back is taller than the front, and the sides have angled top edges.  Wound up doing more trigonometry than I would have expected.

The base.  The little pieces along the side are called “ledger boards” and they are what I used to attach the base to the sides without exposing any screw holes.  I grabbed them from random scraps around the space, which is why they are all different colors.  One of them turned out to be maple, which apparently has the same chemical properties as adamantium.  Whoops.

Attaching the sides to the base via the ledger boards.  Chris bled on it.  My fault, really, for picking those pieces out of particularly dense wood.

Nothing a little sanding couldn’t fix!

Did I say the top was finished?  Because it wasn’t.  I had to use a router to cut out some of the wood around the joystick holes, on the underside.  This is necessary to give the joysticks a little more height, by giving it ⅜” of wood to get through, instead of ¾”.  The one on the left came out perfectly.  The one on the right went to shit because the router bit wasn’t properly tightened and dropped a smidge at the last second.  Oh well, another invisible flaw.

Stand proud, little stick.

I didn’t take enough pictures of the rest of the assembly process, but it’s pretty straightforward.  Hinges hold the top in place along the back edge.  Buttons and joysticks take their places: the buttons are just tightened by plastic nuts and are easy enough to remove, the joysticks are screwed from below.

I tried to spray paint the exterior, but apparently some part of the spray painting process escapes me because the paint came out in shitty bursts and so it kind of came out looking like spotty garbage.  I’ll go over it again later.  Kind of gives it a beat up aesthetic in the meantime.

Now, how does it all work?

The buttons connect to a board called the IPAC-32 as TTL.  Which basically means there’s no need for me to worry about impedance or current or any of that analog crap.  One terminal of each button and joystick switch gets sent to a dedicated terminal on the IPAC, and the other ones share the same ground wire on a loop.  The IPAC converts the On/Off button transitions into simple keyboard scan codes, and connects to the host machine via USB.  So, as far as the host sees, it’s just getting keyboard presses/releases from the panel.

The nice thing about the end result is that it’s so encapsulated.  It’s only output is a USB cable, so it really just looks like any other plug-in peripheral.  As such, it was easy to test.  Just plug in a Raspberry Pi with some emulation software on it, configure it for keyboard input (harder than it should have been), and give it a go.  A few minutes later, Snake Man was toast and I had myself a confirmed functioning control panel.

I may add some video or stills of gameplay in action, if people are interested.

This is a standalone component of a much larger project.

 

# ssh morsepower.net -p  <redacted>

Connection refused

Hmm.

Ok, don’t panic.  The server has been turned off and on several times, maybe I just got caught in a bad state.  Obviously I can’t shut it down from the network, so I’ve got no choice but to pound the Reset button.  Should be fine.  Obviously the thing is idle.

# ssh morsepower.net -p  <redacted>

Connection failed: No route to host

Hmm.

Ok, don’t panic.  Must be the router.  Port forwarding probably got screwy.  Let’s just check 192.168.1.1 and…nope, it’s not the router.  OK, this headless server concept only works if the server can actually be access on the damned network.  Time to get over myself and plug a physical freaking monitor and keyboard into the thing.  Fancy electronics sitting on a decrepit old wooden workbench.  I like the juxtaposition there.  Anyhow let’s take a look-see.

…

Nothing?  No video output?

HMM.

Don’t panic.  Pound the Reset again.  I need to see what is going on when it boots u-why is it rebooting into the BIOS setup screen?!  What’s the hard disk boot priority set to?

SATA 1: -

SATA 2: -

SATA 3: -

SATA 4: -

SHIT ASS FUCK.

Ok, don’t panic.  There are multiple possible points of failure.  I might not have lost everything.  Let’s pop the hard drive out, shove it into an enclosure, hook it up to my PC and see what Linux can tell me.

#ls /dev/sde*

/dev/sde

#fdisk -l /dev/sde

No partitions found

#testdisk /dev/sde

Cannot access /dev/sde

OK ACTUALLY DO PANIC.

You know when they tell you not to just turn off a computer without gracefully shutting it down?  Yeah, they aren’t joking.  Of course, out of pure frustration I’ve done this several times to this stupid server because of its propensity to refuse to shut down like a normal computer.  But it always came back swinging.  Not this time, though.  Now it’s dead.  It’s really dead.  This was a solid state drive, so I don’t know if there’s any coming back from this.

Now I’m faced with the same choice I had when this happened a few short months ago.  Do I rebuild my blog from scratch, again?  Or do I just swallow my pride and get a wordpress.com account and let them do it.   Now repeat that question across all the potential use cases for this device.  Blog, game server, backup file host, IoT base station, calendar server.  Do it myself, or let somebody do it for me?  It would be so much easier, wouldn’t it?  Just buy my way out of the problem, with my money or access to my data.

No.  Fuck that.  I’m an engineer.  I make thing.  I solve problems.  I don’t pay people to do it for me.  I’ll learn from this.  I’ll get better.

Hell, the replacement hard drive is on Prime.  I won’t even have to wait very long.

 

I’m not surprised that I was able to find enough of these abominations to put together another post.  I speculated this would happen when I wrote Part 1.  No, what surprises me is how quickly I was able to do so.

London Bridge Revisited

I love this one because it’s such a slow burn into ridiculousness.  It’s like boiling a frog.  One minute you’re listening to a run-of-the-mill rendition of a centuries-old diddie.  Three minutes later you’re drugging a prison guard to help him pull an all-nighter, wondering what the fuck happened to that bridge.

Itsy Bitsy Low Budget Spider

Here’s a video rendition of Itsy Bitsy Spider performed by heavily medicated vocalists, drawn in MS Paint.

I have no idea why this exists.  This from a channel that seems to be dedicated to children’s songs.  Somebody there just decided that what this song really needed was a 90s rap interlude.  If this was actually intended to be a viable children’s song, we might have a Hall of Shame Part 3 before the month is over.

Five Little Babies Do All the Things

Another Indian video channel produced another whackadoodle video series.  That’s a strange coincidence.  This time it’s in 3D.  And it’s an hour marathon of the same damned song, after they’re done misspelling ice cream.

The general formula seems to have been lifted from the classic “Five Little Monkeys,” and each video obeys the following simple algorithm.

Initial condition: N = 5

While (N > 0):

 N babies are doing a thing

 Something bad happens to one baby

 An authority figure is contacted

 Baby cannot do that thing anymore

 Decrement N

No more babies doing the thing

First off, “authority figure” in the above sense is always either a doctor or the dad.  The mom is basically just there to defer to the males.  Take that, Susan B. Anthony!

But in this case they’ve also gone off the rails with the sheer variety of activities these babies are doing, as well as the ways they manage to fuck it up.

• Riding scooters
• Skating on ice
• Taking selfies
• Playing with toys in general
• Throwing balls
• Driving cars
• Opening Giant Eggs

Hickory Dickory Dead

There’s just no two ways about this.  We were trolled.  This wasn’t an attempt to make a kids video gone awry.  This wasn’t a mistranslation.  It was a honey pot.  Somebody wanted this to happen.

It was a well executed troll, to be sure.  It starts out pretty straightforward.  Then it gets spooky.  Okay, I can get it, maybe it was a Halloween thing.  Then headcrabs show up.  A Half Life reference?  Seems strange but if you’re going for scary, it’s not that bad.

Then the All Seeing Eye summons the Manticore to begin a flame ritual to awaken Cthulu.

Um.

Stephanie cut this one off at 8, and that was a wise choice.  She’s a smart woman.  We’ve since been thinking twice about letting the little ones pick the videos.  They don’t know what’s out there.  They don’t need to know.  Not just yet.

So I started what was supposed to be a series detailing the various electronic and cardboard games that I had been playing in a given month.  Then life exploded and I didn’t follow up on it.  I started trying to write the next iteration, and found it would be extraordinarily short.  Not because I hadn’t been playing anything over the past three months.  But because the way I game now has fundamentally changed.

I realized that the shift was dramatic enough to be worthy of inspection.  How has parenthood changed the way I game?

One Game at a Time

I’ve found myself getting singularly focused more than usual.  For two straight months, all I did was play Dark Souls 3.  I beat it twice around, and started on a third run before switching back to Elite: Dangerous a week ago.  Correlation doesn’t imply causation, so I can’t tell if this is related to the adoption, or if I just really like this game that much.  Would I have zeroed in on it regardless of life events?  Hard to say.  But that’s what happened.

I’ve got a wide catalogue of games I own but haven’t played (this is all your fault, Humble Bundle).  But context switching between them seems to be too much work.  Instead I just plop down in front of my game de jour without any thought.  Even if that game winds up being very cognitively tasking.  That doesn’t seem to make sense.

No Restrictions on Quitting

I want to know I’m able to jump off of the seat and leave whenever I want.  Not just in case of emergencies, but for simple things.   Like, “can you get my a glass of water” simple.  So, many games are complicated.  Dark Souls 3 actually actively penalizes you for ungracefully quitting, but I can work with that.  But games with save points would be a non-started.

I think this roadblock is mostly a product of paranoia.  I haven’t had any situation arise in three months of parenthood that would have required me to jump up at full attention right now, after the girls are in bed.  But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow.  And so I still refuse to risk it.

No Multiplayer

This seems extreme but I can’t find a way around it.  It’s actually a by-product of the previous restriction: most multiplayer games are hard to leave arbitrarily.  For example, quit Rust at the wrong time and your player character just falls asleep in an exposed position.  Habitually leaving matches of DotA gets one relegated to the low-priority queue (and for good reason, it fundamentally breaks the game for 9 other people).  Any game with a fixed “session” is problematic this way.  All real-time strategy games will be unavailable unless, I think.  Elite:Dangerous works only because I one can play in an semi-offline state.

Part of this problem might be the games that I’ve chosen.  If I played CS:GO or Overwatch I could just drop out any time without a problem.

No Board Games

I haven’t played a board game since we got the girls.  Not a single one.  I can’t figure out why this is.  It might be because so many board games just aren’t very fun with only two players, and we’re not playing with other people any more.  Board games are inherently social, so a loss of socialization means a loss of the hobby.  That hurts.  This is a restriction that video games never had, which might by why I initially found it hard to get into board games in the first place.

 

All in all, it’s been a big shift.  This is entirely expected, but still interesting.  Are there any parents reading this that are also gamers?  Do you have similar self-imposed restrictions?  I’d love to hear how our experiences compare.

Jumping head first into the deep end of parenthood in the 21st Century has provided me with some strange discoveries and revelations.  One of which is just how many nursery rhymes and children’s songs you can find on Youtube.  Combined with a Chromecast, this is actually pretty great.  It’s much more controllable than TV, more convenient, and can be used in varied doses to fill gaps of time in a semi-educational way.  Many of them are incorporating CGI instead of 2D animation (one channel in particular  is actually really great at this).  Others are mediocre but forgivable.  But I want to talk about the third category: the WTF-inspiring nightmare fuel that crops up in the Related Videos section of otherwise reasonable content.

(Caveat: You’ll notice that many of these videos are over an hour long.  That’s common for kid’s songs; long medleys to reduce the number of interactions with the Search bar.  I actually kind of like it, but for your purposes, just watch the first song in each)

Idle Hands

Finger Family is okay for a kid’s song.  It’s a song about all the fingers on your hand.  It doesn’t really teach much beyond that, but it’s still mostly harmless.  Here’s what a normal one looks like, for reference (I had never heard this one as a kid).

For some reason, however, I keep coming across videos for Finger Family that involve everything but actual fingers.  Let’s start with this monstrosity.

What I’m hearing is a song about fingers.  What I’m seeing are Jell-O molds and gummy bears beating the shit out of each other.

And then there’s this.

First off, you’ve gone and set the song to Frère Jacques instead of using, like, the actual Finger Family song.  But more importantly what the fuck is wrong with these creepy-ass egg faces?  You charged straight into the uncanny valley and never looked back.  AND WHY ARE THEY EGGS IN THE FIRST PLACE?   Eggs aren’t fingers!  You have created a problem that didn’t exist and then solved that problem in the most disturbing way possible.

Little Baby What Now?

The next two sections are dedicated to a couple of channels I’ve struggled to understand.

To be fair, Little Baby Bum isn’t the worst channel out there.  But it does have the worst name.  I’m assuming it’s less hilarious in Britain, its country of origin.  My biggest issue with this channel is that it’s just so somber.  Everything is low-energy and I feel like they’re putting my kids in a trance.  The low-budget CGI might actually be what drives it.  They can’t animate well, so they slowed everything down.  But then they go off-script in strange and and unusual ways to boot.

This one is just confusing.  Bah Bah Black Sheep’s Interstellar Knit Goods Delivery Service?  What’s interesting is that the sheep is a recurring character in LBB videos and always wears his space suit.  At least they are consistent with their characterization.

Then I found this.

For reference, “London Bridge is Falling Down” is a nursery rhyme and game that originated in the 18th Century and has one verse.  Apparently there’s a much longer version that was published in 1951.  Neither version makes reference to an evil hydrophobic monster rampaging through London, or the porcine superhero that would ultimately best him.

Again, LBB is nothing consistent.  Superhero Pig shows up in other videos as well.  I don’t know any Englishfolk, but if I did, I would have asked them if this is an actual figure in Anglo Saxon mythos.  I like to do my research, you know?

Chu Choose-Something-Else TV

I wanted to make a separate section just for Chu Chu TV because I hate it.  I hate it so much.   But apparently the internet disagrees with me because this India-based channel’s content is always at the top of every damned search for every damned kid’s song.  The art is atrocious, the accents often unintelligible, and most importantly they can’t get the melody or lyrics to many of the songs right.  They’re always just slightly wrong.  This confuses kids who like to sing these songs away from the TV, but now have multiple conflicting versions kicking around in their impressionable heads.

Here’s their take on Finger Family, where all the fingers are actually giraffes.  Because why not.  Also, wrong melody.

Here’s one about a kid who tries to drown a cat.

To be fair, they didn’t invent it.  But just because a song exists doesn’t make it worth animating.  Also, what the fuck, England? I mean, were there any rhymes that people cooked up that didn’t make the cut to turn into cultural memes?  Maybe that’s why they were called the Dark Ages.  Because your songs were so fucking dark.

 

This post is dragging on, which means I should probably just start stockpiling more of these.  Clearly there will be a Part 2.

I think I liked it better when my kids were just watching What Does the Fox Say on repeat.

Two years old.  Running around in the lakehouse, I fall face first into the only non-childproof, sharp metal edge and gash my lip open.  I have no memory of this incident.  Only a faint scar.

Four years old.  I wander into the basement.  My dad and his coworker and working on some sort of circuit board on the workbench.  While their backs are turned, I find what might be the only pair of un-insulated pliers in the entire workshop.  I run up to the board, jab it, and immediately short a power line.  A loud BANG and suddenly I’m on the floor, looking up at my bewildered father, wondering why he looks so worried and also how I got down there.  I’m unharmed by the experience.

He looks away for a second and damn near loses his idiot son.  Twice.  Parenthood is terrifying.

Five years old.  My dad sits me down in front a computer to show me this neat game he got from a coworker.  A clearly xeroxed manual serves as a key component of nineties copyright protection circumvention, but provides little in the way of instruction for a barely literate child.  Once inserted into the 286, the bootlegged floppy materializes a series of images I could barely comprehend.  He tells me the strange word I’ve never seen before reads “MechWarrior.”  The words are a jumble, but I see giant stompy space robots blowing things up with LASERs and I’m 100% on board.

Still am.

Eight years old.  Riding down the highway with the entire family and much of our belongings in our car.  It’s dark and my brother and I sleep for most of the 14 hour drive, which was most likely a calculated decision on my parent’s part.  When I wake up we’re driving down small roads surrounded by trees.  The dirt is red.  I know we’re not in our old home anymore.  Because the dirt wasn’t red back in Pelham.

Thirteen years old.  Building my first PC, of course with a great deal of parental direction and supervision.  After careful assembly, we hit the power button.  The intended outcome is a series of lights, beeps, and whirring fans precluding a brief boot process that yields an operational computer.  The actual outcome is a quick pulse of light and a puff of smoke that yields a very much not operational computer.  Hours of work undone in an instant.  It could have been a devastatingly frustrating moment.  My dad didn’t even wince.  Things happen.  Pick up, figure out what went wrong, and move on.  No point in losing your cool.

For those wondering, it was a defective CPU.

Eighteen years old.  Leaving for college.  He gives me a souvenir from one of his jobs, a small piece of one-inch-thick LASER-cut wood, cut in the shape of his name.  Which, conveniently, is also my name.  I still have it.  Over a decade later you can still make out the slightly charred smell coming off of it.  It’s a different kind of scent than wood burned by mundane fire.  Organic matter obliterated by light becomes imbued with a very specific odor that I cannot describe in words, but simply know.  I’ve heard scent is the strongest sense tied to memory.  I don’t doubt it for an instant.  I know the scent of LASER-cut wood.  It smells like family.  Like home.

Thirty-one years old.  Sitting in a hospice facility patiently waiting for the end of a story.  Waiting for the moment I wasn’t ready for.  I wanted it to be different.  I wanted more time.  More years.  More lessons.  But the cancer didn’t ask for my opinion.

I thought the learning was over.  But he had at least one more lesson for me.

I used to think my dad was an introvert, and that I got it from him.  He was always quiet, always reserved.  He listened, he solved problems.

I was wrong.  He wasn’t an introvert at all.  Or if he was, I have to recalibrate my understanding of the term.

I called his life insurance representative to tell him to news, to start some paperwork balls rolling.  The man was audibly shaken to hear it, and said that my dad was important to him.  The insurance broker is saying this.  I got similar reactions from doctors, banking representatives, lawyers, business clients, you name it.  I have memories of sleeping over at my parent’s real estate agent’s house when we had trouble finding lodgings, watching Charlotte’s Web on VHS in their living room.

My dad somehow managed to always inspire a deep loyalty in, and formed a very personal bond with, everybody with whom he worked.  I don’t know how.  It’s not something an introvert would be capable of.  It’s not something I’m capable of.  I don’t trust people.  I live in digital, binary world of numbers and values. True and false. On and off.  Professionals disappoint me, and I cut them out of my life.  I want so badly to form a network of professionals I trust, and I cannot seem to do it (or perhaps I choose not to).  My dad did so, effortlessly and repeatedly.

But trust is a double edged sword.  My dad was frequently putting himself in difficult situations because of misplaced trust.  Perhaps I’ve just taken those lessons to heart myself.  Perhaps this is a risk versus reward valuation that I’m performing.  Maybe it’s easier to trust as few people as possible, depend on others only as much as is absolutely necessary, than it is to get burned.  This seems to be my default stance, but I’m putting a lot of thought into reevaluating it.

Thirty-one years old.  Now a father myself.  I wonder what snapshots I’ll create.  I have a pretty good model to follow.

There have been several sudden and dramatic changes in my life recently, which I’ll get around to posting soon.  But at the tail end of that storm of change, PAX happened.  I wasn’t sure I’d go.  But I already had tickets, reservations, and plans made.  Plus the wife not only have permission, but her insistence that I take advantage of this annual pilgrimage to center myself.

Afterwards, I was certain I would not have the bandwidth to make another blog post just about PAX.  I’ve got a backlog of way more important stuff to talk about here, and not a lot of free time with which to do it.  But in spite of all that, I found myself constantly remembering bits and pieces of my truncated PAX 2016 experience that I wished I could blast out to multiple friends at once.  Plus I’ve got writer’s block on the big posts, so I might as well get the easy-to-talk-about stuff typed out first, maybe jump-start my brain a bit.

Apologies in advance for the wall of text.  I didn’t really have the wherewithal to take pictures.

Loud Noises

I’ve said before that that $50/day price of admission is worth it just for the two nights of concerts.  It was mostly still true this time around, but this time the shows were more hit-or-miss.

Bit Brigade is a band with a novel live show.  They play the entire soundtrack to a single retro game while a speed-running tears through it on screen.  It makes for quite a show, and I was impressed by everybody involved.  However, they picked Ninja Gaiden for this particular show, which just happens to be a franchise I don’t care much about.  So it didn’t really hit me the way, say, a Megaman or Zelda run/set would have.

The Protomen, however, fucking brought it.

Finally, we dropped in for the VGO show at the end of Saturday night.  These guys are impossibly talented musicians and performers.  But this was a strange set.  They’ve apparently been on a Capcom-sponsored Japanese tour, and they played pretty much the set that they’ve been doing as part of it. I love that Capcom is so cool about fan music.  But, I also really don’t care about most of Capcom’s current lineup.  The Street Fighter music was great, because it was familiar to me.  But I don’t care about Devil May Cry, I don’t care about Phoenix Wright (does anybody!?), I don’t care about weird spirit dog game, and I don’t care about Monster Hunter.  So it was a cover show about songs I’ve never heard.

But then at the end, my favorite game music cover band was joined on stage by my favorite video game composer and they played my favorite classic rock song.  Performance redeemed, worth it, 10/10 would see again.

Fancy Virtual Boy

It took three days of trying but I managed to do one 3 minute Oculus VR demo for a game called Pollen, which appears to be a first person game about surviving in a space habitat.  The demo content was unbearably boring, and just involved walking around some habitat while lights occasionally flickered.  And while I didn’t get any motion sickness, I also found myself having trouble with using a combination of mouse, keyboard, and head tilt to interact with objects and navigate the space around me.  While I’m sure VR has a very big future in gaming, first person games might be the least compelling use of the technology, and I have no interest in this game.

The accelerometer fidelity was pretty incredible.  The screen quality was better than the previous iterations but still seemed a little grainy, and blurry if not situated well.

I wish I could have checked out the Vive.  But the lines were stupid long (>4 hours) and I’m not going to PAX to just sit around.

Panels

Or maybe I am.

I only went to three panels this year.  The Speedrunning panel, run by the fantastic crew behind Games Done Quick, was honestly pretty disappointing.  They were generally low-energy and not really prepared for their questions, and the live demos had tons of tech issues. Hey, guys.  This is PAX.  You do this once, maybe twice a year.  Don’t bring your shitty laptop.  Bring a PC and make sure it works.  Prep your panelists.  Show us interesting stuff.

We went to line up for the panel on the reboot of Master of Orion, the original 4X strategy game from the 90s.  There was a giant crowd behind and ahead of us, and we could not fathom why.  Then we realized that the panel included several of the star-studded voice acting cast, included Alan Tudyk (of Firefly fame).  So maybe that many folks are excited about a grand space strategy game, or maybe that many people just wanted to see Wash talk in a funny voice.  Either way it was a good panel, and I’m actually finding myself looking forward to this game.  Usually I hate to see devs blow tons of money hiring big name Hollywood talent for voice casts, when there are so many talented new actors out there who will work at a fraction of the cost (hell, Logan Cunningham never did voice acting before Bastion and proceeded to deliver some of the best performances in gaming history).  But, Wargaming is developing this title, and they have pretty much infinite money and apparently a deep seated love of this IP.  I’m allowing myself to be optimistic.

Finally we checked out the PressXY panel on Crossplay, gender-bending cosplay.  It was uplifting, lighthearted, and really did shed some light on the issues of diversity in the gaming world, especially in such a passionate subculture.  I came away feeling like we’re living in a better time than the previous generation, and that gaming culture is becoming more inclusive and accepting every day.  And this is based on the statements of LGBT cosplayers, who remain both passionate and optimistic about their hobby.

Insane Contraptions

I’ve suddenly found myself in the market for a very specific niche of video games.  I’m looking for puzzle games that are accessible, with a low difficulty curve and short time commitment.  Crayon Physics is okay but the difficulty ramps up really quickly.  Minecraft is a bit too complicated.

 

On the PAX Expo Hall floor, I talked to the developer of a game called Crazy Machines 3, which might just be what I’m looking for.  Not only does it have a decent number of not-too-challenging puzzles, but he also showed me what might be the most feature-rich level editor I’ve seen in a game.  Combined with Steam Workshop, I can hopefully generate a constant stream of inventive but not overwhelming puzzles.  I will be looking into this.

Ready to Rokh?

I got to spend a couple minutes in the Kickstarter lounge trying out a game called Rokh.  I’m already invested in Space Engineers, which (according to the dev) was a major inspiration for this game.  Clearly they are very similar products.  But there’s a key reason why I’d still be interested in checking out Rokh when it releases: it’s built on UE4.

Engine choice is a big deal.  UE4 is a cross-platform engine.  Space Engineers, while a beautiful game with a bright future, is being developed on a home-brewed engine in .NET, as well as incorporating PhysX software for server-side physics calculations.  As such, it’s inextricably tied to Windows not just for the client, but for the server.  So not only do I have to dual-boot just to play it, but I also can’t host my own dedicated server to play with my friends.  If another space construction/survival game can get Linux client and servers, I’m jumping ship.

It’s still pretty early in development and I’m not sure if there’s a release date.  But it will be interesting to see if they can get the cross-platform capability working for them.

 

That’s all I have for now.  Stay tuned for heavier fare.