Author: keithjr

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fxthMdSIa0

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK2fv9ACWCs

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.

 

If you’ve been reading this blog, you might have noticed by now that I have a penchant for answering questions that nobody asked. This is an essential part of my blogging experience, because if a question were worth answering, I just sort of assume somebody has already answered it better than I could and then what’s the damned point.

I’ve got a friend who took an extended leave from the gaming world. He’s a busy fellow, and his time is valuable. So what should, and can, that person play?  Well, I’d recommend games that were vitally significant experiences, novel in some way, and with limited time commitments. Games that are important to this culture in one way or another, and make it clear what kind of play time we’re looking at for each of these titles.

I’m also biasing games that I’m fairly sure he missed out on. I will point out if a game is available only on Windows, or if it is platform independent, because I know that’s also a key feature. The game time estimates are based on my own Steam metrics if I have them, or else based on community submissions to Howlongtobeat.com, a handy website that I only learned about thanks to writing this post.

I’m working with the years 2005-2015 as my time frame. And what a decade it was. These entries are ordered not chronologically, but by my personal sense of their priority.

 

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Bastion

Supergiant Games, 2011
Platform Independent
6 hours

This isometric action RPG features the best narration in gaming history and I’m not even exaggerating. It’s on this list for its excellent art design, it’s blending of mechanics with narrative, and setting a high bar for voice acting. If I were forced to point to a single title in which to make the case of video games as an art form, it would be this one.

But best of all, the game doesn’t sacrifice gameplay quality or enjoyment for storytelling, as many narrative-heavy games tend to do. It has a great deal of replayability, but you’ll probably be all set after going through it once.

It’s relatively short, it plays great on Linux, and it’s a masterpiece. If you only play one game on this list, make it this one.

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Transistor (Optional)

Supergiant Games, 2014
Platform Independent
5-6 hours

Supergiant Games is all about quality over quantity. To date they have released two games. This is the second. It’s still an isometric action RPG, still has amazing narration, and sports another absolutely amazing soundtrack. They switch it up with a Cyberpunk theme and make the storytelling a little bit more nuanced. If you enjoyed Bastion you should play this.

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Portal

Valve Software, 2007
Platform Independent
3-4 hours

This tech demo was included in the Orange Box deal (apparently as an afterthought) and became an instant classic. It’s an excellent puzzle game that forces first-person-shooter fans to think about navigating the world in a novel way. And the execution of its mechanics is perfect. You’ll find yourself “thinking in portals” in no time, able to solve puzzles by exploiting the simple rules that are set out from the beginning. It also sports a captivating story that seems to suddenly come out of nowhere.

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Portal 2 (Optional)

Valve Software, 2011
Platform Independent
7-8 hours

Longer than the original, but with better production values overall. If you enjoyed Portal and want more, give this a try. Not nearly as critically acclaimed as the original, it adds several interesting mechanics while keeping the pitch black dark humor largely intact. Also Stephen Merchant is great. I’m calling it optional because of the added time investment for much of the same game.

This game also includes a very novel 2-player cooperative mode that is completely distinct from the single-player game.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Eidos Montreal, 2011
Windows-only
20-30 hours

This prequel comes close to replicating the excellent level design and storytelling of the original. I wouldn’t say they nailed it, but it is still very much worth experiencing. The developers made sure not to repeat the mistakes of Invisible War and hired a third party contractor to handle the PC version, and it was a great decision. The Director’s Cut fixes heavily criticized boss fights, but it’s still not possible to skip killing some characters.

In this entire list, I believe this is the second longest single entry. It’s what you would want in a Deus Ex entry: large amounts of content and a deep branching storyline. But I would only recommend attempting to tackle this you know you have the time; it’s not the kind of game you can just walk away from or leave unfinished.

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Minecraft

Mojang, 2011
Platform Independent
?? hours

The indie gaming darling that exploded in popularity while it was still in beta, and after launch somehow became the game that every 8-year-old plays. I’m not sure how that happened. Don’t let the demographics of the fan base distract you; this is a game that deserves the credit it received.

The problem here is the time sink. With no narrative, no hard objectives, and creative freedom, you can spend limitless amounts of time in this game. But we don’t have limitless time nowadays, do we? At the very least, play this for a few hours to see what everybody is on about, and maybe watch the video where a guy made a functional CPU in-game.

Personal aside: this game’s enjoyability scales well in multiplayer, so let me know if you want to team up.

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Braid

Number None, Inc, 2008
Platform Independent
5-6 hours

This list isn’t big on platformers, but this one made quite a splash.  It was one of the first indie game hits on X-Box Live and was one of the talked-about games in Indie Game: The Movie.

By the way, go watch Indie Game: The Movie. It’s free. I’ve watched it three times now.

This puzzle platformer comes with a very short time commitment, but it an artistic and design marvel that shows what a small team (two, as far as I can tell) can put together. Since Minecraft and Braid, the indie game scene positively exploded. This is a great starting point. Honestly I could have also put the other stars from the aforementioned documentary in this list: Super Meat Boy and Fez. Those are great games to explore if this one resonated with you (more the latter than the former).

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Bioshock

2K Boston, 2007
Windows-only
12-15 hours

System Shock 2’s spiritual successor. It features great voice acting and storytelling, but I almost didn’t include it on the list due to how much of a slog it becomes towards the end. The combat isn’t great, and eventually starts to feel like a chore. But it’s a chore you push through because of how invested you become in the world. You can safely skip the sequels.  Bioshock Infinite got a ton of press, and is worth investigating if you really want more of this style of game.

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Spec-Ops: The Line

Yager Development, 2012
Platform Independent
6 hours

It occured to me that I didn’t include much in the pure FPS genre (DX and Bioshock are technically RPGs). So I might as well include the one that pokes fun at typical military shooters and hits the player with a severe mindf**k.

This game is basically Heart of Darkness set in modern Dubai, and presents itself as a cookie-cutter shooter. But over time, through clever imagery and illusions of choice, it becomes clear that the game is presenting a critique not just of the genre itself, but of the players. It caused a stir and remains controversial for a number of reasons that I can’t quite explain without spoilers. For how short and accessible it is, I think it’s worth trying.

Extra Credits said it better than I did, but listen to their advice and watch part 1 of their review, play the game, then watch part 2 to get what the big deal was all about.  “Holy hell I did not see this game coming,” echoes my impressions.

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Dark Souls

From Software, 2011
Windows-only
40-50 hours

This was a very hard game for me to recommend. Not for any glaring reasons; it hits so many of the right notes. It has a fair and engaging combat system, sports a perfectly executed artistic style, and has hands-down the best map design I’ve ever seen. It’s highly revered as one of the best action RPGs ever made.

But it’s long. There’s a huge amount of content here, and more importantly the game will keep you bogged down by its brutal and unforgiving difficulty. You will face challenges, and fail over and over again. You’ll inevitably overcome them, and it will feel deeply gratifying, but in doing so you’ll probably lose a great deal of time.

The problem I faced here is that the game is so well done, so highly regarded, and so influential that I couldn’t not put it on a list of essential or important releases over the last decade. But it’s near the bottom of the list for a reason: the time commitment it asks of you, the player.

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Mechwarrior: Online

Piranha Games, Inc,
Windows-only
?? hours

Okay fine I’m only putting this one on the list because we both bonded over Mechwarrior when we were little kids, okay?!  It’s actually not particularly noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. And it has a significant grind. But I want more people to play it with.

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So one thing I just noticed is how many of these games were published in 2011 or 2007. Big years, I guess?

I did cross reference my list with a few Game of the Year lists, and found a surprisingly small amount of overlap. This was most likely a side effect of my self-imposed constraints coupled with my urge to focus on novelty and cultural impact over pure execution. Or, simply put, I don’t care how good Call of Duty 4 was, give me something different. As such, I’m asking you to trust my instincts as they do seem to conflict more than a little bit with industry insiders.

Of course, I can’t pretend to be the be-all-end-all when it comes to opinions about games.  My own experiences and tastes weigh heavily on the above choices.  Ultimately, with so damn much art out there to choose from, we must each form our own opinions on what constitutes novelty and impact.  And, at times, help each other along in the process.

It’s been almost a year since the wife and I embarked on the quest to marathon-watch all of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  We’re rounding the bend now, so I thought I’d do the proper thing and vent my thoughts on the Internet like so much opinionated exhaust gas.

This show began in 1987, and ran for seven seasons with 26 episodes each.  We started at the very beginning, and endeavored to watch every episode through to its end.  So without further ado, let us catalog our findings as we boldly went where very many nerds have gone before!

Season 1

Holy shit.  This is bad.

This is really bad.

Our overall verdict after finishing this season on a marathon run was “this show was lucky get renewed.”  We found ourselves wondering what it was up against at the time, since syndicated TV of the 80s didn’t really have the production values we enjoy nowadays.  Well, according to Wikipedia, here are the top 10 rated shows from 1987.

1.  The Cosby Show
2. A Different World
3. Cheers
4. The Golden Girls
5. Growing Pains
6. Who’s the Boss?
7. Night Court
8. 60 Minutes
9. Murder, She Wrote
10. The Wonder Years

OK, that provides some context.

Note that TNG isn’t on that list.  Because it was syndicated, it doesn’t appear in the network television ratings ranks.  But (again according to Wikipedia), “The new show indeed performed well; the pilot’s ratings were higher than those of many network programs, and ratings remained comparable to network shows by the end of the first season despite the handicap of each station airing the show on a different day and time, often outside prime time.”

So, it was a popular and well-received season, and even won a few Emmy awards.  I don’t think people of the time were wrong to appreciate it thusly, but it does show you how much the world of science fiction television has changed since the halcyon days of The Next Generation’s premier.

This season, TNG won awards for Outstanding Sound Editing for the episode “11001001”, Outstanding Costume Design for “The Big Goodbye,” and Outstanding Achievement in Makeup for “Conspiracy.”  I wasn’t even aware that some of those were awards, but there you go.  What made them special?

“11001001” featured a race of partially cybernetic being who communicate mostly in auditory binary, which doesn’t make a ton of sense, but is fascinating in a life-but-not-as-we-know-it kind of way.  Even though it features another Riker the Horndog arc, his role is tastefully handled.  It might very well by favorite episode from this season.  But for the life of me I have no idea why it won an Emmy for Outstanding Sound Editing.

 

“The Big Goodbye” did have decent costumes; the cast was all done up in film noire style garb because it was a holodeck episode.  I never like holodeck episodes but the fact that it picked up an Emmy maybe explains why they utilize them: there’s clearly an appeal to the idea of breaking up the monotony by picking literally any setting and just running with it.  I tend to write off holodeck episodes because they tend to be non sequiturs or just nonsense, though.

 

“Conspiracy” is the penultimate episode of the season, and honestly I enjoyed it!  Apparently this episode’s airing caused a bit of a stir because the of surprisingly graphic violence of a single climactic scene that lasts about 10 seconds.  I don’t disapprove of violence in media, but I totally get the shock that came with this.  It comes out of nowhere and is about 10 shades darker than any other content in the rest of the season.  Maybe even the series as a whole.  I’m not sure why they did this.  Perhaps to make waves.  And to win Outstanding Achievement in Makeup.  Which it did.

But exploding torsos aside, this episode had tension, an acceptable amount of treknobabble, and characters overcoming the odds through teamwork and guile.  It’s far from the worst way to end the season.  That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but you take what you can get here.

So, those are the high points.  Unfortunately not every entry into this season was so shiny.  We see the emergence of a pattern in these early episodes: an attempt at an interesting idea lost in poor execution.  “Code of Honor,” for example, almost touches on themes of cultural relativism but quickly gets bogged down by a script that is covertly sexist and overtly racist.

We are introduced to the Ferengi as a primary adversary, and it’s painful to watch.  A greedy materialistic and profit-driven race is an obvious attempt at making an uncanny caricature modern human society.  But in this 24th Century post-scarcity society, it doesn’t make sense.   What makes even less sense is the fact that every interaction with them involves the Ferengi perpetrating multiple acts of war against the Federation and Starfleet.  And we can only assume they’ve behaved as badly in their encounters with every other race in the quadrant.  There isn’t a clear reason why they haven’t been phasered back into the stone age at this point.  Their replacement by the far-more-interesting Borg, introduced much later in the series, was entirely welcome.

What really nags me is how Denise Crosby’s character, Tasha Yar, is killed in action (apparently because the actress she wanted out).  Mind you, I’m not upset that her character died.  I’m upset with how it was handled.  At the end of the episode the cast finds a recording from Tasha.  One with a message to each and every named cast member, which apparently she recorded just in case this exact thing were to happen.  Thus providing closure and solace in the face of such a loss.  “Hey guys, it sucks that I’m dead now, but everything’s going to be okay because you’re all great folks.”

 

No.  No no no.  You were so close and then you ruined it.  They shouldn’t get off that easy.  That’s not how life works.  If you want to give this moment weight, they don’t get closure.  They don’t get to wrap it all up in a feel-good blanket at the end.  One of their fellow crew members died for no fucking reason.  She’s gone, and they’re never going to see her again.  It’s senseless, it’s tragic, and it just as easily could have happened to any one of them on any number of these dangerous missions.  We could have gotten to watch each character come to terms with this over the remainder of the season, grappling with the loss in their own way, or maybe watch them never get over it.  But, no, this is what we got instead.  It might seem like a minor issue to harp on, but I see the problem as a symptom of trying way too hard to fit into a procedural formula despite having to deal with the permanence of cast attrition.

Rant over.

Okay, so this season, things were a little rough.  Upon review, it feels like done I’ve far more complaining than praising.  But as I said earlier, this series debuted with an overall positive reception and good ratings.  So is this all unfair?  Is it legitimate to criticism television, science fiction especially, outside of the context of its time?  Are people ten years from now going to look  back on Babylon 5 and say “I can’t believe people thought this was good TV?”  I’m not sure.  I want to believe that great art has staying power.  And I know for certain that if this show were to air today, it would need to put forth an astounding turnaround in its second season.

And as Stephanie and I have learned…it did not.

TO BE CONTINUED.

One of my goal for this year was to write more.   Of course, this means I need something to write about.  Since the games I’m playing tend to change from month to month, I thought this might serve as a good source of brain droppings with which I can litter the internet.  The rules are simple: this is just a list of the stuff I’ve played, new or old, this month.  Video and board games both count.  It doesn’t necessarily mean these games are great, it just means they’ve occupied my time for whatever reason.  Usually the two are correlated.

So, what have I been playing so far in 2016?

 

Defense of the Ancients 2

It’s been so long since I typed out the whole name of that game that it didn’t feel natural.  In fact, the Steam listing doesn’t even say it.  It just says “Dota 2.”  It’s like the acronym turned into it’s own word shortly after turning into its own genre.

This game oscillates between being a source of either joy or blinding frustration, as it remains one of the least fun games to lose in the history of multiplayer gaming.  But as a rule, I never play it alone, ever.  Friends that rage together, stay together.

I often judge games by the simple boolean metric of “would I recommend this game to a friend?”  No.  In this case I would absolutely not.  But it’s the most-played game in my Steam library by leaps and bounds.  I’m not sure what to make of that.

 

Castles of Burgundy

I didn’t expect to like this game as much as I do.  The boards seem daunting and there’s a lot of dice rolling.  But it is engaging, easy to learn, and not nearly as random as it looks.  It’s a 2-4 player game that actually plays well (and differently) at all player counts.  The fact that it scales well to 2 players is really nice.  Also, every game I’ve played has ended with fairly close scores.

The setting is boring as all hell.  It’s yet another castle-building game in the middle ages.  Also on the down side is the fact that the game does still involve a fair amount of luck, despite several mechanics that exist specifically to mitigate bad rolls.  A 4-person game can easily last 3+ hours.  But again, since the games seem to always come out close, it’s not so bad when the games run long.  I’d recommend it to fans of tile-placement board games.

 

Mechwarrior: Online

This game is getting good.  It took a long road to get here, with an open beta that went way too long, a store that opened way too soon, and a soft launch with way too many features unimplemented and an unforgiving new user experience.  But the UI is slowly getting better, balance is improving, the community is supportive and helpful, and in the end it is still the best iteration of Mechwarrior multiplayer to date.  I’m not regretting my time with this game one bit.

My main problem is that I’m flying solo.  This game works really well with a team, but I don’t have the time to join an organized unit or go hunting for community groups (of which there are plenty), and it’s hard to recommend this game to friends because of the steep learning curve.  So I stomp on alone.  Ping me if you are interested in playing this game and want a mentor.  At the very least, hey, it’s free!  You’ve got nothing to lose!

 

Fallout 4

Obvious entry is obvious.  I will say this, I am having fun.  The game feels more like Borderlands in the Fallout universe than a proper Fallout entry.  The dialogue system is bad.  The factions are dumb.  The graphics are lackluster.  The story is making increasingly less sense as it goes on.  There’s way too much mindless combat.  The UI is bad.  There’s no way I’d call this a great game, or game of the year, or any of that.

But I am having fun.  And I can’t stop playing.  True to Bethesda’s roots, the amount of content presented to the player is staggering.  The writing and voice acting are actually spot on, to the point where I don’t mind having a voiced character this time around.  The combat feels great, even if there is too much of it.  There are interesting characters and I find myself wanting to know more about them and their world.

Despite its many flaws, I’m having fun, and in the end perhaps that’s all that matters.

 

Splendor

The visceral satisfaction of this game, coupled with its short play time, make it a frequent choice in our board game shelf.

One downside is that I’m starting to see how much of a role chance plays in this game, and how that results in a fairly low skill ceiling.  This is great for new players, but when you’ve been playing for a year and those new players blow you away, you start to wonder.

I sometimes ponder about the competitive scenes of these board games.  That is, whether or not they exist and what their play looks like.  Usually when I’m getting schooled at a video game I watch some replays or Let’s Play footage and get some pointers, but I haven’t really found a good source of board game tips and tricks.

 

Space Engineers

When describing this game, I’ve often called it “Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program’s lovechild.”  That’s not really accurate, but it’s close enough.  You are collecting stuff to make things, but you’re in going to space and the laws of physics matter.  While playing this game, I have calculated thrust-to-weight ratios and fuel efficiency metrics for fun.  I taught myself how to pilot a single-engine gyrocopter because I could.

Unfortunately, this game is still in Early Access as an alpha product.  And boy does it show.  Shit has a tendency to just explode for no reason.  The netcode has issues: if Dan and I touch each other, one of us dies instantly.  And it’s the only early access survival crafting game that isn’t available cross-platform.  Even the dedicated server is Windows-only, which would cripple the multiplayer scene if the broken netcode didn’t already do that.

If this game were stable, and had a Linux dedicated server, I’d recommend it to every single gamer I know.  And the non-gamers, too.  It’s that good.  Even without a Linux client (which I do not expect to see happen).

This next year will make or break this game, and one can only hope the developers will move it out of alpha and focus on performance and stability.

 

FTL: Faster than Light

Do you own a computer?  Do you have a few bucks hanging around in your pocket?  If so, you can and should play this game.  Cross platform, easy to walk away from, addictive and infinitely replayable.  And that awesome damned soundtrack.  This is on the list because I still pop it open every now and then and play a Random round.

 

BattleTech

Why yes, I did spend some time playing a tabletop game from the 80s that still has a devoted following.  This game is in a weird place for me.  I own an intro box set but I’ve never played with it.  It’s complex enough that I don’t feel comfortable running my own game, and the community is so small that I have trouble finding anybody interested in playing it.  Were it not for a monthly meetup in Boston I probably wouldn’t.  But thankfully, that does exist, and it is awesome.

I do wish they would update their miniatures and republish their ‘mech spec sheets to be a little more interesting.  This game needs a face lift.  I haven’t tried the Alpha Strike rules yet; maybe they shake things up a bit.  All I know is that between this and MW:O, I find myself wondering just how much ‘mech action I can get before I burn out on this franchise.  Hasn’t happened yet.  Not even close.

 

---

 

I think that’s about it.  Was this interesting?  Should I do more?  Because I’m probably going to.

What the hell, WordPress?! Look at this shit. LOOK AT IT. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I’m afraid to upload pictures to you now.

 

Okay now that that’s out of my system I can explain why all my previous posts are currently filled with broken image links.

 

I decided on a whim I wanted to try to install a dedicated server to play Ark with my friends, on the personal web server that also happens to host this blog. So I tried, and found I had been running with a very outdated version of the Gnu C library. Okay, let’s just run a package update. Wait, my kernel is how old? Upon further inspection it looks like the “long term stable” version of Debian Linux I was running had gone out of date a while ago and wasn’t really taking updates. Oops.

 

So, no problem, I’ll just upgrade in-place to the latest Debian. What do you mean, I have unmet dependencies. For the update. I find out later that I was trying to skip a generation of releases (that’s how out of date I was) and just trying to automagically update wouldn’t work. And attempting to force it had…consequences. In that I now had wildly conflicting packages running around. Web server is down, PostreSQL database is unrecoverable (there goes the calendar), MySQL database (my blog) is reachable but not through the web interface.

 

Okay. Abandon ship.

 

I still have the external hard drive. I managed to dig up the commands I needed to export and backup the MySQL table for the blog contents. Copy those over. Don’t need the media, I have the originals already. Copy major config files for the web server. Copy anything I left in the home directory. Let the rest burn. Download the latest Debian install, shove it on a USB drive and start fresh and new. Reinstall apache, MySQL, and wordpress. Restore the database.

 

Okay. As you can tell by the fact that you’re reading this, it mostly worked. But if you navigate to any of my previous posts you’ll see that I was clearly wrong when I thought I didn’t need to back up the media. Not that it would have helped. You see, when you upload pictures to a wordpress site, it silently goes and resizes them, and then renames them to include the resolution of the resized picture. So the original file names are not good enough. Ouch. And, between versions, they seem to have changed the resolutions they use, so re-uploading the originals won’t work either. Ouch.

 

I think I can fix this, but it’ll take a lot of Perl. Yay. Problems spawning problems.

 

Why am I writing all of this? I mean I doubt anybody is going to discover my silly blog, try to re-read my posts from years ago, see all the broken links, and throw up their hands in disgust if I don’t provide a reasonable explanation. No, there’s a greater lesson here. This is part of the risk I assume when I go with the roll-your-own approach. I could have just created an account on wordpress’ main site and let them host it. But then it isn’t mine. This way, I get to own it.

 

But it also means I have to deal with this bullshit. You think I had spare time to spend hours trying to repair a borked operating system to get my 2-readers-a-year blog back online? And during the downtime my personal calendar didn’t work either, because I decided to run that myself too. I think I missed a doctor’s appointment or something. I shudder to consider what it would have been like if I had decided to run my own email on the server as well.

 

It’s all well and good to think about taking back our data from centralized third parties. But nothing is free, and nothing is easy. It becomes a very harrowing cost-benefit analysis of privacy versus convenience, and I’m starting to wonder if the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.

Home ownership is a process in which you pay, handsomely and repeatedly, for the failures of others.

This may sound like a pessimistic conclusion to draw, but it does cut to the heart of the human experience, doesn’t it? So many of our attempts to make the world a better place revolve around correcting the choices of those that came before us. Choices that, with a few decades of hindsight, seem ludicrous. Like not putting any insulating material behind the walls of a house. Or building a house at the bottom of a slope but not accounting for drainage. Or building a house with an attic and forgetting to put in any sort of access to get in to said attic.

Note to self: check my attic for treasure. Clearly they were hiding something.

Well, the choices of yesterday become the problems of today. And we’ll tackle them one by one. I might even blog about them. But today, I’m going to focus on one very minor change we decided to make to our little domicile.

With three cats, it becomes important to secret away litter boxes to an undetectable corner of the house. The goal being to prevent guests from recognizing that we are playing host a trio of odor-generating food processors. Once we moved into a house with a basement, the proper location for the Poop Zone became clear. But this means that we have to keep the basement door slightly ajar, because the cats cannot turn door knobs (yet) and probably wouldn’t be bothered to shut the doors behind themselves.

This isn’t a great long term solution for the sake of both safety and aesthetics. The accepted solution to this problem is to embed a door within the door, for use by small furry animals exclusively. For a seasoned homeowner and handy man, this is a trivial task. As I am neither of those things, it was kind of an ordeal.

This commercial cat door comes in two pieces. The front piece is a small frame and contains the actual flap. The back is just an empty frame, meant to simply cover the whole you cut in the door.

First, we start by drawing a frame around the area of the door which will become void, by tracing out the inner frame of the pet door. Drill large holes in the corners to accommodate a jigsaw blade. Then jigsaw out the hole. This would be straightforward if not for a few complications.

1. Interior doors are mostly hollow, but have struts of solid wood running through them intermittently. I opted to leave the bottom inch of the door intact. This proved to be the correct choice: it was solid wood down there.

2. The width of the door is just about equal to the throw of my jigsaw blade. It’s close enough to cause a real mess if you aren’t careful.

3. My jigsaw is corded, and the proximity to the floor meant I couldn’t cut vertically upwards from the lower holes, because the power cord was too intrusive. If I were legit I would have taken the door off of the hinge and mounted it on horses to work flat. Hindsight.

4. The veneer (this layer on the surface that makes a door look like real wood) splinters like a motherfucker when jigsawed, especially the opposite side from the jigsaw (maybe because of #2).

Despite all of these problems, I managed to slice out a rectangular chunk of the door for the front side of the cat door, which fit perfectly and covered up the minor chipping I had. The back was a mess, but meh, it’s dark on that side.

Not too shabby. Now to put the rear side in and…it doesn’t fit. Remember that second side I mentioned? Well, the inner flange is significantly larger than the opening for the front side. So that perfectly fitting hole I cut out is actually too small. Why? Why why why why why. Why. This means I have to widen the hole on both dimensions to fit in the piece that otherwise has no functional value. And that means the hole for the front side is now going to be slightly large.

Now I have to saw out the back-side hole to make it larger. Which thanks to #4 meant that my pretty front facing hole was soon turned into a splintered mess, and the hole wound up being over-sized to the point where one of the screws didn’t have anything to screw into.

What began as a minor home improvement project soon turned into a life lesson on accepting imperfection. For a denizen of the digital world, this is a tough pill to swallow. My craft is based in the imaginary world of ones and zeros. If I don’t like something, I have the opportunity to change it. Over and over again. At no cost. Nothing has any meaning until I decide it’s perfect enough to send out into the world. This post, for instance. How many proofreads and grammar fixes did I have to do? Nothing was permanent.

Now, what if I never could make edits or fix typos? What if the first draft was the only draft? That’s what home improvement is like. There’s no Ctrl-Z. Every mistake becomes a fixture. Edges will be rough. Details will be missed. You have to live with imperfection, or you will go stark raving mad. Or, worse, you get scared and stop trying. I’m going to see that cracked veneer every time I walk down that hallway, and it will hound me until I learn this lesson.

-K

 

It’s been a while since I’ve managed to see a side-project to completion. So it seemed like a logical choice to pick my next electronic diversion carefully. Maybe this time take on a task both that is straightforward and compelling enough to finish .

In my previous post I mentioned how much fun I had playing Elite: Dangerous with an Oculus Rift. Well, long before VR came along, “head tracking” hardware has been a staple of flight sim enthusiasts for years. The idea is for the player to move his or her head, and have the in-game view react accordingly, usually in an exaggerated way (so that one can still see the screen). This creates both a greater sense of immersion and improved situational awareness.

It should come as little surprise that I wound up buying Elite: Dangerous a few days after PAX. I found myself wanting to replicate the immersion of the VR headset but without paying $300 for a DK2. Unfortunately most commercial IR head tracking solutions are rather pricey as well. But, through the miracles of Reddit I found that a enterprising group of British E:D fans had put together a DIY head tracker, the EDTracker , using an accelerometer and an Arduino micro controller. They posted their source code and some detailed instructions.

Now this sounds like something I can sink my teeth into.

I quickly ordered the parts, sticking to US based distributors. The stars of the show are the Sparkfun Pro Micro control board and an MPU-6050 Accelerometer breakout board. Sparkfun has an updated version of the Pro Micro for sale, but they were not offering the 8-pin version of the MPU that I needed to follow the edtracker guide, and their only offering for this particular accelerometer was $20, so I picked one up on ebay for a quarter of that. The parts all arrived a week later, at the same time. Handy that.

 

First I needed to soldering some header pins into the two boards. I still haven’t mastered the art of the helping hands so I’m not sure if they came out perfectly straight. But close enough.

 

I decided to start with a breadboard prototype. Looks like the pins were straight enough after all; they fit into the breadboard slots, albeit a bit snugly. I followed these directions  and routed some signals under the boards. Also, I didn’t realize how small the Pro Micro and MPU really were, so I wound up buying buttons that were comically large. The button is used to “zero” the device for quick re-calibration.

 

Next I needed to get the edtracker software onto the Arduino. This is when the project took a frustrating turn. I’ve only ever developed Arduino project in Linux, where the operating system has very little trouble recognizing and communicating with these devices. But, currently, Elite: Dangerous is a Windows-only game (Mac client is in beta, Linux client promised but no ETA). So I needed the Arduino to be recognized correctly in Windows, which is something I’ve never really tried to do. It sucks. I had hoped never to look upon the Device Manager again. After yesterday I think we’re on a first-name basis.

When I installed the Arduino drivers from the EDTracker site, the GUI and console scripts they provided would not work at all. I couldn’t even use the Arduino IDE to flash the bootloader, I just got mysterious USB errors. Also the EDTracker sketches won’t compile in the outdated version of the IDE they insist you use. Apparently the new Pro Micro that Sparkfun is selling uses an entirely different AVR core than the one that the EDTracker was originally built around. So blindly following their instructions was actually detrimental to my efforts, and cost me a couple of hours of banging my head on a wall trying to flash the thing. I needed to download the “Arduino Addon” files from Sparkfun, unpack them, dive into their hierarchy and find the signed Windows drivers, and associate those with the mysterious device Windows created. Once I did that, the EDTracker GUI sprung to life.

 

Calibration seemed to be successful. Now I just need to test it! By wearing it. On my head. While it’s plugged in. Somehow. I’m sure in the future I’ll have it enclosed and properly mounted on my headphones or something. But for now, double-sided tape will have to do.

 

I couldn’t use a baseball cap because they all have that little button on top. This was the best alternative. The good news is that I’m also protected from the sun’s harmful rays while I play my videogames indoors. I had the wife take pictures of my “field testing.”

The good news is… IT WORKS. Almost perfectly. I occasionally get some snapping to center when I’m looking very slightly in any direction. It could be an issue with dead zones in the game clashing with the fine input from the Arduino, but I’ll play with it a little more. And, of course, find a better way to wear it.

I could talk more about this experience, but they pretty much mirror the results from the EDTracker demonstration video.

Despite this being a fairly simple one-day project, I still have the opportunity to perfect it by giving it a proper PCB and enclosure. That said, I fear I may be taking the first step down a very dangerous path. There are communities out there dedicated to passionate players building custom controls, cockpits, and peripherals for simulation games. I mean check out this redditor’s home made E:D control panel! And this guy’s custom ‘mech pit! People make their own flight sticks and throttled out of spare parts, repurpose racing pedals, all kinds of things to enrich their experiences and…

I should… I should turn back now.  Or should I?

-K