Poppy seeds are the opiate of the masses.

1) Get excited about the game through /v/, metacritic, and marketing.
2) See a copy on Steam for half off (yay, Black Friday).
3) Think to yourself, "It's a single player game and I could pirate it -- but nah, I'll be legit. If it's such a good game I'll buy it."
4) Download the game. (Wait a day or so.)
5) Attempt to start the game. Wait until 4 pieces of additional software are downloaded.
7) Attempt to start the game. Stop. Get asked for a CD key. Copy/paste a CD key which has been emailed to you.
8) Attempt to start the game. Watch an unskippable page of corporate logos for a full 30 seconds (I timed it). Reach the main menu.
9) Attempt to start the game. Be informed that you need a Windows Live account. Get linked to a page where you can create one.
10) Attempt to create a Windows Live account. All of your normal usernames have been taken, even the obscure ones. Get recommended these alternative usernames: "BuxomHarpy", "DestructionCylinder", "CatatonicCentipede".
11) Spend 10 minutes thinking of an even more obscure username.
12) Attempt to fill out account information. Get CAPTCHA'd. Form resets.
13) Attempt to fill out account information again. Get CAPTCHA'd. Form resets.
14) Attempt to fill out account information again. Success! Give Microsoft your email address. Wonder why you have to give Microsoft anything when it's not even a Microsoft game.
15) Start taking notes on what is becoming the worst user experience you've ever had.
16) Attempt to start the game. Fill in Windows Live account username. It doesn't work.
17) Check email. Microsoft wants you to confirm the email is legit so they can spam you through it. Confirm.
18) Attempt to start the game. Fill in Windows Live account username. It doesn't work.
19) Attempt to start the game. Fill in Windows Live account email. It works! Fill in your CD key... again?
20) Go back to email. Copy CD key. Paste CD key. Wait for it to "download your profile". Windows Live checks for updates. Windows Live finds updates.
21) Decline the offer to update Windows Live at this time. Be informed that, if you do not update Windows Live, you may not sign in, and if you don't sign in, you will not be allowed to save your game.
22) Attempt to start the game. Fill in Windows Live account email. Save login information for next time. Wait for it to "download your profile". Wait for Windows Live to check for updates. Accept the offer to update Windows Live at this time. Wait while the update is applied. After 5 minutes, the game will restart. Watch 30 seconds of corporate logos again.
23) Attempt to start the game. Be informed about the Windows Live updates. Enter in login email and password again, because it forgot them when it updated. Wait for it to "download your profile".
24) Woohoo! You're playing! Wasn't that fun?

Note: There's a neat cheat code that lets you skip at least half of those steps.

All that aside, though, the game is decent. It ain't the next Bioshock or Metroid Prime - it won't be a piece of gaming history or anything - but it's good enough to warrant a play-through.

From a geek-junk mail-order catalog that arrived today:

So, 2009 was the first year that Burning Man's attendance actually decreased since it got properly started in 1991. About 1/6 of the people who should have been there, weren't. The economy's more messed up than I realized.

Ooh, look, it's an unemployment trends graph. I read somewheres that the best indicator of the end of a recession is when people start getting jobs again. Sounds reasonable to me. On the graph, take a look at the Louisiana line: unemployment spiked just after Hurricane Katrina hit. Right now, it's almost as if the whole nation's been hit by a hurricane. And the graph suggests that the widespread optimism about economic recovery is misplaced, or at least premature.

EDIT: Wow, Michigan's really bad!

I was off at Burning Man last week. This being my first burn, there were a huge stack of unknowns. Will the fierce winds blow the tent away? Will there be any food? Will we run out of water? Will the dry heat turn us into delicious human jerky?

I was there with neurochemistry and foliagedecay, both of whom are obsessive planners like me, so we did well - we actually ended up being a bit overprepared. And we were joining up with an established camp, with our hosts sysd and rosindust, along with some other folks who had been coming for 13+ years. So anything we didn't have covered, the camp certainly did, and that was a huge help.




( Lots more under here! )


----------------

So, I've been going to a weekly board-game meeting with neurochemistry and other cool people from around the area. A card game called Dominion came out recently, and it looks like the next Settlers of Catan. It's caught on so well that several of the Game Night attendees have gone out to buy their own copies, so they can play it more often than once a week. It's got one expansion out already and another coming in a month or so. It's a fast-paced card game, works comfortably for 2 to 6 players.



A Dominion action card.

The wiki page has a good overview of Dominion, with rules and such.

Some of Dominion's best ideas reminded me of a collectible card game that came out in 2000 called Magi Nation: Duel. I brought out my old Magi Nation cards tonight for a bit and got all nostalgic.


A Magi Nation Magi card.

Back in 2000, several companies were starting up collectible card games, because they were proven profitable by the success of Magic:The Gathering. (A lot like the MMORPG rush that's been going on in more recent years, with Everquest and its many imitators.)

The two games are quite different, but they share some great features. Like Dominion, Magi Nation gives you resources at the beginning of your turn, which you use to play things from your hand. Like Dominion, you draw at the end of your turn so you can plan your next moves while your opponent plays. Like Dominion, the rules are minimal, but the cards interact in complex and interesting ways.

I always thought Magi Nation was going to make it as a card game. Compared to Magic, it had:
- Much lower barrier to entry (simple rules)
- Player avatars (The Magi was "you" in the game -- Magic later used this exact idea with its Planeswalker cards)
- No resource cards (You get energy every turn, you don't need to sit there hoping you draw land cards)
- Simpler, attrition-based combat system
- Turns were much faster
- Not quite as deep as Magic strategically, but still very satisfying
- The game could expand indefinitely; Magic was stuck at 5 colors, while Magi Nation had 12 distinct, well-imagined regions and could easily add more
- Magi Nation had fewer balancing issues, no game-breaking infinite combos, no painful hackish rule-fixes, no huge list of banned cards. (Though to be fair, had it survived longer, it might have developed some more flaws.)
- I liked it. A lot. I played it every chance I got. I'd bring cards everywhere with me, and teach the game to people who hadn't played before.

Magi Nation had a few years of popularity, but was overshadowed by Magic and Pokemon. The last expansion was released in 2002. Since then, it's been announced that the game was coming back at least 4 separate times, and nothing's ever materialized. The cards are hard to find now, even on EBay. Searching for information about the game yields a mass of broken links and empty promises. The game's wiki page still claims that it's coming back, "Sometime in 2008". So it's safe to say that it's gone forever. It deserved a better death.

So, rest in peace, Magi Nation. May your ideas be reabsorbed into other games, that they might be improved. Who knows, maybe that next Dominion expansion will have a few more features that build on Magi Nation's.

brb london

So there's this huge list of games that are coming out in 2009 or have come out within the past year or so. Screenshots are included:
http://adrianwerner.wordpress.com/games-of-2009/

Trine and Limbo stand out -- they could be brilliant.

There are more innovative, artistic games out there than I'd thought possible. Clearly, I pay too much attention to the big-name ones.

Good information technology, like supply chain management, seems like it makes centralized planning a much more practical proposition. Let's say the government were to specify food production and transport. Most of the infrastructure is already in place. Databases are linked to barcode scanners on supermarket cash registers, and the flow of goods is tracked all the way from production down to the individuals who purchase them. We're approaching an information society anyway. All that's really left to do, technology-wise, is to join up the databases of the various corporations involved.

Some of the failures of previous centrally-planned economies, like the Soviet Union, were essentially due to poor information flow. The planners weren't connected to the needs of the people, so they'd push resources into stupid places. Tractors would be produced instead of bread, and shortages happened all the time. This is a problem that is solved by modern tech.

Granted, any such system would take some tuning: Unexpected spikes in demand for products will happen, as will failures in the supply chain. A bad year for tomatoes will still raise the price of tomatoes. Adaptive and predictive modeling could be used to minimize these effects. The Farmer's Almanac has been predicting crop outputs since 1792; central planning would incorporate such data into a larger system. In theory, this would work better than the market-economy solutions do, as surpluses could be predicted. Extra tomatoes can become ketchup and stored long-term, instead of being sent to markets, where the excess is discarded.

So that's a technical possibility, that could be started within the next 10 years*. One approach would be to have the resource tracking system in place, and run it in for several years simulate its effects before it's put into use. Can we do better than the current system? We can find that out without risking anything.

(*An IT project? That's also a government project? Better make that 50 years...)

----

So that's an outline of what could be done... whether it should be done is an open question. Any such project is likely to arouse fears of corruption, power concentration, and the possibility of a total system failure. Are those fears well-founded?

EDIT: One possibility would be to have a disinterested third party, e.g. a non-profit org, in control of the data. The data and the predictions made from it would be open for public viewing. Rather than this grand data system being at the top of a hierarchical economic control system, it would take on an advisory role; it would recommend globally optimal ways of channeling resources, and the corporations, organizations, and governments in control of those resources would be free to heed or ignore the recommendations.

EDIT 2: Wired put up a related article.

EDIT 3: Damn, Salvador Allende thought of this same idea in the early 70s. Go him.

They're giving away free Magic decks now.
Even if you don't play the game, the art is still pretty.
Seems legit - I used my spam email account.

So, Ethan tossed me the book Eastern Standard Tribe, and it's an interesting read. It's also free online. It's about the impact of communications technology on lives and culture.
The book is worth reading in its entirety, but if you want to just get the crux of it, I'd recommend going to the PDF, and reading from page 62 to 65. (Background: The main character's name is Art; his friends betrayed him and committed him to a mental hospital where he doesn't belong. He's sitting in a group therapy session with strangers.)

----


I'll be at Burning Man in late August, along with Syn and everyone else I can get to come with me. You! You should come too. It's a big arts-fest in Nevada. The tickets aren't cheap, but I get the feeling that it's one of those life experiences everyone should do at least once.
Note: The more expensive tickets are the same as the cheap ones -- the cheap ones just sell out first.

----

The Friday before last, I took the midterm for my evil math class. I was sure I'd failed it; I couldn't answer any of the four questions. I felt lousy about it, so I shut myself in my apartment for all of Spring Break and worked. I didn't work on math, just got way ahead on my other projects, so they wouldn't distract me from the classwork in future. We got the grades back today: Everyone else failed the midterm, too. The average score was 2.8 out of a possible 20. That class is a bloody nightmare.

So, now I'm still feeling... well, not that great, actually. I got a lot done in the past week, but self-imposed isolation wears one down after a while. Even with Forged Alliance to keep me going.
Or maybe it's just that it's been raining for days. That could be it too.


Time to hit a coffee shop, I think.

I named my desktop Simia. The name sounds better every time I hear it.

My last desktop, Cynch, liked to show her personality by causing bizarre glitches, catching fire, screaming, freezing, and throwing tantrums. A problem child, to be sure, but she was dear nonetheless.

Simia showed her first signs of personality yesterday. I asked her to print out some review sheets for the math midterm I had today. She produced this:



Apparently she understands the material exactly as well as I do!

----

Aside from the bloody math class, life's going great. Work's easy enough. I'm off to get a new car in a couple weeks - mine's been on the fritz for ages. And I think I know just what to do with my old one! Spring Break technically starts today, so I have time to do some of my MS requirements and maybe do a cool side project or two.

And Syn's coming down to visit for a week in late April! We're planning some sort of mountain-biking excursion, possibly off in the Great Smokies. Also SignalFest. Hells yes. I gotta remember how to swing glowsticks again, it's been way too long. And my first rave was with Syn, it seems fitting that she gets to visit on rave-weekend. Thinking forward to then is a great happiness-generator.

So. I'm busy and stressed, but, good things in the future. Makes it all manageable.

Last time, I mentioned I was building a computer. When you look around the internet for tips on this sort of thing, you find that plenty of people post lists of parts for the machines they plan to make. But there's almost never any reasoning as to why parts were chosen, or whether they even worked. So the information is next to useless.

My parts list is below; my build actually worked quite well. It only took a few hours to put everything together and test it out. I ran Farcry 2 at highest settings for half an hour. It was pretty. And then it was boring... FPS, not really my thing. Once I've seen the same rusty car copy-pasted in four different places, I stop caring about the game. It made a great benchmark / stress test though.

So. This is everything that went into my Core i7 box, and why.

Case: LIAN LI PC-K6
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112216
Price: $110
- USB/Headphone connections on the top of the case
- Front fans keep the hard drives cool, and provide good front-to-back airflow
- Plain side panel is very moddable
- Aluminum construction, so it's light and spreads heat
- Lian Li is a good company. http://techreport.com/articles.x/16258
NOTES: Wow, what a sleek case. Removable trays for everything, great construction, no sharp edges. I'm almost afraid to mod it, it's so nice already.

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
Price: $289
- Core i7 is a really good architecture. There are many articles explaining why; this is one of them. http://gizmodo.com/5099060/giz-explains-why-intels-core-i7-processor-is-a-beautiful-monster
- This is the cheapest core i7 processor. The next model up, the 2.93GHz version (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115201), is almost twice the price.
- The rest of the components in the system were chosen with the intent of overclocking this processor to 2.93GHz or possibly even higher.
NOTES: Came with a heatsink/fan that already had thermal grease on it. Awesome.

Motherboard: ASUS P6T LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131359
Price: $220, after $30 combo deal with the processor.
- Asus is a good brand.
- This is their second motherboard made for the Core i7 architecture. Most of the boards currently available were made for the initial release back in November. Many of these first-run boards suffered from reliability/stability issues. (Early adopters always get screwed.)
- Compared with the "Deluxe" version ($50 more expensive), there are very minor differences. http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=534 If you can live with 6 USB ports instead of 8, and 1 ethernet port instead of 2, and you're not water cooling anything, this is the board you want.
- The orange/black color scheme is cool.
NOTES: Nice construction. The most intuitive motherboard I've seen. Lots of tweakable settings in the BIOS, too.

Video card: EVGA Geforce GTX 260 Superclocked Edition
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130433
Price: $230, after $20 rebate
- Good price. the next model up (GTX 280) is $150 more expensive.
- The 260 has excellent performance; the superclocked version costs around $30 more. It's worth it. Check the benchmarks, it's a good card. http://www.guru3d.com/article/evga-geforce-gtx-260-core-216-superclocked-review/14
- In a year or so, when the price drops, I will be getting a second one for SLI. The motherboard and power supply will support this just fine.
- The card exhausts heat outside the case, so it won't cause heat problems.
- Nvidia and EVGA both have great reputations.
NOTES: When did video cards get so big? Works fine, came with Farcry 2.

Power supply: Thermaltake W0106RU 700W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153039
Price: $95, after $40 rebate
- Thermaltake is a great brand for power supplies and cooling. (Off-brand power supplies, like the power supplies that come with cases, will die on you.)
- 700W is enough to run everything in this system comfortably. Even with the second video card, this should handle it by my calculations. The manual that came with the motherboard advised getting a 1000W PSU for multiple video cards, though.
- For a top-tier power supply, this is pretty cheap.
NOTES: Worked

Memory: G.SKILL 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231225
Price: $136
- Damn, DDR3 got cheap recently!
- It's DDR3 1600. This will allow some good overclocking.
- G.Skill is an OK brand. It's not top-notch, but not bad either.
- If you want something more reliable / expensive, go with Corsair's version http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145222 (a good brand).
NOTES: Being able to hold an entire DVD in memory is a headtrip. The heck am I going to do with all this RAM?

Primary hard drive: Western Digital Caviar Black (7200 RPM)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284
Price: $129
- 1 TB, and pretty cheap at that.
- Western Digital is a great brand. They make reliable stuff.
- 3.0GB/sec
- May consider getting a few of these and RAIDing them.
- NOTE: You will see that the Western Digital Caviar Green is cheaper. It's also a little slower, so avoid it unless all you need it for is long term file storage. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-caviar-gp,1703.html It makes a fine secondary drive, though.
- NOTE 2: You will see 10,000 RPM drives around. These are not worth the extra cost unless you're buying more than 1 and putting them in a RAID. (I don't think they're even worth it then.)
- NOTE 3: There's a Seagate 1.5TB lying around too (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337), for the same price. I didn't get it; I've had bad luck with Seagate in the past, and heard a few rumors about this drive being unreliable. It's probably OK, I'm just cautious with my data.

Monitor: Acer P243WAid Black-Silver 24" 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009125
Price: $259, after entering promotional code "EMCLNMN23"
- Cheap, bright, big, good resolution, good reviews.
- (Warning) some users have complained of backlight bleed / dead pixels. Monitors are tough to buy; unless you're spending ~$2000 on an S-IPS panel from Apple or NEC, you're gonna hit issues. There's no way around it; every monitor out to at least $500 has problems like this, and I didn't check past there.
NOTES: No backlight bleed at all. One dead pixel. Huge, beautiful, amazing. Had to turn the brightness down - by default it's like having a mini-sun in my room.
EDIT: There is backlight bleed. To see it, you need to be watching something dark, and be a good 8 feet away from the screen. So, in other words, this is not the best monitor for watching movies on. Still great for gaming and general computing though.

in the most soulless way

Tomorrow morning I'm ordering all the parts for my next desktop. So, I'm researching the hell out of everything related to it. It's going to be my primary tool for pretty much every project I'll be doing for at least the next 4-5 years, so, I'm making it good. Using proven, stable technologies, parts from good manufacturers, the whole deal. And I don't mean I'm breaking the bank on it, just that I'm applying the lessons learned from previous builds.

But I want it to look awesome, too. Been reading case modding guides, and I ran across the best case ever. Mine will be considerably less elaborate. I can't find a good image of what I'm planning, but let's take this as a starter:



Starting with a solid, boring case (no side window), you can cut any old shape into the side with some careful Dremel work. Then you glue a piece of plexiglass onto the inside to make the window. People often cut stencil designs for this, just like pumpkin carving.

But there's really no need to limit yourself to stencils. After all, when you mount it on plexiglass, you can take any cut-out pieces and stick those back on. So you can actually take any lineart you want, cut that into the side of the case, mount the plexiglass, and light it all from behind. And it will look fantastic.

The only problem comes up in cooling. By cutting out a design from the side panel, sticking a fan on the side is less practical. So a front-to-back airflow is the way to do it. Aluminum would help too, since that's a better heat conductor than steel. I think this one is the only case in existence that meets my specifications.

Anyway, I'll update with the parts list, the image I pick out, and perhaps some pictures of the process as I go.

Yeah, meme-ing is a copout. But every time I try to write something here lately, it feels like it comes out wrong. For a long time, I was making an effort to Strunk and White my writing style, to reduce it down to be terse and informative. But that feels so bland. I want to write like the Penny Arcade guy writes - full of images and stories. I've put my writing in a centrifuge, and tossed out the superfluous supernatant. Now I'm trying to figure out how to resuspend the content. I need a solvent to this problem (ha, ha). I think I can do better than science references and bad puns, but that's a start.

( meme time )

What color is your favorite hat?

EDIT:
After spending some time considering this theory, I think it's useful - but not as useful as it presumes. Encoding thinking patterns into colors allows for quicker analysis, more efficient metacognition. But saying, "To solve Problem X, you need to use Blue thinking, then Yellow thinking, blah blah..." That's oversimplifying things.

My current favorite theory of getting stuff done is still Basic Math. I've been learning to subtract lately. It's difficult.

The reason I care about all this productivity stuff? My job is entirely about creation. If I can get more done in a shorter time, I open up more time for what I want to do. So the reward for being faster is very high.

Are we more than what we create?

Urgh. I need to write a proper entry. There's much I need to put into words so that these shards of experiences and thoughts can be reassembled into a single reflection.

But now's not the time, at least not for all of it. It's been under two weeks since I got back from Australia, and in a few hours I'll be running off again, this time to CT to see Syn and a few old friends on New Years'. I'm excited - I've been missing them dearly.

Christmas went well. My parents came down from Canada to visit me here, so, I got to host. We watched The Zero Effect and MirrorMask, and ate a lot of the usual family recipes, most of which I prepared. It's odd; having my parents over for Christmas dinner felt like a big transition to me. This is the first time in my life I've had a living-place that was up to the task. I've put this place together by bits and pieces - salvaging furniture and electronics from neighbors and departing students, and I guess it's finally done*.

I'm worn out from the effort of the holidays and the past two weeks, but I'm satisfied, too.

Now, I pack, and run through one or two more lives before I return at last to that life where work and school exist. Existence is a long eclectic playlist set on Random, with some impatient jerk hitting the "Next Track" button a minute into each song.

* Still needs improving, of course. No project is ever finished, only abandoned. But I'm reaching the limitations of what I can do with this place; I'll need to move in order to make a really good home. With devoted office / lab / workshop / project spaces. Mmmmmyesss.

Behold! The drama! The horror! The high fructose corn syrup!.

I went in for LASIK on Friday morning.

Talking with people about it has been interesting. The reaction I got when I told most people I was looking into LASIK was neutral at best; most people tried to dissuade me. Often, there was some emotional reaction in it. I've wondered about why.
I think it comes from these factors:
- LASIK is scary, they cut up your eyes, and there can be complications.
- People like me the way I am. (Aww.)
- It's hard to tell someone to change without rejecting how they currently are. For example, if you tell someone to go on a diet, it's hard to do it without insulting them.
- LASIK is advertised and hyped; most people I know reject things that are too heavily marketed.
- It's new and (somewhat) unknown.

(Also, for most people, contacts are a viable alternative. My eyes had nasty astigmatism, so contacts were uncomfortable for me, and I got eye infections twice when I tried them.)

It seems like LASIK is a lot like getting braces. It's not fun. There's not much of a survival or health benefit to it. It costs a bunch. It hurts a bit. And mostly, it exists to make you look better. Based on the popularity of dental correction, I would predict that LASIK will have a better public reaction in the coming years than it does now. Despite the occasional horror story, the surgery results are overwhelmingly positive; complications are very rare.

That said, some folks have been curious about what the actual experience is like, so I'll go through that too.

( detail under here )