Speed Screed: Scads of Hardware

As the complexity of computers increases, so too does the number of things that can go wrong. Additionally, as more and more peripherals flood the market from competing companies, the possible hardware configurations of computers are increasing exponentially. This presents a real problem for game developers.
In the old days, there were maybe a dozen basic outfits that a computer could have, with a couple variations. Beta testing on virtually all available machines was practically possible. When a game was released, there was no chance of hardware or software compatibility – the games were pretty much designed on the same computers they were ultimately going to be run on.

These days, testing is becoming the longest part of game development. Any company that wants to take a stable release seriously has to put the game through its paces for an absurdly long time. This is because there are something like ten thousand possible rigs that meet the minimum requirements, and you never know what innocuous-seeming software is going to gum up the works. Any game that is released these days has a small contingent of people who get unexplained crashes to the desktop, horrible and archaic errors like total system freezes, or the extremely dreaded monitor completely deactivating until the computer is reset.

These poor souls love to bitch about what a horrible and buggy release it was, and how badly the developers screwed up. But it often has just as much to do with a publisher. The publisher is in it to make money, and they want the game out as fast as possible because they want to make their money back as fast as possible. The developers may tell them that they need six months of alpha and three months of beta and the publishers may only agree to half that amount, instead offering a longer contract for creating game patches and the like. Many publishers don’t seem to understand the fallout generated by a game that barely runs after someone dropped fifty bucks for it at the store. Some do, though.

Blizzard (although they merged with Activision) are notorious for taking godawful amounts of time to make games. This is because they understand the requirements for making a game these days, both in terms of innovation and also product testing. Blizzard’s famous attitude of “it’ll be done when we say it is” is really the only way to ensure a top-quality release that will require minimum patching and also that it will run on a huge number of systems.

The upshot of this is that it may be easier in the future to play games on consoles, since developers only have to make sure it runs flawlessly on ONE system. Considering I can get an Xbox 360 for much less money than a state-of-the-art video card (let alone a computer), this argument is persuasive indeed.

Today’s Rave: Surround Sound and Movies

We (by which I mean my parents) are going through a substantial remodeling of the upper part of the house at the moment. Since my parents have decided to stay put at our old house, they decided to make it nicer and build equity at the same time. That’s what I call good use of money.

Anyway, our kitchen is now awesome, and the living room has nearly finished following. But not withstanding that, we put the new home theater system through its paces the other day. Since the design, remodeling, and much of the other miscellanea was left to Mom, Dad got the theater system as sort of his part of the remodel. I have to say that we were probably due. We had an adequate set-up before but now this thing is ridiculous.

I have to say that I’m not much of a movie watcher, so I was only moderately anticipating the whole thing. I mean, the HD TV screen is impressively huge, but even the fact that I could now play video games on a huge TV wasn’t really all that exciting.

What ultimately impressed me (besides the crystal clarity of Blu-Ray movies) was the speaker set-up Dad bought. The speakers are actually optimized for listening to classical music, but they are of outrageous quality. We watched the new Indiana Jones movie on Blu-Ray and it was seriously theater-like sound. The subwoofer was of ridiculously high quality. It did more than simply shake the floor, though it did do that well, I must say.

So, in short, what the system is capable of aurally is what impressed me the most. Can’t wait to see what this bastard can do with metal. Um, when no one else is around. Preferably in the whole neighborhood.

Speaking of the Indiana Jones movie, it got reasonable reviews but many people bitched about how it wasn’t as good as the previous three. First of all, nostalgia is a powerful lens. I watched the other three movies recently in preparation to see the fourth, and in terms of writing, direction, implausibility of action sequences, acting ability, or plot, it was just as good as the other three. I think we expected less of our movies back in the day. Now we expect too much.

When I go to the movies these days, and I see an action movie like Iron Man, all I’m expecting is to have a good time. You can’t have The Dark Knight every time. Apparently we’re lucky to get a movie like that every couple of years. So when I sat down to watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I expected a semi-mysterious plot overarching a series of unrealistic fights and action sequences in exotic locales, and that the movie would never be boring.

That’s exactly what I got. Would I nominate it for an Academy Award? Of course not. But I had a good time and it seems like as good of an Indy movie as we could possibly expect after a gulf of twenty years.

Later.

Weird Poetry XV: Death of a Computer

I cannot seem to sleep tonight
For though I have shut off the light
My PC moans and groans away
As if this is its dying day

The case fan whines as if possessed
The sound indeed denies me rest
But if I turned it off, instead
It would be permanently dead

Image persistence like a book
I see three screens each time I look
The pixels dying left and right
Accentuate the dimming light

This piece of junk is old, and well
I’d like to send it straight to hell
But cut off from the internet?
Insomnia’s a safer bet.

Speed Screed: Immortality

How about a little musing on the idea of being immortal? I firmly believe that we could probably keep a person alive more or less indefinitely in some fashion within 200 years or so. Maybe sooner, if people don’t keep stepping all over stem cell research. Now I’m just saying one person, and probably at incredible cost.

The most obvious thing would be to use stem cells to continually clone new organs and so forth for the person, but that’s still not going to help with old bones, and then there’s the brain, aging away with no ability to clone a new one. Not to mention organ transplants involve a lot of trauma. I suspect we would eventually nail a more elegant way to go about having the body regenerate itself, as it seems that people mostly die when things go wrong, due to dna getting mutated or some rna transcriptor making some kind of one in a billion error. Perhaps we can reset the cell clocks, in a manner of speaking, using crazy cocktails of rna inhibitors and nanotechnology. In any case, as we learn more about processes on the cellular level, the more we can know about keeping things running ad infinitum. I really think this is far from impossible.

I imagine the process would be prohibitively expensive, even a long time after they’ve figured out a way to essentially give your body a full rejuvenation. It’s possible you’d have to go in once a month for a “free-radical extraction” or some such to keep the process humming along. Who knows?

Other than spitting in the eye of God (who I think would be impressed, and not angry, or at least he’d be impressed if he didn’t see it coming, which of course he did), immortality raises some interesting philosophical questions, many of which I am deeply unqualified to answer. Were everyone immortal, for example, would coming-of-age be a personal choice rather than a socially mandated occurrence? After all, if one is living forever there is no reason why one period of life should end and another begin. You could essentially dick around until you were bored with being a kid (perhaps physically as well as mentally, depending on whether the treatment freezes time or isn’t viable until one reaches physical maturity).

As a side note, the whole idea of cloning someone and transferring consciousness to the clone is pretty much spiritually based, since there is no reason to assume continuity of consciousness, or indeed that consciousness is a product of anything but the functioning of the brain. That would mean, I imagine, that if they transplanted your physical brain into a new body somehow you would probably have continuity of consciousness once you were resuscitated. Anyway, fascinating idea. I’m sure I’ll be long dead before they get the hang of it. Oh well. You win some you lose some.

Today’s Rave: 2000+ Hits

Well, well, well. Thanks to my loyal and incomprehensible following, I have now exceeded 2008 hits. That means that I have more hits than years since Christ’s birth. What does this mean? Absolutely nothing.

The thing about writing a weblog is that it is much easier to be better than most, but hard to be as good as the best. I’m not some goth kid talking about the depths of despair, or some spoiled bitch complaining about the sandwich she had yesterday. I try to portray myself as someone who has some idea of what’s going on, and try to use fury to make up for my lack of genuine authority. The trick? It often works, strangely enough. But most likely, you come here because you agree with my points, and no one likes anything more than reading something by someone they agree with. As much as I’d like to think I’m helping people to think critically, I’m sure that’s fatuous bullshit and I’m preaching to the choir.

I’m just some crank railing on the irritation du jour. However, I have gotten enough hits to know that this project is not doomed to more than mild obscurity, and clearly some people are genuinely entertained by my angry invective. And some by my strange poetry, which appeared essentially when I couldn’t think of anything to write about. Believe me when I say that writing a poem is much easier than writing a rant, since you don’t have to try and make any cogent points. At least not necessarily.

As the massive hit and comment influx from my post about hating on magic tricks has demonstrated, the eclecticism of this project is its greatest strength. Just because I’m not qualified to talk about something doesn’t stop me. No sir. I’ll read Wikipedia for a few minutes to make sure I’m not accidentally making stuff up or am completely wrong, and then it’s off to the races.

Truly, a blog is vanity at its core, and I make no attempt to hide that I think my opinions are valuable. Let me assure you that they mostly aren’t. Still, people are paid to give their opinions at the New York Times. The Op-Ed page is people making cogent arguments with little admission of the points the opposing side has, mostly because they operate under the assumption that they don’t have any. If you agree, you love them to death. If you don’t, you probably claim bias. After all, the Op-Ed sections isn’t news, and yet it’s undoubtedly the most popular section of the Times.

The point I’m trying to make here is that there are a hundred thousand places where you could go to hear people angrily ranting about things you agree with. So let me just extend a humble thank you for coming here, to listen to me.

Later.

Today’s Rant: Youtube Comments

This may be the most snooty entry I have yet, but quite frankly, nothing depresses and enrages me more than the quality of discourse surrounding 90% of Youtube videos. This is a singular problem that anonymous communication seems to cause.

I will admit that many of the videos are of astoundingly low quality in terms of content, so perhaps the asinine exchanges of gay accusations to follow are only a natural product of the terrible video itself. Nevertheless, in many other area of anonymous or semi-anonymous discourse (such as forums, bulletin boards, etc.) moderators are deployed to keep things civil and ban arrogant dicks who apparently cop a wicked buzz from insulting people they’ve never met and know nothing about.

In Youtube, though, all bets are off. This is the bottom of the nearly bottomless chum bucket of internet forums. Anyone who tries to say anything even moderately relevant will be drowned in a sea of casual hatred and near-illiterate ramblings. I fear for the literacy rate of our country when people can’t spell words like “when” correctly. The only source of moderation is from the posters themselves; if enough people label a comment “irrelevant” it is blocked visually, though you can still click on it to read it if you want. Since most of these people are the same people spewing flaming gibberish at their imagined foes, you can guess that this feature is not used very often.

There seems to be a virtual age reduction that occurs on the internet. I see many posts that are so fatuous, stupid, or poorly spelled that I have to think they were posted by a ten-year old. I would venture to guess that half of them actually are posted by ten-year olds, and I am frankly disgusted by their use of terminology that would make a sailor blush. Of course they picked these hate-mongering (and often racist) words from the selfsame forum. Figures. But the other half are probably teenagers of all ages and description who revert to little whining babies when suddenly they don’t have to take responsibility for their actions. This is a sensible conclusion to draw, if you make the assumption that people are basically assholes. I’m still on the fence about this one. I’ve met some genuinely nice people now and again. A rare breed, perhaps.

By the same token, one of my friends (Mike Wakcher, creator of circlerversussquare.com) often tries to have an intelligent conversation about his web comics in so-called “art” forums, where people are supposedly gathering to actually have a real discussion, weighing things like pros and cons and defending their points of view with things like facts, and making it clear when something is an opinion. He has had very little luck finding people who don’t take offense when he tries to defend himself intellectually against their comments. Let me make this clear: these people are offended that Mike is attempting to have a rational discussion as opposed to simply blithely accepting their poorly reasoned commentary. The whole process for them is an emotional one, not a rational one, so they are often flabbergasted when Mike easily reasons their point away.

You would think that casting aside all manners and good sense would be liberating at first but boring after a while. But it appears to be going strong. The only other solution is that there are only a few genuine adults online and it is otherwise infested with actual 10 year-old boys. I put it past 10 year-old girls to give a damn about insulting people anonymously. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Today’s Rant: What to Worry About

Why are people fixated on stupid things re: the candidates rather than things of substantive worth? Whether it’s Barrack or Hilary, I no longer care. Let’s just address issues that need to be addressed:

1) The Iraq “War.” Immediate and unconditional withdrawal may not be the best solution. I no longer care. I don’t believe we need to take moral responsibility for someone else’s (W’s) immoral mistakes. It wasn’t “right” to invade in the first place, I therefore think it is a moot point whether staying is “right.” As they say, two wrongs don’t make a right. Iraq is unsurprisingly using us a crutch to conduct a civil war, and it’s just about time we let them kill each other and get out of the way. It’ll be so volatile that I don’t think Iraq would be much of a threat for a while anyway.

2) Oil Dependency/Green Energy. This is so goddamn huge and people still aren’t talking about it. Getting other sources of energy and cranking up fuel efficiency on cars would seriously help national security, since our petrodollars will not be landing directly in the hands of those who wish us harm. It just so happens that finding alternate sources of energy and reducing our oil usage goes hand in hand. Who’d have imagined?
Let’s start spending money here. Investing heavily in green and alternate energy would also give a nice boost to our ailing economy.

3) Recession. This is no surprise, what with the collapse of various markets and the preposterous “shadow banking system.” What additional regulations will be applied in the future? (McCain says that they will regulate themselves, which is hilarious since this crisis is precisely the result of that. What an asshole.) What can we do to give a shot in the arm to our economy? A new PWA focusing on green energy projects. How about that? If only our government could claw its way out of the pocket of the oil industry. So corrupt and so stereotypically so.

4) Health care. This may have to wait, given the magnitude of the other crises, but as much as I’m still behind Barack, Hilary clearly has the better plan for health care, and at least there I will be happy if she ends up grabbing the nomination. Practically every other developed country has universal health care. It’s time we got out of the pockets of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries too. In fact, all of these can be traced back to:

5) CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM. As my dad has often and correctly insisted, many of these woes would be solved if would-be politicians were not beholden to special interest groups who therefore dictate their platform instead of any of these wholesome alternatives:

a) common sense

b) the wellbeing of their constituents

c) any sort of principle whatsoever

I hope Barack gets his foot in the door, since I honestly think he’s the only person that would even bother with that last line. But maybe he (or Hilary) will get Edwards as his running mate. Oh man. I wish Edwards was the nominee instead of either of the current people. He would actually solve some of this stuff, because he understands what the root of the problem is. Well, he might still be around in 4 years if McCain miraculously. I just don’t know how much more punishment our poor nation can take. Time and time again, I look over to Europe and wonder if, in this day and age, that’s where I belong. People use common sense over there.

Today’s Rant: Big Oil

Does anything piss people off more than huge prices for gas? I can think of one thing. When oil companies post record profits and then give a “who, me?” shrug when lawmakers point the old finger at them and ask why they need to make so much goddamn money, especially when they refuse to invest some of their capital in (gasp) renewable energy sources.

Now, I will admit, the era of cheap oil is over, and I would be willing (in theory only, as I don’t own a car) to pay even another buck or two per gallon in taxes if I knew that that money was going directly into a government fund for alternate energy research and development. As it stands, oil companies refuse to acknowledge that oil won’t last forever, and just sit idly by and rake in the cash while energy doomsday approaches at terminal velocity.

Any company with half a brain would realize that if they are tapping a limited resource, i.e. fossil fuels, and if they want to think about more than next quarter’s profit margin (a mighty intellectual feat for some of these greedy CEOs) they’ll realize that it behooves them to invest in long-term renewable energy sources so their company doesn’t collapse around them fifty years from now when suddenly we’re entirely out of oil. Somehow I think that a multi-hundred-million dollar paycheck somewhat deadens you to concerns like that. Call it a hunch.

Why a company like Shell wouldn’t want to invest its billions of dollars in becoming a worldwide leader in alternate energy sources is a complete mystery to me. Aren’t people motivated to get ahead of the competition? If you, unlike all your myopic competitors, actually consider the long term, you’ll have a goddamn monopoly on renewable energy twenty years from now because they were all too lazy to actually carve out any sort of genuine future for themselves. Next quarter, next quarter. How much can we increase our stock prices?

And let’s not forget that we fund terrorism indirectly with our oil obsession. If America didn’t have to lean on the Middle East like a crutch we would see much less money mysteriously making its way into the hands of Islamic extremists.

Oil companies are big scaredy-cats. They don’t want to invest any money in anything that doesn’t have a guaranteed return. The only thing they know is oil, so they invest in getting more. It’s not like they can’t afford to take risks. Give me a break.\

Also oil companies can’t just sit around and shrug when there are issues like the ones we are having here. It’s more than just free market capitalism at work; oil companies literally provide the modern world with what it needs to keep whizzing along. You can’t be a complete asshole with something that’s so blatantly necessary for the functioning of civilized society. Gasoline is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for billions of people. Stop acting like it’s some sort of god-given right to gouge the hell out of people because you’re providing a luxury.

These bloated, next-quarter driven American companies pretty much showcase the worst things about America. The only responsibility any corporation has is to its bottom line. No wonder Toyota has utterly replaced the American automakers; while Toyota actually plans ahead for things like oil becoming more expensive over time, Ford and GM refused to get with the times and rightly they have been punished for it. Toyota cranks out cheap, fuel efficient cars, whereas the best GM can do is offer to give you free gas for a year just to sell their Hummers. Absolute idiots.

I think its a crying shame that so many hardworking employees at these companies got laid off because of the inability of their executives to do anything remotely intelligent. It’s not the workers’ fault that the only thing the execs can see is the chart with an arrow sloping upwards. Down is bad. It doesn’t matter if it’s down for two years and then up for the next 10, down is bad. Always. God I hate these people. Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

I would love nothing more than to see these moronic companies come crashing down but they take so many innocent people with them. All of the ordinary employees and investors have to pay for the board of directors’ willful blindness to simple facts.

This is why corporate America disgusts me so much. Small companies actually have common sense and maneuverability. It would be worth working at one even if you got paid less, believe me.

Today’s Rave: Link

My article today will be about who is possibly in my eyes the best video game hero ever created: Link, of the Legend of Zelda series fame. I will try to limit ridiculous fanboy-style commentary as severely as I possibly can, and attempt to discuss his qualities in an informative style, in the highly likely case that you’re not a Nintendo fiend (like I am). But first, an aside.

I could not be happier with my Wii. Holding out for it was absolutely worth it. I acquired it without sacrificing my principles vis paying too much for it, and now Twilight Princess is shaping up to be the best Zelda game to date. My brother long ago threw up his hands and said, “Fuck the Wii, man. Nintendo botched the launch. Just get a 360, there are a bunch of great games for it.” Both true. However, no game from either of the Nintendo’s competitors or their monstrous cast of third-party developers will ever have the same impact as games made by Nintendo. When you play a canon game (not a sports game based on it) from one of the Nintendo series (Metroid, Zelda, Mario) it absolutely bleeds old-school qualities.

It just feels like these are people who understand what it is to make a thoroughly complete game experience from start to finish.  Here I am, at work, fantasizing about playing Zelda again. I can’t remember the last time when I was so tightly gripped in the narrative flow of a game. I have to see what happens next! I haven’t been this excited about any game in recent memory.

So, onto the hero of said game, Link. One of Link’s greatest idiosyncracies is that he is the star of a game series that does not include his name in the title. (A Link to the Past aside, which is an amusing pun.) The Legend of Zelda would, you’d think, be about Zelda, but she’s usually fairly peripheral. Yes, she’s a pivotal character in certain games, but Link does 95% of the actual work. He goes and heroes it up, risks his life a hundred different ways.

So if you’re not aware of the whole Zelda mythos, it nearly always involves the Triforce, so called because there are three holy triangles that represent one of each of the goddesses who created the world: Power, Courage, and Wisdom. Generally the story revolves around the three people who control or represent each of them: Ganon controls Power, Zelda controls Wisdom, and Link controls Courage. Seems like Link gets the short shrift, but as a matter of fact Courage is almost always displayed to be the number one factor in overcoming the inevitably insurmountable odds. Link, as I’ve said, crawls through dungeon after dungeon, steadily collecting the item d’jour he needs to stop the world from being consumed by some sort of evil. Sounds formulaic, and it is in a sense. The difference is that Nintendo is always able to put a new twist on an old formula. One of my friends has said he sees the series as essentially re-tellings of the same basic tale, embellished by time and different storytellers. After some thought, I would have to agree with his take on it.

What makes Link so cool, in my opinion, is the fact that he is so extremely non-chalant about virtually everything. He moves with a purpose, but he performs heroic acts as if they were pretty much nothing special. And Link is Mr. Hero Archetype; he conforms to practically every heroic qualification that Joseph Campbell figured out.

There’s also a more intangible quality about the series that uses your understanding of the Zelda formula. It’s about the only adventure game I’ve ever played that actually instills you with some sense of destiny. A lot of character will say things deliberately designed to make you feel the weight of the journey ahead of you.

And the newest incarnation of Link vis in Twilight Princess is an order of magnitude more badass than in previous games. There are so many little upgrades to how he interacts with the environment. If he’s in combat, he backflips off his horse to dismount. If you sheath your sword right after killing an enemy, he does a stylish flourish. It’s so damn cinematic. It’s little things like that, where I feel like Nintendo thought to themselves “Hey this is cool. Fans will like this. Let’s put it in,” that really puts games by Nintendo into the upper ranks.

So in summation, I am a huge fan of the Zelda franchise. Cough. Well, a better summation would be that whenever I play Zelda, I feel like I’m playing a game with some real history and weight. It feels like a really heroic epic, and not just some cookie cutter fantasy game that tries to invent a new mythos out of thin air.

Okay, that’s enough. Wii: awesome. Zelda: great. Tomorrow: more interesting article.

Today’s Rave: Monday Musings

I’m in an inexplicably good mood today. It must be the fact that I was pissed off on a Friday; it has to even out by giving me an unusual feel-good Monday. Plus I saw an old pal on Friday night. Shameless plug: Andrew Janss (the aforementioned old pal) is the cellist in the Escher Quartet. I think they’re going to have their own website soon, but here’s a bit of info on them:

http://www.kirshdem.com/artist.php?id=escher

They were playing up in Ravinia on Friday night and I checked it out once Janss brought it to my attention the same day. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to; absolutely riveting intensity and incredible chemistry. The selection was fabulous and decidedly modern; a few atonal and quasi-atonal selections along with some early Ravel and a few relative unknowns rounded out the program. I think quartets are the best form of string music; you can hear the distinct character of each instrument, and the chemistry between the players is a make-or-break proposition, unlike in an orchestra where the whole thing is much less intimate. The Escher Quartet made furiously technical sections grab you with their sheer force and brilliance, and yet they had great control of the slower, nuanced sections of the pieces as well. If you’re at all a classical music buff, and even if you’re not, you owe it to yourself to check these amazing musicians out; it is a rare treat to hear people this young sound so good, and you can only imagine what they’ll sound like in just a few years’ time!

Additional allowances for my good mood must be made by my enjoyment of finally getting to play the new (read: old) Zelda game on Wii yesterday. Wii is essentially a powered-up Gamecube, so there was nothing graphically astonishing about the game, in general it just looks a lot nicer with better textures and animations. I didn’t buy a Wii for the graphics (obviously) so I was not disappointed.

And finally, I miraculously managed to nab 10+ hours of sleep on Saturday night, which, although I was in super-groggy mode for essentially all of Sunday, set me up nicely to not take the daylight savings time hit as badly as I would have otherwise. Now I’m just back to a mild state of delirium, rather than super-crazy near-hallucination delirium.

All in all I feel like I’ve regained some semblance of a positive attitude. I also set out to write a metal album which is coming along fabulously.

This read like a typical self-possessed teenage blog entry today. Expect greater things from me later this week.