the bblog

So I went to MinecraftCon 2010. It was wet.

In a masterpiece of planning and foresight, the Minecraft forums decided to hold it in a Seattle park in early September.

The occasion was, of course, that the man himself was in town to meet with a software company, widely presumed to be Valve. It is, of course, just as likely that he was meeting with Microsoft, but I'll reserve judgment, given my lousy track record predicting the moves of the game industry.

Notch was indeed in attendance, as promised.

As well as a creeper cosplayer.

The maker was too much of a wuss to forge through the crowd to get the head signed, so I interceded for him.

I'm uploading this now from a Mod Pizza outside of the park. More later.

There isn't quite anything like Plain Sight.

The game is an indie FPS about robots with swords who kill each other and then blow up.

I hate falling back on the old cliche of starting off with a confusing description, but, well. Plain Sight is different. By no means derivative, which is not something you can say of the AAA titles, as I have complained of, at length, previously.

Plain Sight is cel-shaded pretty, in the zero-budget indie way; sparse, elegant visuals as a result of not having enough money to clutter up the screen.

Its instructive to compare, as in, "one of these things is not like the other", the orbital "mechanics" of Plain Sight to the venerable Orbiter, which came out ten years ago, and has been succeeded by... nothing at all. If you're one of the two or three people who want a dead accurate spaceflight simulator, then you download Orbiter, and you'll damn well be happy with it. It reminds me of nothing more than the people who were looking for a semi-realistic tactical FPS, started playing Counter-Strike in 2003, and then... never stopped.

To this day, CS 1.6 is the third most played multiplayer game on Steam. The third. A seven year old game.

The second most played game is Counter-Strike:Source.

Plain Sight is not a genre installment, like the endless list of AAA first person shooters who periodically wash over /v/, it is a genre definer.

You want a train simulator? You play RailWorks. You want a war simulator? You play Arma II. You want to play a tank simulator? You play Kharkov 1942. (Or something a bit more old school.) You want Starcraft, but less ugly? You play Starcraft 2, which I'm not going to link, because it's friggin' Starcraft 2.

And if you want to play something like Plain Sight, you're... pretty much stuck with Plain Sight. There is, again, nothing like it.

It is beautiful, extraordinary, but it's not perfect. For one, the game mechanics are oddly tilted.

When one of the aforementioned robots kills another robot with an aforementioned sword, it gains a unit of energy, which is the unit of scoring. Energy is points. But those are not points in the bank, no, in order to convert them into score you have to self-destruct.

The aforementioned blowing up.

Of course, if that was it, then you would immediately kill yourself after scoring a unit of energy. Except that if you manage to kill someone in your explosion, then you get twice as many points. Kill two people? Three times as many points.

And if you're killed before exploding, then whoever kills you gets all your energy.

This is the diabolical twist. You want to get as many points as possible before exploding, and catch as many people as possible in the explosion, except there's an excruciating delay between pressing the kamikaze button and actually detonating, a delay during which you are completely helpless. And the more unbanked energy you have, the bigger you become, and the brighter and more obvious your vapor trail becomes.

So far, so good. No, well, deviously twisted, but whatever. But here's where Beatnik stumbles.

Once banked, energy permanently counts towards your final score. But you can then spend that money on perks, like faster movement speed, double jumping, and longer lock-on radius.

This is absolutely poisonous. An upgraded player is significantly more dangerous, and the people with lots of banked energy are precisely those who you don't want to have gameplay advantages, since they're the ones who are the most skilled.

This is bad. It gets worse.

There is absolutely no visual difference between an unupgraded player and a player who can jump in the air twice, float, kill you from twice the normal charge distance, and erect an unbreakable energy shield at command.

Good games developers, like, uh, Valve, go to enormous lengths to make it easy to identify different types of threats at long range, mostly because it is very not fun to gamble on how dangerous an enemy is.

Despite these enormous difficulties, Plain Sight is still fun. And here's some good news: Until midnight, August 27th, it's only two dollars.

You can pay more than that for a candy bar. Hell, you can pay more than that for a see through horse that doesn't actually exist.

So buy Plain Sight, and do it now.

It recently came to my attention that the classic webcomics-criticism blog Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad has bought the farm. In John Solomon's memory, I'm going to rip the shit out of Subnormality, a webcomic by one "Winston Rowntree", which may or may not deserve it. You decide! Admire this page, chosen not particularly at random.

I don't know about you, but I don't think it's half bad. It's of classic illustrated story form, with drawings accompanying text. The hyperbole is overwrought, but overall, it's competent. There are definitely worse webcomics.

With the comic before that, everything falls to shit.

A specific criticism: The punchline doesn't make any sense. The punchline that is telegraphed wasn't particularly funny, but made a certain kind of har har, Reagan rapping, sense. But in the same manner that reverse stupidity is not intelligence, adding a shocking reversal to a not terribly funny punchline causes it to make no sense at all. Just what is Winston saying here? That Reagan was literally a twenty foot tall rapper, and Margaret Thatcher was a space alien that could summon ICBMs?

Seriously?

A general criticism: There are too many words.

Let me start this off[*] by saying that I have only contempt for people who complain about verbosity. As a person who regularly churns out huge doorstoppers, I cannot help but be a fan of talking a lot. It is certainly possible to be overly verbose, but some ideas are just plain complicated, and have to be explained at length.

But certain mediums are brutally unsuited for long form writing. Viz, the visual ones; movies and comics.

In movies, this is plain to see, inherent in time constraints. A movie is primarily limited by the bladders of the audience. Someone reading text out loud, at a moderate speed, will average something like 3500 words an hour.

This is slow. The audiobook version of Harry Potter 5 is 27 hours. Cryptonomicon is 42. (One can immediately see that Cryptonomicon is the superior book.) You can save quite a lot of time by just panning across a scene, instead of devoting a couple pages to it, but you still have to have actors talking at each other.

And so, in the conversion to screenplay form, a novel will usually end up as about 8,000 words, by excising subplots, redundant characters, the hundred page rant about the evils of capitalism that brings the second act to a halt; as well as subtlety, theme, or anything that made the novel good.

This, incidentally, is about the length of a short story, which, incidentally, is why the short story market imploded around the time Hollywood took off. All the short story writers became screenplay writers, and all the people who read short stories started watching movies instead.

But we're getting away from the point, which is that Subnormality is far, far too verbose for the comic form. It's just got too many words per panel.

This has a number of knock-on effects. For one, the emotional tone of all the words in a speech bubble have to remain about the same, or else the expression on the face of the character becomes incongruous. This can be seen in the third panel of this Penny-Arcade strip. What is being said conflicts with what the character is showing.

Winston appears to be aware of this, jiving with his general competence everywhere else. Unfortunately, the only way to work around this is to write bland dialog. This can be worked around by putting all the talking characters off-screen, like this one but that is of... limited utility. (Full disclosure: I laughed so hard at that one that there may have been some drooling.) You can also just have one character delivering a monologue, with no actions, and no dialog, like this one. That works, and works fairly well, but there's just not a whole lot you can do in that format. And, again, there's no emotional range, which is why all the characters tend to end up wearing expressions of dull surprise.

Note: This is not at all the same thing as "talking a lot". Watchmen probably has an entire novel's worth of words in it, that's cool. Because it's in comic form, with a sane number of words per panel. As I have already said, I like Subnormality page 514, which happens to have a lot of words in it. What's the difference between page 514, which is good, and page 513, which sucks?

Paragraphs. The text in page 514 is in prose format, with line breaks, and paragraphs. The text in page 513 is in giant blocks, in tiny squint-o-vision font. When Winston crams tomes of text into speech bubbles, he is not being verbose, he is being inept. End note.

The second problem is that this results in wasteful storytelling. For an example, look dis.

Wow, that's a lot of words. Let's count the number of words in the eighth panel... and I get 317. Just counting the dialog-heavy panels, and rounding down, that's 2500 words. Uncondensed, since Bruno (No seriously, that's his name!) is summarizing, that's maybe 6000-8000 words. A full short story, a hundred page graphic novel.

In one page. What the fuck? Why are you doing this?

Think what it would be like! First ten pages, you're in orbit with the spess mehreens, some worldbuilding, some subtle backstory, next ten pages, they go down to the surface, introduce the planet itself, some speculation on how a dead world would end up with so much oil, maybe a hint that All Is Not As It seems, next ten pages, the first night, all hell breaks looks, psychedelic horror dreamscape, (which Winston loves drawing etc, etc. That wouldn't be bad!

It wouldn't be good, though. I've got some problems with the story. For one, it's eye-crossingly retarded, postulating a number of incredibly stupid things, most notably, that transporting oil over interstellar distances is profitable, a position that is, to put it lightly, inconsistent with reality. (1.3 MiB pdf. Punchline on page 10.)[**] Plus, he implies we're using an oil-based economy, even after said oil runs out. Ha ha, really?

An aside: What's with Winston and the "there's a lot of ghosts" theme? Also, assuming there's an even twelve billion of baby chick ghosts, outnumbering the human race 2 to 1, then that's one ghost every 42.5 square meters. Not exactly a "carpet". Also: "a level of death unprecedented in nature"? Are we not counting entropy, death by old age, the inevitable death which awaits us all? Because that's a fun one.

Getting back to the story at hand...

Asteroid impacts are rare, but the Earth is old. Over its lifespan it has been repeatedly smashed with terrifyingly huge asteroids, an event that is so common that evidence for it is hard to find, each wiping out trillions of lives at a time. There's been five events where half of all species alive at the time went extinct, were entirely wiped out, and that's just the ones we know of, because before 542 million years ago, they didn't leave behind bodies for us to count!

Yet there are no legions of ghosts carpeting the Earth, furious at how their lives were cut short.

The basic foundation of fantasy (because this sure as hell isn't science fiction) is internal consistency. If something happens for a reason, then it has to happen for the same reason, everywhere.

And this isn't counting that you wouldn't get oil this way. Oil formation is kinda complicated, requiring a few more things than "dead animals", such as suitable rock formations, a certain kind of anaerobic decomposition, etc, etc.

And and this isn't counting that the proximate result of sticking a planet in a time acceleration field is the mother of all ice ages. Accelerate time by a million times, and you reduce the intensity of infalling light by a million times.

First the water would freeze out of the atmosphere, then the oxygen, then the nitrogen. A snowball world, far too cold to sustain any atmosphere at all. Does this sound like the kind of place where mudslides happen?

This all takes place while the planet gently drifts out of the solar system. Accelerate time by a million times, and you reduce inertia by a million times. This "plan" doesn't even begin to make sense.

Speaking of basic factual errors, this comic. 18 years? If you're going to make a joke based on the speed of light, check to make sure that the solar system isn't 36 light years wide. Or how this comic assumes that technology can be banned. The example used in the comic, and I am not kidding, are nuclear weapons. Which nobody has ever misused, right?

He then goes on to assume the existence of both free will and predestination, simultaneously!

This isn't even mentioning Winston's habit of making bizarrely pointless comics. Ha ha, reusable envelopes are hilarious! Except for the point where you forgot to actually write a joke. That makes even less sense than it would in context, since it's part of an extended riff, but even when even considering it as a whole it just isn't funny.

But since Winston obviously wants to be a political cartoonist, what with his taste for captions and subtle humor, he could do well by emulating the greatest political cartoonist in the history of the world, Tim Kreider, who has a habit of appending multi-thousand-word artist's statements to cartoons.

That way you get the best of both words, saving the complex ideas for the essay, and the luscious breasts for the comic. (Apparently Winston liked that idea so much he did it twice. What's the punchline for either of these? Ha ha, attractive women are attractive?)

Another webcomic that operates using this model is the venerable Penny Arcade, where indeed the first thing you see when you visit their site is the essay, and then you have to click a link to see the comic.

A webcomic along those lines is a webcomic I'd read. Heck, I might even buy a printed collection, a monumental act of faith I have invested in very few comics. Subnormality could be one of them!

If only it didn't suck.

*: "No offense, but those pants make you look, like, super fat. Five thousand calories a day fat. Medical emergency fat. Fatty fat fat fat fat."

**: See also: The Myth Of The Starship, by Charles Stross. Punchline: Sublight starships as we think of them do not, can not, and will not ever exist, without really startling breakthroughs in quite a lot of fields.

One sentence review: Alien Swarm is L4D, except not as good, but that's okay, because it's free.

What, that isn't enough for you? Fine, have a couple dozen more sentences.

Alien Swarm is Valve's latest game... so to speak. It's actually a Source-engine port of a Unreal Tournament 2004 modification by the same name. The reason Valve is releasing such a thing is because they bought out the creators, Black Cat Games, in 2008. The reason they're releasing it for free is perhaps the more interesting question.

There's not a lot to Alien Swarm. Four classes, a dozen weapons, and exactly one campaign, spanning six maps. I played through the entire thing, on hard, in about two hours. And it wasn't a cakewalk. There were numerous failures, resulting in TPKs. Even played at this excruciating pace, it's still short.

It is a lot like L4D, with a near identical front end, UI, and play style. It's also utterly unlike L4D, in that enemy placement is completely static, exactly the same on every playthrough, which kills replayability. Short and unreplayable is not exactly a killer combination.

The story is also ludicrously cliched. You play a squad of grizzled space marines, assisted by their commanding officer over the radio, fighting a flood of aliens unwittingly let loose by a sinister megacorporation, whose many misdeeds are detailed in PDAs scattered across the place. The Citizen Kane of games it is not.

But it's still a full, commercial game. I never played the original, beyond reading the immensely amusing RPS piece on it by Quinns, but looking at old screenshots, there doesn't seem to be a lot of reuse of 3D content, which makes sense, if the levels were assembled with UT 2004 assets. All this new art costs money, and Valve is not typically in the habit of doing ludicrously unprofitable things just for the hell of it.

But they have done something like this before.

Think back, waaaay back, to 1999 when a little ole game called Team Fortress Classic was released by Valve. It too was a port of a modification for another game, it too had non-trivial original art, (though, this being 1999, games cost a lot less to develop than they do in 2010) and it too was released for absolutely nothing.

And it, too, wasn't a terribly good game.

Don't get me wrong, at the time, TFC's shit was so hot it glowed. I played a lot of TFC back in the day. But most of the maps were based on the fatally flawed CTF gamemode, the classes were about as well balanced as a bowling ball in a washing machine, (hint: there's no reason to play either Pyro or Scout) there was more grenade spam than a fatal accident at an ordinance depot, there was an entire official gamemode nobody played because it sucked so hard, the resupply system was moronic[*], and Detpacks...

The Detpack was a Demoman class feature that could destroy certain types of level geometry, and thus open up new routes, on several maps. (Off the top of my head, crossover2, warpath, and rock2) It was essentially a big bomb with a timed fuse. It wasn't a big feature, but it was somewhat important in a number of maps.

It didn't have a key bound to it. There wasn't even an option to have a key bound to it.

To use it, you had to open the developer's console and type in a command. It is hard to think of a more obscure video game feature that doesn't involve filling out a form in triplicate, or the phase of the moon.

TFC had a lot of rough edges. But it was free, and it was the very best game of its kind, so who cared?

A year later, Valve released Team Fortress 1.5, also for free, which contained all new class models, new maps, and new gamemodes. And most crucially, for a comparison to Alien Swarm, TF1.5 was created to showcase the new modding system for Half-Life, complete with working code examples. And here in 2010, Valve releases a Source engine game for free, again, along with its source code, again.

It is not hard to see where they're going with this.

*: There were ammo backpacks, which resupplied ammo, grenade backpacks, which resupplied grenades, health packs, which healed you, and armor backpacks, which resupplied armor. When you spawned, you had about half your full ammo stock and half armor, so you would have to pick up some backpacks, (Which were finite! A Heavy would have to pick up two armor backpacks, while the Scout would only need one!) as well as a grenade backpack, if you wanted a full compliment of regular and class special grenades. And these were pickups, which had a respawn interval and not an especially short one. It was not at all unusual, on a full 2fort server, to see several people sitting around in the respawn room, waiting for ammo to show up.

A few items of no particular import:

Copper2, the machine that hosts bbot.org and friends, had a hard drive failure a couple days. After arguing with serverpronto for a couple days, they replaced the hard drive, but charged me $70 to install Debian 5 on it.

Of course, I had backups, but they're ancient. The one I had for bbot.org is five months old... so I've lost two posts.

(rimshot)

Of course, I have all the source files, but importing them is tedious, so I'll add them over the next few days.

As for my E3 predictions, nobody released a hardware upgrade at all, giving me a magnificent .000 batting average. This is disappointing, in that I was proven wrong and because I love new hardware, but curious, as Sony keeps insisting that Killzone 3 will be in 3D. I really don't know how they'll deliver the doubling in FPS required for 3D gameplay, as well as the upgrade in graphics expected in a major sequel.

But hey! They're the ones running the media conglomerate, presumably they're the ones who know what they're doing, oh no wait they've lost millions of dollars on a succession of failed bets, whoops, my bad.

As for Microsoft, they renamed Natal to Kinect, (YES) and showed off a bunch of demos... none of which showed people using it sitting down. Hmm.

They also formally announced the Xbox 360 Slim, a smaller version of the 360 Fat. This is great news for Microsoft shareholders, since it costs less to produce than the former console, but can be sold for more, since it's new and shiny. Unfortunately, it features absolutely no new hardware at all... besides the memory card slots, which have been removed, just as I predicted.

Nintendo didn't do anything interesting, except talk about the 3DS, which is old news, yawn.

"Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers"

Amazon Prime is a subscription product that gives customers free two day shipping on everything they buy from Amazon. The current fee is $79/year.

These are Amazon's very best customers-- the ones who tend to make multiple purchases per month. And they are also likely to buy multiple books per month on their Kindle devices. If those users buy enough books, and Amazon gets the production costs of the Kindle down enough, Amazon can get Kindles into "millions" of people's hands without losing their shirt. At least when the goal is to break even or better over the course of a couple of years, the expected lifetime of a Kindle.

So what will be the proximate result of this story? Thousands of people signing up for Amazon Prime in the hopes of getting a free kindle. The comments section is packed with these people, fretting that they might be disqualified for not signing up early enough.

On the basis of a completely unsubstantiated rumor on a industry news site, a rumor Amazon will have no trouble denying, and not living up to.

That dry rattle you hear is Jeff Bezos cackling from atop his obsidian throne.

I'm at Metrix Create:Space. They're neat.

The sign is subtle.

The entrance is hidden.

But they do have quite the array of printers.

As well as a vending machine full of all sorts of neat things. I bought a stepper motor for $5.

There is an attractive display of 3D printer output.

As well as an attractive display of assorted attractive things.

As well as a... display... of assorted nerds.

The comparison to Jigsaw is interesting. It's much more of a hangout than Jigsaw, being a lot easier to get to, and in a residential neighborhood, but they're much more electronics oriented, without all the heavy equipment that got me to ante up for a keyed Jigsaw membership.

Cruising the bowels of the internet this morning, (ICHC, dooce, wedinator, you know, the sites I feel ashamed for even knowing that they exist.) when I came upon this gem.

Today, I realized the only reason I watched the SuperBowl is because Justin Bieber ███████ about it. I don't even like football. I had no idea what was going on the whole game. All I knew was who I was cheering for, because Justin Bieber ███████ who he was cheering for. FML

Ha ha, what a loser. Who's this Bieber guy?

Justin Drew Bieber (Born March 1, 1994) is a Canadian pop/R&B singer. He was discovered on YouTube by Scooter Braun, who later became his manager. Braun flew Bieber to Atlanta, Georgia, to consult with Usher and soon signed a record deal with Island Records, where he began his professional career.

N--no! That's not true! That's impossible!

1994! He's fifteen! A child! With a million ███████ followers!

So, inserting those censor blocks was fun.

(What censor blocks? Exactly.)

Xemacs is a great editor, and I love it to bits, but it's old, and does a lot of things in amusingly broken ways. This is mostly because it is so old that most of it was written before various APIs were nailed down, so it implemented many things by itself, then had to maintain them for backwards compatibility. This results in awful, hideous shit like their copy and paste implementation. Summary: It keeps its own clipboard, only it calls it a "ring buffer", and can have multiple entries, and is sometimes overwritten with what you just deleted because it also serves as the undo function, and it can never ever be fixed, because it would break a million other things.

Xemacs' unicode support is similarly fucked. (And unicode certainly doesn't need any help) The block character is U+2588, FULL BLOCK, and trying to input it natively was getting me lost in a maze of twisty little xmodmaps, all alike, and all inscrutable Unix bullshit that we supposedly left behind in the 90s.

So I punted, and just pasted it in, which made Xemacs colossally unhappy, and rendered not at all.

So I punted harder, opened the file in vi, and pasted it there, which worked perfectly, since all the encoding zaniness was handled by gnome-terminal, and vi just accepted the bytes.

Magic!

(Fun fact: Lucid went out of business before Bieber was even born!)

At the Feb 2010 Dorkbot Seattle meeting. Taking pictures. More later.

Later:

The first talk was by Dominic Muren, and was essentially an overview of personal manufacturing technology. Nothing I hadn't heard before, but with more minor technical inaccuracies that I wasn't nearly nebbish enough to stand up and object to.

The second talk was by Jigsaw's Willow Brugh, and again, was stuff I had already heard.

The third talk was by Matt Westervelt, who owns Metrix Wireless, (who I've bought networking gear from) runs seattlewireless.net, and whose newest venture is Metrix Create:Space, which is half coffee shop and half hacker space. His talk was mostly about bootstraping a Mendel Reprap from a Cupcake Repstrap from a cheap Chinese CNC laser cutter.

Not something I had heard of before. Quite interesting. I've been following the Reprap project for three years now, waiting for it to get good enough, and right now it's looking like it'd be a viable hackerspace build.

The third and a half talk was by Mark Ganter, and was mostly about counterfeiting feedstock for commerical 3D printers.

All in all, a good night. Now, if only Joey answered his damn phone, and I could have returned his graphic novel while I was at the University. Jeez, Joey. Jeez.

I attended the Jigsaw Renaissance hacker space open house on Saturday.

Shit was nerdy.

Jigsaw is conviently located right next to a elevated highway, and on the wrong side of the tracks, in what can be described as the "gritty" part of town. It's perfect!

The nerds are nerdy!

The desks are poorly lit!

The wiring is dangerously substandard! And the downstairs shop is entirely undocumented, since I completely forgot to take pictures of it!

For those of you who are not hip to the jive, or who didn't follow the wikipedia link in the first sentence, hacker spaces are essentially communes, but with machine tools. By becoming a member, I can build stuff I otherwise couldn't, especially now that I lack a garage.

It's pretty neat. I'll be posting about it more in the future.

(Unrelated: I wrote a script that automatically scales and uploads images, because I got tired of doing it manually. It's here, and is pretty neat, if I do say so myself.)

Edit:

I went back and got some pictures of the shop. Behold:

Beauty!