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December 9th, 2009
03:19 pm
I stumbled across this news article, and grew quickly excited as it looks like a wormhole opened up above Norway the other night.
Mysterious Blue Light.
Not only is unexplainable, but there are pictures and youtube videos of it, which is something we just didn't have back in the X Files glory days. Regardless of if it is a Russian missile or not, it is still very pretty to watch swirl about and then whoosh into nothingness.
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December 8th, 2009
04:51 pm - Crusader Kings
December is a quiet month for me during the daylight hours. School is out, and as such most of our customer interaction will only be with faculty and staff through email, with very infrequent instances of people actually coming in person to see us. In between shooting out resumes to various "real jobs" (as my mother calls them) I will need to keep myself entertained, and as such I have secretly installed a copy of Crusader Kings to be enjoyed during these quiet times. Crusader Kings is built by the people who make EU2, but instead of taking the role of a country between the 15th and 19th centuries, you take the role of a family between the 11th and 15th centuries. Your territories can shrink, you can even be banished from your homeland, but you haven't lost yet, there are still generations to go! Beware, below is pretty nerdy...
( Read more... )
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December 3rd, 2009
09:15 am
I am still relatively new to the experience of being a member of a work organization with things like an HR department, holiday "merit banquets", and an obsession with a mediocre football team with a terrible color scheme. In a few short weeks, our Christmas meal will occur. I will trundle upstairs to get a plate and perhaps watch, again, the poorly edited slide-show/poem "the Night Before Christmas" starring the sweaty, house elf-like building director going from office to office while a deadpan narrator reads from the literary genius of some long retired secretary. ("Pie" does not rhyme with "tonight"!) Among the other employees of the building I and be faced with the predicament of deciding whether to sit beside the surly, forever unhappy janitor with the endless 'Nam stories, the Sarah Palin obsessed woman, or the obnoxious orca of a woman who gets paid three times more than I do to organize stupid holiday office parties. I will share a snippet of an email about this party that she sent out to everyone:
...I’m wondering if anyone would like the idea of a non-traditional meal for Wednesday. Rather than limiting to the usual holiday food, maybe bring in favorite ethnic dishes like lasagna, tacos, chicken fried rice, curry chicken, jambalaya, etc...
My differences with this person were great before this revelation about what she and (I am assuming) others in the building think is exotic. Lasagna? Apparently any school cafeteria offers a variety of food from other cultures for her to choose from.
This presents me with a new dilemma for this year's Christmas. For one if I go I am sure to be mildly offended that they think of hot dogs as german food, yet on the other hand this provides the impish side of me the chance to educate these people. Would you like some pho, Mr. 'Nam? How about some masgouf Mrs. Mini-Palin? Why Mr. Building Director, you seem like a Hungarian goulash type of guy. Ah, and for you Ms. Orca, I cooked up some Australian Aboriginal delicacies for you: bat, opossum, even cricket. I know you are on the Atkins diet and all...
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November 30th, 2009
01:11 pm
These are some words I love, but hardly ever have the opportunity to use:
feck, bonny, ammonium, cider, corollary, postulate, apsis and periapsis (or particularly the phrase "perogee and apogee"), gherkin, phoneme, wasp, and Nunavut.
Most of the above words are best appreciated when said aloud over and over again, preferably in ridiculous accents.
Immediately after typing this I brazenly uttered "I postulate that this bonny cider would leave you feckless if you forgot your ammonium and wasp gherkin up in Nunavut."
Immediately after that, my coworker looked at me with no small amount of derisive alarm.
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November 19th, 2009
09:56 am - Worldbuilding
There is a hierarchy of Nerdom. This is not a natural order, as there is no ecosystem or balanced biosphere were everything has its place. Nerdom is more like Dante's Purgatory, a massive tiered pinnacle, an Olympus Mons rising from the florid fungal landscapes of distant Alpha Centauri.
At the base of the mountain, where the ground is rocky but still largely even, are those that indulge in a good sci-fi movie, or perhaps even watched episodes of the old Star Trek with their dad as a kid. Further up the slope are those that read such fiction, and dabble in imagining themselves at the Battle of Pellenor Fields. Even further up, amidst the slime encrusted limestone cliffs, traversing the canyons created by ancient glacial floes, dwell those that play role playing games. These polyhedron-wielding Morlocks usually dwell in the recesses of dark forbidden caves labeled with devilish names to try to ward off curious interlopers. "Dark Sun" this one is called. "GURPS" is the guttural cthonic name of this one. "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" promises to house Gollum-like mutants that will surely feast on your flesh, or perhaps just a solitary tentacle monster.
At the higher reaches of the cliffs of the RPGers are those that actually design their own settings to host their games in. They'll perhaps create a map (with or without slime-covered cliffs) for their players to explore, roughly determine a reason for fantastical gods to exist and for evil to be smitten (smoted? smited?), and then lead their players into this newly invented netherscape. They preach down from their precipice to their comrades who howl below. These beings are feared and revered by the RPGers, and given such shamanistic titles as "Game Master". Then, there are the worldbuilders.
Dark and brooding along the jagged, sheer surfaces of blacken volcanic glass, the worldbuilders' smoldering eyes seldom look down at the beings who dwell below them. Having left their cannibalistic tribes of RPGers for a solitary existence, their reptillian wings keep them warm in the howling, frosty, thin air. They breathe out great bellowing gouts of smoke. These beings might have once designed maps and settings for the specific purpose of entertainment, but then the obsession took hold. No longer satisfied by simply letting a gold piece be a gold piece, they instead have to ponder the worth of a particular country's coinage. Which denominations do they use? What are the implications of the existence of magic on currency? What is used for international trade? How abundant are these precious metals to make the coins? Where are these precious metals mined? Since that place has gold, will it not be the center of many battles and intrigues? How does that affect this neighboring country? What does that country use for coinage? AD INFINITUM.
No, there is no end to the detail that must be fleshed out. What once started as a few blobs scribbled on a paper slowly transforms into continents, countries, regions, greeting customs, legal systems, table manners, local delicacies, and more. Then there is always the possibility to not design a world that is simply static in time, but one with history, and suddenly there is a thousand years of the above questions to answer. Running out of things to flesh out? Just turn your attention to a new area on that little map. Should the RPGers below wish to use the world for their purposes of entertainment is of little interest to the worldbuilder, save for a passing amusement that the Great Sapient Madness has shaped the rituals of insects below.
I am a worldbuilder. The first time I gazed acrossed that line from simple madness to Madness-with-a-capital-M was in the latter years of highschool, when I designed a little D&D setting, and then redesigned it to show what it would be like 500 years later. It was the most in-depth a setting I had ever made, one with continents that floated on soupy clouds and world-changing wars and a new species or two. It was a simpler time for me, pastoral and tranquil and ignorant of the depths of the devilry to follow.
The world I've been building for the past several years is a monster. I have gigs of maps, including regions, landforms, religious majorities, migratory phases, and the state of countries at various times in their 5000 year lifespan. I have a 800+ year timeline and history of the events of one country's recorded history (only a general synopsis of their orally kept histories) that now spans over 60 pages of a size 8 font, and it still grows. I have a 17 page document detailing in the most abstract terms that country's calendar, festivals, entertainment, government, and genetic ancestry. I have rough equivalents for other regions so that I could tell you details, by heart, of the general way of life for probably 60% of humanity on the planet, and I've so far designed humanity to cover only about 30% of available landmass so far. I may claim that I only fill in a little piece here and there when I am bored, but how can I not be sure that I am simply bored when not crafting the the make, size, and building materials of the trade ships of the Veridian Coast, or when I am not defining the marriage ceremony performed by the painted-headed priests of the vulture god Cshen? Surely there must be an answer. Perhaps I should question Emperor Merivanon "the Bittersword" of the great Draconic Empire, or consult the faceless masked Aelvs of the north...
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November 13th, 2009
01:44 pm
As per John's request, a photo from the late Halloween party I attended last weekend...
( Read more... )
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November 12th, 2009
02:38 pm
Two fine Victorian gentlemen, equally wealthy from the windfalls of African colonisation, meet for tea and crumpets. Over their fourth crumpet, they decide to make a game out of comparing the contents of their wallets. Each is ignorant of the contents of the two wallets. The game is as follows: whoever has the least money receives the contents of the wallet of the other (in the case where the amounts are equal, nothing happens). One of the two men can reason: "Suppose that I have the amount A in my wallet. That's the maximum that I could lose. If I win (probability 0.5), the amount that I'll have in my possession at the end of the game will be more than 2A. Therefore the game is favourable to me." The other man can reason in exactly the same way. In fact, by symmetry, the game is fair. Where is the mistake in the reasoning of each man?
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November 10th, 2009
08:42 am - Harvest Moon
I loved Harvest Moon in high school. While my friends were perfecting their Counterstrike headshot, or doing yet another Protoss Carrier swarm tactic on Starcraft, I was often found ploughing my virtual fields and living the quiet life of a Japanese villager. I played other games a plenty, and Harvest Moon was by no means the majority of my playing time, but when I played it I felt that it was good for me.
You start out with a pathetic heap of a farm: a place overgrown with weeds, a field littered with stones, a tiny one room house, and a pittance of savings. Though it is spring and the town market offers a huge array of produce seeds and livestock for sale, you can only afford to buy enough turnips for one or two small parcels of your field's potential. You toil all morning trying to tame your land into some semblance of civilization, and you spend all your remaining free time in the hills, scrounging berries and tubers to supplement your income.
But what of the villagers? They want you there, openly inviting this young, silent stranger with dark hair into their lives and homes. They invite you to visit them and participate in the act of being a part of the community. One cannot forget that they have pretty young daughters as well, and there are five eligible ladies who, if not overtly interested in you, are at least willing to talk to you any time you wish. Pretty good odds for a shy kid. The fact that winning over their hearts involves repeatedly giving them presents simplifies the interactions into something completely stress-free, as wooing her with words is a difficult task for a mute Nintendo character.
Before you know it, you are bringing in huge cash crops, adding extensions to your home, and having babies with your new bride. A capitalist success story, accomplishing the American dream in an agrarian way. You now live for the holidays, training your horse and dog to be good at the races, insuring your cows' milk win all the prizes, and maintaining your friendships with a community that by now adores you. All that extra time? Just go fishing.
The virtue of the game was in that first year as a poor farmer. Everyday you'd work your little pixelated character to utter exhaustion (try to swing a ho and he would just fall over and sort of cry and sweat for a minute), so that by winter you could make a profit. The special game items you sought were not things to make life more regal and pleasant, but things to give you more endurance so you might work a little longer. All personal relationships had to be maintained by frequent, if not daily, interaction. Hard work and kindness. I even want to say "hardwork" - a compound word, a basic and necessary phrase.
The reason the game was successful in conveying its educational message was because that message was simply a byproduct of making the game. There weren't little cheerful people preaching at you in tutorials, you did not get points, the game didn't even really have an ending if you didn't want it to stop. Your rewards in the game were that you had a nice house now, that you had a wife and strangely animated little baby. No one told you that you succeeded or failed. If you wished to play the whole game earning just enough to go get drunk every night at the town bar, you could do just that*. At the time in my life while I was playing it I was sixteen and "preparing for life" with grand expectations upon me that should I become anything less than the first astronaut-president-CEO-Bodhisattva I would some how be disappointing people. I still have my N64 and the game, and once in a while the impulse to play it does come upon me, though I'd like to think that the escapism from those expectations is no longer needed.
*I actually played a game like that once... while humorous to an extent it was also very depressing.
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November 5th, 2009
02:56 pm
Having scrounged and scavenged for my meals the last couple of days out of a tenacious loathing of the act of going to the store, I find that it is unavoidable tonight. No longer are warm summer evenings about me as I head home, instead they have been replaced with autumnal darkness and headlights, headlights, headlights. So I had best take up the old rote of cataloging items needed on a napkin in the order in which they are encountered in the store: a tired invocation of ideas for meals for two and the necessities of lunches to bring to work.
Then off I will skulk to the store in my dented car with no radio, grimacing through the foggy windshield at headlights, headlights, headlights. The choice of the store which will be the source of the groceries seems trivial, but even that dark decision has a part to play. Does one choose the store with unwashed, camo-wearing white trash piling their frozen garbage in their buggy while they ignore their vacant-eyed children buzzing about them like wasps, or perhaps go across the street where the sour, undersexed faces of middle-aged housewives scowl should your buggy bump into theirs? Should you feel adventurous, you could drive a few minutes further out and go to the store where there was that stabbing the other week.
Churn through, row by row, until you've gotten everything, make your way through checkout and off back home through all the headlights, headlights, headlights. Then it is a matter of filing it all away in the cupboards and the fridge. Fruit on the bottom, bread on the top, boxes in the pantry. If you get all that done in enough time, you have yesterday's dishes to look forward to.
Yeah, just being bitter as I am tired and not well fed (3/4 a pound of gummy bears, while tasty, is not nutritious).
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November 1st, 2009
09:10 am
With the annual Halloween fiesta that we share with my brother and various Crossville people having been put off a week do to our host needing jaw surgery and a biopsy (he found out he's ok!), last night I prepared to receive a horde of trick-or-treaters. I very much live in "the hood" of Knoxville, but not the bad hood, the good one. The bad one is down on Magnolia, were the hookers and the shootings are. My hood instead is just where the black people live in Knoxville, so people assume it must be dangerous.
There are a lot of kids around here, as well. A school bus stop across the street both confirms their existence and the abundance of them, and the elementary school just 3 or 4 blocks away signifies that there are some of trick-or-treating age. As such, I prepared for an assault. Candy was attained in three times the quantity that I would normally purchase for myself, and in popular flavors and known name brands rather than the esoteric delicacies that I prefer. Kate even purchased a pumpkin, accessorized by a pair of teenie colorful gourds, which she artfully arranged on our porch. I was ready.
Imagine my disappointment then, when not a single damn kid showed up. Not a one. Not even a teenager asking for a handout. My other place across town didn't get any either, but back then I suspected that it was because it was an apartment complex filled with younger age people, and there weren't any kids around. It does make me wonder what these poor "city kids" do for Halloween. Kate suggested they go to Halloween events at their various churches, but I am sure that there are a lot of children with irreligious parents. Plus, I have been to a few of those events, and they typically have a lot less booty-to-time ratio than traditional trick-or-treating. Having to say a bible verse or mini-putt a ball into a hole in order to get chocolate is definitely not the same as running screaming through the night from porchlight to porchlight, shoving your fellow goblins and ghouls down into the begonias, and praying that the scarecrow that's been sitting on Old Mr. Crazy's porch for the last couple of weeks hasn't been secretly replaced by Old Mr. Crazy dressed up as a scarecrow, remaining very still and waiting for you...
I suppose I will have to find something to do with all this extra candy I have now. Hmm.
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