geardrops [blog]

Apparently SF Signal picked up the guest post I wrote for Jeff’s blog and decided to signal-boost it. This makes me double-plus glad, being as that was the first Guest Post Blag I’ve ever done and I was very nervous about its quality.

Perhaps I should do a series on this. Object oriented design paradigms as they pertain to characters? Compilers, Editing, And You? I already have the Five Things Algorithms Has Taught Me About Writing post.

Since I’ve been unemployed, I’ve taken to trying to be a full-time writer. Though I think I’m stretching past the full-time mark, being that I wake up, toddle straight to my laptop, begin editing, take breaks to eat and remind MrMike that I am, in fact, still alive, and then toddle to bed sometime after Unreasonable O’Clock. Though to be fair, coming off working full-time and school part-time to… nothing? I’m used to a 14-hour day. And I took two weeks off to relax (only to watch unfathomable quantities of HGTV). My brain is upset with my laziness.

Good news is The Novel will be off to betas today, and then I can begin studying for my interviews.

I suspect this is something unique to the sciences: we have to study for interviews. It’s been two years since I’ve thought about operating systems in any significant way, or compilers for that matter, and even though I’m competent at TCP/IP and the OSI model and many other things you can ask about the intarwebz, there are many terms and details and I’m not so great with words. I’m also easily confused by acronyms, which I realized when I interned in the aerospace industry. It’s hard enough when I’m dealing with a series of illogically-arranged letters, but that place often had the same set of letters translating into multiple things, requiring me to parse them in a context-sensitive way. Ugh.

And of course, there’s always the nervousness hanging over my head of “Hai guise I totes am doing this second-career thing with writing, but I promise I’m 4srs about the tech stuff too. Pie?”

The following email exchange between myself and my professor, concerning requirements for the cryptography class, is 100% accurate in its quotations.

From: me
To: Professor

Hello Professor –

I was your student last year in [class]. In my upcoming coursework I plan on taking Cryptography, and when I looked at the previous offering, I saw that you were teaching it. I was hoping to ask for your help.

I’m still a bit weak in math, as I haven’t really done much since undergrad, and struggled in your previous class with all the probability. I’m also struggling with the math in one of my current classes (Data Mining and Pattern Recognition). To prevent further struggle, I was wondering if perhaps you could tell me what kind of math I should brush up on, in order to be sufficiently prepared for Crypto?

Thanks very much!

From: Professor
To: me

Hello

As AMTH 387 Cryptology is a 300-level mathematics class, a certain level of mathematics appreciation is required, but not necessary. [emphasis mine]

A basic course in discrete mathematics or number theory should be helpful, but again it is not necessary.

Regards.

From: me
To: Professor

Hi Professor –

Thanks for your reply! So there will be no use of statistics in this class?

From: Professor
To: me

In my opinion, one of the following two requirements would suffice.

1. A likeness for things mathematical (preferable).

2. Do not dislike mathematics (less preferable alternative).

Best Regards.

In summary, my professor is THE FUCKING RIDDLER.

I decided to try an idea. The Friday Rad. Like Music Monday except I share the coolest thing I done seen on the internet all week.

CL!CK: A Lego Short Film. It’s a short film done in stop-motion, which conveys the iterative process that is creativity, with fantastic music and wonderful visual direction. Seriously, I want to shake the hand of whoever did the sound for that thing.

Of course if you follow me on twitter this sort of thing will prove utterly useless. But perhaps I have followers here that aren’t on twitter? I haven’t the mechanisms to measure these metrics. And that’s a lot of M’s.

Note to self: sort out why I can’t fscking embed youtube videos. Nothing works. Also, site redesign. I really want to get on that. Something simple.

With a bonus level at the end.

Disclaimer: If you think a game should have been on this list and it wasn’t, it’s likely I simply haven’t played it. Bear in mind, I am but one woman, and in this decade I finished high school, college, started a master’s degree, went through some roughness, moved out of my parents’ basement, and in general did shit.

Listed in no true order except that my favoritest of ever is the last one…

World of Warcraft

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve sunk too many hours of my life into this game. Even running a /played on every one of my characters across every server is inaccurate, because I’ve deleted level 25 characters for petty reasons, like not liking their name or eye color or whatever. I still miss the days of rolling through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair with nothing between me and death save a priest who likes to remind warlocks that they have healthstones and life tap is not an excuse.

Eternal Darkness

The game that clearly played too much tabletop Call of Cthulhu, persistently demanding you roll for sanity and taking particular delight in your rolling a 1. I loved how obviously this game read Poe and Lovecraft and maybe a few history books. And anybody who has played this remembers the tub. That’s all I have to say.

Metroid Prime

I’m really goddamn lucky Metroid Prime and Super Metroid came out in different decades. If I ever had to make the call between those two… well, it’d go to Super Metroid, but then I’d miss out on talking about teh darmaz surrounding Metroid Prime. The transition to 3D was ill-received by fans, until they actually played it, and then shut the hell up except for the occasional breathless utterances of gratitude. It managed to maintain the feel of Metroid, but move into a more FPS feel. Still doesn’t beat Super Metroid for Best Metroid Game Ever, but it’s been a wonderful addition to the series.

Psychonauts

Wacky art, hilarious writing, incredible character, fun, unique, yet intuitive gameplay… all of that is just longhand for “Double-Fine.” For those unfamiliar, Double-Fine is headed by Tim Schafer, who was responsible for the fun subset of LucasArts games, before Lucas decided to focus on the Star Wars IP, ride it hard and put it away wet. Schafer decided balls to that and ran off to make the same kinds of games, to the same kind of critical acclaim, but maybe weaker sales. I don’t know. Money is a mystery to me. Point is, if you missed this one, then fuck you, go fix it.

Portal

If you missed the meme, then I don’t know what to do with you. The only downside to this game is that it’s too short, and I mean this sincerely. You can roll out of bed on Saturday morning and blast this game beginning-to-end in the time it takes the WBKids morning line-up to wrap (make sure your DVR records Ben 10). Made as a final project by some clever assholes at DigiPen, music by Jonathan Coulton, this is the cleverest game to come out in some time. If you don’t understand, watch the trailer.

Team Fortress 2

Look, I don’t even like shooters. It’s thanks to the afore-mentioned Metroid Prime that I can even play in the first-person view. But this game rocked me, and I never would have played it if it wasn’t for the Orange Box. Personally, I favored the Doctor, because it’s fun keeping a rampaging Heavy alive, and if he drops due to sheer idiocy (seen it happen) I can sweep in with my needle gun and hacksaw and handle bidnizz (trufax). The trailers and ads for this game are hilarious, and worth your time searching for on the toobz.

Professor Layton

Deliriously entertaining, especially when you’re sitting in line at PAX. My best memory for this game is being stuck on one puzzle for a half hour, and bringing it to the PAX help desk. The Enforcer solved it for me, admitting he, too, was stuck on it for forty-five minutes before getting it. Kind of him. A collection of fun brainteaser puzzles with quaint art and a cute mystery. If you have a DS and you don’t have this game (there’s two now) you’re doing it wrong.

Super Smash Brothers: Melee

All I have to say is I was a motherfucker with Peach, Kirby, and Jigglypuff.

Soul Cailbur 2

Seung Mina. Taki. Sophitia. Talim. Raphael. Astaroth. Voldo. Ivy. Yoshimitsu. Cervantes. Link on the GameCube. Spawn on the XBox. Nobody remembers who was on the PS2, but that’s okay, doesn’t matter, why would you ever play a fighter game with anything that isn’t the GCN controller? (More on this later.) I rocked this game in arcades and on the Dreamcast for hours on end, and continued to do so on the GameCube. A good, fun 3D fighter, well executed.

Resident Evil 4

If you haven’t played this, kill yourself. You’ve missed out on the rebirth of the Resident Evil series, and the template from which RE5 was lazily lifted. If you wonder how much I loved this game, note that I named my beta fish Leon Kennedy. Yeah. That happened.

Beyond Good and Evil

I’ll rate this not only as one of the top games of the past decade, but also one of the most ignored. It enjoyed a renaissance some years down the line, but not enough to justify the dust it collected on shelves. It’s action-adventure, it’s stealth, it’s alien abduction and government conspiracy, it’s quirky, fun, and a hell of a good time. And, by now, it’s got to be super-cheap.

Rockband

Do I even need to say it?

Shadow of the Colossus

Made by the guys who gave us Ico (as if you couldn’t tell from the art style) this game is everything that is good about games, condensed. Boss battle after boss battle, and each one is fun. There’s really nothing bad to be said about this game. Anyone I know who has played it has fallen head-over-heels in love with it.

Katamari Damacy

Try explaining this game to someone, and they’ll think you’re crazy. Here. I’ll try: “Your father, the King of All Cosmos, has destroyed every star in the night sky on a drunken bender. It is now up to you, the Prince of All Cosmos, to fix it. You will do so by rolling around sticky balls and picking things up and those sticky balls become stars.” Yep. And somehow this was some of the most fun, creative, unique gameplay of the year. If that don’t sell you, check out the opening theme.

Bioshock

Sure, it’s apparent the writers read Atlas Shrugged, but don’t let that deter you. Artistically rendered, wonderfully written, intense gameplay, and subtly horrifying, this game will knock you on your ass, even if you hate the FPS genre. Fort Frolic was so incredible I restarted the game just to play it again.

F-Zero: GX

If you haven’t played F-Zero before, I don’t know what to do with you. This is the pinnacle of non-realistic racers, the exact opposite of Gran Turismo. You don’t steer, you drift. The speeds you’re racing at can’t handle sharp movement. The gameplay hasn’t really changed from the original on the SNES, because it didn’t need to. Race for three laps, boost takes away from your life, power up strips to regenerate life, and boost bars to get you through the patches when you’re low on health. This was a favorite at Steak Night in college.

Mario Kart: Double Dash

There’s a divided camp here, on where this game peaked. I’m a fan of the GCN version. Others say the N64 version is superior. Either way, this is a game worth your time. Change the setting to maximize the madness that items can induce, because this game isn’t about speed, it’s about awesome upsets. As for me? I brought the Blue Sparks.

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly

This is and isn’t a rough call for me, which Fatal Frame to pick as the top. Both one and two are incredible (we’re not going to mention three). But Crimson Butterfly tips it over for me because this is the first, and thus far only, game to have ever successfully given me nightmares. The graphics here have aged beautifully. The game is wonderfully laid out, knowing just when to let you feel safe, and just when to horrify you. Pick this game up, play the first level, and then come to grips with the fact that what you have gone through is one very tiny house, and you have only fought one ghost. This? This shit right here? That was your fucking tutorial.

Silent Hill 2

There’s a reason Yahtzee called this game the pinnacle of storytelling in games. Say what you will about the controls, but when you come to story, characters, atmosphere, camera positioning, replayability, general cohesiveness of a game, this one’s hard to beat. This game has aged wonderfully, and is playable even a decade later. If you can handle creepiness and horror, this is the best of the series, very closely followed by the first. (The only reason the first loses out to the second, for me, is the controls.)

Holy hell. What a goddamn good decade in games. You don’t even realize it until you step back and try to list what came out.

BONUS LEVEL: Best Controller of the Aughts

Unlike above, this is a for-reals countdown.

Number Five: Wii

Why would someone so obviously a Nintendo fan hate the WiiMote? Because it hurts my fucking wrist, that’s why. I’ve been playing Metroid Prime 3 as of late, and I can’t play for very long because of that goddamn remote and my combination carpal tunnel and tendinitis. Terrible design, and worse because many games don’t support the optional GameCube controller. I’m a gamer. I don’t want to get off the damn couch for every game I play.

Number Four: XBox

Oddly, I’d rather use this controller than the WiiMote, and that should be saying something. My narrow hands, suitable for delicate surgeries and withdrawing lost keys from narrow crevices, are more at home wrapped around this carved-stone controller than something that requires my wrist to twitch minutely for hours on end.

Number Three: XBox 360

Hooray! Microsoft learned! Still not the best controller for prolonged gaming sessions, as my fingers are unable to curl, but the size is significantly more manageable.

Number Two: Sony

Let’s not kid ourselves, I’m lumping all Sony controllers into one because there’s been no real change over the years. Which isn’t a bad thing. A solid design, comfortable, well crafted for extended gaming sessions. The only real difficulty is the labeling of the buttons instead of making them distinct shapes. Combos are a bit hard to learn when they tell you it’s up-over XXO and you have to look down to see what that means. Still, one of the best controller designs, a solid tradition they have no reason to change.

Number One: GameCube

For my cold, wraith-like hands, nothing beats the GameCube controller. Sharp curves on the underside to allow my fingers space to curl around it, buttons placed so that combos are intuitive by touch alone, this controller is, in my opinion, the peak of controller-ness.

So today I did a very silly thing: I set myself up to donate $500 to Child’s Play.

Child’s Play Charity started in 2003 (wow, has it been that long?) when the Gentlemens of Penny Arcade, The Gabe and The Tycho, decided to use the collected power of their readership, 4.5m strong at the time (likely stronger now), and funnel it at giving toys to sick kids. It has since spiraled out of control into a million-dollar-plus charity ($1.4m last year, already over $1m this year) giving money and toys to hospitals worldwide.

Note how I said “money and toys.” At PAX this year, a story was shared of a hospital in Egypt who asked — asked, because they did not want to be dishonest about where the funds were going — to buy paint for the walls. Paint. So the children aren’t surrounded by drab grey cement walls. My cold black heart grew three sizes that day.

The only problem I see with Child’s Play is that, as big as it is, I want it to be bigger.

First I tweeted that I would donate one dollar for every RT about Child’s Play (I had to not-count some because they didn’t include the Child’s Play name or URL, which is more important). Then The Gabe went and retweeted, and it became only a matter of time.

My honest hope is that this continues being RT’d. I don’t need my name attached to it anymore, because I’ve hit 500 and there’s no need for me to keep track of the RTs. I just want people to go and give what they can, and encourage others to do the same. And I want to get more people involved.

I’m sure there are haters out there, suspecting I did it for the glory. Go ahead and think that. I really don’t care. Nothing I argue will change your perspective. But at the end of the day, five hundred dollars are going from my pocket to Child’s Play, and I get to feel really good about that.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m currently working towards my master’s degree in computer engineering. This is among other things which consume my time, such as the working, the boy, the writing, the baking, the video games, the fire stuff, the pretending I’m normal so my family doesn’t cut me from the will. I am spinning many plates on sticks. Good thing most of it is Corningware.

Algorithms has taught me many debatably useful things. Such as:

– patience (I will not walk out of this class to get ice cream, yes it is boring and ice cream is delicious but I must not fail this course)

– restraint (don’t throw pens at the back of that one guy’s head despite how irritating he is, despite how useless his blurted-out and incorrect responses are, despite how obnoxiously nasal his voice is, seriously guy, can you talk through your mouth, or is it just a sound-shaping peripheral?)

– and which foods not to eat in closed spaces (cafeteria chili)

But in thinking about it, many things I learned in algorithms apply to writing, so I’ve decided to list them. Don’t worry if you’re not technical, everything is explained.

Fun aside: Writing really shares many parallels with coding. For instance, style. There are some writers whose styles are so distinct that you can be handed an unlabeled page of fiction and name the author. There are programmers on my team at work whose programming styles are so unique, I can instantly pick out who wrote what.

(1) “Brute Force will be your first answer. It should not be your only answer.”

You will find a Solution to a problem. And it will be quite good and efficient, in your eyes. This will be your first Solution. But then you look further and say, well, perhaps a vector was not my best choice. And oh, look, I can actually run these two operations simultaneously. And wouldn’t it be better if I could spawn this off as a separate process and let the rest of the app continue working. Et cetera. This will be your first Solution. It better not be your only solution.

You will compose a Story. And it will be quite good and lovely, in your eyes. (Or perhaps not, depending on your particular mental configuration.) This will be your first solution to the problem of writing down your Story. But even though you really wanted a specific character to play a specific role in the ending, maybe it’s not his job. Maybe it’s her job. Maybe it’s their job together. Maybe you have to cut him entirely from the story. This is your first solution. It better not be your only. No matter how lovely you think it is, it can be more lovely.

(2) “The problem will be NP-Hard, but not too hard.”

There is a vast, gaping difference between describing a problem and solving it. Certain problems are very easy to describe. For example, the Travelling Salesman problem. You have a salesman. He is, as the name denotes, travelling. He has to fly to a bunch of cities the area he’s covering, and each city is connected by a flight, and each flight has a cost. What is the cheapest way to fly to every city, stopping at each city only once?

Sounds easy, non? If you find the solution, please let me know. I’d love to get in on that sweet multi-million-dollar action. (No, seriously. There’s heavy money on the line if you solve that in under O(n²) time.)

This is not unlike a good book. The IDEA is easy (”It’s AS I LAY DYING as a comedy set in space!”). But writing? Well that’s where the work really comes in. And the right execution will make or break it.

(3) “One problem can have infinite solutions.”

There’s the oft-said adage that there are only ten sitcom plots, and somehow these manage to get recycled into twenty seasons of the Simpsons, eleven seasons of Married With Children, and far too many seasons of Friends, seriously people, it took far too long to stop paying them. And though we’ve figured this out, it still seems fresh to viewers.

This is because while there are ten plots, or “problems” to solve, there are infinite variations on the parameters entering, and on the specific ways you can treat them to still come to the same conclusion. And if there wasn’t, we’d all have the ancient Greek plays memorized by now.

(4) “Divide and conquer.”

One of the methods of attacking a problem is to divide it into smaller, related problems. For instance, say you want to sort a list of names. One method might be to pick a random name in the list and sort the list so if the name comes before your picked name, you put it before your picked name, and if it goes after, sort it after. Then sort each remaining chunk in the same way, on and on and on, until you have a sorted list. (AKA quicksort)

Treat your novel like this. Writing a novel is a big problem. Having a huge plot is a difficult thing. So break it down into smaller bits. Your main character has to get the MacGuffin at the end and destroy it. Divide it into sub-problems: How does he find out about the MacGuffin? Who’s hiding it? How must he destroy it? Is he going to hurt anyone in the process? Divide each of those into smaller problems.

It seems like a lot, but if you tackle them one by one, you’ll have a story at the end.

(5) “Sometimes, brute force is the answer.”

You can have a lot of tricks to help you get through a problem, fun things to try, paths to go down. But at the end of the day, sometimes you have to set your ass down and just write, even though it isn’t working, even though you hate what’s on the page.

Because writers write, especially when it’s hard.

When I was in high school, my blog was a split between the casually humorous MLIA moments of my day and the darkly humorous moments of being with my family. But now, my life is actually average, and I censor myself with respect to my family because as much as the casually corrosive words still affect me, my license to whine was revoked at eighteen. And when it’s not so average, I tend to tweet about it. So I feel like a blog post is simply duplicating content.

That’s a worthless explanation of why I don’t blog so much.

Anyway, onto the important things, holy fucking shit, my Tauntaun Sleeping Bag came!

IT CAME!!

I slept in it last night. First of all, it’s so plush and soft, you almost want to sleep on top of it rather than inside. The lightsaber zipper pull is plush and cute. I crawled inside and discovered the inner lining to be filled with glitterlights that flashed when you brushed your hand along it. I got scant little sleep last night.

Gravy was initially afraid of the tauntaun. She hopped on the bed and landed on it, to her surprise, and she jumped right back off. She approached it, sniffing, cautiously. She swatted at the lightsaber zipper pull, which quickly became a game. She nosed her way inside, then promptly fled. But by morning, she was curled up inside the bag with me, cozy and asleep.

It is a thing of beauty. Worth every penny.

Before I open with this post, I would like to recommend against using the Add an Image button in Wordpress admin if you’re running Chrome. The whole process crashed, and something has been fractured on a very basic level. I cannot type in web addresses anymore. It attempts to search for everything. Getting back to the Add New Post page was a hassle on its own.

That said, I had an image to post for the goings-on this Saturday. You’ll have to wait until my memory kicks in outside of work. Probability of this happening is low.

Emily and I trekked on up to the city for SF in SF, primarily because Jeff was going to be reading from FINCH (which he did wonderfully, and I need to go read it already, because I’m terrible). (Also, that’s a lot of links.) Wound up also liking Scott Browne’s book BREATHERS enough to trust his suggestion that I read more Palahniuk (I’m not linking Palahniuk, he doesn’t need my help, and there’s enough links up there anyway).

Briefly…

FINCH is the fifth and “last” novel in the Ambergris series. Finch is a detective working to solve a double-murder in the true fashion of a noir novel, but set in an Ambergris now ruled by the sinister Greycaps, a completely foreign species who subjugate the people, their actions driven by misunderstanding and malice. Would appeal to fans of noir looking for something with an edge of horror (memory spores?) and the fantastic, or to fans of urban fantasy who miss the genre when it wasn’t paranormal romance rebranded.

BREATHERS is a novel about zombies and their plight as sentient beings in the unaccepting world of the living, the narrator a zombie with a persistently detached dry humor. Would appeal to fans of Palahniuk who want the guy to take himself less seriously.

Here’s my tip to you: don’t show up to these things late. Emily and I scooted in t-minus one minute before the reading proper was to begin, and we stood in the doorway awkwardly. Then we were informed “There are seats in the front.” Rows upon rows of plush seats not unlike a movie theatre were packed full, but we trusted the words whispered to us and shot off for the front row.

And yes, there were seats. On folding chairs set maybe a foot back from the authors’ table. I could have set my water on there. Instead I just leaned in awkwardly and stared at Jeff.

Another tip to you: don’t do that. The awkward-lean thing. You get branded, poorly.

Afterwards a good lot of us toddled up to The View for drinks, and if you haven’t been there, it’s not unlike standing on the viewing deck of the Death Star, overlooking the San Francisco skyline on either side. The booze is overpriced and underpoured (I asked for a Jameson sour and got a twelve-dollar lemonade) but you’re there for the view and I was driving back to south bay anyway. And if that was the cover charge, totally worth it to hang out with Emily, Jeff, Jean (EIC of SF/SF ezine), and new friend Espana.

No music post today. I’m just tapping my toes to some Mountain Goats. I’ve mentioned their song Lovecraft in Brooklyn before (link is actually a remix by Aesop Rock). Today it’s This Year.

I spent the weekend at the Union Hotel in Los Alamos, attending Mme Cavalaxis’ most splendid Ceasfire Tea and Croquet.

That is a picture of myself and Boy, clearly playing chess.

The croquet quickly descended into speed croquet, and I do believe I won, it matters not what anyone else says. I spent a good portion of the night mixing concoctions and running up to people saying “Taste what I have made!” which caused fear in some people. Understandable.

Jen: Are you drinking out of…beakers?

me: Flasks.

Jen: Pardon me.

The bar setup was quite a splendid thing, and I will attempt to post a picture of it, should I find one. Flasks, beakers, test tubes, graduated cylinders, all sorts of chemistry cookware for the ardent mixologist. And there was elderberry liqueur.

It was really wonderful seeing old friends and making new ones. I hope to do something like this again, soon.

(Images flagrantly stolen from Mme Cavalaxis’ flickr)

I saw District 9 this weekend. It was pretty good. I wanted it to be better. It could have been better. But it played to safe cliches instead of breaking free from the mold, which is sad, because we can’t even blame the trappings of Hollywood for that. Also Peter Jackson persists in calling it a low-budget film, which makes me wonder if he forgets what low-budget really means.

Yes I’m aware $39mil is technically a low-budget film. Which prompts me to ask where our priorities are.

I have registered for classes, at which point I hope my life to be a touch more exciting. At least I’ll have more to blog about? Because networks and algorithms whip everybody into a verbal frenzy. (To refresh, I am working on a master’s degree in computer engineering. I’m rather dull, I know.)

I think I may have forgotten to mention this from… two weeks ago? Right outside Hacker Dojo. I’m the one who glides right up to the camera with a “hello” about thirty seconds in. And then another, in which I am pulling. At the end, there was a cry of “To the speedbump!” and thus I took them there. And so you’re aware, that game lasted something near forty-five minutes.

I’m very good at being a grown-up.