Quentin Hudspeth

For the past few weeks, Planet Money has been running a fascinating series of reports about the history of machines taking over human jobs, starting with the original Luddites who rose up in the 1700s when textile factories switched to mechanical devices. It was like a Georgian-era Detroit, as middle-class workers were suddenly displaced en masse.

Planet Money closed out the series with a debate about whether this time was different. Would the next generation find new jobs after the current phase of contraction? They pointed to the last few cycles of recession and recovery, in which the economy recovered with fewer jobs available than before. It was a really interesting series, and I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

That got me thinking about the extreme conclusion of this trend: What do we do when billions of displaced workers with nothing to do, families to feed, and an economic system that hasn't caught up with a post-employment era of human civilization. That's a really interesting theme for a game and I have one nasty little game mechanism to model it: Let's call it "Cull Upkeep" for lack of a better term.

Cull Upkeep

First, take a standard deckbuilding game where each player begins with their standardized supply of mediocre cards. These are your mere human workers in various fields of employment. As long as they're in your deck and doing their jobs, they're okay. The only problem is that they're inefficient.

In time, players can earn new machine cards for their deck, building up a more efficient machine to acquire money. But alas, those human cards keep clogging up your hand. The natural choice is to cull those cards from your deck. Sorry, humans, but it's a new day and these machines are just way more efficient.

In a normal deckbuilder, once a card is culled from your deck, you never have to worry about it cluttering up your engine again

But here's the twist: Any cards you cull from your deck stay in a personal tableau. These are the humans leftover despite your overall economy becoming that much more efficient. Those humans must still be paid a living wage and be kept comfortable. Otherwise, you may have a refugee crisis on your hands. Those humans may depart for your neighbors' tableaus.

The only way this mechanic works is if the victory condition is more like Valley of the Kings, where culled cards are banked so they're worth points. However in this case, they have the added complication of still needing to be cared for in order to be worth anything at the end of the game.

So the overall goal of the game is to keep as many humans as comfortable as you can. The more humans you have, and the happier they are, the better you'll score at the end of the game. You're basically building a technotopia. A post-singularity civilization where humans are cared for by an omnipresent network of benevolent machines. Neat! Or scary, depending on your perspective.

Anyway, this is just a brainstorm now, but I love it when a cool radio story inspires this sort of left-field game idea.

So the big news in costume crimefighting funnybooks last week was the new trailer for the upcoming Supergirl show on CBS:

Link (YouTube)

Lots of people are unhappy with it. For starters, it looks a lot like this idiotic and satirical SNL parody movie, except played straight. Our protagonist is a down-on-her-luck assistant to a powerful magazine editor who is looking for love and approval. So it’s Superman crossed with The Devil Wears Prada, maybe with a twist of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” thrown in. It feels like an executive got the green-light to make a superhero show and – unable to imagine a world where women would watch a power fantasy – his first instinct was to take the bog-standard “chick flick” formula and make the protagonist a super. Going by the trailer, it feels less like a superhero with romantic elements and more like a rom-com with comic book elements.

It really rubbed me the wrong way. The whole thing. The whole, “Nobody respects me” angle can work for some heroes. But Supergirl? At one point a guy tells Supergirl – in her Supergirl costume – to stick to getting coffee. I can buy the idea that a government guy would tell Spiderman to “stick to taking pictures”. I can believe he’d disrespect Daredevil, Ant-Man, Aquaman, Mr. Fantastic, The Flash, or Luke Cage. But Supergirl? if you don’t trust her with matters of national security, fine. If you’re really so dumb you can’t imagine ANYTHING more useful that could be done with limitless thrust, fine. If you’re dumb enough to SAY THAT TO HER FACE then your character is the worst sort of drama-for-its-own-sake contrivance.

Also, the line about capes aiding with “aerodynamics” made me reflexively shake my head. I can believe in a world where an alien gets laser eyes because the sun is yellow, but I’m not going to accept the idea that a loose cloth cape offers the slightest bit of air control. Stop being so silly.

But!

The problem is not this show, the problem is the lack of alternatives.

My wife and daughters loved the trailer. It resonated with them. Yes, it’s stupid that some government guy would tell AN IMMORTAL BEING OF STAGGERING POWER AND SPEED to “go back to making coffee”. Yes, the fact that she gets no respect kind of makes a lot of people in the story into idiots. But that’s fine. Her experience feels genuine and familiar to a lot of women. “Oh, I’ve had people talk to me that way before, and I wish I had the power to show them how wrong they are!” It is an empowerment fantasy. It’s just more focused on interpersonal empowerment than physical empowerment. (Assuming, of course, that the show sticks to the presented formula and is setting up this world of strawmen jackasses for Supergirl to overcome.)

Her story actually feels a lot like Spiderman: The hero has tons of powers, but super-strength doesn’t solve the fundamental problems of caring for your family, making friends, and (assuming you keep your identity a secret) impressing the people you meet. Classic^[2] Peter Parker is actually a pretty sad case once the mask comes off. He struggles to please and care for his Aunt May, his work is remarkable but his boss still uses him as a doormat, he struggles to pay the bills, and he’s lonely and looking for a girl in his life. All of this is the reason I love Spiderman so much. I can’t relate to a handsome billionaire who is Awesome at Everything, but I can relate to a teenage kid who has gifts he doesn’t know how to use and problems his gifts can’t solve. And the thematic similarities between classic Spidey and the new Supergirl are striking.

This is not to say I think everyone should love the new trailer. In fact, I don’t blame people who loathe it. It feels like the worst sort of clueless corporate bungling: Let’s put this superheroine into My Big Fat Greek Wedding, because female viewers like that sort of thing.

But like I said, the problem isn’t the show. The problem is the lack of alternatives. If you don’t like the grim-n-gritty Batman, you can watch Thor. Don’t like the fantasy magic in Thor? Watch Iron Man instead. Don’t like the pro-corporate vibe of Stark? Try Captain America. Don’t like the whole idealistic “boy scout” attitude? Try Guardians of the Galaxy. Too much silly comedy? Watch The Punisher, Avengers, Superman, the Hulk, Chronicle, Kick Ass, Daredevil, Blade, or the Fantastic Four. No matter what tone or style you’re into, there’s probably a movie in there that you’ll dig.

But if you’re looking for something with a female lead, then this show is basically it right now. And this show can’t be all things to all people. If they went gritty, some people would deride it as “Batman with boobs”. If they go for comedy, other people will complain that nobody takes female heroes seriously. If they go full-on power fantasy then other people will gripe that the show is just a “guy show” that doesn’t explore feminine themes. It’s not that any of these things are bad, it’s that many of these things are tonally or thematically mutually exclusive.

The best thing that could happen would be for this show to be a hit and kick off a wave of female-led shows. There are obviously a lot of women out there who are looking for some kind of hero story, and if we’re lucky then some of them will like this specific attempt enough that other shows will be greenlit. If it tanks, executives are never going to conclude that they were wrong to turn Supergirl into Bridget Jones. No, they’ll shrug and say, “I guess women just don’t like superheroes!” And then it will be another decade before anyone gets the nerve to try again. It’s been almost a decade since the last female superhero (ish) movie, and that one was shockingly bad.

EDIT: I have no idea why, but an alarming number of people are leaving with the impression that I said this show has no right to exist, or that they did it “wrong” just because I don’t like it. This is really annoying, since it’s the opposite of the point I was making. I assume people are dragging their expectations into this discussion and trying to pigeonhole me as either a fan or a hater. So let me repeat:

I don’t like the show, but lots of women do. Which was the point. The only reason this is controversial at all is because we get so few female-led shows.

Lately, people (thankfully not too many) have been popping up in my social media streams, complaining about protesters, activists, and all the other random folks who take stands against police brutality, against racism, and against wanton mass murder.

It is you, the "Shut up about the police already!" folks whom I would like to address. Imagine, for a moment, that your best friend's child was recently murdered. A month later, they make a Facebook post about how they're struggling with the shock and grief. You respond, "Whatever. It's just a kid. They probably deserved it anyway. Get over it already and stop complaining."

You wouldn't do that, would you? Even if you were so emotionally messed up that you didn't care one bit about the kid or the murder, and were sick of hearing about it, you would still know better than to respond that way. Right?

And yet that's what you're doing. White people are finally noticing things that people of color knew all along: That many police officers are dangerous sociopaths who would sooner club you or put a bullet in you than give you the time of day. I'm not going to ask you to care. You'll care about what you care about, and if you don't give a shit about police brutality because it disproportionately affects ethnicities that aren't yours, and it doesn't bother you that HUMANS are being murdered on a regular basis by the people whose job it is to protect them, then I won't be able to change your mind.

But I will ask you to recognize that those of us who value human lives are grieving. And as long as the murders continue, the grief cannot stop. The illusion that we live in a civilized society is crumbling by the day. I have friends -- good people, people whom I love and would do anything for -- who could at any time be murdered by the police because of the color of their skin. That thought is terrifying and heartbreaking.

Don't tell me that mass murder fueled by systemic racism is not a problem, or that we should shut up about it. Whether you think it or not, for the same reason you wouldn't treat your hypothetical, grieving friend insensitively, you should know better than to say this out loud.

Don't tell me about looters. Protesters in Ferguson have been protecting stores from looters, and the police in Ferguson have been assaulting protesters. So whose side are the police on?

Don't tell me that some police officers are good, and risk their lives. I know that. It doesn't excuse murder; it's just changing the subject.

The times are changing. The first step in fixing the problem is recognizing that we have a problem, and a lot of people are finally doing that. If you want to keep your eyes closed, cover your ears, plug your nose, and pretend that we aren't living in a barbaric police state that terrorizes a large portion of its own population, go for it. Life with your head in the sand is pleasant; I understand that. But don't get in the way of the good people, the people striving for justice, the people who know that equality requires more than a pretense at colorblindness, the people who want to change the world for the better. We have work to do, to make the world a better place, and we have bigger fish to fry than you pissants who just want to hold us back for the sake of your comfortable illusions and your racist status quo.

This entry was originally posted at http://blimix.dreamwidth.org/26926.html. ( comments there.)

I’ve written before about how useful I believe the bittorrent protocol is, and today I wanted to share something with you guys that you may not have known about (I’m pretty with it, as the kids say, and I didn’t even know about this until a couple of weeks ago): Bittorrent Bundles. The BT Bundles are all legal, official, and released by artists to promote and share their work with their audience. Instead of paying for server space and bandwidth, artists seed files, and let the bittorrent community do the rest.

You can find tons of bundles at https://bundles.bittorrent.com/. Here’s Moby’s Innocents, De La Soul’s Smell the Da.I.S.Y, and Thom Yorke’s newest solo work, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes . Most of the artists release a couple tracks for free, with the option to pay them for the full album. These are incredibly fast torrents, too, because so many people seed them.

Whenever someone tries to argue that torrents are just for piracy, I show them the BT Bundles, because it’s such an effective way for artists to promote themselves and share their creations with their audience.

(Segment I deleted from The Unwritten Blog, which explains my disappearance. It’s goofy, so I’m leaving it here, just for the hell of it.)

If Twitter were a character on the show Firefly…

…then Twitter would be Book. Y’see? Book is obviously… no, wait. Facebook would be Book, of course.

Twitter would be Wash. No, who am I kidding, Wash is so totally Yahoo.

“This is a fertile land and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land and we will call it… This Land.”

Yup, that’s Yahoo.

Could Twitter be Kaylee? Yeah, maybe if… unless… is she Pinterest? Hmmm, let’s see…

“Look at the pretties!”

“No, it’s shiny! I like to meet new people, they’ve all got stories.”

“You don’t seem to be lookin’ at the destinations. What you care about is the ships, and mine’s the nicest.”

“[pointing to a pink frilly dress] Say, look at the fluffy one!”

“Don’t you just love this party? Everything’s so fancy and there’s some kind of hot cheese over there.”

I don’t know, I’m still not convinced that Kaylee is…

“[Sits on her bed, eating finger foods, listening to classical music and staring at a fluffy dress.]”

ALRIGHT! Fine! Kaylee is Pinterest.

But then who the hell is Twitter? Simon is obviously WebMD, Zoe…Amazon (heh).

Inara? Could Inara be Twitter? Well Inara is a companion, so… Youjizz.com? DAMMIT, Tarol! Don’t be such an asshole! Inara Serra is a capable, strong woman and NOT an example of sexual objectification! So… xvideos.com? Wait, no. That’s not what companions are about at all. Yes, they provide sexuality, but that’s not the point of it. As a companion, Inara is smarter than you, offers support and information and she helps you get to where you’re going in life if you’re lost, but only works when she wants to andOHMYGOD INARA IS GOOGLE! It makes perfect sense! Also, if Inara had married Capt. Reynolds… Well that would’ve sucked. Damn, that might have ruined the whole show.

So… I guess that makes Capt. Reynolds, Youtube? At least I think he’s Youtube. He disables comments…

“[Book] Captain, do you mind if I say grace?”

“[Reynolds] Only if you say it out loud.”

He regularly picks fights with large groups of unified people…

“[Reynolds] Wha? I didn’t start it! Just wanted a quiet drink.”

“[Zoe] Funny, sir, how you always seem to find yourself
in an Alliance-friendly bar come U-day, looking
for a ‘quiet drink’.”

And oh yeah, I once saw his naked ass even though I didn’t want to. There’s no doubt about it, Capt. Tightpants is Youtube.

Saffron is Tumblr, that’s easy.

River is… um… what the hell is River?

“The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.”

Hmmm, I’m still not sure what she is.

“I remember everything. I remember too much. And some of it’s made up, and some of it can’t be quantified, and there’s secrets…”

Damn, this is a tough one.

“I don’t belong… dangerous like you. Can’t be controlled… can’t be trusted.”

Um… hmmm.

“No power in the ‘verse can stop me.”

I’m sorry, I just don’t know…

“I threw up on your bed.”

OH! 4Chan! Duh!

So I guess that leaves Jayne as Twitter. Which makes sense, I suppose. He almost always talks in less than 140 characters…

“Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don’t you think?” (69 characters)

“We’re gonna explode? I don’t wanna explode!” (44 characters)

He ‘retweets’ things…

“Shepherd Book once said to me, ‘If you can’t do something smart, do something right.’” (86 characters)

He gets blocked by other accounts for trolling…

“[Jayne] You don’t pay me to talk pretty. Just because Kaylee gets lubed up over some big-city dandy doesn’t mean…” (108 characters)

“[Reynolds] Walk away from this table. Right now.”

He ‘tweets’ about his food and drink…

“Mmm. They call it Mudder’s Milk. All the protein, vitamins and carbs of your grandma’s best turkey dinner, plus fifteen percent alcohol.” (138 characters)

And finally, when he gets a lot of followers, he lets it go to his head and annoys everyone with an over inflated ego.

“[Jayne] No really Mal, I mean maybe there’s something to this. The mudders, I think I really made a difference in their lives. Me, Jayne Cobb.” (135 characters)

“[Reynolds] I know your name, jackass!”

So the point I’m trying to make, is that Firefly was fucking awesome. Wait. No. My point was… Jayne’s hat… um… no… DAMMIT JOSS WHEDON! You screwed me up again! You do this to me EVERY time!

What was the last book you read? Not an e-book, but the last actual book, that bound up stack of paper, with weight and thickness and texture and smell. What did it smell like, for that matter? The slightly musty aroma of old paperback stock that has to be earned, not made, by a Larry Niven novel from 1976, on its third trip through used book stores, and finally resting on your nightstand after you found it in a place reeking faintly of aged hardwood floors, stale carpet, and incense?

Or did it have the aroma that only a math textbook can, like Stewart’s Calculus 6th edition, with it’s slightly glossy stock and ever-so-evanescent bouquet, more a memory than an odor, of mimeograph copies and pop quizzes in 3rd period?

Yeah, your Kindle is cool. Holds a zillion books and all that. I know, I’ve got one. What does yours smell like?

---

I’m quite the dyed-in-the-wool, never-look-back, pros-outweigh-the-cons fan of science and anything technical. It’s been an abiding interest since I was knee-high to a Star Trek re-run (original series, of course). When computers first became something one could own and fit on a desk, I wanted one more than I wanted a car, even more than I wanted high school to be something other than a source of humiliation masquerading as a rite of passage. I used to wonder, decades before flash drives and MP3s, why an Atari game cartridge couldn’t contain music the same way it contained the program code. I cried when Carl Sagan died, and again when I saw “Contact” made into a film and realized he missed it. I have no nostalgia for vinyl records, and I can’t explain what I do for a living to most people in less than a paragraph.

So far be it from me to ever play the Luddite. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 1-click shopping cart these past few months. I keep a small personal library in one corner of one room, and we picked up another bookshelf. Naturally I wanted some books to go on it now that I had more shelf space than books, an inversion of the ratio I had been living with for years. And in doing so, I found that I got more reading done in that time than I had in the previous year, despite having an assortment of devices that make reading as convenient as possible, whenever possible, and will even remember your most recent page. Which is good because trying to dog-ear a Kindle will void the warranty.

While I’ve finished more than a few books on an e-reader, I’ve noticed the books I’ve read in that fashion rarely wove themselves into my consciousness with quite the same level of absorption. There’s something lacking. It’s more a dispassionate observation of the material, an analysis held at arm’s length, than a narrative that pulls you in and makes time irrelevant and the ringing phone unimportant. Not all e-books have felt equally detached to me (Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones is a stunning book in any medium), but the pattern is consistent. The words become a museum piece, protected under glass. Sir, please stand behind the yellow line, and no pictures allowed.

In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, a Pulitzer-nominated book addressing the loss of the deeper-thinking literary mind in our ultra-connected and ever-distracted lives, he relays the story of Frederick Nietzche using his first typewriter. Nietzche found that the mechanism itself was changing his writing and even his thought processes (he eventually ditched it). The medium may not be the message, but the medium changes our relationship to the message.

A book, then, is more than a neutral storage medium for the words it contains. Just as the difference between two piano players, playing from identical sheet music for Chopin’s Concerto #2 in F minor, is in their delivery of it, timing, and interpretation.

You might be tempted to say that this is a poor analogy, that an e-reader doesn’t have an interpretation, that the words are identical and they read the exact same way, ink or e-ink. You’d be right, but also missing much of the picture. Humans are not biological flatbed scanners. We interact with all of our senses. The weight of a book. The feel of thumbing through the pages. The variety of ways that it can be held. The interplay of light, paper, shadow, and ink. The tangible thickness of it. The uniqueness of it that distinguishes this book from that book. And of course, the smell. Judge a book not by it’s cover, fine, but the cover and binding are still part of the experience.

Think of your favorite reading spot -and I do hope you have one- and name some part of it that isn’t a tactile, sensual element. A favorite chair, couch, or corner of a couch. An end table, a place to sit a cup of coffee. Just the right lighting. Or maybe a nearby park, two hours prior to sunset at the start of fall, and a travel mug. Every part of this is designed, by you, to an exact specification that isn’t written down but is keenly felt. It involves all of your senses, even if at a not-quite conscious level. Comfy? Good. Now I’m going to hand you a slab of black plastic. The one thing you were going to really focus on in this careful arrangement is also the blandest.

You may find several things to read, even dozens, all presented the same. Quite convenient, no doubt. Can you stick to one of them without distraction? The last time you went to that ideal reading spot with a printed book, did you bring one book, or twelve? Did any of those books have the ability to push a favorite quote or passage to Twitter or Facebook, or did they allow you to quietly unplug? The last time you read on your iPad, how long was it before a notification popped up that took you out of the story you in which you were trying to lose yourself?

The physical space occupied by books is, I believe, an advantage over the reduction to pure information offered by a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. A glance at your bookshelf is a barometer of accomplishment and of goals, of what has been read and what’s still on your list. I have more than a few e-books and magazines that I keep forgetting about and remain untouched; they have no physical presence to remind me that they’re there.

---

Billy and I met up for coffee, and he told me of the experience of reading something on his Kindle, thinking it needed to be noted or underlined, and having the immediate first reaction of wanting to reach for a pencil. While e-reader interfaces have come a long way since the first attempts nearly 10 years ago, they have come nowhere close to the natural, no-training-needed-beyond-basic-literacy user interface known as pencil and paper. It’s not obvious, without some experimentation or up-front user education, how one bookmarks or highlights in an e-reader. Watching someone learn to do this is an exercise in cautious hesitation and sometimes profanity aimed at the device (no, not that sentence, dammit!). This despite the Kindle interface having evolved to a quite impressive state. It hides the considerable complexity underneath, the fact that this device is a computer with a full Android OS. I would be hard pressed to come up with a better design for an e-reader. But I can’t think of a better design for human interactivity, for direct intuitive connection, than words directly on paper. You can touch, trace, dog-ear the corners, bookmark, flip through to have a sense of how far along you are or look up a passage, underline, highlight, and note. It is immediately interactive with as few elements as possible.

Here’s the real kicker, the underlying realization, almost a dirty little secret, even; e-readers are largely a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. The question of how to deliver narrative and story to other people in large numbers was solved by the book. A more complex solution depending on a massive technological infrastructure doesn’t beat a beautifully simple and direct solution that was devised in the 1400′s and has only needed gradual, evolutionary updating. However much book production has changed in that time, humans have changed even less. We haven’t evolved to need a different solution, and if we examine our experience closely we’ll see there isn’t a better one. Will I keep using my Kindle and various e-reader apps? Sure, just like I’ll order take-out now and then, but I’d rather make dinner at home and open a good bottle of wine.

I invite you to try this for yourself. For the next book on your list, or your next impulse buy, get the actual book. Find a good spot and make time for yourself. See if reading in this fashion isn’t somehow calmer and more absorbing. You may find that not every technological advancement is a human advancement.

Happy reading!

Filed under: art, culture, technology Tagged: books, experience over efficiency, literacy, reading

Someone asked on Twitter…

@shamusyoung heard you were playing Skyrim w/ mods. Mind sharing your complete BOSS / NMM Load Order?

— Andrew Simms (@Mistah_FixIt) January 30, 2014

Well, I never pass up a good excuse to fill the blog with easy-to-produce content like lists. So sure. Let’s go over my list of mods.

Note that installing mods in Skyrim is not something you do in moderation. Either you ignore mods and just play the base game, or you’ve got three dozen of the dang things, because once you start it’s hard to draw the line. There are so many aspects of the game that could be improved, and once you’re over the initial learning curve additional mods are basically free.

Here is what I have loading via the Nexus Mod Manager:

1. Hearthfire DLC.
2. Reduced distance NPC greetings. Because it’s stupid and immersion-shattering when I sprint by someone at top speed and they respond as if I’ve walked up to them and struck up a conversation. Chatter is good, but incessant absurd chatter is worse than none at all.
3. Riverwood enhanced. There are about ten of these, so I’m not going to enumerate them all here in this list. Winterhold, whiterun, Windhelm, Markarth, Morthal, etc. You get the idea.

   These mods just increase the clutter density of the stuff in town. More trees, more bushes, more furniture, etc. Makes the place less barren. Not in love with these mods. Once in a while an object is placed so that it screws up the pathing, so NPCs will get caught on new crates or have conversations with a new tree trunk between them.

4. Sounds of Skyrim – dungeons This adds a bunch of ambient sounds to the dungeons in the game. Howling, echoing wind. Spooky sounds. Dripping sounds. I never realized how flat and lifeless the soundscape was until I installed this.
5. Natural skin. The name is something of a misnomer. It really just modifies the elves so they don’t have sunken eyes, dark spots on their cheeks, and ridged Klingon noses. While I appreciate the Elder Scrolls moving away from stock fantasy elves, MAN the original look of those guys is ghastly.
6. Lanterns of Skyrim. There are lanterns placed along the main roads that (somehow) light up at night. Kind of silly and hard to justify, but… eh. I like it.
7. Sounds of Skyrim – wilds. Like the dungeons one above, this adds a bunch of ambient sounds to the wilderness.
8. Saturation boost. I think game developers are finally getting over their love affair with those “realistic” washed-out color palettes. Until they’re all cured, I’m glad we have this mod, which makes the world so much more vibrant and interesting.
9. Ponytail hairstyles. I have no idea what the deal is at Bethesda, but they love to spend MASSIVE textures on dungeon walls that are viewed at a distance and modest-sized textures on faces and hair. This would be tolerable if not for their obsession with making the camera ZOOM IN on people’s faces when you talk to them.

   Also, Bethesda is somewhat notorious for having a dozen haircuts in their games, half of which are Mohawks. The rest are things like cornrows, dreadlocks, and three different levels of going bald. But a ponytail, the most practical and likely hair style for and active person of either gender in a medieval setting? You get one or two of those, both of which are unflattering. This mod has a dozen or so gorgeous, interesting, well-animated ponytail styles. ALL my characters use these styles. I never look at the default haircuts unless I’m going with a shaved head look.

10. Lush grass and trees. Makes the grass a bit thicker. I don’t know what it does for trees. I forgot I had this installed.
11. Improved skill books. Instead of instantly auto-reading a book as you pick it up, the game lets you put books into your inventory, and if the book gives a skill point the description lists what skill. This saves you from the stupid and tedious task of quicksaving before you pick up books.
12. Enhanced lighting. I dunno about this one. Josh runs this mod, and it looks amazing. I’m apparently running it, but the game looks the same as vanilla Skyrim. Don’t know why.
13. Item recycling. Melt down weapons and armor into ingots, appropriately losing a bit of raw materials in the process. Good for blacksmiths and for people who hate fast-traveling to EVERY. DANG. CITY. to buy out all the shops’ supply of ingots. Because that gets old. It also gives you a loot sink to absorb the gear you find, rather than selling it all to shopkeepers. (See below for more on that topic.)
14. Hobbit House. My home of choice. Unlike most player homes, it’s not some sprawling doom fortress fit for a king. It’s just a little place with the basics. I don’t want to showcase my loot and display my wealth. I just want to stick my books on a shelf, put my gear away, cook dinner and fall asleep in a bed, preferably without a lot of hiking in between. Note that the “One Ring” on the mantle piece is a bit much, and its 40% stealth bonus is flagrantly OP. But this is still my favorite player home.
15. Main theme by Lindsey Sterling. This is Lindsey Sterling. Her music is a mainstay for me when I’m coding. Her rendition of the Skyrim main theme is marvelous.
16. Laintar Dale. This city existed in Skyrim (the place) in Arena, but doesn’t appear in Skyrim (the game) for whatever reason. I added it not because I care about the place, but because I just like having more places on the map where you can spend the night when I’m doing my Frostfall / Hardcore / No Fast Travel games.
17. Oakwood. Small village. Added just to have another place on the map.
18. Random Alternate Start Dragonborn? Never heard of him. I’m just some travelling adventurer who pays the bills with grave robbing and bandit slaying. This mod Lets you pick from a fixed selection of starting gear and then drops you into a completely random (and by no means safe) starting location. You’ll never see or hear about the main quest unless you visit Helgen to kick it off.
19. Auto Unequip Arrows. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a game thinking, “THIS time I’ll be a mage”, or “THIS TIME I’ll be a fighter”. But an hour later I’m skulking around with a bow, because that just feels so right to me.

    This mod makes it so that when you switch to another weapon, the arrows vanish from your outfit. It’s basically for people who admire their hero in third-person view. Not that I would know anything about that.

20. Dragon Priest Mask Quest Markers. Once you get your first dragon priest mask, it shows map markers for all the others so you can complete the set. I installed this thinking I’d actually collect them all, but I never bothered.
21. Race+ Makes all the various racial features available across all races. So, you can have an elf with red hair or a Nord with dark skin or a Redguard with angled Elf-eyes. It’s nice if you make a lot of characters (maybe because you play hardcore permadeath) and want more variety to keep things interesting.
22. Barenziah Quest Markers OH MY GOSH is Skyrim annoying about these. Around the world are these eye-catching little stones. If you ever pick ONE of them up, you will end up taking the quest to collect ALL of them, with no reward until you’re done. The quest requires you to join the sodding Thieves Guild just so you can talk to the person who completes the quest. There are twenty-four in all, and getting them all without a guide would be incredibly difficult and time consuming. This mod saves you from alt-Tabbing out to the wiki by putting quest markers on all of them.
23. Frostfall More than all the other mods in this list, THIS one is the real game changer. It takes into account how much skin your armor covers, the weather, the ambient temperature, and even how wet you are. It makes the entire game very survival simulation-ish. You need to wear fur, stay out of the rain, build fires to keep warm, and generally act like cold weather is a dangerous thing.
24. Realistic Needs and Diseases. A great companion for Frostfall. Eat and drink to stay alive. Cook food to make stuff that’s more filling for the same weight. Diseases are now a serious threat that will eventually cripple your performance if you let them run unchecked, not a minor nuisance to be taken care of when you feel like it.
25. Skyrim UI. This is a big one. So big that it requires an external executable to make it work. It basically makes the console-minded UI into something less painful to use on a PC.
26. More Carriages. It never made any sense to me that I could take a carriage to Winterhold, but when I arrived there wouldn’t be one. Not a big deal in the vanilla game, but when you’re playing with Frostfall and no fast travel, details like this are important.
27. Rich Merchants. So players can break the economy easily by selling all the loot they get to shopkeepers. And what solution does Bethesda come up with? They give all shopkeepers really tiny bit of money so that you have to visit every merchant in town, then fast-travel to the next town and exhaust all THEIR merchants, and maybe even visit a third town. Brilliant! Players still break the economy, but now it’s super immersion-breaking, tedious, and sends them through dozens of soul-sucking loading screens. I’d say the solution is worse than the problem, but that would imply it was actually a solution. It’s actually just another problem.

    Don’t get me wrong. I understand this is a really tough problem with lots of tradeoffs. But this is an ugly hack that just creates an incentive to play in a really un-fun way. This mod ups all the merchants so you can unload all your loot without making more than one or two stops.

    For my own part, I’ve solved the “broken economy” problem by simply not using fast travel. This cuts down on the number of trips to town for me, which stops me from selling EVERYTHING I find. That solution isn’t for everyone, though, and for another player “no fast travel” is just a different sort of broken annoying time-sink.

Not loaded: Dawnguard. Because screw Dawnguard and its railroady plot, nonsense dialog, and shopkeeper-murdering vampire spawns. What a waste.

Have not gotten Dragonborn. I hear it’s good, but since I tend to avoid the main quest and all things Dragonborn, I know I’d never get around to experiencing the content.

So that’s my mod list. Hope this was useful to you.

My wife and I noticed a strange formation of ice on the shore of the lake near our apartment yesterday. From a distance, it looked like a miniature Fortress of Solitude – that’s Superman’s Arctic man cave for all you philistine’s non-nerds out there. We walked over to get a closer look and discovered something magical.

This: (click to enlarge)

It’s bizarre and a bit surreal but absolutely mesmerizing. As Brett put it when I shared it with him, “Mesmerizing is right! Looks like you’re in freaking Russia.” It’s so beautifully out of place, especially in Middle Tennessee, that you can’t help but be absorbed and attracted.

I looked up and down the shoreline and this was the only spot where this formation occurred. How did it happen? Why this spot?

An explanation: It’s been ridiculously cold lately (have you noticed?) so the lake froze over a couple of days earlier. It warmed up just enough the previous day for the ice to break up and drift into the shore. This shore, because it was an inlet facing the current. Shards of varying sizes piled up on one another and froze together overnight when the temperature dropped.

But it wasn’t just how it looked that captivated me. It was how it sounded. Those pieces of ice still floating freely were getting knocked about as the water lapped against the newly formed shore of amalgamated ice shards. This created a composition of soft, high pitched chimes that sporadically undulated with the current.

Why am I even bothering to try and articulate this? Words cheapen it.

Good thing I made a video:

You can see now (I hope) why I’m spellbound by this gorgeously haphazard accident of nature. The random events that took place to create this little wonder. That it happened within walking distance from where I live. That I was fortunate enough to see and hear it before it melted.

Life is a lesson in perspective. Even the bitter cold can yield an unexpected miracle.

Filed under: chaos, nature Tagged: beauty, chimes, freshly pressed, ice, inspiring, lake, life, miracle, music, nature, photography, water

A new info-sheet issued by the FBI redefines the bureau's primary mission, dropping "law enforcement" and replacing it with "national security." The bureau has not made any formal announcements regarding this change -- but it does signal that the bureau's leadership views its primary activity as spying on Americans, not catching bad guys, possibly because the budget for spying is effectively bottomless.

"What happened in the last year that changed?" asked Kel McClanahan, a Washington-based national security lawyer.

McClanahan noticed the change last month while reviewing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the agency. The FBI fact sheet accompanies every FOIA response and highlights a variety of facts about the agency. After noticing the change, McClanahan reviewed his records and saw that the revised fact sheets began going out this summer. "I think they're trying to rebrand," he said. "So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security."

FBI Drops Law Enforcement as 'Primary' Mission [John Hudson/Foreign Policy]

There is a chicken lurking in the geography of our continents.

A giant chicken.

The world’s countries can be arranged to form a giant chicken. (via Making Light)

Here's what I love about Lords of Waterdeep: After a few plays, I saw through the "Matrix" of the quests. You're spending cubes and coins, which have their own flat universal point value, in order to buy quests which typically have a far greater point value. The challenge was acquiring the right combination of cubes and coins. What I love is that the conversion rates are idiosyncratic enough to be interesting without being unpredictable.

That said, I'm curious if such a game would work as well if there was only one resource: Points. Place an agent on a space: Gain x points. Completing quests then becomes a cold exchange of one small quantity of points for another larger quantity of points.

Domesticate Owlbears
Spend 3p.
Reward: Gain 10p.

Even if the game did work that way, it would be so dry. The different cubes and coins in Waterdeep are great because they're liquid and thematic. They can be spent and invested, while straight VPs cannot. They reflect the nature of the quests, and what they give you in return. Though cubes and coins inherently have some VP value, they're more useful being spent.

VP-as-resources would simply allow the rich to get richer. Runaway leaders would be rampant. In that case, perhaps it's best to think of VPs as money, and one game in particular has some useful lessons for managing money-as-VPs.


Single Currency in Small World

Small World might be considered a worker placement game with a single resource: VP. After all, you place a token on a space, according to certain restrictions, and those tokens earn you VPs, based on certain conditions. Strip away the conceit of warfare, and that sounds like a worker placement game to me.

Small World deals with runaway leaders by making investments finite. Your supply of tokens/workers is limited, as is their lifespan, so you must periodically dip into your purse to buy a new supply of workers as needed. Furthermore, you can only own one active supply of worker/tokens at a time.

It should be noted that even with these limiting factors, some edge-case factions do tend to result in runaway leaders. The game is still fun, though!




Throttling Currency
It seems TIME and ACCESS are the central mechanisms for throttling a runaway leader.

• TIME lets you pace how long an investment takes to mature,how long it will be fruitful, and even how long it will be available to buy in the first place.
• ACCESS keeps some of your resources liquid and available to invest in further acquisitions, while keeping the bulk of your assets locked up in ongoing projects.

So let's say you still had the Domesticate Owlbears quest described above. How can we use Time and Access to control its pace?

In terms of Access, Waterdeep already has a central mechanism for accessing a quest. You must place a worker on a space in order to acquire the quest in the first place. Once you've done that, you can then spend your requisite resources to get the reward.

However, Time is crucial in controlling that reward. Let's say you have the Domesticate Owlbears "quest" and you spend your $3 to "complete" it. I use those terms in quotes, because now we're really talking about investments and rates of return from those investments.

The next step is to add $10 (in cubes, or chips, whatever) to that quest. Thereafter, at the start of your turn, you earn $1 from that quest and add it to your purse. So you have to wait three whole turns before this quest even makes a return on its investment. In that time, other players could be making their own, faster investments.

That's the baseline system. You could design special abilities that allow you to speed up the rate of return on "quests" of a particular category; gaining $2 per turn from Piety quests, for example. You could even sell ongoing quests (and any remaining points) to other players for quick cash. Now this becomes a real game about stock trading and brokerage.

Is that fun? I don't know, but it's an interesting space to explore.

Tim Bray's "Content-free" is a great piece on why the term "content" is so objectionable. He raises some good arguments, but misses my favorite one -- one of the origins of the term "content" in technical speech is the idea that you can separate the "content" of a Web-page from the "presentation." Indeed, scripts that present "content" to users are sometimes called "decorators."

Now that the Web's in its second decade of common use, it's pretty clear that "content" and "presentation" are never fully separable. This is a lesson that was already learned in other media -- for example, when movies progressed from being a single, locked-off camera recording a stage-play and instead began to integrate the limitations and the capabilities of film into the "content" of that film.

John Perry Barlow made this point well in his introduction to my essay collection Content (a title chosen for largely ironic reasons). It's also a point that David Byrne makes very well in the brilliant How Music Works, where he discusses the move to record each musician separately and mix the "content" in the studio, and how that produced a manifestly different kind of music than music where all the musicians played together.

In other words, "content" isn't just pernicious for Tim Bray's excellent reason ("'Content' has the stink of failure; of hustlers building businesses they don't actually care about"), but because it implies a harmful untruth: that there is a clean line that can be drawn between "content" and "form." Where this untruth flourishes, people who produce "content" that is, in fact, optimized for the form of "content whose form will be determined later" go about claiming that they have found the neutral, form-free, platonic ideal of content. Instead, they've constrained their content by eliminating all the form-dependent elements, and thereby constrained their ability to communicate the full range of human ideas.

“Content” has the stink of failure; of hustlers building businesses they don’t actually care about. Which is icky and usually doesn’t pay off.

Enough with the negative findings, because there’s something important and positive to say here: If you’re building something that’s used for communication, and you find that people are using an idiomatic name for what they’re sending and receiving, you’re probably on to something.

But if you’re about “generating content” you’re dead.

Content-free

(Image: Content Writing Tips and Tricks, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from findyoursearch's photostream)

Back in 2009, we partnered with Institute for the Future to hold a "Digital Open" contest for teens around the world. One of the winners was Harry Lee, a 16 year old from Melbourne, Australia, who created a game called "Sneaky Cards" that "spread the seeds of sneakiness and espionage into the unsuspecting pockets, math books, binders and bags and jackets of his schoolmates."

Over 300 people in the Sneaky Cards subreddit have worked to turn Sneaky Cards into a fully realized game, with new designs, decks and bonus packs. The game is free to download under a Creative Commons license. Harry Lee has blessed the revamp, headed up by a designer named Cody Borst.

Sneaky Cards is about creating fun and creative social interactions, breaking up the tedium of everyday life. SneakyCards.net is the platform for the Free Print-n-Play game with multiple decks and variations of the game. Focused on instigating fun and expressive social interactions. Everyone is free to download, print, and share the game as it is published under a Creative Commons license.

There are a few variations of gameplay depending on the type of deck you have, the main goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards by following each cards own rule set. This can be done with the Classic Deck over the course of many days, and during everyday life. Alternatively you can play the game competitively with each player having a Mini Deck and the winner is the player that can complete all the objectives first. The game works best in common social environments. Places like malls, school campuses, offices, conferences, camps, youth groups, parties, and other public places. In most situations there is a player who is playing the game and a non-player who is not. With the player interacting in some way with the non-player.

Example: A card in the deck might say “YOUR OBJECTIVE: Give this card to somebody without them knowing. If your target catches you giving this card to them, you must take back this card.” in this case you must find someone and reverse pickpocket them by placing the card on their person.

Sneaky Cards

Benjamin Franklin was a leaker of government secrets, who circulated intercepted letters from the colonial lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay to the British government. The letters detailed a scheme to take away colonists' legally guaranteed freedoms "by degrees" and called for more troops to keep order during the process. After the letters were published, Franklin admitted to leaking them, but refused to give up his source. The crown called it "thievery and dishonor" and he was fired from his postmaster general gig (thankfully, there was no Espionage Act on the books at the time). (via Techdirt)

NASA just released this breathtaking photo of Saturn, seven of its moons, and Earth in the background. Actually a mosaic of 141 wide-angle photos, this stunning view was captured by the Cassini spacecraft while inside Saturn's shadow. The image covers 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers). According to a NASA report, "This mosaic is special as it marks the third time our home planet was imaged from the outer solar system; the second time it was imaged by Cassini from Saturn's orbit; and the first time ever that inhabitants of Earth were made aware in advance that their photo would be taken from such a great distance." Click through to NASA to see the much higher-res image including an annotated version: The Day the Earth Smiled (NASA)

Link (YouTube)

The Freddie Wong video we mentioned is here: Splinter Cell: Lightbulb Assassin. This ties in nicely with the conversation we had about stealth in Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. And really, it also relates to stealth in just about every stealth-optional shooter. The stealth is often silly, absurd nonsense.

I think the reason for this is that it’s prohibitively difficult to make stealth mechanics that are both sensible and fun. Stealth is complex and involves a lot of fussing with AI. If I was actually guarding a single dark room all by myself for hours, I would very likely be extremely sensitive to even the slightest sounds. I’d notice if a door was open, a chair was moved, a light was off, a shadow moved, or a friend was missing. I’d hear someone (particularly a grown man with a lot of gear) hitting the ground in the next room. And if anything spooked me I’d likely keep my back to the wall and turn on every light at my disposal. If not out of a sense of duty, then out of a sense of self-preservation and a desire to fill the time. I mean, I literally have nothing else to do. And even if I didn’t find any enemies, I’d be paranoid for the rest of my shift.

And of course, knocking out a human being in a single non-lethal blow is incredibly difficult. It’s very unlikely anyone could do it reliably and silly to imagine they could do it silently. There is no way a full-grown man in combat gear could slink around silently in an unfamiliar building while carrying three full-sized firearms, particularly when the inhabitants are bored, jumpy, and intimately familiar with the space. And if the place is made of crumbling concrete and creaking wood? And everyone spends their days worrying about monsters and ghosts? No way.

But none of this matters. Sneaking around in the dark and knocking people out makes for really fun gameplay. It adds tension. It has a lot of interesting mechanical trade-offs between safety and expediency. It usually adds another whole dimension to what would otherwise be a monotonous shooter. There are already well-established rules for how these systems work and most players have kind of made peace with these contrivances. It’s understood and expected that guards will walk predictable routes, that they will talk to themselves to communicate their current mental state to the player, and that they will drop back into patrol mode after only a minute or two. None of this is realistic, but it’s unrealistic in a familiar way and so it doesn’t shatter immersion the same way that unrealistic but unexpected behavior will.

The point is: It would be incredibly difficult to make stealth realistic, and if you somehow succeeded then it would probably just make stealth gameplay impossible or boring.

So any would-be game designer has to design their game knowing that somewhere, SOMETHING is going to not make any dang sense. Some part of stealth has got to be a silly contrivance.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

While I was looking at Triple Triad in the Final Fantasy games, I stumbled across another card-based mini-game. This one is called Pazaak, found in the Star Wars video game Knights of the Old Republic.

The goal of the game is similar to Blackjack, in that you want to play cards such that their sum is as close to 20 as possible without going over. The twist is that you have your own supply of cards, as does your opponent, and there is a randomized deck of "neutral" cards. Player cards have various ranks in negative and positive values. Neutrals are always positive. There are also special cards which double your previous card, flip between positive pr negative, and so on. See the tutorial above for more info.

I got to thinking about how this would work with dice. Your goal is still trying to reach a sum of 20 without going over, using a combination of your own dice and randomly rolled neutral dice. Here's how to play.

First, give each player a supply of dice and set aside an equal amount of neutral dice. The example above is inaccurate, but you get the idea. I think nine dice per player and 18 neutral dice is more than sufficient.

Each player rolls their entire supply of dice to find out their "hand" for the round. You can keep this secret if you like, but it's hard to not cheat with hidden dice so I think having it all be public is fine.

Set aside your personal dice and start taking turns. On your turn, roll a neutral die and keep it in front of you. You now have three choices.

• Add one of your dice from your supply.
• Combine two or three dice from your supply for a special action.
• End your turn, meaning you take no further action for this turn.
• Stand, meaning you won't take any further turns this game.

For example, if you add one of your dice from your supply, the results are added together. The sum above is now 6.

Or you may combine two identical results from your supply and set them down as a stack. This will double the previous result while also adding its own face value. The sum above is now five, because the 2 is doubled and the stack's face value is 1.

Or you may combine three identical results from your supply and set them down as a stack. This would flip the previous result to a negative. The stack's face value is still added. The sum above is -1, because the triple stack turns the 2 into -2, plus the stack's face value of 1.

Of course if you're feeling dangerous, you can simply end your turn without taking any further action whatsoever. Just keep stacking up those neutral results until you get closer to 20, then you can strike!

The winner is the player with a sum closest to 20 without going over. If tied, the player with the fewest dice in play (including in stacks) wins. If still tied, arm wrestle until someone's honor is restored.

So anyhow, that's a little idea that I'm sure is quite broken. For example, I bet rolling three sixes isn't that great because they're worth more individually than they would be doubling any other result. UNLESS, your neutral result was six, then you play a stack of double-six reach a sum of 18. Not bad for a first turn.

So there you go, a little push-your-luck strategic fun for your day.

Street artist and illustrator Daan Botlek is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands and is known for his strange form of character-driven street art. His generally simplistic, site-specific figures often interact with the space around them, passing in and out of unseen dimensions, shedding skin in the process. Kind of like morbid Keith Haring, no? You can see much more of his work over on Flickr. (via Lustik)