gregbrown

There's an odd parallel to the minimalist UI discussion this episode compared to the showing vs. telling anecdote in the book podcast, I think, and their position on both is pretty internally consistent. Some effects are just really hard to show, and a hardline stance on trying to show it in-world can be much more disruptive than simply telling us through the UI. There are some things we can sort of cheat by showing a subjective view of the world—like the bloodlust effect you're mentioning, Rodi—and like you I'm not sure if that should be lumped in with UI. It would be like an unreliable narrator in a book, or some particularly tight third-person limited passages. Still others, like Far Cry 2, actually benefit from having these concerns swim in and out of view as necessary. The malaria mechanic would be far less effective if we had advance warning when the attacks were coming on, and works because it only really needs to tell you when you're almost out of pills.

I guess for me lovable and relatable are very similar: when I'm reading through the eyes of a character I don't have to necessarily like you or think your actions were good, but if I can get close enough to understand your values, then that's enough for me. There's sort of an adoration beyond simple approval there.

I think it's important to draw a line between likable and lovable characters. I'm also suspicious of the former, especially in the hands of a clumsy writer who obviously wants them to be well-liked to the point of being wish-fulfillment or a Mary Sue. Infinite Jest, for me, is basically a master class in how to construct characters that are lovable even if you would be horrified to hang out with them in real life. It might also be understood as the boundary between emotionally-open and emotionally-vulnerable—we get a lot emotionally-open writing online, but so much of it is defensive posturing or strutting where there's nothing really at stake, just like Tony's reactionary letter to Adrian and Victoria that's ostensibly directed at them but is instead a working-out of internal dramas. The Sense of an Ending is in large part the emotionally-vulnerable part of Tony coming to terms with the own carapace he's built around himself, so cemented in place that it no longer seems a part of him but instead a feature of the world itself.

FTL is out today for just $9! I just picked it up on their website and activated it on Steam, which was very easy. Now I just have to fight the urge to play it until after work.

What primarily worries me about Greenlight is the chicken-and-egg nature of it all: the games which have enough momentum to make it through Greenlight are most likely to be the games that won't benefit the most from that attention. It's abated somewhat by the co-mingling of sub-cultures within gaming—where it may be very popular within a specific social group, but virtually unknown to the larger audience that would be exposed to it through steam—but is still a worry for me. I'd much prefer it if they instead took a more active role in advocating for games that they thought would be interesting to their audience, and that push gaming forward. I can understand that Valve probably wants to be more hands-off about this and simply ensure they're efficiently picking any low-hanging fruit out there, but it could be so much more if they were willing to invest more effort. This also got me thinking about some financial models gaming could import from other media to support innovative, indie work. I'd love to pay $10 a month for a carefully selected indie game delivered to my steam library. It seems the subscription model has only been applied to ongoing single games, while it could also be applied to more of a magazine model—providing a solid revenue basis to champion existing games and commission new work.

Day Z, Day Z, Give me your answer do! I'm half crazy, All for the love of you! It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage, But you'll look sweet on the seat Of a bicycle built for two! I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.

I will often enough that audiobooks are usually no-go for me.

Caro's biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson are incredible—at least, the volumes I've read of them. (In my defense, they're several-thousand pages in full, and I'm only 27.) It's wild to read something that has both a great deal of primary research and an incredibly amount of care in how it was written, since the latter are usually synthetic works from existing academic tracts. Edmund Morris' trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt is also pretty highly acclaimed, but I haven't read it myself yet. Really great biographies are hard to come by, since the documentary evidence can be so tough to gather unless they're a really influential person. And there's always the pull—the worst in The Devil in the White City—to try and show the person's inner life, which can very easily come off as very very stupid. There are some great ones that use the central character as a lens for bigger topics—see Nixonland by Rick Perlstein—but it's hard to call them bios, really. But I have an odd paucity of biographies on my shelves, so I'm probably not the most representative reader.

I saw it as her way of seeing if he'd changed; Tony makes a big deal about wanting to show her he was different now, a better person, but he is still unable to pull himself away from himself long enough to see what was happening, or at least not be a bore about it. Of course Victoria has her own weaknesses like him, so that too made her behavior very non-absurd to me. His decision to not contact his old school chums, on the other hand, felt a lot more contrived to keep him in the twilight of self-deception.

Suttree is my wife's favorite McCarthy book so far, though she described it as a month-long trip.

I don't think anyone has pointed it out yet, but the fragment of Adrian's diary is an exact lift of the structure from Wittgenstein's Tractus Logico-Philosophicus, which was written as nested lists of propositions. I think he might be missing the point by jumping from 5.9 to 6.0, though, unless that was just a coincidence. Also this book is even better re-reading it a few months after my original go!

I wanna hear you guys introduce every podcast in this way from now on, like they're Masterpiece Theater or the clip-shows that they just show for Lawrence Welk episodes now. Especially with the outro too.

I enjoy that initial buffer—like, SHITTY METAPHOR ALERT, an orchestra warming up—but the laudatory blurbs can sometimes sort of pre-contextualize my read in a way that sort of flattens the work down into one interpretation. I'm much more OK with non-fiction works sporting that stuff, especially when it's needed to give you the initial push to get through a 600+ page monster, but for such a short fiction work it's like these quotes aren't really going to convince anyone. I can't remember the last time I picked up a book because of the jacket/inside blurbs, though. (I also despise certain serial blurbers, but that's another subject.)

Mike "Cyberdemon" I-don't-know-his-last-name.

Kotaku—and the other Gawker blogs—are increasingly sprawling into whatever they think will get them pageviews. TLC redux.

I got a kindle almost two years ago, and have also tried using a retina iPad for reading. That said, I've switched back to exclusively buying (trade) paperbacks. They're just easier to share between me and my wife, and I enjoy the reading experience more. That said, I read The Sense of an Ending the first time on Kindle, and picking up a paperback for the second read, I was immediately envious of how the Kindle just drops you on the first page. The paperback has a few pages of blurbs to dig through, which seems absurdly excessive. I can understand that stuff to gird you for a lengthy book, but for such a pittance of pages it seems silly.

Here's a more detailed look at Pac-Man's ghost AI, aided by an actual deconstruction of what the code's doing. For example, it notes that Inky's behavior IS dependent on Blinky's state—but it's not so simple as he gets artificially smarter when Blinky's near Pac-Man. Related: everything you'll ever want to know about Pac-Man.

I bet it's to give the impression of non-deterministic behavior for the ghosts. If they all behaved the same, it would be a lot more obvious. A very clever solution.

This is the same reason I had to quit Bioshock, though I intend to revisit on an easier difficulty setting in the near future (and focusing more on using the wrench). The splicers were just too jumpy and the whole game totally activates my OCD tendencies on conserving bullets, so it's just constant feeling of "ugh I didn't do that last part correctly, I hope that doesn't screw up everything", etc. Oddly enough, the original Homeworld felt the same way too due to the persistent fleet between missions. Plus I don't feel quite as comfortable with the Unreal engine's controls as I do with the Source engine, so combat feels a lot worse to me.

Luckily, I think we can fill that hole with this YouTube clip I'm calling "The Sense of a Vending":

YESSS Thanks to you and radaxian for digging that up! On the downside, looks like I'll have to re-read more quickly than planned.

Mozilla's refusal to support even the platform-implementations on Windows and OSX is so silly. Opus seems like the first codec that could actually stand a chance of beating out mp3—offering advantages outside of Ogg's "It's just like MP3 but with less hardware support, lol" pitch—but the window on any mp3 replacement is rapidly closing as the final patent expirations in 2017 come into view. Not sure if hardware-acceleration is still a pressing need for audio with today's smartphone power-management, but it's what ensures that Google's WebM video effort won't get off the ground.

The HTML5 audio players are so rad! It's like I'm living in the future.

The schedule listed on the site is the first Friday of each month, so I'd guess that this first cast came early and we're reading Sense of an Ending this month and casting it on October 5th, and likewise reading Cloud Atlas in October and casting it on November 2nd.

Part of it is what you mentioned: the entire discussion—at least, what they showed us in the doc—was basically about "hey we actually use responsive web design in our CMS". Which is cool... but I'm a lot more interested in what their editorial slant is going to be, and I would hope that would ALSO be a part of their pitch to EA or whomever. Hopefully they'll go into more detail in future episodes!