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So shopping for a present is a bit of a shot in the dark. We could get him a gift certificate, or something suitably generic, like fancy coffee, but I take my gift-giving more seriously, even when it’s a shot in the dark. Generic presents are dull, and pointless, apart from carrying what Dave Barry calls the central message of every gift: “Look! I got you a gift!”

If a gift is to be interesting enough to be worth anyone’s time, it has to be unpredictable. Ideally, it will be something the recipient wants but would never get for himself. That means the giver must take chances. And, naturally, risks don’t always pay off; that’s why they’re called risks. That’s okay. I’m willing to take the occasional miss, or even frequent misses, in exchange for the real payoff: something I’d never have thought to buy for myself. All the rest are lost to the mists of time and fading memory—in the final analysis, worthless.

My odds would be better, of course, if I knew Mark better, but it’s a little late for that. So I must rely on something I really enjoyed myself and hope he will enjoy, too. I finally settled on a treasured book, Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s a heavy tome, literally and figuratively, which began as an illustration of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, but which grew into a magnum opus on self-reference in art, mathematics, philosophy, and more, laced with some of the cleverest wordplay you’ll ever find. Hofstadter introduces concepts through dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, from one of Zeno’s infamous paradoxes, and structures the dialogues to demonstrate the very phenomena the characters discuss. One dialogue is a sentence palindrome, in which the sentences say something coherent but entirely different when read in reverse order. Another dialogue is structured in the manner of a six-part fugue. Another officially ends before the text ends, leaving it to the reader to figure out where the story stops.

Sandwiched between is some very dense epistemology, symbolic logic, algebraic logic, surrealist art commentary, combinatorics, set theory, Cantorian set theory, intelligence theory, and deliberate nonsense in the vein of Lewis Carroll. It’s a difficult but rewarding read, and can leave people cold. I figure it’s worth the risk because Mark is mathematically sophisticated enough to edit a math text, and is considering a master’s. He’ll understand it. Whether he finds it entertaining is another matter, but that’s where the chance of a truly pleasurable surprise lies, so I’m going for it.

Posted by at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been an interesting week for junk mail, both post and electronic. Like everyone, we’re subject to that plague of modern life, spam. This week’s crop at least had the virtue of being amusing. Not the contents of the spam, of course—that’s all crap—but in the method of marketing. Naturally, spam is aimed at idiots; discriminating shoppers aren’t going to choose stock packages, pharmaceuticals, or…um…girlfriends from some random guy, much less some guy who considers concealing his identity from buyers prudent.

The tactics we saw this week, however, were particularly designed for idiots.

Take, for example, this emergency-red envelope labeled “URGENT: Open Immediately.” It’s got some incomprehensible icons on the front that vaguely resemble warning labels, the kind with diagonal lines that let you know, for example, that using your electric razor in the bathtub could end in a sudden life insurance payoff. This is an envelope warning you of critical personal consequences. And by “you,” I mean “whoever happens to read this.” Literally. The addressee’s name has been black-barred with a felt-tip. That’s okay, though, because the second line, “or current occupant,” ensures that this vital information gets to the individual who needs it most: me.

I also got email from someone who “saw [my] picture on one of the web sites,” might be coming to my area, whichever area that might be, and wanted to know if a visit is possible. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be prepared to let strangers into my home, or to share my personal information with them, just because they’d seen my picture on an unspecified web site, but there’s more to the letter. Tossed in casually, as one might ask how the weather is in…wherever I live, is the closing comment: “btw, I am a woman.” Which is odd, because the email comes from someone named Kareem, traditionally a male name. Also, (s)he is 25.

We also got some investment advice by accident. This email, addressed to someone named Mark, explains that the author has just received (unspecified) insider trading information, and wanted to let “Mark” in on the chance to make a killing on this penny stock. “Don’t tell anyone,” cautions the email; once word gets out, the window of opportunity to invest before the price moves will close. I received this very hush-hush stock tip through one of my subscribed newsgroups. Sure hope nobody else in the newsgroup got the same tip! It could end in an SEC investigation, or, worse, close that window of opportunity before I grab the brass ring.

So the spam has been entertaining this week. Not only are the offers transparent rip-offs, but all three cases find some unique way to render the sales pitch pointless: urgent personal message to occupant, an intimate visit from a bearded Arab lady, and a stock tip guaranteed to be too late. The offers are so clearly bad that I’m tempted to look up the web sites (or, in the case of the envelope, open it) just to find out whose advertising department is this bad. Unfortunately, this would only reward the spammers for bad behavior, earning them a fraction of a penny for a hit to their clients. Also, Kareem’s only contact info is an email account, so I won’t reply there. I guess (s)he, unlike myself, has no picture on one of the web sites.

Posted by at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m still waiting for a chance to love Barak Obama. Perhaps once he begins endorsing particular policies, I’ll discover he’s got the right stuff. If he doesn’t soon, I may have to support Edwards. In the meantime, I’ve gotten pretty sick of Hilary Clinton.

This country has had extraordinarily poor leadership for the past five years or more, in large part due to Bush the Lesser, but even more due to the deeply corrupt Republican leadership that has done its level best to turn election victories into regime change by packing appointive positions with right-wing loyalists at the expense of merit, and to make the president answerable to no one, including the American public. We need a sharp reversal of these policies, and we need it soon. I don’t know whether the Democrats can provide it, but I’m damn sure the Republicans can’t. McCain might want to, but he doesn’t have even his own party’s love, and proved, in the end, willing to sell principle to woo the rabid partisans.

Given the need to reverse our anti-constitutional freefall, the Dems need to focus on winning, and winning big, across the board. Hilary has proven more interested in winning herself. Not content to criticize Obama’s silence on substantive issues, she—pardon me, her campaign managers—have decided to get right down to mudslinging even when there is nothing to discuss, as when they demanded an apology from Obama for something David Geffen said, and to return any campaign donations to show his sincerity. Wait, excuse me? Geffen didn’t step over any lines; he said she was polarizing, and ambitious. And so she is. Trying to turn that statement into an embarrassment for a rival, to hold that rival accountable for what a third party says, and especially to win the primary with money instead of ideas, is the kind of vicious trick we’ve seen too much of, and the very reason we need an electoral turnover.

I suspect Clinton is so eager to savage Obama because she feels the next presidential election already belongs to Democrats by default, given the abysmal approval ratings of the current administration. If so, she is wrong. The next Republican candidate will find it all too easy to disavow Bush; the right-wing habit of equating all enemies—terrorists, environmentalists, secularists, Satanists, pro-choicers, homosexuals—doesn’t work both directions, for some reason. Already, the major Republican contenders are hiding behind the flimsy excuse that they would never have supported a war in Iraq had they known Bush would handle it so badly.

Clinton should expect this from the eventual Republican candidate, because it’s precisely her own approach to Iraq. Since some people aren’t willing to forget she voted to give Bush the authority to launch a war, she’s settling for pretending it seemed like a good decision at the time, and that only with the benefit of hindsight can we realize how wrong it was, blinded as we all were by the charming Dick Cheney and his unassailable assurances of nuclear weapons in Iraq, the evidence too classified to share with mere Senators. I must protest. The war didn’t suddenly become wrong only after it went badly. It didn’t become wrong because Bush surprised the credulous with incompetence. It didn’t become wrong when we failed to find the promised WMDs. It was wrong when it was started, for reasons that we knew at the time. Mrs. Clinton’s pretense that she doesn’t bear some of the blame because, hey, she only voted for it is a steaming pile.

Perhaps most damning is a quality that is much harder to define than specifics like putting her interests before those of the nation or culpability for Iraq. She is an old-school democrat, the kind that led to the conservative vehemence that made Tom Delay, Fox News, massive deficits to support tax cuts for the rich, Guantanamo, war profiteering, a savaging of the national environment, and Jack Abramov possible. The term tax-and-spend is overused, but sometimes it deserves to stick. Clinton belongs to that school of government that believes having a program in place to address a problem is more important than that the program actually work, like universal health care without selective denial of services. She embraces the paradoxical racism of affirmative action, that racial minorities must be helped because they, being racial minorities, cannot achieve on their own. She feels eternal government subsidies are right and proper. She follows the currents of public opinion instead of holding American government to American ideals, which leaves her in the depressingly common Democratic disease of Mealy-mouth: failing to stand for anything or anyone, because she’s too busy embracing everything and everyone.

Senators from Illinois excepted, of course.

Posted by at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I visited the Kloonigames website (www.kloonigames.com/blog/games) when it got a mention in the Gladstoned column of the latest edition of Games for Windows. The column was a confusing combination of a rant on the computer game production industry and a half-baked review of “The Truth About Game Design,” a tongue-in-cheek simulation of a game development project. I like business sims, so I decided to give this one a try.

Calling TAGD a simulation is extravagantly generous, since only two variables under your control are of any interest: how much you pay your wage slaves, and how frequently you kill them. The more you pay the slaves, the faster they trudge back and forth along the catwalks of their factory building hell, improving your game quality (thus sales) at the reckoning of the shipping date. Naturally, this increases expenses. Cheap bastards can instead motivate the slaves by clicking whichever laggard catches the eye, causing his head to explode. The survivors, inspired by fear, will speed production…for a while. Then it’s time for another round of motivational executions. Kill too many slaves, and you’ll face a general strike, forcing you to ship your product as-is. Your score is determined by the return on investment upon shipping.

So TAGD is not a deep game, although the panache with which its black humor is delivered makes it an entertaining fifteen minutes. (To be fair, its designer treats it as nothing more than a silly exercise he knocked off in a week.) I wouldn’t bring it up at all, were it not for the slyness of its hidden message.

Despite all its cues, from the quote on the opening screen to the gulag drumbeat music, to the gradual revelation of a picture of a rifle-wielding boss (you), killing idlers is a losing strategy. That’s right: the entire theme of the game is a red herring. Even without a general strike, killing more than a handful of slaves cuts long-term productivity so much that your game will ship half-finished. I’ve had vastly better success with only a few executions to jump-start the workers, coupled to a slow, steady diet of raises. The starting salary, sneakily set to a default $2, should be $4 or more right from the start, and reach somewhere around $10 by game end. Take care of your workers, says the game, and you’ll get your reward, no matter how tempting it is to revel in your power over life and death, or, symbolically, employment and unemployment.

At least, that’s what the game says if you have the patience to play it a few times. Gladstone apparently gave up after several tyrannical failures, without bothering to try the carrot as well as the stick. Rarely do you see that kind of deliberate bait-and-switch in a game’s design. You can find games that swear they include peaceful development as a viable strategic alternative to conquest, but trust me, these are lies from marketing division. Games that challenges you to question the very premise, to cut the Gordian knot to find deeper truths of the subject matter, are rare.

That’s not surprising. Unless done with finesse, the experience of buying a game of betrayal only to learn cooperation works better, or a game of conquest to learn success lies in diplomacy, or a game of construction to learn that sabotaging your rivals is the path to victory would feel like a rip-off. The key is to make many strategies viable, but allow the subtler, more ingenious strategies to pay the biggest dividends. We could use more of that. But then, we could use more intelligent design decisions of all kinds, I suppose.

Posted by at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Jersey recently underwent a change in its car insurance laws. Until a few months ago, New Jersey was one of three or four states to demand that all car insurance providers insure anybody who applied. Insurance companies might charge higher rates, but state law mandated that no one be uninsurable. Many insurance providers, including the big ones like Geico and State Farm, just stayed out entirely; those that remained in a less competitive environment still felt it necessary to spread the cost of dangerous drivers around. Insurance rates for even the good drivers were roughly double what you’d find in the rest of the country. For me, nailed for driving with an expired license, the price was prohibitive.

But now the law has changed. The big boys are back in town with their economies of scale, and prices are way down, enough for us to afford insuring us both. (In fact, it’s cheaper for both of us than for just the driver with the better record. Go figure.) So, once I pass the driver’s tests again, I’ll be back in the saddle, so to speak.

Driving again will be convenient. I can take over the wheel at night, when Eileene doesn’t like to drive, or over some of the longer distances in our upcoming trip to Arizona and New Mexico. I can drive myself across town to my Sunday role-playing sessions; more importantly, I can drive myself home. I can take care of small emergencies, like rushing out to pick up a relative with car trouble. There’s peace of mind in knowing I can take care of big emergencies, too, like getting Eileene to the hospital, should the need arise.

But for all this convenience, I do not feel the sense of liberation most people feel upon earning their license—that I myself felt at sixteen, for that matter. I suppose that isn’t surprising. Cars no longer symbolize, for me, an escape from this hick town to greater things, nor are they a convenient place to make out free of parental supervision. I’ve settled down, and I’ve got my own place, with my girlfriend living in it. Gone is the thrill of learning to drive for its own sake, the enjoyment of mastering a complicated skill. No doubt I’ll be a bit rusty, but the principle that you never forget how to ride a bicycle applies. No, for adults, driving represents a responsibility as much as opportunity: responsibility to fill the gas tank, to pick people up from the airport, to get to places on time, to drive at inconvenient hours.

Still, it’s nice to know I can again.

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been a couple weeks since my abdominal pain has been taken care of. For several weeks, it remained a mystery, defeating diagnosis by blood sample, urinalysis, x-ray, cat scan, and colonoscopy. However, the cure was effected, ironically, by diagnostic testing; flushing out my intestines in preparation for the colonoscopy let my bowels unkink and restore proper bowel movement. The gastroenterologist said beforehand that it might work out that way. The pain hasn’t returned for a while now, so it looks like I’m out of the woods. Mostly.

To prevent a recurrence, I need to adopt some minor changes to lifestyle, and especially to diet, and most especially an increase in fiber. So I’ve been particularly conscious of how much fresh fruit, vegetables, and whole grains I take in, and also of how my body reacts to a diet that varies wildly from day to day as I experiment with different combinations.

All of which keeps reminding me of an interview with a nutritionist I heard a few years ago. The dialogue turned to an idealized food, the one-meal pill. With advances in nutritional chemistry over the past century, science fiction postulated a concentrated pill, or handful of pills, that could give you all your nutrition for the day. You might not enjoy the dining experience much, but the convenience couldn’t be beat. Where, the host asked, did such promises go? The nutritionist replied, in essence, that the promises were never made seriously by anyone who knew anything about nutritional chemistry. Yes, we can concentrate certain nutritional supplements, notably vitamins and trace elements, in a pill, but the body needs considerably more than the chemicals needed to regulate metabolism. We need the raw materials to metabolize, as well: fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. And, while some foods are considerably richer in calories than others, even a sedentary life demands more calories than can be packed into a pill. A single M&M, or an aspirin-sized globule of lard, essentially pure caloric food, couldn’t keep you going for a sizeable chunk of the day. Dietary fiber alone comes to several spoonfuls. The food we eat contributes a significant portion of the eight cups of water we’re supposed to take in every day, too; even with a super-pill, we’d need the same volume of water, and water doesn’t compress to pill size.

In short, the nutritionist concluded, the closest we can come to that kind of super-food is: food. Because we enjoy eating well, and because our ability to regulate our appetite to our actual needs depends in part on a sensation of bulk in our stomachs, we might as well eat proper food, although, of course, we could stand to take in a bit more leafy greens and a bit less Frito Lays.

Posted by at 9:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This commentary relates to World of Warcraft. If you haven’t played WoW, or at least some other MMORPG, it won’t make much sense to you.

1. Gnome names are just flat-out cooler than elf names. You can find an Ellanaria or Lalina Summermoon in any cheesy fantasy game you like. Or cheesy fantasy novel. Or hippie commune. Names like Klockmort Spannerspan and Nittlebur Sparkfizzle have personality.
2. The looped conversational flavor text you get from gnome NPCs is better, especially flavor text from the generic NPCs. Elvish Cenarion lookouts stand around making pretentious statements like “Behold, how the land still heals itself, despite the plague. There is yet hope for our work to continue,” or “I sense something wrong in this forest…” Really Sherlock? Anyone with an I.Q. above that of asphalt can see plagued wolf bats spawning continuously to replenish the population, and that the land hasn’t changed in appearance since launch. Perhaps what’s wrong is the way the plagued wolf bats are devouring travelers not twenty yards away. Gnomish technicians’ flavor text, by contrast, is short, informative, and to the point: “I’m on fire!”
3. Major elf NPCs are rude. Arch Druid Staghelm will tell you to stop wasting his time, even as he asks—nay, commands—you to cross a continent and collect some dirt samples for him. Like you aren’t already busy saving his tree-town. Again. High Tinker Mekkatorque shares deep personal emotions with you as he asks a favor.
4. Elves don’t make other races welcome. Humans allowed night elves a whole section of Stormwind to themselves. Other races are not accepted in Darnassus. Oh, you can find a dwarf or two in there, but can you find a mage trainer? A warlock trainer? A paladin trainer? If the elves don’t practice your class, they’d rather not sully themselves with your race’s teachers, thank you very much. You can just travel to the other side of the world before returning to save them from Moonkin predations. And be quick about it!
5. Gnomes won’t block your line of sight. In tight quarters, seeing well enough to fight effectively can be a challenge. Elves think nothing of standing right in the doorway, obscuring the targets you want to hit, and then complaining about your target selection. To quote a guildmate forced to stand behind a wall of elves as a boss fight began, “All I see is a bunch of night elf asses.”
6. When elves block your line of sight, they find it hard to believe you’d rather see something other than their butts. After all, their players chose elves so they could look at an elf butt for hours on end; why wouldn’t you?
7. Elves tend to attract self-absorbed players. Elves are long, lean, and athletic. If it’s more important to look competent than to be competent, you can bet the player has an elf. Gnomes look silly, no matter what combination of physical features you choose, and some are very silly, indeed. No player can choose a gnome without a firm grip on the fact that WoW is, after all, only a game.
8. Night elf hunters are the most common race-class combination in the game. ‘Nuff said. Their numbers were even higher at launch, when hunters were the easiest solo choice, and before fine-tuning of various class abilities made them more useful to other players. They remain particularly popular with gold farmers, who can set their pet to kill mobs while the farmers aren’t even at the keyboard.
9. When gnomes’ bad ideas go wrong, gnomes suffer. Refer to the irradiated city of Gnomeregan. When elves’ bad ideas go wrong, evil is unleashed on the entire world. Refer to Illidan’s decision to open portals for a demonic invasion because magic would be so tedious to practice otherwise.
10. Gnomes clean up after themselves. Gnomes got right to work trying to fix the Gnomeregan radiation problem when they caused it. Elves decided to take a thousand-year vacation while the rest of the sentient races fought elf-unleashed evil without them, returning only after things settled down again. And they have the gall to announce their local problems as some new earth-shaking emergency.

Posted by at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our local library regularly changes the pictures hanging in a back hallway stretching from the tiny café to the restrooms. This month, instead of some local artist’s work, they have photographs of great writers, including a few, like Abraham Lincoln and Bertrand Russell, who did not earn their reputation primarily for writing. The display worked in my case; I decided to check out a few books by great essayists, reminded of the value of learning from the masters.

Not long ago, I wrote about needing novelty in my literary diet, after a long stretch of almost nothing but folk tales, mythology, and modern fantasy. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole story, as I realized last night after reading some of those essays. Free of the need for research in a specific topic, I binged on literary junk food, science fiction and recreational math and, yes, comic books. (These genres do include some excellent works, but I didn’t pick those titles.) Moving abruptly from fun writing to great writing wasn’t just a reminder that our English teachers have been correct all along—this stuff is worth your time—it was a humbling experience.

I refer specifically to “The Dream,” Winston Churchill’s transcript of an imaginary conversation with his dead father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, letting the old boy know how England and the world had been getting on since his death. It was precisely the kind of conversation I fantasized in my own April 30 entry, but was vastly, embarrassingly, more interesting.

This was not because Winston Churchill himself is far more interesting than I; in “The Dream,” Churchill plays coy with his father about his own achievements, admitting only to writing books and articles for the press, and to being a major in the Yeomanry. Churchill’s fantasy of discussing current events with the dead is vastly more interesting because he actually writes the conversation, rather than describing to the reader what such a conversation might be like. How many times have we seen the basic literary rule “show, don’t tell”? How many times? Well, it works. And I feel like an ass.

Great writers find their own voice, but they still learn their tricks from good writers. If these essays are really going to be worth your time, and not just text potato chips, I need to improve my own diet, first.

Posted by at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning’s news featured an article on a curious problem in Estonia. Somebody—it’s not clear who, although fingers are pointing to Moscow—is sabotaging government websites by overloading their capacity to respond to requests. Whoever is doing it isn’t just some punk hacker; according to the Estonian minister of defense, overloading the websites requires millions of hits within a single second. That takes a lot of computing power, a lot more than a lone wolf vandal can afford. The attacks are a large, well-funded program of sabotage.

Typically, only governments can afford that kind of cash, which is part of the reason Russia is the target of unofficial blame, but there are other candidates. Widespread sabotage, or just the threat of sabotage, has been part of blackmail attempts from organized crime in several countries: “Pay us, or we’ll crash your business’s website.” A canny terrorist-revolutionary group might calculate it does more harm with these kind of tricks than with bus-station bombings. But groups like this have every reason to step forward and claim responsibility, and they’re not. This feels a lot like a dirty government trick. The necessary budget, the limited range of candidates who would benefit, and a resurgence of Russian bully tactics make Moscow a likely choice to blame.

The whole incident puts me in mind of Frederick Pohl’s The Cool War, a novel in which nuclear weapons in particular, and the massive destruction of war generally, had reduced national conflict to a program of general sabotage: whatever you can muck up in another country—any country—must be good for you, if only because it makes it harder for him to afford his programs to muck up your country. The protagonist is drafted into a covert ops division and taught to puncture tires, to use fake credit cards, to litter, because every time someone is late to work, every bank error, every worker hired to clean up a needless mess is a hit to the enemy’s productivity.

This sleazy little race to the bottom sounds very mild, almost pleasant, compared to outright war, but it’s also insidious: it targets everyone indiscriminately, there’s little incentive to stop because the costs are less visible, and denies the idea that a neighbor getting richer isn’t always a bad thing.

Economies bootstrap themselves, and in a global economy, every step upward anywhere is an opportunity for you to better your own life. There may be specific losers—an increase in Ethiopian coffee production is bad news for Colombian coffee farmers—but for every loser, there’s a winner, like coffee plants and coffee drinkers. Tightly targeted sabotage against specific targets for specific purposes is wicked, but it makes a selfish sort of sense. Sabotage on general principles is a sleazy race to the bottom, and, in the long run, counterproductive.

Whoever is screwing up the Estonian government is attacking too broad a target for the results to be predictable; quite possibly, they’ll get just the opposite of what they really want. It bothers me to think that the methods are so successful. Somebody, somewhere, is noting how effective the sabotage is as sabotage, without giving proper consideration to whether it’s actually achieving its intended object, and thinking to himself, “Yeah, that’s the ticket! We ought to do that, too.”

Posted by at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unknown Armies (UA) is an edgy role-playing game with a very different take on the whole “secret supernatural war waged beneath the notice of mundane humanity” bit. It’s got powerful magic, sure, and cabals and monsters and weird events that can really screw up the life of any normal person they touch, but the game’s unofficial motto—“You did it”—embodies the notion that however weird the world may be, it’s made that way by ordinary people. History is not in the hands of the supernatural sub-culture; it’s us. Even the demons are just people angry to be dead, and the gods, such as they are, are people who have lived closely enough to a basic archetype as to achieve apotheosis.

I said the game was edgy. While it could, technically, embrace the vast breadth of human experience, the product line focuses on how we screw ourselves over in our desire for power, sex, money, status, self-image, parental approval, whatever. There’s a price to pay for everything. A lot of NPCs have paid a horrible price for what they wanted, and the game invites PCs to do the same.

You did it.

In keeping with this principle, magic is not, by and large, an empowering thing. Magic is transgressive, paradoxical, and it demands a price, usually a price you can’t really afford to pay. This price takes two forms. First, magic is fuelled by charges, which an adept must earn by performing some basically self-destructive act in keeping with the magic’s symbolic tension. Adepts of body magic must wound themselves, symbolically destroying the human form in order to assert control over it. Adepts of luck magic must perform an act that places them at great personal risk, symbolically surrendering to luck in order to assert control over it. Second, any adept that breaks a taboo in keeping with his magic’s theme immediately loses all charges. Adepts of money magic break taboo if they spend more than a $100 at once, including rent, groceries, or medical bills. Adepts of hysterical exhaustion break taboo each time they sleep. An adept must be dangerously obsessed with his subject to keep up a lifestyle like this.

The basic rulebook comes with a half dozen or so schools of magic to try out, if you dare. An entire supplement is devoted to new schools, and a few more crop up here and there in other supplements. Clearly, there’s room for new schools, if you feel creative enough to make your own. Some players do, posting them for peer review in the UA newsgroup, or on the UA website. But players, being players, usually want their characters to be powerful. More often than not, magic schools designed by amateurs allow for huge personal power at minimal personal expense, with a trivial taboo (never run for public office) and trivial methods to generate charges (listen to records for four hours). Typically, designers of power trip magical schools just don’t get the ideas of symbolic tension, obsession, and the price of power fundamental to UA magic, so fans keep posting reminders of how necessary painful sacrifices are to the cool, edgy, dark themes that drew them to UA in the first place.

I rarely join these discussions. Players who want to play out power fantasies will play out power fantasies, no matter what the purists would prefer. And who’s to say they’re wrong? But occasionally, someone will offer a magical school of their own design with a frank admission that it feels too candy-coated, and solicit advice for how to shape it to fit the UA tone. Then I’ll offer my two cents.

I did so two days ago, and two posters chimed in with the sentiment: “This has to be one of the best write-ups I’ve seen of the idea of paradox in magic.” Ego strokes like that are terrific, and they’re coming more frequently, especially for things that I’ve tossed off in an hour or so. Apparently, these sort-of-daily journal entries are making me a better writer after all.

Posted by at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lately, I’ve been watching an anime series titled Samurai 7, an adaptation of the classic movie The Seven Samurai. Meh. It’s okay. Because the people behind it are not masters of their medium, as Kurosawa or Miyazaki are of theirs, the adaptation is anime first and narrative second. Thus the bandits employ giant battle robots, because anime has to have giant robots. The peasant trio of Rikichi, Manzo, and Yohei are replaced by a teenaged girl in a miniskirt, because anime has to have teenaged girls in miniskirts.

Heavy-handed revision, unsurprisingly, leads to awkward moments. Events are preserved in the adaptation that no longer make sense in the context of changes already made. The tragic demise of classic swordsmanship before the encroachment of firearms, for example, seems grossly out of place in a space-faring culture, which has presumably mastered gunpowder long, long ago, not to mention smokeless powder, automatic fire, and something that looks like plasma projecting rifles. The adaptation is hurt, too, by a simplification of characters and their motivations. Kambei is transformed from a humble failed soldier to a great warrior-philosopher. The awkward romance between peasant Shino and young samurai Katsuhiro is replaced by a trite, and shallow, flirtation between the Katsuhiro and the miniskirt chick mentioned above, without any of the richer undertones of class-consciousness.

Such incongruencies take many forms, and make the animated 7 seem “dumbed down,” either by a production team with only a superficial understanding of the movie, or—more likely—for the benefit of a young audience that won’t pick up the subtle but rewarding plot threads from the original Samurai.

Faults of dumbing down are easily dismissed as just that, but one type, seen a lot here, particularly piques my interest. The original Samurai was deeply enmeshed in questions of class relations: whether the peasant girl Shino and the young samurai Katsuhiro can court one another ethically, difficulties with trust and communication between samurai and villagers, the unchallenged pecking order among the samurai themselves, the impropriety of peasants hiring ronin at all, and especially Kikuchiyo’s awkward status as peasant-turned-soldier by virtue of simply arming himself and taking to battle. Class differences are so important to the movie that the Criterion Collection version’s commentary returns to it again and again. Modern Americans, growing up in a society that makes a virtue of egalitarianism, may not realize the class issues percolating through the movie, and may have a hard time understanding them even once explained.

Samurai 7, by contrast, doesn’t address class differences. The closest it gets is an informal ranking of the samurai themselves by skill; otherwise, everyone speaks to one another as equals. The scandalous romance between Shino and Katsushiro is replaced by a trite, shallow romance between Katsushiro and the miniskirt chick, Kirara. Kikuchiyo is set apart not by his common upbringing, beyond his control, but by his personal failings of impetuosity and abrasiveness.

This makes me wonder: is this change also the product of an egalitarian society? Heaven knows the US is not free of class consciousness, nor is modern Japan a carbon copy of the American dream, but American attitudes toward meritocracy and upward mobility are now firmly entrenched in Japan, and have been for generations. Japanese kids are exposed to far, far more samurai movies than we are, so they’ll easily absorb another show featuring superhuman feats of fencing. But I wonder how easily they would absorb a show depicting, without a lot of exposition, a society in which class informs every decision. I wonder whether a Japanese teen would need the same kind of film commentary I do for the original movie.

Posted by at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few months ago, I found a freeware translation of San Juan to a single-player computer game. Today, I had a chance to try it out.

San Juan is a translation itself, from a more complicated board game called Puerto Rico to a card game. Both are interesting, exploiting a clever if complicated turn order to inject agonizing strategic decisions. Each player, in turn, gets to choose one basic game function: producing goods, for example, or selling goods, or erecting buildings for points and special benefits. When a function is chosen, everyone performs it; so everyone builds on the same turn, everyone redistributes labor at the same time, and so on. And, since most functions get chosen sooner or later, the game revolves around timing the functions to a sequence that most benefits you.

The thought process goes something like this: “I need to get some cash so I can build this sugar mill, so a merchant phase would be good. But I don’t need the cash until a builder phase, and if I do a merchant phase now, Bob will sell his coffee for a lot of money and be free to do whatever he wants. I think Bob needs money, so he might do a merchant phase of his own. I think Carol wants a merchant phase, too, so I can wait for Carol as long as Bob doesn’t produce goods or build first. If Bob decides to produce, it’ll be too late for me to take advantage of a sugar mill, and if he builds, I can’t yet afford a sugar mill. Either way, I’m screwed. Okay, should I sell stuff now, and be certain of getting my sugar mill up and working, or go prospecting first, and hope Bob does a merchant phase?”

People, unless they’re Rain Man, can’t see more than two or three steps ahead in these complicated webs of sequencing, so building a competitive computer player isn’t too bad. Puerto Rico is complicated, but San Juan is simple enough that seeing four or five moves ahead by brute force is feasible, and in San Juan, that’s enough to offset a human player’s natural heuristic advantage. The computer opponent(s) in the freeware translation I got are pretty good, good enough that I lost my first few games by large margins, in the neighborhood of 36-24 and 25-19.

At first, I suspected cheating, but I’d just suffered some bad luck at the outset. Later, I began winning games by similar margins, and winning as often as losing. That made me feel better about myself, but at a price. It’s made me aware of how much San Juan depends on raw luck. I mentioned above that each building provides a specific benefit—anything from reduced building costs to extra production to victory point bonuses. Some combinations of buildings work very well together; others combinations are no greater than the sum of their component parts. Because San Juan has you draw potential building projects randomly from a deck of cards, rather than selecting them from the entire pool, you are dependent on the whims of fortune for the opportunity to build in an efficient, productive order.

Playing against humans, this wasn’t so obvious. Humans are less predictable, especially while learning the game, so crazy score distributions look like the scores we deserved for good or bad strategies. Repeated games between myself (past the learning curve, and no longer improving quickly) and the computer (not learning at all), the wildly swinging scores suddenly looked a lot more random. And suddenly, I’m a lot less interested in San Juan. I’m still up for Puerto Rico; a freeware version I’ve seen clearly penalizes dumb computer tactics, which suggests that good strategies pay off. But San Juan just looks like a matter of luck. Flipping coins is faster and less effort.

Posted by at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I gave blood today, as I do every two months, barring the occasional cold virus. There’s not a lot to keep one occupied as his vital essences drip away, so I’ve grown quite familiar with the framed inspirational posters over many visits. That’s about the only reading material under the circumstances.

A few of the posters are bland reminders that everyone needs blood, complete with multi-ethnic children to tug the heartstrings. These are boring.

The north wall is more interesting; it has four posters obliquely urging frank discussion of HIV/AIDS and its dangers through proverbs taken from different regions of Africa. As it happens, I recognize three of these proverbs, as they are taken from parables I’ve read as part of my folk tale research. (Presumably, the fourth is as well, and I just haven’t seen it.) One of the proverbs is misquoted, and another is taken grossly out of context. This drives me to distraction.

So by preference, my attention focuses on the remaining three posters, done in the style of WWII recruitment posters—for all I know, they are reproductions of actual blood drive posters from the period. In each of them, bold letters urge you to give blood, while a young woman in nurse’s garb stands yearningly beneath. Just what she is yearning for is ambiguous. The artist did his work carefully; the explicit suggestion is that each of these nurses is straining forward with raw, patriotic fervor, burning with a desire that you save your country by spilling your blood, if perhaps a bit less messily and painfully than our boys Over There. But the implicit suggestion is that each of these lovely ladies has an urgent desire to have sex with you right there on the couch, held back only by the need first to see you proven a man through blood donation. Although the nurses are tastefully covered, their eyes are heavily made up, and their lips are parted in a manner reserved for women about to tear someone’s clothes off, and their hair is just beginning to work loose from where it had been decorously pinned back that morning. The pearly lighting and low perspective suggest a virginal Greek goddess, until you realize that the lighting casts unambiguous shadows down the abdomen, and that the perspective doesn’t make the nurses so statuesque as to be unhuggable. They’re archetypal depictions of the virgin slut.

I doubt that any of this occurred to whoever selected the decorations. If you don’t pay attention, the posters are just a bit of history; maybe they’ll remind people of the noble efforts of the Red Cross in past generations, and make them feel part of a larger whole. I doubt the workers give the posters a second thought, either; they’re usually hustling to deal with donors, and when traffic is sparse, they’re busy with gossip. But for a donor, with little to do but stare at the walls and/or ceiling, there’s time to take a good, long look. And frankly, it’s rather surreal to be lie on that couch, carefully avoiding thoughts of needles and arms, suddenly to realize…

“Hey! There’s soft porn in here!”

Posted by at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A simple little flash game has developed a rabid following on one of the newsgroups to which I subscribe. It’s a variation on the “tower defender” class of game, wherein ever-larger waves of bad guys swarm toward your base, trying to destroy it, and you score by enduring as long as possible.

This variation is unusual in that you have no control over the defenders themselves. Instead, you buy and place defensive towers between waves; more efficient tower placement kills more attackers, extending your survival time. You’re not so much general as defense contractor. To keep things interesting, you can also upgrade towers, and select from a few different kinds: rapid-fire, heavy damage, slowing effect, and so on. Every improvement costs you some of your limited budget, so choose wisely. If you’re feeling gutsy, you can earn a substantial bonus by going in without spending all your money, defending with understrength towers. The number of interesting decisions one can add to the game’s design is surprisingly large, and the tactics surprisingly deep.

Gamers on the newsgroup I mentioned above aren’t the only fans. Amateur versions of varying quality are popping up all over, partly because they’re addictively fun, but also because they’re very easy to code. But, so far as I know, nobody has tried adapting this simple game to two players.

Imagine this: you log into a pool of players, specifying whether you want to play the noble defenders or marauding hordes. The system matches you with someone from the other side, possibly according to some kind of handicapping system. While the defender plays as described above, spending his limited cash on gun turrets he hopes will do the job, the attacker is busy spending his limited budget on a choice of troops, trying to find a mix that will get past the towers: slow but heavily armored assault troops, quick but fragile skirmishers, flying units immune to ground-fire towers, whatever.

After every wave, the attacker gets money to buy new troops; the defender keeps his towers in play. Also, attacker and defender split a pot of money for new towers, troops, and upgrades. The more troops to get through on one round, the larger the attacker’s share of money to expand and upgrade his horde; the fewer troops to get through, the more money the defender has to build more towers. Eventually, of course, the attacker overwhelms the defense, and players score according to how long it takes. Their scores are recorded for future use in matching opponents of comparable skill.

I think it’s a great idea, or at least great for people who like these tower defense games. And it’s hardly any more difficult to code than the one-sided games making the internet rounds now. If you’re an ambitious coder with some free time, give it a shot. You can thank me in the credits nobody ever reads.

Posted by at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eileene and I were discussing the TV series Heroes recently, and she pointed out that Heroes is doing something unusual for shows pandering to the fanboy market, sweeping away many of its established characters with the season turnover. Abruptly changing a winning formula is a gutsy decision, especially when fanboys really, really like sheer volume in a setting: more characters, more locations, more supplemental source material than normal people can stomach. Fanboys especially thrive on the polynomial expansion of the number of relationships between members of a growing dramatis personae, to the point that they will provide their own fiction to explore whatever relationships the series does not pursue. Killing off characters, or even just shuffling them offstage once their part is done, gets in the way of that kind of volume. Plus some fans will inevitably lose their favorite character. Nevertheless, fans are taking sweeping changes of the guard in stride.

I maintain that this is because Heroes also offers definite, satisfying conclusions to character arcs, another departure from the norm. All too often, shows like this string both characters and stories long past their narrative life span, precisely to milk the fanboys for all they’re worth. It’s easy to jerk the audience around when you’ve got time travel, alien technology, magic, and/or super-powers floating around to explain half-baked teasers, and—so far—Heroes has given a clear signal they will not cross the same line The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Lost have, where the audience finally decides they’re just getting jerked around, and quit in disgust.

I, for one, really like the approach. I’ll trade the lingering promise of my favorite character’s return for a satisfying ending any day, even if that ending is an unpleasant one. While Eileene and I talked about this, I suddenly realized this was precisely something I’d wished for years ago, in a different setting.

The now-defunct West End Games once put out a large role-playing setting called Torg. The basic premise is that natural law operates in different ways in infinite parallel worlds. High technology exists in some worlds, not in others. Likewise magic, spiritual powers, and even social abstractions like uniform time measurement. A handful of powerful raiders have learned to pierce the boundaries between worlds and harvest energy from worlds they conquer, a thermodynamic engine of cosmic proportions. And now they put aside natural rivalry over possibility energy to raid our earth, a source too rich for any one raider to absorb safely.

As a result, a half dozen chunks of our world have been transformed. England and Scandinavia are locked in a high fantasy civil war, including Vikings, giants, and dragons. France has been taken over by a brutal high-tech theocracy. The pulp villain “Doctor Mobius” rules a pulp-action empire from Egypt. Indonesia has become a land of gothic horror, Japan has become a megacorporate dystopia, and intelligent dinosaurs walk the ruins of the eastern U.S. Part of the process of conquest involves transforming territory, and especially the people who live there, to the natural laws of the conquering cosm: where the dinosaurs invade, our armies can’t fight very well because our guns don’t work in their occupied territory, and slowly our soldiers “go native,” becoming primitives who can’t even conceive of things like nations and armies.

The war to repel these invaders from other realities would be a terrific milieu for an ensemble cast. Enormous possibilities to mix-and-match characters to exotic settings (and equally exotic characters) would make it a fanboy favorite. It would also be a vast production to undertake. My vision for such a series didn’t make any promises. This is a war for our very reality, and individual good guys often lose big in wars. As episodes progressed, the ranks of starting characters would get weeded out. Some would die big, dramatic deaths, others would find and settle into less dramatic seats from which to pursue the war, and some would simply become statistics. A show like that would be awesome to watch, but I had no illusions that I would never see it happen.

It was a pleasant surprise to realize that’s what we’ve got in Heroes. Not the reality wars, but a premise equally compelling to geeks who like superpowers and battle suits and psionics in equal measure. More to the point, it has the same sort of narrative structure I wished for, with numerous intriguing mix-and-match possibilities, and no guarantees. Unlike most fans, I’m quite looking forward to the familiar old characters getting replaced, if only to see how well it works.

Posted by at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’re planning on a trip to Arizona this year, to see the Grand Canyon and sundry attractions. If we’re ambitious, we may drift across the New Mexico border to see Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Roswell is vaguely tempting, but I can’t believe it amounts to anything like what I wish it were.

The job of finding interesting places to go falls to me. This is somewhat tricky, since Arizona is a big desert, when you get right down to it. Geography they have in spades; urban attractions like restaurants and museums, not so much. The big population centers—Tucson, Phoenix, Santa Fe—only number a couple hundred thousand people. Hardly trackless wilderness, but nothing like a metropolis, either. These regional centers are comparable to large suburbs around L.A., Chicago, and NYC. Speaking of suburbs, the population difference is sharpened by the absence of suburbs in the desert. Newark may be no larger than Tucson, but it can draw on shoppers and audiences from a dozen neighbors; Tucson’s market ends at the city borders. Without the sheer numbers to support many cultural attractions, Arizona’s tourist bureau relies on geography.

All this demography has me thinking about the great cities of the past, and how size is always relative. At their respective peaks in ancient times, Rome and Baghdad and Chang’An got above a million residents. Urban centers in medieval Europe didn’t even get that far. Nevertheless, they were the biggest population centers people had ever seen, and supported marvels that couldn’t be found anywhere else. Travelers passed on tales of these wonders. Sometimes these tales were preserved for us in the writings of people who had seen them, sometimes they grew by way of rumor to ridiculous claims, but either way, we remember ancient cities as places of wonder.

But think about it again, without the perspective of historical significance or making allowances for primitive technology and institutions, as a not-especially-precocious kid today might. Imagine stopping overnight in Babylon as it existed at the dawn of history: buildings of clay, because clay and stone were all they had to build with, and it cost too much to ship in wood. The buildings sag, from inadequate support, because the bricks aren’t quite uniform, and because cheap clay slowly melts away in the occasional rains. No quality restaurants: everybody eats bread—coarse, unleavened bread—and, if they’re lucky, vegetables or a scrap of meat. The water is murky, the beer and wine crude and amateurish by our standards. Roads aren’t paved. No sanitation to speak of, or, for that matter, proper toilets. Everyone wears the same outfits of coarse wool, or, if they’re lucky, linen. The celebrated Hanging Gardens are remarkable only because there aren’t any other sizeable floral gardens in the city; people need that space for vegetable plots. The central palace/temple is done up with a bit of gold and paint, but everything else is a uniform sun-baked ash brown. Nightlife is non-existent, because the lights go out when the sun goes down.

What a dump! On returning from your 7-day, 6-night cruise, you’d describe the place as a seedy, boring place you passed through on your way to more exotic locations.

The whole process scales downward, too; roadside farm towns in Nebraska, with a diner, a video store, and a video game in the gas station sparkle in comparison to backwater farm towns in medieval France, which had el zippo for tourists—or residents, for that matter.

Chances are good that we’ll spend a night or two in some dull spots on our vacation: a motel next to a T.G.I. Friday’s, or a town that closes up at 7. That’s okay; a bit of quiet meditation is part of a good vacation. But if the times between Grand Canyon and the Crater get to be too much, I’ll remind myself of ancient Babylon, and count my blessings.

Posted by at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I write this, a bee is hovering around me. As a kid, I was afraid of bees. I find bugs—including arachnids, myriapods, and shrimp—generally creepy, but bugs that can attack people? Horrors!

Bees don’t bother me much any more, though, because I’ve really absorbed the idea that bees don’t want to sting anyone. Setting aside exaggerated claims that bees invariably disembowel themselves when they leave the stinger behind in the skin, they’re just plain busy with the work of finding sugar, pollen, and nesting sites to go spending their time and precious enzymes stabbing things for the heck of it. Of course, this is small comfort to someone who accidentally steps barefoot on a bee, thus giving it a reason to sting, but bees generally don’t go looking for trouble. Like rattlesnakes, they just want to be left alone.

On the other hand, bees are pretty stupid. I wrote here earlier on how expensive intelligence is in biological currency, and how insects are often smart like a computer: capable of complicated preprogrammed tasks, but incapable of responding creatively to stimuli outside their programming. This bee here is clearly no Einstein; it keeps bonking into the same cushion over and over, when succulent flowers are no more than six feet away, and the planking on the porch would make a far better nesting site. It’s just sort of bumbling around—sorry, couldn’t help myself—until it bonks into something interesting, at which point new programming will kick in.

When a mind is that tiny, it can be very predictable to an expert, but very unpredictable to a layman, like me. Bees may ordinarily be unaggressive towards people, but what if a person smells wrong because he’s eaten the wrong food, or just happens to be sitting in just the right position to create an ideal little nook for a hive? Signals invisible to us can be quite significant to a bee. Most people know smoke makes bees more docile, but not necessarily why. Recently I learned that this is because it triggers a reflex to save what can be saved from a nest in a forest fire, and a bee saving eggs is a bee too busy to attack an interloper. A little knowledge is dangerous; a bee far from the hive would not react the same way to smoke, which might surprise someone inexpertly pacifying bees at his picnic. I’ve watched people “pet” bees as they feed, stroking a finger along the back of the abdomen. Done gently enough, the bee just endures the poking and goes about its business.

So yes, normally bees won’t sting, even with a little provocation, and my second thought on seeing a bee is to relax and ignore it. But before long, I have a third thought: there’s no guarantee that tiny little mind will not misidentify me as something worth stinging, and, of course, once the attack reflex is triggered, there’s no reasoning with a bee.

Posted by at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)