June 2009 Archives

Junta

June 30, 2009 9:24 PM

I pity Honduras, caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, you have the military coup, the overthrow by force of the rightfully elected president by the military. Though the military is siding with the courts in this case, it’s still usurping the courts’ authority, making itself the final court of appeal—with guns. A recipe for disaster no matter how enlightened the army’s decision might be, and no assurance that even this level of enlightenment will continue. Interim “president” Micheletti’s promises to step down at the end of what should be President Zelaya’s term of office remain an open question.

On the other hand, President Zelaya is hardly the beleaguered defender of freedom and justice in his country. The military moved to eject him when he sought to override constitutional term limits and run again for election. When a court denied his motion, he sought a plebiscite to rewrite the constitution, immediately and without discussion. Zelaya’s protests that the plebiscite is just a harmless little poll to gauge the national opinion are an obvious crock; after demonstrating that voters want him to remain in office—and I guarantee the poll would produce the required results—he would inevitably try to overturn the constitution with a mob.

Rule by military junta or rule by charismatic dictator. What a choice. Maybe a lot of Hondurans are getting the government they deserve, having enthusiastically backed either the military-industrial complex or populist dictatorship, but they can’t all deserve to be stuck with this no-win choice. And the international community has the arrogance to add insult to injury by announcing that one side is wholly right, and the other wholly wrong.

I suppose there’s a certain vested interest here in the US in arguing that the president should remain in office no matter how he may violate the constitution, and no matter how many court orders he ignores—from both parties, now that Obama is refusing a court order to release evidence of torture at Abu Grahib. Many Americans, too, may be getting the government we deserve. Maybe more than some of us deserve. But others of us are getting decidedly less.

Equal Air Time

June 25, 2009 9:19 PM

I ought to be relishing the schadenfreude of Governor Mark Sanford’s exposed affair, yet another hypocritical right-wing loon who ought to be drummed out of office but won’t be. But I’m not. The sex scandals are coming so thick and fast that they’ve lost most of their power to ruin careers.

Well. Republican careers.

I mean, there’s lying cheating bastards on both sides of the aisle, but it seems only Democrats suffer for their dalliances. John Vitter’s still in office, and running for re-election. Larry Craig served his term of office. So did Vito Fossella. Mark Foley resigned, but then, Republicans won’t stand up so readily for…y’know. John Ensign, who loudly cried for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, has decided to remain in the Senate. So, it seems, has Sanford. I can’t help but notice three things:

1. When Republicans are caught dipping their wick, the talking heads immediately name as many straying Democrats as they can who have done likewise, but it doesn’t work in the other direction. That includes supposedly liberal hotspots like NPR. I’ve heard Eliot Spitzer’s name more often in the past three days than I have Mark Sanford’s, never mind David Vitter’s. I’ve heard John Edwards named more often in the past week than John Ensign, let alone Vito Fossella. When Spitzer and Edwards were caught cheating, Vitter and Craig were long forgotten, although listeners were often reminded that they belong to Bill Clinton’s party.
2. God readily forgives Republicans for cheating on their wives, and even for spending public funds to do it. Must be all the brownie points they earned demonizing fornicators and fags. Democrats’ sins, however, are very nearly unforgivable in God’s eyes, and—if we’re to take our cue from right-wingers—utterly unforgivable in the public’s. It’s almost as if the party clings to God primarily to forgive themselves and damn their opponents in his name. No, on second thought, it’s precisely like that.
3. Fox “News” once again—whoops!—mislabeled the party of a high official doing something embarrassing. If twice begins to look like carelessness, what are seven documented cases?

As I say, both parties have their creeps. How about we talk about them with something like equal frequency?

Without It

June 24, 2009 9:13 PM

Last Sunday, we had a father’s day dinner with Eileene’s family, including an elderly friend of my father-in-law, who smiled and shrugged when the conversation turned to electronic games and admitted he didn’t understand a thing we kids were talking about. I suppose at that table, we were kids, but we surely aren’t in an absolute sense—we’re easily old enough to be out of touch with the hip new thing, whatever that happens to be. I’m the 40-year-old, and never much into trends in the first place, so I’m most out of touch, but even Ella, the baby at 27, acknowledges she isn’t up on musical trends the way she once was. And it struck me that electronic games are the rock-and-roll of my generation, in a very specific sense.

Dave Barry described his own generation living in denial as they crossed the threshold of maturity by calling upon rock music as the image of youthful rebellion. Comfortably insulated in the largest and richest demographic group the country had ever seen, the baby boomers were privileged to listen to Woodstock era music on the radio all the time, anywhere in the country, and to watch television sitcoms focused on whatever activity was on the baby boomers’ minds, and just generally to saturate mass media with the message that whatever baby boomers were up to was cool precisely because the baby boomers were doing it. Climbing the corporate ladder? Totally different from the way other generations had taken jobs, fraught with modern, hip issues. Raising kids? Totally different from the way square Ward and June Cleaver families raised kids when the boomers were young. Midlife crisis? Yeah, that too. Cool. Hip. With it. When, in fact, Barry points out, the boomers were not “with it,” but were so far beyond “it” that the light from “it” would not reach us for several centuries.

Computers generally, and computer games specifically, perform the same function for generation X. Raised as latchkey kids, we’ve continued to play with our Nintendo stations well past the age when we’re supposed to be doing responsible things with our time and money, and, in our minds, computers and electronic entertainment are still “high-tech.” Still cutting-edge, just as those clunky old Apple II’s were the face of technological progress when we were learning our multiplication tables. And as long as we understand computer games, surely we must be with it.

News flash: Playstations and portable music are no longer the wave of the future. They’re the wave of today. There’s microchips in your coffee mug, fer crhissakes. Understanding programming and microcircuitry is still a valuable skill, but no longer the mark of a forward thinker; merely using electronics just qualifies you as an ordinary schlub in modern culture, a consumer sheep.

Oh, You Wacky Collectors!

June 23, 2009 9:09 PM

I picked this up through the Nodwick website, from which it might insinuate itself through the geek community. Woman’s Day magazine reports ten “crazy” collections—collections so massive that they surely must speak of something aberrant in their owners.

I can’t speak for most of the collections, although none of them strike me as terribly impressive, but I can comment on the dice. With no slur intended toward Amos Kwok or his collection, his tray of dice qualifies merely as “a useful variety.” It’s barely larger than my own stash, and I’ve put no special effort into it. Dice are a signature tool of the RPG hobby, and I just “collect” sets I’m likely to use, mostly 6- and 10-siders. I admit I never throw out old, unwanted dice, and occasionally rescue a stray from some forgotten board game, just in case. A matched set is nice, and I’ve chosen to buy replacements for dice I already own after discovering that what seemed cool in the shop is illegible in a darkened basement, but nothing like serious collecting. Nothing that would stand out among gamers.

For players who enjoy dice artifacts, and not merely tools—and there are many—the variety which is readily available at even a modest RPG convention or a puts the photo to shame. Some collectibles I don’t see in the photo: 30-siders, 100-siders, 7-siders, oversized dice (about the size of an apricot, and a real nuisance when someone insists on using one at the table), dice specialized to a particular system (e.g., FUDGE dice marked with +, -, and 0), stone dice, metallic dice, “adventure generators” with dungeon elements in place of numbers, dice printed with weighted distribution, and shoddy dice that came with the early D&D sets, kept as a badge of pride. Not to mention items that purists would eschew, like fuzzy dice and electronic dice.

A couple weeks ago, Eileene participated in an on-line discussion wherein everyone confessed the proof of how hopelessly geeky they were. Many were pathetic: “I attended the opening night of the Star Trek movie.” Big whoop. When you get to attending opening night in full costume, and insist on asking for your tickets in Klingon, let me know. The Woman’s Day article strikes me as this very kind of reporting on geekiness from across a vast gulf separating the reporter from actual geekiness, an inability even to perceive real geekiness from deep within the womb of normality. Perhaps the photo is only a sampling of the entire collection—in which case, the photographer isn’t doing his job—but I doubt it. I strongly suspect that this is merely the largest quantity and variety of dice someone in the tidy little offices of Woman’s Day has ever seen, or could ever imagine. They need to get out more.

That's the Second Biggest Case of the Crabs I've Ever Seen!

June 19, 2009 9:03 PM

By way of dealing with a bout of summer flu, I spent much of the day yesterday “taking it easy”—that is, skimming about some freeware games, rather than doing housework and writing. I found three real prizes, all in the point-and-click graphic adventure category.

Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs and Nick Bounty: Goat in the Grey Fedora feature a private eye in a tongue-in-cheek noir setting, and are worthy low-budget attempts to reproduce the classic LucasArts point-and-click adventures, like the Monkey Island series. Like Guybrush Threepwood, the hero is something of a loser trying to live up to his more grandiose self-image, combining loose objects in implausible ways to overcome obstacles—for example, dipping a sea sponge in squid ink to create a makeshift ink pad for use in fingerprinting. Whenever possible, a useless click generates a one-liner rather than a generic “that doesn’t work” message. (Some are funnier than others. Hey, they can’t all be winners.) Although neither title matches Monkey Island in polish or size, they do a damn good job for freeware, and are a fine reminder why the genre would live on in a just world.

Morningstar is a grittier treatment that gives you a first-person perspective on an alien world where your ship crashed and you must collect enough spare parts to fix your ship and dispose of the “gravitational anomaly” that brought it down in the first place. Hints are readily available through the wounded captain/pilot, pinned to his seat by debris. Whenever you get stuck, you can radio in for a hint on what you should be doing next—or, more often, where you should be now. While online hints are a dangerous temptation in general, they are welcome here, as the lush graphics can hide significant details if you aren’t fortunate enough to roll your mouse over just the right spot and see, for example, “the space between the consoles” light up as an important feature. Hunt-the-pixel is never fun, but at least with the pilot’s help, you usually know at least which screen conceals the hidden pixel. (My advice: look for alien lettering everywhere once you get to the alien base.) The production values are extremely good for a small project.

When text adventure games crumbled under the assault of graphic adventure games, Infocom generously made its TADS coding engine available to the general public, and die-hard fans did a surprisingly good job at creating their own. (Check out the interactive fiction archive if you miss Zork.) In retrospect, their achievements may not seem so amazing: the coding of text adventures is laughably simple compared to most games, and, with an engine in hand, even non-coders can turn out a pretty good game, if their puzzles or color text are clever enough…and they have the willpower to stick with it. Perhaps we’re witnessing a similar amateur revival in the graphic adventure genre, now that even graphic adventures are dying out, victims of colorful explosions and short attentions spans. I would have thought that the work involved in adding graphics to the basic text format of rooms-with-objects-in-them would be a deal-killer, but it looks like my appreciation of coding enthusiasm, or of the work load actually involved, is once again wrong.

Good.

Go, you plucky indie designers! Make us remember why we played Grim Fandango, just as you once reminded us why we played Zork. And the rest of you punks—send in your $5 to encourage them.

Parasites

June 18, 2009 8:57 PM

This evening, I went to cut up one of the tomatoes that have been sitting too long on the decorative plate where we keep fresh fruit, and discovered a little bump of foreign material poking into the flesh. So I plucked it out and took a closer look to estimate the damage and whether I would need a second tomato once I’d cut out the inedible bits. To my surprise, the foreign material wasn’t poking into the flesh, but out of it. Yuck.

Only then did I notice the blemish was not unique. A dozen or so little ridges, 2cm or shorter, maybe 2mm across, and stiffer than the surrounding flesh, were crawling just under the skin, looking like some mama bug had planted its eggs there, and they were beginning to hatch out. Double yuck.

Dreading crushed larva on my thumb and finger, I looked at them, as one might look at a booger, just to see how gross it is before cleaning it off, only to find that I was pinching vegetable matter. The foreign bodies growing from the tomato were tomato seedlings. I thought produce was irradiated to prevent sprouting and protect the fruits (ha ha) of laborious hybridization from competitors. If so, somebody was sloppy in this case. Cutting the tomato open confirmed it: dozens of little sprouts worming their way toward the surface.

And it still looked yucky. Even though the tomato, in being consumed, was doing precisely what nature intends for it. Lacking an animal predator to eat the seeds and deposit them elsewhere (which I understand to be the usual strategy for berries), the tomato was acting as the initial fertilizer for the seedlings, doing its best to give its children life despite lying in a sterile bowl rather than fertile ground. But packed into the tomato, the seedlings looked every bit as predatory and parasitic as insect larva or a fungal growth. Nature is one sick bitch.

You Can Keep That Old Time Religion

June 17, 2009 8:52 PM

Zen is purported to be a branch of Buddhism, but the more I learn about both Zen and Buddhism, the less they seem to have in common. Okay, both make a point of renouncing an attachment to the material world, but then, almost every religion does—almost by definition. If all religion is an attempt to address spiritual issues, inevitably every religion will remind us not to be too attached to the material world, although they may differ greatly as to what qualifies as “being too attached.”

Even on the subject of renouncing material concerns, old school Buddhism and Zen part ways. Classic Buddhism renounces the world as a place of suffering, life as an eternal burden, and the sooner you rid yourself of both, the better off you’ll be. Zen merely treats the material world as unimportant: it is what it is, and getting all crazy about rejecting it in every way is just another psychic anchor, another doctrine by which we start playing “holier than thou” and lose enlightenment. “I eat when I am hungry, and sleep when I am tired. This is everyday Zen.” Zen monks aren’t exactly wild and crazy hippie types—they work hard and pray hard, to the point of accepting beatings when they let their attention drift, and live lives of extreme asceticism—but they do accept pleasure where they find it. Some of the most celebrated Zen parables involve maiming, starvation, suicide, but it’s often done with a sly grin: the important part isn’t getting your thumb chopped off; the important part is how you answer questions about the Buddha now that that crutch is gone…and discovering it makes no difference, that the answer was always there before you, and had nothing to do with a thumb. And then there’s Zen parables about students teasing their teacher, contests of wit, bopping people on the head, even urine jokes.

Zen parables are usually playful, fun; the Buddha’s lectures are pompous and despairing. The difference between the two is as stark as the difference between a real whooping Gospel dance extravaganza and a Puritan interest in damnation of pretty much everybody and everything; for all that both are nominally Christian, it’s impossible to see any similarities between the two, apart, perhaps, from the cross on the steeple.

Shortcut

June 16, 2009 8:50 PM

Last week, we attended two lecture panels as part of the NYU-sponsored science festival. The first reported cutting-edge developments in integrating computers with brains, which proved something of a dud. The second explored traffic of all kinds, and was much more interesting. In particular, they made brief mention of the Braess Paradox.

Braess (rhymes with “ice”), whose paper is decades old but is only now causing a lot of excitement after being translated to English and catching the attention of the right people, demonstrated that, under certain circumstances, one flow network might tolerate more flow than another, almost identical network with a new edge added. The discovery applies to many phenomena, but I’ll stick to cars: translating the math into concrete terms, adding a road to an existing network can slow traffic flow overall. This is not due to the physical peculiarities of roads, such as the way a five-road intersection may be more confusing and tangled than a typical four-road intersection, but due strictly to the collective options of which path to take. Drivers with more options of how to get from home to work in one system might find that all of these options are slower than a road network from which some of these options are removed.

This is counterintuitive. Typically in mathematical models, adding options may or may not improve their overall behavior, but rarely do new options reduce the overall behavior. If the new options are less effective than existing options, they are simply ignored. If you’re deciding which of two jars of peanut butter to buy and someone comes along to offer you a third choice, the third peanut butter might be even better a choice than the other two, but if it isn’t, you’ve still got two perfectly good options that aren’t destroyed by adding a third option.

Road networks don’t fit this intuitive model because the overall path is not a single decision, but rather is composed of smaller steps. You first decide whether to drive to the northern toll road or the south freeway. Having chosen the north route, you decide whether to take the early exit and drive through town or the late exit and circle the city to enter on the far side. Having chosen the early exit, you choose whether to take the main drag or a smaller back road. And so on. Meanwhile, other drivers are choosing their routes, and many of them will overlap part of your route, but not the whole thing. Even your next-door neighbor who works in the office next to yours may take a radically different route, but share certain legs of the journey. Maybe he takes the freeway to circle the city, but shares your route along the main drag. The way that parts of routes can overlap may create a situation where one small part of the network is part of too many optimal routes; it offers the chance to mix-and-match better choices of individual roads. But making this mix-and-match choice available allows everyone to pile onto the few best roads, overburdening those few roads and slowing everyone down.

The pile-up is a Nash equilibrium—a situation where the collective choice is to no one’s advantage, but where any individual who tries to break from this decision suffers for it. If every driver chose a different path, sharing out the burden of taking less trafficked but slightly longer roads, everyone would get to work faster. But any individual driver finds a path stringing together each optional road his best route, whether or not the other drivers share his route.

The solution, then, is to remove the road that gives the mix-and-match. Simply take it out of the road network: tear up the street, or close it off, or turn it into a pedestrian mall.

All of this is interesting stuff, but how likely is a Braess Paradox, really, on real live roads? Given a network like a city road grid or a web of telephone wires, how likely is it that adding a new edge will slow the entire system? As a rule of thumb, mathematical curiosities like this require a finely balanced set of unlikely circumstances, like a man marrying his father’s second wife’s mother. I got the chance to ask one panelist in the Q&A, but she didn’t answer the question, perhaps because she’d been instructed to avoid using mathematics for fear of intimidating the audience—she complained as much when I went up after the Q&A portion to ask again, giving me a website that didn’t prove very helpful. Happily, other websites did prove helpful.

How likely is a Braess Paradox in an arbitrary network? Hang onto your hats. Fifty percent. Yes, for a given network, adding a new edge between two arbitrary vertices is just as likely to slow traffic as to speed it.

At least, that’s the report, under “certain reasonable assumptions about a road network.” I’d like to know what those assumptions are. Access to that paper is proving a little difficult; to date, I’ve found it available at a $15 subscription, and I’m hoping for cheaper.

A Mathematical Certainty

June 15, 2009 8:45 PM

The whiff of election rigging was in the air over Iran well before the official tallies were announced. Opposition candidates jailed. International election monitors and even ordinary press ejected from the country. Interruptions to cell phone and internet usage in large districts and even country-wide when it became apparent that Mousavi supporters were using services like Twitter and Facebook to get out the vote. The usual harbingers of a fraudulent election.

So outside observers were disappointed but hardly surprised when the official tallies came in. Surprise, surprise: what polls had predicted to be a close election officially gave president Ahmadinejad a whopping 62% of the votes, winning right across the board, including his opponents’ strongest bases of support. The electoral commission broke with decades of tradition in handing the results immediately to Khamenei for clerical approval, instead of waiting several days to allow for challenges and for irregularities to come to light. The Iranian government is now doing its level best to shut off all unofficial communication with the outside world as it deals with angry protestors.

But honest, or nearly honest, elections have occasionally produced shocking results, and all of this post-election repression looks a lot like a mostly honest government trying to maintain order. How do we distinguish between a regime falsifying its elections and a regime merely hoping to forestall or minimize the rioting which would predictably follow a close election regardless of who won, and would predictably follow as well a surprisingly large margin of victory for the incumbents?

Math. Juan Cole lists some grossly improbable statistical results coming out of the election. Readers’ comments below offer a few more observations. If that isn’t enough for you, hard-core statistics geek Nate Silver is crunching numbers as we speak, and linking to others’ analyses. To put their conclusions in the vernacular: elections can produce surprising results, but even these happen in predictable ways, especially in the distribution of where the surprises occur. Perhaps one particular voting bloc (e.g., the emergent “soccer moms” of 1996, or the religious right of 1980) makes a surprising turnout and tips the election, or polls systemically underrepresent one or more voting blocs (e.g., voters without phones in the Truman-Dewey upset of 1948), but national elections definitely do not turn out uniform results in every district, no matter how surprising the overall result—which is just what official tallies in Iran report.

Nothing is truly, absolutely certain in statistics, but you can reach conclusions that are incomprehensibly close to certainty, in much the same way that every subatomic particle in your body might spontaneously tunnel through space and reassemble on the other side of the room, or a monkey bashing keys randomly on a typewriter might reproduce Hamlet…but you’d have to wait many, many times the age of the known universe to have a significant chance of seeing it happen. The level of certainty behind claims that the Iranian election was reasonably close to honest, belong in the same realm of “technically can happen, but didn’t.”

We will surely get official press releases from the Iranian government in the coming days about how hustling the election results through approval wasn’t part of a fraud, but merely an attempt to forestall civil unrest, and how cracking down on the opposition isn’t an act of political repression, but merely an attempt to stop the ringleaders of violent protest. That these are lies is not merely likely, given the government’s oppressive behavior; it is a certainty—well, as certain that the sun will come up tomorrow.

Jawbone

June 11, 2009 7:59 PM

My friend Jen is due to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed. This led to a discussion around the gaming table about each of our experiences with getting our wisdom teeth removed. Some of us were better off than others, needing only upper teeth removed, or suffering lesser degrees of impaction, or growing teeth more exposed to surgery, but we’d all been compelled to surgical removals. Which got me to thinking about evolution.

Homo sapiens sapiens has smaller jaws than our immediate relatives in the evolutionary family tree, which is why we have wisdom tooth trouble: our genes still tell our bodies to produce the same number of teeth in a smaller space. The last teeth to come in get crowed aside, often failing to grow out of the lower jaw at all. Failing to grow out is bad, but growing out part-way is much worse—or would be, in a pre-industrial, pre-surgical environment, where being able to reach the tooth easily for removal doesn’t count for much—because the irregularities and inaccessibility of the partially-grown tooth are magnets for tooth decay. Again, in a pre-industrial, pre-surgical environment, that’s very dangerous, because the blood and lymph vessels serving the jaw are closely tied to those serving the brain; untreated or maltreated tooth decay often leads to death as infections are carried brain-ward. Even today, people who neglect their teeth to an extreme degree occasionally succumb to brain infection.

(Since the change in jaw predates surgery, I’m at a loss to explain how our jaws could have shrunk in the first place. There must be some link to an evolutionary advantage even more important than reducing the chances of death by brain infection. Greater mating potential from the attractiveness of neotenous features?)

The idea that modern medicine renders humans immune to the pressures of evolution and natural selection is plausible only so long as you don’t think very hard about it. Okay, maybe we’re no longer subject to the same evolutionary pressures as animals in the wild, and increasingly rapid changes in society and technology may shorten the timespan over which a given pressure might operate, but that just means we’re subject to different evolutionary pressures. Behaviors are just as subject to natural selection as gross physical features. Perhaps a modern, industrial, urbanized lifestyle selects for greater comfort in enclosed spaces, or the beauty of youth in place of the beauty of health, or a reduced territorial drive. Your guess is as good as mine.

Coraline, the Musical

June 10, 2009 7:54 PM

The adaptation of Gaiman’s Coraline to an off-Broadway musical format was another stop on our whirlwind of activity last weekend. I didn’t care for it, although I confess that doesn’t mean much. I don’t like theater as a general rule, especially not musicals. As both a musical and an adaptation of a story I liked very much in its original (book) version, and the show had two big strikes going against its chances to impress me before I stepped through the door.

It wasn’t all bad. They did some interesting things with sound, including an introduction played in disjoint notes on four or five toy pianos (which much have taken a lot of practice) and the opening, closing, locking, and unlocking of the door to the other house. They had a few funny jokes breaking the fourth wall, including the belle dame (or, strictly speaking, her hand) pausing just before she sings a song to narrate falling into the well to remind us that it does take an awfully long time to reach the bottom.

Mostly, though, my attention was taken up by how hard the musical would be to understand for anyone who had not read the book, or at least watched the movie adaptation. The production was very small, playing to about 200 seats, and employing only seven cast members. That meant that the cast doubled up on many roles, and not entirely in a natural fashion: the roles of Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible, naturally enough, were played by the same actors who played the other Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible, but those same actors also played Coraline’s mother and father, while two entirely different actors played the other mother and other father. The characters and their speech are quite distinctive, and I was never at a loss to distinguish one from the other…but I read the book, and quite closely, too. Someone coming in cold would likely be bewildered.

Bewildering, too, was the very brief attention paid to important plot points. The loss of the belle dame’s hand happens “off stage” in the book, the penalty for breaking an oath taken on her “good right hand,” before appearing for one last attempt to spoil a happy ending. The musical duplicates the movie’s decision to lop her hand off as she grasps after Coraline through a closing door, which is fine, but it happens so quickly, amid such a confusion of noise and flashing lights, that an audience not primed to watch for it is likely to miss it.

Knowing my prejudices, I can’t give Coraline a thumbs-down. I only warn potential audiences to read the book first, especially as it is a short read, aimed roughly at bright grade-schoolers, and very tightly written, masterfully turning out plot turns that consistently strike the sweet spot between predictability and non sequitur.

Pretension

June 10, 2009 7:52 PM

One stop on our whirlwind weekend was the MoCCA convention (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art), a combination of lecture series and fundraiser and indie comic dealer room. Our particular interest was in watching some graphic animated shorts in the “cartoons from hell” seminar, but we also stopped, inevitably, in the dealer room.

It was a graphic (ha ha) demonstration of the rough pyramid of talent that applies to every creative field: for every comic artist with real skill and something clever or engaging to say, there’s ten who are merely adequate draftsmen going through the motions, and for every one of those, there’s ten (or more) who never learned to draw—or lay out a page, or lay out a panel, or much of anything comic book-y, really. And that last category, in indie comic books, hides behind the fig leaf of a self-ironic postmodernism. I lost track of the number of titles in the vein of “Bob’s Crappy Comic,” or “Learn to Draw!” or “Pretentious Art Comic.” (And for those who are truly on top of the self-ironic pile, titles like “Bob’s Absolutely Terrific Comic”—plastered across low-grade monochrome scribbles.)

Talking about the artistic process itself is usually—not always, but usually—a strong indicator that the artist has nothing to talk about. When what the artist has to say is “This all sucks, but I’m really sophisticated in that I am able to realize it,” he really has nothing to talk about, apart from the semi-expressed urge for attention.

Red Baron Redux

June 8, 2009 7:49 PM

I’m at the Toyota dealership, giving our car a routine checkup before taking it to its annual inspection, making sure it won’t pollute the spring-fresh New Jersey air. The dealership works hard to make the wait as comfortable as possible, and I appreciate it. There’s free donuts in the morning, free popcorn in the afternoon. Three televisions air three different programs: CNN, daytime talk show, and Spongebob Squarepants for the kids. The chairs are comfy, and more than adequate for the number of people in here. And you can play video games for free. One machine is hooked up to a modern (though not quite the latest model) console game system, but my attention is on the other: a stand-up booth from the video arcades of the ‘80s.

It’s undergone some modifications. The games of that era were embarrassingly primitive by today’s standards. The memory demands are slightly larger than those of a digital watch. You could fit dozens, probably hundreds, of them onto a single CD, so the machine is designed to play several dozen games from several companies: Space Invaders, Defender, Joust, Robotron, 1942, Qix, and some titles you’ve forgotten ever existed.

And my very favorite is the cheapest-looking one of all: Red Baron. I don’t know whether it really is less sophisticated than some of those classics, or that it requires less processing power, but to the casual eye it sure looks like it. A close relative of Battle Zone, it employs those same bright-line vector graphics left over from Asteroids and, before that, Space War. Mountain ranges are two-dimensional zig-zags rising in front of the horizon like angry M’s—good luck estimating whether you’ve passed one or whether a sharp wingover will result in a crash. The only sounds are an understated siren to let you know an enemy is on the screen and beeps to count out your score: low tone for 100 points, high tone for 10 points. Shoot a gun emplacement (250 points), and you’re rewarded with a congratulatory “boop boop beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.” There’s no sound effect for blowing up enemies apart from score, nor for firing your guns. Or gun, more precisely—Red Baron places you in a pure fighter, not a fighter-bomber, thus overlooking a chance literally to add another dimension to the game, and your gun is never upgraded.

But guess what. It’s still fun, after twenty-five or thirty years. Not so fun that I’d shell out money for it, but fun nevertheless—more fun than some of the more recent offerings on the machine, like Bust-a-Move. I enjoyed Red Baron a lot at my local arcade where, rather than the stand-up booth, it was packaged in an enclosed space with a seat and a joystick with the fire button built into it (rather than placed separately on a dashboard), meant to simulate roughly the tactile experience of sitting in a cockpit. The arrangement helped block a little of the noise from the other games in the arcade, and, once I’d worked out a weaving infinity-symbol pattern to avoid enemy fire while keeping my guns more-or-less in line, Red Baron was my favorite for about a year, when they replaced it with some other game. I can understand why: Red Baron wasn’t very popular, and it took up the space of two or three upright booths. Still, its passing was mourned by at least one pimply teen, who only once experienced the thrill of being confronted with a wave of five biplanes at once, and bringing them all down.

You're Not Really Dead 'Til You Reach -10 hp.

June 5, 2009 7:56 PM

Rants are traditionally understood to do anyone but the author much good. A particularly witty and scathing one can be entertaining, to be sure, but the usual purpose of a rant is a therapeutic release for the writer, more an unleashing of frustration than a reasoned argument, and careful attention to the details of argument are likely to be counterproductive.

So the way this rant provided me, the reader, some therapeutic value is surprising.

I’ve complained here before about the state of the RPG industry. The hobby is dying, its aging devotees squeezed by demands on their adult time, younger blood drawn to other interests: first to CCGs, then internet gaming, with a brief flirtation with miniatures in between. The d20 indian-giving fiasco didn’t help: disrupting the distribution leg of the industry did nobody any good, but the costs were born disproportionately by small press and indie designers, so that almost all we see on the shelves today is D&D and White Wolf—maybe a little GURPS, if you’re lucky.

But dying? Probably not. The defining test of a true artist—that he must create, that he will create whether or not he’s paid to—applies to a lot of the best talent among RPG designers. The internet is a fertile ground for distributing small-press and indie games, especially those of the rules-lite variety. My sister-in-law’s surprisingly good showing as a novice GM, experienced only in online RPGs (literal RPGs, not merely MMO hack-and-slash) suggests that that medium is becoming sufficiently refined after a long period of growing pains to replicate the tabletop experience.

The picture isn’t entirely rosy. There’s a lot to be said for glossy products that a GM can use to whip up excitement among his players, for professional writing, and especially for rigorous playtesting, which the freeware model finds difficult to support in comparison to the heyday of the 1980s. Even if the internet makes it easier for gamers to stay in conversation with one another, and to exchange ideas, it won’t prevent the isolation of gamers who live outside metropolitan centers. Nor will it replace talent lost to the need to make a living.

Still, the blog rant, and the more perceptive comments attached below it, forced me to pause and rethink the glass as half-full, which has proven good therapy. As long as gamers can continue to find players around them, we’re good. Fewer, but still provided for.

Unquenchable Resolve

June 5, 2009 7:47 PM

I had this editorial called to my attention today, care of Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI). Although it shares a “double down” devotion to doctrinal purity in the name of Saint Ronnie with Michael Steele’s announcement of the return of Republican power, and shares too a sort of vague wish that energetic new ideas will arise—among *cough* conservatives—in place of an actual offering of energetic new ideas, it doesn’t come across quite so batshit crazy, swinging between a need for apologies and a refusal to offer apologies or trumpeting a grass-roots initiative secretly engineered in private conferences.

Still, there’s a kind of desperation there, a desperation that reminds me of nothing so much as Jefferson Davis’s speech following the fall of Richmond, claiming, in part:

“Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense…nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve.”

Stirring words, skillfully composed, but painfully at odds with observable reality to anyone who paused to think about what they mean, rather than the sentiment they hoped to be realized: without all those pesky centers of population and industry, our armies are finally assured victory! Davis was reduced to inflating morale with lies, because he’d reached a point where hope was all his cause had left. Were he not defending a nation founded on nothing more than a desire to preserve slavery, I could consider him a tragic figure, shouldered with leading a rebellion he did not approve and forced to keep hope alive when all hope was gone. But he did, and I don’t.

Thaddeus McCotter’s essay displays the same empty sentiment, although McCotter differs from Davis in that he believes what he’s saying: without the support of all those pesky moderate voters, ideas arising from our renewed purity must surely be victorious! No actual ideas, merely the hope that ideas will arise if everyone just believes hard enough. Were he not defending a generation of sabotage to American wealth, power, prestige, and principle merely to further enrich the very wealthy, McCotter too might seem a tragic figure. But he is, and he doesn’t.

Conservatives have been coasting for years on a mixture of bullying and faith: faith in unregulated business, faith in a hateful god, and bullying of anyone who dared challenge either. They finally broke the system far enough that even bullying and faith aren’t enough to win elections outside the reddest of the red states. But they’ve been coasting so long that, now that bullying and faith aren’t working, they have nothing else to offer—not even the opportunity to engineer a convenient crisis just before election day, now that they aren’t setting policy. And once the general public stops buying into the faith, and stops fearing the bullies, there’s nothing left to run on.

Nothing in politics is forever. Some day the right wing will be back, probably sooner than is good for anyone. But not as long as this remains the party line. It’s a different kind of faith-based politics. Not politics motivated by religious faith, but politics rooted in a faith in inevitable victory. If we just believe hard enough, it will be true.

Which suits me just fine. Faith is no way to run a government; witness the recent results of running an economy on faith, or launching wars on faith. When the Republican party breaks its reliance on faith, and starts to measure policy, whether for elections or governance, on objective reality instead of what it might prefer to be true, they may come back in touch with reality, and I may have to start taking their ideas seriously again. Wouldn’t that be nice? Two political parties with meaningful ideas instead of merely half a party? But until they break the habit, they deserve the wilderness they’ve found themselves in.

So Cold

June 3, 2009 7:46 PM

The library has some heavy-duty air conditioning. Come the height of summer, that is quite welcome. There isn’t much need to lower the temperature artificially, however, when it’s uncomfortably cool outside, as it is today: about 64°F, breezy and drizzly. There’s no need at all to lower the temperature artificially below that.b

Yet the A/C is pounding away today, keeping the library a frosty 62°F. I can’t make up my mind which of two problems is to blame, but they’re both stupid. Possibility one: the central air is programmed to keep the temperature below an expected outside value, rather than keep it within a fixed target range. Possibility two: the air conditioning is set to run between certain dates, regardless of what the weather may be like on those dates.

Neither case is wholly nonsensical. You see such behavior a lot in old heating systems. In the first case, the regulator is so old as to be mechanical, and allowing the target temperature to vary with the strain on the system presented by the outside conditions is cheaper than aiming for a fixed target. In the second case, the expense of firing up the boiler only to shut it off again a day later, or vice versa, is greater than the expense of running it needlessly, or the inconvenience of a few days’ over- or under-heating.

But these systems are not wholly nonsensical in the context of the industrial age, when control systems were crude, mechanical devices, insensitive to small changes, difficult to design so as to handle multiple variables, prone to getting stuck or broken when designed to be too responsive. Isn’t this the information age? A generation or three after electronics became widely available? Even granting that the library’s temperature control may be old, it isn’t that old. World War II had electrical control systems. By now, even if the original control system depended on wires and circuit breakers, it should be easy enough—and cheap enough—to replace all such systems with a microchip with more processing power than the world’s largest calculating machine back when the original system was built. Programmable. Able to handle numerous variables: target temperatures that vary by date, by outside conditions, by time of day, by time since the last adjustment, by what flavor of ice cream the current administrator likes—anything. And any or all of them in combination.

So why the hell is it so cold in here?

Better Living Through Runes

June 2, 2009 7:45 PM

Our new RPG campaign is off to a roaring start, the PCs reuniting at the island where they grew up, beginning their plans for vengeance upon the raiders who orphaned them as children and upon whoever may have triggered the raid through dabbling in transgressive arts. To my surprise, runes came into play almost immediately as a game element. Good thing I’d prepared a lot of information on them ahead of time—looks like that time wasn’t wasted, after all.

When I’d first conceived the campaign, Everway was a fresh, new product, experimenting with the notion of defining game elements with pictures instead of numbers. The visual approach was two-pronged: a large deck of evocative illustrations (with plans to expand the deck if the game caught on) meant to inspire characters, locations, and adventures; and a smaller deck of tarot-like cards meant to replace dice in adjudicating success and failure in character actions. The big deck of pictures didn’t excite me, smacking too much of an attempt to tap into the winning “collectible” formula of Magic: the Gathering, but the tarot-like deck did, for an almost paradoxical reason.

I’m facile with numbers, and therefore quite comfortable with dice as a game element; I can estimate quickly, and on the fly, what a player’s chances are for a single action and, more importantly, for several rolls in series or in parallel, and, as a GM, can fudge the environment to alter those odds to a satisfying risk level. Dice are a swell tool in my book. That very facility, however, allows me to work myself into ruts. Consistency is good; predictability not so good, and Everway’s fortune deck offered a way to drive me out of predictable habits. I designed this campaign years ago to make use of the fortune deck, or something like it, only to shelve the whole thing. But mirabile dictum, it’s been reborn when my fellow players unexpectedly decided they wanted to try this campaign idea.

In the meantime, I had a chance to try out the fortune deck in a different setting, and I liked it. Unfortunately, my players did not. The fortune deck obscures the process by which the GM arrives at a decision, and the players were frustrated and confused by the apparent arbitrariness of judgments arising from the deck, largely born from the way that different cards mean different things to different people. To illustrate:

Suppose player A wants his character to climb a steep wall, and draws a card to determine whether he succeeds. He draws the Wall, meaning resistance, protection, durability, caution, conservatism, stasis. Player B might think this is a good draw: A is climbing a wall, and here’s a card about walls. Great! Player C might think this is a very bad card: A is climbing a wall, and here is a card about barriers and defenses, including keeping Player A out of whatever lies behind the wall. The GM, meanwhile, is thinking more abstractly, already having decided Player A will succeed as long as he doesn’t draw a “water” card, feels that an “earth” card like the Wall is enough to give A the benefit of the doubt, and rules that Player A’s character scrambles up the wall, if a little noisily and inelegantly. Unless the GM explains his reasoning—and doing so too often kills the action dead—B and C end up confused, and grow frustrated that they cannot accurately measure their own characters’ chances, even when the deck is used fairly.

So the fortune deck was unpopular, and I ultimately decided to use traditional dice for this campaign, but not before a long period of flirtation with how to use the deck to better effect. I nearly Everway’s conceit that the fortune deck—or, in the case of this campaign, a set of 25 runestalks—is part of the game world as well as the game components. The players could, theoretically, duplicate their characters’ divinations quite literally. I also wanted to steal a small part of the fortune deck’s design—that one card was stolen by a trickster god, and the void left behind ever since disrupts the reliability of the deck, even to the point of letting symbolic forces which are not truly eternal elements of the pattern of the universe grow to fill that gap—and use it as a clue to the Evil Conspiracy’s machinations. I even designed my own set of tokens (runestalks), the better to serve that story element. And I spent way too much time on it all, more than will be paid back by actual game-worthy material.

So when one of my players asked whether the sinister obelisk they encountered had any suggestive symbols carved on it, I had a ready answer. Why yes. Yes, it did have symbols carved on it: the runes for Winter, the King, and…um, the Comet. Like the tarot, the 25 symbols that make up the runestalks are broad and ambiguous. Nobody will ever make any more sense of those runes than I choose to provide through inspired guesses coming from NPCs, yet it gives a strong, though false, sense that there is real meaning to be found here, if only the players are clever enough to make the connection. I can go to that well over and over, especially if I provide a more complete description for the players on the game’s wiki. So maybe all the time I spent on an imitation fortune deck wasn’t wasted, after all.

Home-grown Terrorism

June 1, 2009 7:51 PM

Dr. Tiller was not the first doctor to be assassinated for performing abortions, nor will he be the last. All but a radical few anti-abortion activists decry his murder, as well they should. In most, I am sure, the sentiment is genuine, an honest expression that killing is wrong, whether of fetuses or of physicians. All too many, however, give every impression that their reproval is not at all genuine, but merely trying to distance themselves and their cause from an unpopular attitude…and often, not trying very hard. These are the spokespeople for anti-abortion politics who agree that oh, my yes, shooting abortionists is wrong, but we shouldn’t be so hard on killers who are, after all, only executing “mass murderers.” These are the spokespeople who will declare for the microphones that while they would never, ever advocate murder, maybe those “mass murderers” ought to be more careful, because—heh, heh—you just never know…

There’s a word for this kind of politics. It’s called “terrorism.”

Some people may not recognize it as terrorism. As it has with so many things, the right wing has corrupted our language so that humanitarian aid and criticizing the national leaders are considered terrorism, while indiscriminate bombing and kidnapping are not. But by any definition not offered by right wing extremists, assassinating doctors in the hopes of stamping out abortion through fear where due legal process has failed is terrorism: the use of violence and intimidation to affect, or even effect, political policy.

And it works, too. Not universally; doctors still offer abortions—but then, rock music didn’t disappear entirely under the Taliban, either. But it does work. Physicians are on record stating that they have stopped offering abortions for fear of murder.

Stamping out this form of domestic terrorism may be impossible, but it could be curtailed through heavy public censure, not just of these few nut-jobs with guns, but of the barest expression of sympathy for them. Applying a tiny fraction of the apparatus we’ve put in place to harass terrorists, or people who know terrorists, or people who vaguely resemble terrorists, or people the state just doesn’t like very much, to the very real terrorists and terrorist sympathizers we have on American soil fighting legal abortions would put a real crimp in the abusive, predatory behavior we see in the anti-abortion movement: vandalism, shock tactics on women already traumatized by a difficult decision, death threats…and those who go beyond mere threats to murder.

I don’t advocate turning a police state apparatus on the anti-abortion movement. While I disagree with their position, I find moderate anti-abortionists reasonable in their beliefs; we don’t differ on how to treat humans, but only on whether a microscopic fleck of tissue is a human. Treating anti-abortionists as de facto terrorists, apart from being wrong in itself, would also make it easier to turn the same tactics on others practicing open political discourse. But fair is fair. If we’re really serious about fighting terrorism, no matter who gets hurt, shouldn’t we be hammering away at terrorists of the right wing, too, especially since they’re right here in our own jurisdiction?

Or, if we’re not really all that serious about fighting terrorism, if we’re only in it because fear tactics win votes, or if this is simply another case of “our terrorists are freedom fighters,” then maybe we should just dismantle the whole Ashcroft edifice. If the only terrorists we pursue are those the right wing likes to demonize, maybe we shouldn’t be pursuing terrorists at all.

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