I stole your images, now give them back or I’ll sue!
June 12th, 2009
There’s some grade-A asshattery over at Dizzy Thinks:
So that’s the difference between rich people and us
June 11th, 2009
I recently discovered a hilarious website called The customer is not always right that collects true stories of clueless, abusive, or ignorant customers from the perspective of the poor service workers who have to deal with them.
There’s a particularly laugh-worthy gem online this morning:
(My dad was standing in an express line at the grocery store. In front of him was a well-to-do-looking woman, who clearly had several more items than the limit.)
Dad: “You know, it’s amazing that someone who is apparently so successful can’t read.”
Woman: (in a huff) “That sign’s for regular people, not for me!”
(An old man behind my dad taps him on the shoulder.)
Old man: “Here, give her this.”
(My dad hands it to the woman.)
Woman: “What’s this?”
Old man: “Metamucil. It’ll make you regular.”
Only if they’re under state control, you see
June 10th, 2009
Doug McCaughan at KnoxNews makes the great point that for years, schools have been trying to get more computers into classrooms, only to now stigmatize and ban them when students bring their own in the form of cell phones and smartphones.
To a certain extent, I suspect good old-fashioned technophobia, but I think there’s also a lot of the desire for control. Schools want computers under their control, with software they determine, used in ways they approve of; students circumvent this central control by using their own.
Smartphones really are just small form-factor computers these days. They can let you browse the web, send email, organize your day, and play games. Schools have to get with the picture, even if that picture isn’t the one they’d prefer to paint themselves.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jun/09/teach-cell-phones-dont-ban-them/!
He was murdered and set on fire…
June 10th, 2009
That word — I do not think it means what you think it means.
March 5th, 2009
Ars Technica is reporting some disappointing data on the web’s so-called “democratizing” effects. They report that political participation using web-centric methods such as emailing representatives or donating using paypal.
Here’s the money quote:
The depressing take-home from Brady’s talk was that, at least when it comes to participation in politics, the Web isn’t quite the democratizing force that many of us had hoped it would be—in fact, it makes things worse.
Basically, the less educated you are, the less likely you are to be politically active enough to use technology in service of it, or technologically savvy to use it for politics, or else some combination of the two.
No duh.
Is this for real? Did anyone really expect that the web was going to magically erase inequality? It’s the most logical thing in the world that poorly-educated people don’t take advantage of technology — they don’t take advantage of many things, like the opportunity to get an education, for example.
But moreover, why is Ars using the word “democratize” to mean “eliminate inequality?” The hallmark of anything democratizing is that increases freedom and opportunity, not equality, and that’s just what the web has done. But the mere existence of freedom guarantees nothing — in this case, even after controlling for broadband availability, the study still showed that the less educated you are, the less you take advantage of the web. Not that it’s not available to you, not that you’re prevented from doing so, just that you choose not to.
As usual, education is everything. So many things flow from it; lack of political participation and tech-savvyness are already heavily correlated to low levels of education. The web can’t address the symptoms if the cause is going untreated.
Oh Adobe
January 28th, 2009
Rarely have I laughed so loudly and so hard as when I read through Adobe Gripes, a user-submitted image blog of all the galling user interface cock-ups in today’s “professional” Adobe software. I like it because I have to use that crap and it’s cathartic to see that others as as annoyed as I am that any company’s UI department could be so bad. If you feel as I do, then you’ll like it, too! Give it a shot: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
You’ll groan over things like this obviously fake-ass menu:
GRRRRRR!
World of Employment
December 23rd, 2008
The question of whether World of Warcraft is an acceptable topic during a job interview or element on a resumé comes up every now and then, but I’ve never understood why this was even a debate at all. The arguments tend to gel around the fact that WoW involves, like, a lot of time and stuff, and like, you have to, like, not hate on your guildmates!
I think this is ridiculous. World of Warcraft does not have a monopoly on the concept of being a non-work-related hobby that builds skills and demonstrates committment. Gardening, stamp collecting, hot-rod building, quilting, playing tabletop role-playing games, target shooting — these activities all require a great deal of comittment to become any good at as well as some financial sacrifices, and many of them have strong interpersonal and social components as well. But would you put any of them on your resumé unless they happened to be related to the job you were applying for? Of course not. So what attributes make World of Warcraft any different? None, I say!
Far Cry 2 — If only… If only…
December 9th, 2008
I wanted to love Far cry 2. On paper, it had all the trappings of greatness for a shooter: an immersive world, realistic physics and fire, a compelling plot, challenging and realistic combat, and a breathtaking rendering of Africa — a place where I’ve lived several months of my life.
The opening sequence filled me with absolute glee. Your character begins in a cab, being driven to a hotel by an exceedingly chatty driver — the spitting image of so many exuberant African cab drivers I’ve encountered, their ebullience perhaps an elaborate (and usually successful) ploy to get a big tip. The car putters down rough dirt roads, bouncing and jostling everything in side it, including the two of you, when another car abruptly cuts you off — and the driver laments the decline in politeness since the civil war started. That drive is the Africa I remember — full of bumpy roads, gangs of roving children, relentlessly curious young men, women selling homemade fried foods, and the occasional bribe to pass by a blockade of armed men.
Sadly, once you’re out of the car, everything goes downhill. You awake to find yourself staring at the Jackal — the bastard who armed both sides of the bloody civil war and who it’s your primary mission to kill. Right off the bat, there he is in front of you, ruining any surprise or the possibility of the Jackal turning out to be one of your friends you’ll make along the way or even — gasp! — being female.
No, instead you find him leering over you like so many snidely whiplash villans before you even have a chance to do anything, musing out loud how he’s not going to kill you now, he’s going to let you live, so you can presumably be killed in some worse way by someone else! Sadly, we all know from years of movie clichés how well this turns out for the bad guy, again ruining any dramatic suspense. He’s supposed to be an arms dealer and he doesn’t have the guts to put a bullet in my head right now? Puh-leeze.
Sadly, the Jackal isn’t the only flat, boring character in the game. In Far Cry 2, everyone else you meet who doesn’t want to kill you somehow automatically loves you. Five minutes later I find myself talking to some dude who’s chastising me for killing some of his men… and then telling me to do some errand-boy task for him and giving me an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, and his own personal car. Do I ever see him again? Nope. Do I remember his name? I don’t even think he told it to me. Why am I working for him, considering that he gave me the firepower to level his compound if I so desired? Unclear. Why did he hire me if I just killed some of his troops? Unexplained. And I could go on.
So I go out and conduct the hit like my mysterious benefactor has ordered. And this leads me to my next complaint: for a shooter, killing is no fun in Far Cry 2. Oh, it’s satisfying, of course — your guns feel solid and real, enemies fall down clutching their wounds after what almost always feels like enough gunfire, and your own character seems just durable enough to sustain going Rambo — but not too often. No, the mechanics of fighting are really very good. And that’s the problem.
You see, each bullet you fire into one of those faceless, nameless mercenaries who are tearing the country apart actually has some real effect. The mercs claw at their injuries, they’ll drop their weapons, fall to one knee, cry out in pain, scream blood-choked obscenities, convulse on the ground, and emit the most spine-chilling death rattles I’ve ever heard from a game. While in a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky your enemies grunt like kung-fu fighters punched in the gut and yell, “Your mom!” in Russian when you shoot them, Far Cry 2’s baddies are much more human in their reactions to injury. This game reminds you at every turn that bullets do bad things to men, and the gory reminders aren’t confined to your enemies, either. When you become sufficiently injured yourself, “healing” consists of watching an animation of your character pulling bullets out of his leg with pliers, or bending back broken limbs, or re-setting dislocated fingers. It’s sometimes difficult to watch, always reminding you of the fragility of the human body when faced with the business end of a lethal weapon.
If there’s one lesson this game has taught me, it’s that fighting sucks. Where in many other shooters I find myself becoming almost bored of violence after hours of killing, Far Cry 2 makes me feel sickened. I avoid the endless guard posts not because I tire of slaying legions of grunts (like I would in another game), but because I feel like a bad person when I send bullets their way. Every time I run out of ammunition for my assault rifle and have to get up close and personal with a pistol, I can feel a knot form in my stomach as I coldly murder the frightened men whose faces I can see fill with fear. It gets even worse if things get so desperate that you have to use your machete. You’re treated to an animation of your character swiftly slicing a throat, with the accompanying cries of pain and desperation from your victim as he collapses to the ground clutching at his ruined neck. Sometimes it’s not quite enough, and he reaches for his pistol to take you with him. There really is no other option than to finish him off, which you do by delivering a coup-de-grace of machete-to-stomach, ending the man’s life with a sickening howl that is almost nausea-inducing.
The first time I did it, I found myself yelling out loud, “Oh my God, I’m a terrible person!” I glanced around, embarrassed, then realized that, no, it was true — my character really is a a terrible person. Later on, after a particularly grueling battle that came down to molotov-tossing and throat-slitting, I found myself wondering, isn’t there another way? Surely we can end this without bloodshed.
Alas, we cannot. Maybe that’s one of the lessons the game is trying to teach me: that sometimes bad men get guns and need to be killed before they kill you, and that diplomacy or stealth or sleight-of-hand won’t always be options in the face of something as monstrous as a civil war. Maybe. Meanwhile, the world of Far Cry 2 is populated by bad men with guns who very much want nothing more to kill each other and you. And that’s all — this isn’t the agency-filled world of an RPG where you can make, you know, choices, and have, you know, conversations.
Which is a real shame. The world seems less like a small African country invaded by mercenaries than it does an anarchic training ground with some buddies of yours hanging out. Having myself lived in an African village, I expected far more, well, Africans! I was expecting burned-out villages, communities huddled together trying to survive, looters, robbers, thieves, old men with world War I rifles, teenagers hawking boflotos and maybe ammunition, and more of the like. Instead, the population seems to consist almost entirely of the mercenaries who are fighting the war. It was actually pretty disheartening when I realized that I could count on every human being I met outside of a cease-fire zone to run at me guns blazing. I’d just be driving along when another jeep would pull up alongside and start shooting! Who are they? Who cares! They want to kill me, better kill them first!
Even the so-called unique locations on the map are no better. The airstrip? Sounds interesting, but it’s just a long tarmac with some rusted hangars inhabited by hostile mercenaries. There’s nothing there you can interact with; the different locale just offers some character and pizzazz to the inevitable gunfight you’ll get into once you arrive there. The chemical company? A couple train cars and a little station populated by thugs with guns. The cockfighting ring? Though the ramshackle sheet-metal compound was brilliantly faithful to real African shanties, I saw a lot less cockfighting than I did armed men shooting at me. Once the smoke cleared and I kicked my way out of the pile of mangled bodies I had managed to surround myself with, I found the actual cocks — all sitting placidly in the same pen, doing anything but fighting. Figures.
I could go on and on; sure, the locations themselves are extremely well-rendered and very unique, but their potential is mostly squandered since the only thing you actually do once you reach them is shoot at men. Again. And again. And again.
Basically, this game is such an exemplary shooter, it makes me wish it did everything else as well as it depicts fighting. I want to be able to upgrade my vehicle at the junkyard, bargain for information at the bars and chat with my buddies about their personal lives as a way of cooling down after a grueling battle. Speaking of my buddies, I want actual relationships with them. I want them to have compelling reasons to be my friends other than “oh, I’ve heard you’re a badass. Let me help you out!” or, “Thanks for rescuing me. You’re now my own personal Jesus!” I want to walk through villages of terrified, starving villagers trying to survive, cringing at my weapons but thankful that I’m not the type who comes in shooting instead. I want my cars to require more to repair them than tightening the magical repair bolt for a few seconds.
Far Cry 2 is such a rich world, full of wondrous peaks, haunting deserts, eerie towns, crumbling infrastructure, and improvised dwellings — but populated entirely by a bunch of trigger-happy goons. A world this compelling practically begs for something other than yet more gunplay.
Building Morgan — Plans
October 29th, 2008
This is a multi-part series about my journey on the road to becoming a real PC owner and user. As a Mac guy tired of being left behind when it came to new games, both in terms of software and hardware, I finally decided to take the plunge and build a gaming PC.
Time for the basics. At its most basic hardware level, a computer needs a processor so it can actually do anything, some RAM so that the processor can process more than a few megabytes at a time, a hard drive to store data on, a motherboard to let that stuff talk to one another, a power supply to fuel everything, and a case to dump it all inside.
On top of this, of course, I’d need an optical drive to actually install the operating system for the first time (and probably all the subsequent times in the future as well if you’re using Windows). Since this was going to be a gaming rig, my new computer would also require a beefy graphics card. As I wasn’t interested in stringing ethernet cables all over the place, that meant I’d need a wireless card to connect it to my home network. Happily enough, I already had a keyboard, mouse, and speakers that functioned perfectly well, so I kept those. Finally, I’d need an actual operating system to install. Necessity dictated that some version of Windows was the only choice for games, and I happen to have been lucky enough to already have several licenses of various versions of Windows handy.
There were a couple of restrictions I imposed on myself to guide my search before I actually started surfing for parts. First of all, the case itself would have to fit on the second shelf of my little rolly-caddy thing (hey, what would you call it?) and function normally when laid horizontally:
This put some serious cramps on size, but that’s okay since most of the larger cases tend to look more like car accidents due to all their flashing lights and caution-tape-like aesthetic anyway.
Second, I wanted this thing to be cheap. Not knowing how much to spend on the screen, I decided to shoot for under $500 for the actual computer itself. If you think about it, I sort of cheated, because of course the screen would be extra and would most likely tack on several hundred dollars, but for some reason I wanted to focus on the price of the actual computer itself, so I did. For the record, that’s a full computer consisting of a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive, optical drive, beefy graphics card, and wireless card, and in order to keep below that budget, I’d have to spend an average of $55 or less on each component. Time to hit the internet!
Next up: Shopping time!
Building Morgan — Intent
October 27th, 2008
I bought my current laptop, a now two-year-old 17″ MacBook Pro, for 3D animation and gaming. I figured I’d need its capacious screen for Maya’s enormous and bloated user interface, and that the extra size would allow the machine to squeeze out more power from its X1600 graphics card, which was pretty good in November of 2006.
As usually happens in life, things didn’t work out quite the way I’d planned. First of all, I became more and more frustrated with Maya and eventually ditched it for the far more space-efficient modo, substantially reducing the necessity of not only the machine’s 17″ built-in screen, but also the 24″ Dell display I had purchased for more space in hopes of satiating the screen real-estate monster that is Maya. Not only did I never manage to do so, but when I tossed Maya, I discovered that such an enormous palette really wasn’t necessary for modo, so I sold the screen when cash was tight. The size of the built-in screen had repercussions, too: though at 6.8 pounds, my computer is exceptionally light for a 17″ laptop, that’s cold comfort when I have to carry it around all day, and I must admit that I long for a pound or two shaved off. Even my bag is complaining, as the shoulder strap has begun to tear under the weight.
Second of all, I neglected to understand the rapidity of graphics-related innovation. A decade of Mac fanaticism and a decidedly software-centric focus had left me relatively sheltered from the hardware innovation on the PC side of things, and while I considered my laptop’s midrange X1600 relatively sufficient, the rest of the world was just waiting to laugh at me. In six months, I discovered that I could no longer run games on their highest settings. Within the year, I was down to medium settings for the new ones. A month ago, my fiancée bought me S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky — the sequel to one of my favorite games ever. Unhappily enough, the thing wouldn’t even run on the lowest settings without looking like junk and playing like it derived some perverse pleasure from viewing blue screens of death.
I begged a friend to let me play on his computer, and he generously agreed, but something felt not right about imposing on him. Eventually enough was enough. I started hitting Newegg and shopping for parts, more out of fantasy than any sort of plan, but my jaw dropped when I saw how much prices have fallen in the last year. The time seemed right; I resolved to build my own gaming PC. T’was a night of online shopping.
Stay tuned for more. Next up: plans!