Looking For Group

Found a nifty comic today.

Well, a week ago. The art's good, the writing's great, and it updates twice a week. Usually you're lucky if you can get two out of those three.

It's loosely based on World of Warcraft, set in that world. It doesn't require that you have played the game to find it funny--I've never played WoW, and never plan to, and I'm recommending it. It probably helps to have a basic understanding of the world and the races, but the comic doesn't assume that you know much about the set up.

Finish the Main Quest Now!

So . . . yesterday's post doesn't really make much sense, now that I re-read it. Ah, well. Such is the internet, the immediacy of the medium. The points are all there, it's just that I didn't string them together very well.

Today, I'd like to write about why I think the main quest in Oblivion is so cool, because I've said it is three times now, without explaining why. Unfortunately, certain persons I associate with haven't finished it, so I can't write about the ending. And I can't explain why Oblivion is so awesome without mentioning the ending, because it features heavily in the awesome quotient.

By ending, I do mean the literal ending, the last thing that happens in the quest. The entire "end" is awesome, because basically what happens is that two thirds of the way through the game it goes all epic, and it just keeps getting better. Heck--as I was digging around in the editor, I half-expected there to be a script along the lines of "begin.awesome." Wasn't there, but I did find a few other neat things, like the exact mechanism for Martin's name changes, and exactly when it happens and what triggers it.

However. The ending is Truly Awesome. I haven't decided whether or not it's a good ending or not, story wise, but it's certainly cool.

And I really can't say any more, until certain persons finish the main quest.

Writing Oblivion

Hey, 50th post. Neatness.

Okay, so I promised yesterday, that I'd explain that long, rambling, not entirely rambling post, and what it has to do with The Artful Writer.

Basically, The Artful Writer has this post on Writing Oblivion. Found it while googling Kurt Kuhlmann, who I found while I was trying to find out who wrote the main quest for Oblivion. (Short answer: he did, but probably had some committee help.) It took entirely too long, because none of the writers are credited as writers. Instead, they're credited as follows:

Quest Design was done by Brian Chapin, Kurt Kuhlmann, Alan Nanes, Mark E. Nelson, Bruce Nesmith and Emil Pagliarulo.

Additional Design was done by Erik J. Caponi and Jon Paul Duvall.

Additional Writing was done by Ted Peterson and Michael Kirkbride.

That's a direct quote from the post, and I include it here because these people need to have their names in the ether, permanently attached to their work. The more websites that mention them along with the words "Oblivion" and "writer," the better. Because their work is really, really good.

The main quest kind of floored me, in terms of how good it was, and how fun, and how interesting. It's a good story, and it works much better as a game than it ever would as a movie or a novel, just from how it's set up. It has themes. Themes! In a video game. Have I mentioned just how awesome this game is?

That's what interests me about gaming: its application as a storytelling medium. It's hard to find games that have really good stories, because that's not where the focus is, right now. It's on the graphics and the simulation and the underlying doodads that make it all work. But I think that better storytelling, that really takes advantage of what you can do in a video game, is an area where the industry really could grow.

There's a Point, But I'm Not Going to Tell You What It Is

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting. There are several things that I could blame this on: lack of things to write about, homework, rediscovering the wonders of social interaction. I should blame it on general apathy, because there's no reason why I can't just StumbleUpon something and pretend it's relevant, like I always do.

What I'm going to blame it on is Oblivion, because it's the Best. Game. Ever.

I mean that. I really do. Normally, I'm not much of a CRPG fan. They tend to compare poorly with the tabletop experience. Wasn't impressed by Neverwinter Nights, wasn't even particularly impressed by Morrowind. (The Morrowind thing may have been a matter of perception and timing, a theory I plan to test this weekend by re-experiencing it.)

I'm not even much of a gamer. I've played Sim games, but those don't really count. Diablo 2, Jak and Daxter. SSX. That's about it. I dabble, mostly because I have friends who are gamers. I tend to be bad at them, so it takes real effort for me to get into one. (You ever hear the Jak 2 MISSION FAILED screen? Every five seconds? For twenty minutes? My gaming experience in a nutshell.)

And then I played Oblivion.

I've actually wanted it, badly, since I first heard about it, way before it came out. It just sounded cool. It was going to have erosion, for crying out loud. (Don't think it actually does, in the release, but this was pre-game buzz.) Then it actually came out, and it turned out that my video card was about a million years too old to play it, and then it turned out that to get a decent video card I'd need to get a new motherboard, and if I was going to get a new motherboard . . . well . . . my computer was really okay for everything I already did, and I wasn't much of a gamer, anyway.

So then, I got the laptop, and one of my first thoughts was: must have Oblivion now. (My actual first thought was: I never need be away from the internet ever again.)

So now I'm finally playing it. And it's awesome. On so many levels. I've spent the entire weekend playing it, I've got several friends who are playing it, and anytime my brain has thirty seconds of downtime I'm thinking about it.

I spent a few weeks playing it semi-casually, fiddling with it when I had a bit of spare time. Then I started doing the main quest, and that really grabbed me, in a way that I've only been grabbed by a few things in my entire life. (One of those things was DragonballZ, but we're not going to talk about that.) And now that I'm out of that, I'm playing the game "as it was meant to be played," by wandering around at random, doing things, and I'm having an unbelievably good time doing that.

Now, I had a point to all this. I found me a new blog. Yes, indeed. And I really should explain why all that was relevant, and link to the part of that blog that I'm actually interested in, and talk about why Oblivion is so awesome, and what's so cool about the main quest, but, y'know, it's late. And this post is long enough as it is.

So instead of writing about all that now, I'm going to do something incredibly lame. I'm going to promise to post about that, tomorrow. Or quite possibly the next day. Because, really, what this blog needs is a few good cliffhangers.

The Last Question

I like questions. I like coming up with them, I like pondering them, I like bothering people with them. (My parents know that last all too well.) And in my life I've learned that there are two kinds of questions: there are good questions, and there are Great Questions.

Good questions are things that I'd like to know the answer to, i.e., "Do I have any socks left?" or "What is the meaning of life?" They're perfectly good questions, but they're either easily answerable or completely unanswerable, and entirely without consequence. Not quite the stuff of great conversation.

Then there are Great Questions. These are questions that are actually interesting, that you can actually get somewhere thinking about. They may have answers, but the point isn't the answer, it's how you get there.

So why bring this up? Because I have just been introduced to a Truly Great Question: Will It Blend?

This, friends, is a question for the ages. Thousands of years from now, when the internet ur-being is purging its memory banks, it will stumble upon this website and it will trigger a revolution in post-robotic thought. This question will be enshrined for our descendants in the hallowed halls of Awesome, shouted from the mountaintops of True Enlightenment, and end the wars with the mutant bug people.

It's just. That. Awesome.

Rube Goldberg Domino Video

This guy has an absolutely absurd amount of time on his hands. If I ever feel the need to learn the Oblivion editor, something like this would be close to the top of my to do list.

Military Humor & Belated Resolutions

This is better than Catch-22: 213 Things Skippy Can't Do.

I need to end more sentences with the words "in accordance with the prophecy."

Alas, Poor Yorick!

"Shakespeare jokes for the easily confused."

A few months ago, I complained about how there are cyborgs already here: people who never put their portable electronic devices away. (I thought about linking to it, but decided against it, because it's embarrassing. Go find it yourself if you care that much; it's not all that impressive.) Why this annoys me, I'm not sure, but it does. Mostly on principle. The idea that humans ought not to spend all their time with machines, get some fresh air, that sort of thing. Not that I ever do that, of course, but it's a matter of principle. That's supposed to be hypocritical.

It's something I worry about. I still don't own a cell phone. I had one, which I lost, and I haven't gotten another one; partially out of apathy, partially out of worrying. I like technology, but I worry about it. I worry about spending too much time with it, on the computer, on the internet, and not enough on "important things." Things that will last.

I worry about mortality. I've been thinking, lately, about how finite time is. How it's always counts down. Quasi-existential nonsense, mostly. I hate making decisions, and it's partially because of the worrying about time. You can never really undo a decision. Even the decision not to make a decision. Every action is permanent.

So I worry that I'm losing time. Losing time to computers, video games, web surfing, television. I don't have that worry about reading, because that, I feel, is not just "recreation." It's also a means to an end. Writing well myself. I don't feel that way about movies (usually) because again, its a means to an end. Studying the craft of storytelling. (Which causes its own problems. I have a hard time just watching movies. I'm constantly analyzing the structure. Which has certain advantages, but it's also distracting.) I do feel that way about television--that it's useless, a waste of time. That's why I don't watch it. Except that I don't feel like Firefly is a waste of time, because its "good."

So where's the line? Is the distinction I make between "frivolity" and "seriousness" in media real, or is it me internalizing useless cultural value judgments? Is it useful? Do I really have to worry about how I spend every minute of my time, and how it's going to affect the world after I'm dead?

I think there's something wrong with me. I'm seventeen, and I'm worrying about my legacy.

Interpreting the Bible for Fun and Profit

So. I was hanging out on this cool website I found today, Creationism vs. Science. I love sites like this: tons of text, history, interesting philosophy. There's a lot of material there. The help on debating creationism is useful, the history of fundamentalism is enlightening, and the essay on how Hitler was not (contrary to popular belief) an atheist, but a Christian, is somehow amusing.

Better than all of those, though, is this gem: Morality Comes From Humans, Not God!

God had to learn morality from humans. A God cannot, by its very nature, (immortal, omnipotent, etc.) understand what humans think of as morality. Brilliant. I may have to do something with this.

Sticky Metal

Cool Science Facts has an Cool Fact about Metal.

Why didn't they teach me things like this in school?

Kansas Drug Tax

I swear, they actually call it a Drug Tax. You buy stamps. It's all anonymous. I have no idea how they enforce it, but apparently they expect that people care more about tax laws than they do about drug laws.

Geek SF

You may have seen, recently, Gene Neuroses 101 on Charlie's Diary. Interesting article, a lot of people have been linking to it. (The most interesting bit for me is towards the beginning, when it talks about the current state of horror fiction. How it's not really scary, and has morphed into this weird Romance meet Christian revival by way of vampire thing.) It talks about how modern American SF has recently started to suck, and the obsession with "alternate history" stories. (THE NAZIS WON! OMGWTF!)

There's another article on that site that's very interesting, also talks about "the decline of science fiction," but approaching it from the readership angle rather than the writership angle. It's sort of a response to an essay by Kristine Kathryn Rusch that defends Star Wars and its tropes, that I read when it was published in Asimov's. (Which you should read, by the way. It's an excellent magazine.) This time, the really interesting bit is about two thirds of the way down:

We've arrived in a different future, and central planning doesn't work. Things are fast, chaotic, cheap, and out of control. Ad hoc is the new plan. There's a new cultural strange attractor at work, sucking in the young, smart, deracinated mechanistically-minded readers who used to be the natural prey of the SF movement. It's geek culture.

There's more, but that's the basic gist. Read the article.

Now, the reason this is interesting is because I'm nominally a member of geek culture, as well as a reader of science fiction. (I say "nominally" for geek culture because I'm not really much of a techno-geek. I participate in geek culture through the roleplaying side of things, and by hanging out with techno-geeks.) So I don't think that geek culture and science fiction are naturally antagonistic to each other.

Particularly, I think that created worlds are attractive to the same kinds of people who are attracted to geek culture. It's one of the major features that I find interesting in sf. "Near-future" types of science fiction, where the focus on how various technologies will affect the world in the next few decades, are not as interesting to me as things set futher into the future, or seperate worlds all together. Partially because the near-future sf I've read has generally been either preachy, frankenstein-type warnings, or singularity nonsense.

I don't read enough science fiction, though. I read a lot of short stories, but I don't really know what's going on with novels. Seems to be time for a trip to the library.

Door-to-door Atheism

This is pretty awesome. This atheist guy (he's an Australian, naturally) gets fed up with Mormons coming around in the morning and trying to convert him, so he flies to Utah to return the favor. Predictably, they don't appreciate it.

There's a bit of wonkyness at just one point in the second half, when they're going door-to-door talking to people, when he says that "we follow the teachings of Charles Darwin." Generally speaking, that's not really true for atheists. We tend not to follow anyone's teachings, that's kind of the point. Charles Darwin was, however, crucial for the development of atheism as a movement and a belief system, because it basically says that God is not necessary to explain life as we know it. Minor quibble, really, but just a point I wanted to make.

Logic Death

Nifty article on why horror heroines are so stupid.

There's some game theory, some evolutionary biology, some cognitive psychology. It's all good stuff.

The most interesting, to me, is this bit about halfway through:

But for better or worse, the neocortex is dominated by its left hemisphere, which tends to be not only logical but gullible, rationalizing and self-deceiving. You know that voice inside your head that says everything is all right, there's nothing to worry about here, just ignore your gut feeling and get on with the task at hand? That's your brilliantly stupid left brain talking, and if you listen to it long enough, eventually it will kill you.

I don't think I've ever heard the left/right brain divide categorized this way, but it makes sense. "Logical" and "sensible" aren't necessarily the same thing. Asimov makes this point in several stories; "Reason," a short story where a robot gets religion (and demonstrates that logic can prove anything, if you start with the right postulates), and The Caves of Steel, a novel that concerns a detective who worries about his robot partner replacing him as they solve a murder together. The detective in question discovers while working with the robot that this is not likely to happen, and one of the reasons is the difference between "logical" and "rational." Asimovian robots are both perfectly logical and perfectly irrational, and it turns out that being rational counts for more in terms of being human.

(Those summaries are horrible bastardizations, especially the Caves one, so go read them both to find out what I'm actually talking about. "Reason" is found in the book I, Robot.)

I'd argue that this ability to clamp down on fear, even when it might be more useful to listen to that fear, is a direct result of the brain's "right sided" imaginative, intuitive abilities. Human's aren't limited to fearing real things; we're perfectly capable of inventing things to fear, so there needs to be some mechanism to determine between reasonable and unreasonable fears. Sometimes this mechanism goes a bit haywire, as most mechanisms do.

4:30

Most people would take "cackling madly every time they finish a sentence" as a sign that they should go to bed.

And now that sentence is also inexplicably hilarious.

Party Ben, Mash Up Master

Three posts within three hours? Yeah, that's how you know there's something I'm supposed to be doing. But instead, I'm reading Twenty Sided! Whee . . .

Anyhow. There's this guy, Party Ben, and he does Mashups. Sticks songs together so they sound like one song. It's freakish, mind-bending goodness.

What you do: Go to the downloads page. Find yourself a song that you know really, really well. "Singing along without actually realizing it" well. The mashup should produce a weird kind of gear switch grinding sensation in your brain.

Or is that just the lack of sleep?

Freakish Quiz Results

Your results:
You are Superman

Spider-Man 65%
Hulk 65%
Robin 62%
Green Lantern 50%
Supergirl 45%
The Flash 35%
Iron Man 30%
Wonder Woman 25%
Catwoman 20%
Batman 10%

Superman? How am I like Superman? Heck, how am I like Spiderman? Hulk I can kind of understand. (Emotionally unstable? Check. Prone to doing unbelievably stupid things because I think everyone's out to get me? Check.) The other two, though . . .

I like how Batman is down all the way at the bottom of the list, though. And how Catwoman is listed as a superhero. I guess she is, these days, but how long is that going to last?

(And yes, the chart did look all nifty originally, but it was also displaying with funky spaces in between things, so I had to fix it. Bleah. It's waaaay to late for me to actually be thinking.)

Starship Crew Quiz

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 81% Moya (Farscape) 69% SG-1 (Stargate) 69% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 69% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 63% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 56% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 56% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 50% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 44% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 38% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

Actually a fairly neat quiz. The main result doesn't really surprise me (And of course it wasn't because I threw some of the questions. Allow fugitives on my ship if they were basically harmless and provided some useful services? That could mean anything.) but I am kind of amused by the next three, since I know nothing about any of them. I think I saw an episode of Farscape, once.

Guerilla Mail: Words Fail Me

Yeah, I know. Two posts in one short day! But this is just too awesome to wait. Even though I need to finish my laundry, finish my homework, take a shower, and get to sleep, it can all wait until I have informed the world of the 21 day revolution of this amazing website, Guerrilla Mail.

I was thinking, earlier today, about how I hate having to use my e-mail address to register for things. Sure, they say they won't use it for anything untoward, but if they were planning on selling it to 12-year-old Nigerian spam-lords, do you really think they'd tell you about it first? No, of course not. Setting up an auxilary e-mail wouldn't do much more good, because eventually it would just get so clogged up with spam that it would be useless. So the ideal situation would be to have a disposable e-mail address, that could be set up with a minimum of fuss, and then easily deleted once it had outlived its usefulness.

Enter Guerilla Mail.

Direct from the website:

Guerrilla Mail provides you with disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 minutes. You can read and reply to e-mails that are sent to the temporary e-mail address within the given time frame.

This is pure genius. Awesomeness on a level unheard of by man or Batman. Sheer intellectual perfection unheard of since the invention of sliced bread.

This, my friends, is zero-cool.

Amaze Your Friends! Confuse Your Enemies!

The Language Construction Kit is one of the coolest sites on the web. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen, period. It's up there with mimes dancing to Christian rock in front of the Jefferson memorial.

It's a guide to creating your own language. It doesn't cover everything you need to know to make a "perfect" conlang, but it covers enough to make a decent one, especially if you don't know anything else about linguistics. It's also a great general starting point for learning about languages.

Best of all (to my mind) are the sections on making related languages, and using conlangs to enrich worldbuilding. It's very hard, if not impossible, to really get a feel for "what it's like to be there" if you don't at least have a rough idea of how the people in a culture talk.

All that is just icing, though. The best reason to get into conlanging, and to check out this website, is that there's no better way to confuse people than to start speaking your own language.