Chugga Chugga Chugga Chugga Chooooo Chooooo!

Move over, Watt. Hello, Newell!

The new Steam power is controversial, and has the potential to make a great change in our lifestlyes if it is embraced. I'd usually be all "cool it is like the steam engine!", but I don't think there's anything that sets it up as some kind of spiritual heir, or anything; the similarities are all superficial, and moreover are commonalities of solid, innovative developments. I might as well be comparing Steam to the Polio vaccine, or radio broadcasting, in any case it would just be an ill-conceived attempt to ascribe to Steam the same greatness inherent in all of the above-mentioned inventions, which isn't terribly appropriate. Steam is more like the Pentium 3-at-speeds-of-more-than-one-gigahertz (say it three times fast?): the original implementation was botched and probably didn't do much for consumer confidence, but eventually with some serious work, a viable product was born (for people whose idea of a good time does not involve the obsessive reading of Tom's hardware guide, I'll explain briefly: the original Pentium 3 core had some incredible stability problems when Intel tried to release it at 1.1Ghz, presumably to fight the awesome AMD Athlon which had beaten them to the 1GHz punch and beyond. Some time later - I think it was after the launch of Pentium 4 - Intel developed a cooler, more advanced Pentium 3 [codenamed "Tualatin"], which was shunned on the desktop, and relegated to notebooks. It ran stably up to 1.4GHz, possibly more). Anyhow, this convoluted simile is really just here to say that Steam wasn't a very good product at first, but has now matured considerably. Sure I could have just said that, but what fun would that have been?

Looking at the comments below the story, you'll see the same tired arguments about PC versus console gaming. PCs can be upgraded, Downside: they essentially MUST BE. Consoles have wonky controls for FPS games or anything resembling "strategy games". Consoles are, on the whole, a cheaper experience, even with the HDTV included. Geforce 8800GTs are awesome and cheap and will save high-end PC gaming, etc. Same thing is true for arguments about Steam, there are the lovers who preach the gospel of downloadable content, auto-patching, and cool community features, and the haters, who think Steam is for the sheep-citizen of the Valve police state (wouldn't it be funny if those same people were on Facebook and bought stuff with their credit cards EVER?). The latter group seems to think that the Steam DRM is too harsh, which surprises me: I can install my Steam account on ANY PC - as far as I know - proceed to download my games, and play them. Sure I can't set up my own private LAN by logging in simultaneously, but how is that worse than "Thou shalt not install me on more than one computer at a time!", as it is written in most EULAs? I've lost one freedom (namely to violate the EULA, and that's not entirely true because some Steam titles have been cracked), but gained another (a legitimate way to use my games on more than one computer). I'm a little more perturbed by the ad-ware aspects of Steam, but I let it slide because it mostly plugs stuff I want, and isn't that the ideal of Capitalism?

But back to Steam and the future of PC gaming, and how I think that even in a non-ideal world things could actually end up going in the right direction. Go back to my original analogy for Steam, and forget I said anything. The gaming industry on PC is like the music business, and Steam is our iTunes; the result of a collision between easy piracy and conservative bigwigs who want their fat cheques. I think that Steam could be the harbinger of the PC gaming dark age, where we have to accept DRM (as much as we may struggle against it) as a part of the business model, until sanity prevails. I'm not saying "accept" as in "submit to", which is personal discretion, but as in "it's a fact of life". Now, the good part: listen to the pundits as they foretell the unmaking of the large studio labels, and rejoice at the thought of a similar fate for EA, or Ubi Soft, or even Valve-as-publisher (as a development house they are too good not to love)! Remember shareware Doom? Wouldn't it be cool if that was gaming again, you download the game, play level one, name your price, and boom! Full version ahoy, DRM-free! I'm not 100% confident in my prediction, but I'll go on record as saying that it is what I expect and fervently hope for in the future. Finally, if I'm right and Steam is our dark age, things aren't all that bad.

To close up this post as a whole, I'd like to note that I'm not on anyone's payroll. READ the EULA and DON'T CONSENT TO WHAT YOU FEEL IS UNFAIR. DON'T pirate the game if you don't agree. Instead, use common sense: write a polite letter or email to the publisher and explain that you don't like it when they put StarForce in their game, or say that they are being unfair by making a game Steam-exclusive. Sure, it's not likely you'll change company policy all by your lonesome, but if a lot of people feel this way, that's when it starts being about lost profits, and if anything gets fat corporate asses out of their comfy relining heated leather chairs, it's people not giving them money. I feel like a public service announcement, or a grandfather, or a school assembly, but someone had to say it: calling game publishers a bunch of "[racial and/or homophobic slurs deleted]" or perhaps suggesting that they "[action which is of dubious possibility due to the inherent limitations of human and/or animal physiology and cannot be printed here for reasons of I don't want to think about it]" just isn't going to solve problems. Not buying stuff and not saying anything leads publishers to the conclusion that PC gaming is dead, and that's a decidedly non-optimal result, too. I guess the only pitfall of being vocal is that it could be a moot point: suppose the PC gaming demographic is actually shrinking and we're all screwed anyway?

That would be very uncool, indeed.

LOUD!

Choose Your Own Adventure, Anyone?

Second Chances

I was watching a video review of Bioshock by one of the funnier reviewers I've ever come across (thank you ever so much for the link, Chris!), in which said game is found to be lacking compared to "more complex FPS/RPGs", of which two are Deus Ex and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Well, being the impressionable being I am, that comment actually made me feel like giving S.T.A.L.K.E.R. another chance. My first impression of the game was that it's just too incredibly hard: the enemies kill you by spraying bullets at you (on the second level of difficulty they only hit about once per clip) until you run out of medical supplies and die. This works very well, because there is one of you, and many of them. Actually, it's rather like Bioshock in that enemies are so incredibly hard to kill that combat becomes actively un-fun, which of course leads me to question why I am playing a game if it is not enjoyable. Well, I re-started S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on "Novice" difficulty, and immediately set to work aggro-ing the Russian guards at a base not far from the "n00b village". Needless to say, everyone in the n00b village died for the cause, but by the end there were a lot of dead Russians, and I was laughing like an evil Santa Claus while toting around an AKM-74U with about 400 rounds of ammunition (yes, the guy in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is quite the packhorse). My cousin added a master stoke, by suggesting (and playing the first time through) that I knife the lead border guard for his upgraded pistol, so I did that, too. It turns out that being a Jackass is fun in any game! (Note: The Russian military is actively hostile towards the player at the beginning of the game, so my actions were not exactly unprovoked...)

By the time of writing, my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. dude is running around with enough medkits to stock a field hospital, and enough firepower to destroy an entire planet...actually, the guns are still pretty weak, but the game gives you more ammo than you can carry. Finding medkits on every dead enemy - or at least half of them - certainly makes the game feel too easy for my tastes, while the next difficulty rating makes the enemies bullet sponges in heavy kevlar! This got me thinking about game difficulty, and how the current model of Pathetic -> Easy -> Standard -> Hard -> Masochistic -> Impossible just doesn't cut it. Crysis, for example, requires you (well, I bet one could hack this, but...) to play on the highest difficulty in order to hear the North Korean soldiers to actually speak Korean. This is kind of daft, because it was being touted as an immersion feature back at the various E3-alikes, as far as I could tell. Now, I suspect that a comparatively small audience will actually be able to complete the game with Korean enemy dialogue, simply because they're not in the top 5% of people with the hand-eye coordination and patience to kill enemies that can absorb bullets like a fucking roll of bounty sucks up spills in those ads. Each level of difficulty comes with hard-wired settings, some of which a player may enjoy, and some not. Now, the people who call themselves "hardcore" will tell me to quit my whining at this point and just play the game on Easy if I want all the niceties, but what if I don't want them all? What if I would like the AI soldiers to employ challenging and effective tactics, but don't find it fun or immersive if I have to dump a half-clip of ammo into them at point-blanc range, because every shot will miss at over 5 meters?

Since games should change more than just weapon accuracy, damage, and enemy health with each level of difficulty, I propose a gradient system, wherein the player is given control of their challenge level. Instead of a simple "easy-to-hard" scale, I think it would be more accurate to "rate" each option based on the effect it will have on the game's "feel". For example, setting "weapon handling" to "ACTION MOVIE" will make guns handle like they would in a game like Half-Life 2, that is to say the player can jump, run, move, and shoot at the same time with minimal penalties to accuracy. There would be a "Counter-Strike" setting (although not named that for copyright reasons) which would introduce slightly more realistic weapon handling, and perhaps reduce the player's capacity for ammunition. Further up the list we would find "Realistic" which would be familiar to players of the original Ghost Recon. The top setting would be "Masochist" which is just like "Realistic", except the guns would have drastically reduced accuracy. This would be included only because some people out there MUST enjoy it, based on games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., where even your crouched, stationary accuracy is on par with that of a fleeing Stormtrooper who has been set ablaze by a butane-torch-weilding wookie! Similar sliders would govern everything from the frequency at which the player will encounter health and armour, to how many bullets your health and armour can soak up before failing. Already, I can see that the replay value of a game could be increased manyfold by such a system, because reducing the potency of armour doesn't just make the player easier to kill, it makes cover of paramount importance. By allowing the player to choose to what extent this is true, the game play like Doom, or like Gears of War! I can imagine people comparing the settings they use to produce the grittiest, most enjoyable, and silliest experiences!

The obvious issue with such a system is that it would take a lot of work, but I think that as it became a standard, it would become like any other part of level design. The developers start by placing the objects that will *ALWAYS* be in the game, and then add "conditional" objects (ie. "if DifficultyPickups = "ACTION MOVIE", spawn Object_Ammocrate here") to fill in. The user interface, enemy AI scripting, and other assets would be handled much the same way: start with the basics and then add extra functionality to suit either the higher or lower difficulties, depending on what the baseline is. For example, "base" items would be those appearing in the most strict setting, whereas more lenient settings would cause the "conditional" spawns to trigger, as established above. Enemy AI would start as cannon fodder for the spastic crowd, scaling upwards to cunning foils for the player. The other issue is that not all games would be suited by all gaming styles: the pulp aspect of Bioshock would not fit with tactical-shooter gameplay, whereas the grim wastelands of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are clearly not meant to be bunny-hopped. I think that the developers could get around this while working within the system. They could build in a set of "recommended" difficulty settings, scaling from "easy" to "challenge", having selected their preferred mix of settings during the development project. The final potential issue is playtesting: with some games offering hundreds of potential combinations, how can you ensure that each is balanced? My personal opinion is to disregard the notion that every combo should be balanced! It's obvious that selecting "action-hero" weapon handling and "player is a real human and can take one bullet only" at the same time will only lead to tears as the player is exterminated by hordes of hopping hombres holding heckler&kochs, why try to balance that? So they could do the opposite and brag that they "beat the game", so what? The whole purpose of independently-variable difficulty factors (or IVDF, if/when it catches on) is that people aren't playing and beating the same game (unless there's co-op and they agree on those settings, or something, or they happen to like the same things in a game, etc), they're playing and beating the game that they want to play!

Ok, I lied about that being the final potential issue, because I have thought of one more, considering the above: would this cheapen the artistic vision of the game creators? I don't think so, because they can always have "recommended" settings to produce the experience they envisioned. I myself might be inclined to appreciate their work MORE if given the ability to use IVDF, because there are games with brilliant high-concept, and amazing art-direction that fall flat because of how much they punish the player for wanting to see the pretty stuff (*cough*S.T.A.L.K.E.R.*cough*). With IVDF, people could buy games without the fear that they might have to humble themselves in order to have any fun playing them, people could spend long hours concocting better, harder, sillier combinations of difficulty factors, to share with the world. Multiplayer afficionadoes would no longer have to decide whether they want a game with tongue-in-cheek team gameplay, Battlefield-style engagements, or Deathmatch a la Quake. This would probably go a long way towards remedying games that ship with inspired SP, but bland-as-Halo multiplay.

Ok, all you Gamers who read my ramblings - would you want to see this, or are you more the "can't stand the heat get out of the oven" types?

-LOUD

I apologize if the spacing is weird...I hate .txt non-formatting!

Oddly, it's a Text Editor, not a Text Adventure...

To minimize the effects of that great distraction which we call 'Firefox', I have decided to compose this post in the no-frills word processor "dark room", and then post process it in my usual Openoffice.org. Should this yield faster composition times than usual, I think it's safe to say that I will make the use of "dark room" a habit. Of course, all the focus in the world is useless if I've nothing to say. Fortunate, then, that I am never at a loss for words...

...but what if they aren't the right words?

Something terribly ironic happened just a few days ago. I held something of an early birthday party, in order to celebrate with as many of those people soon-to-be-leaving as possible (my real birthday is coming in mere days now, when they have all left). A fair number of guests - possibly half - left without saying goodbye. The other half (especially the Windsor-bound Daydream Believer) did bid me farewell, but it left me thinking about how it's just something people do. There are tearful goodbyes, but movies and TV have for years made our best efforts at putting into words the myriad moments of elation and sorrow that we have shared with one and other feel empty, undramatic, and inadequate. I wish that I could bring myself to say in person the sort of things I write here when in a whimsical mood. Were that my tongue posessed of such poetry, I would not feel so intimidated by the prospect of inventing long-term, if not permanent, goodbyes to those departing whom I have come to love over the course of years. Reality, however, has no designs to so imbue me with that power, and as such my restraints remain in place. Until such time as I learn to compose and edit with the necessary alacrity to speak in a refined fashion, I propose a stopgap solution of sorts:

A toast. To those people who have made every minute of my live worth living Take a pic of yourself raising a glass of whatever you can spare, whatever you like to drink (silly expressions are cool, too) and post it somewhere. If you blackmail me into getting facebook

so I can make a group of this, the answer is "maybe". For now, post and link works fine for me. I'll start us off...

For those interested, these are quickly made pics from my Logitech QuickCam, with a single

fluorescent lightbulb providing illumination (bouncing off an orange wall, mind you). The cup is

a plastic pink goblet, and I'm drinking President's choice "Orange Frizzante", aka. Orangina-knockoff.

Sköl!

In gaming news, the Bioshock demo delivers enough of the game to make you know you want it, but not enough for me to tell you how well it scares throughout the game. This is, of course, to be expected. If I have any complaint thus far, it is that after a memorable cinematic in which your character - "Jack", if memory serves - acquires his first genetic upgrade, new plasmids are simply picked up from the ground (or elsewhere, one supposes). I think that the game should at LEAST show the main character injecting each plasmid, and include a period of disorientation after it has been administered, to drive home the magnitude of the biological changes which are occuring. Shooting fire isn't just another pickup like health and ammo, dammit! I think I will buy Bioshock, as much for the gorgeous art design as for the game. I like a good, lived-in, well-constructed gameworld, and Bioshock, like Half-Life 2 and the first 5 minutes of Doom 3 before it turns into a monster-closet crawl... well, it simply delivers those goods and then some.

If Bioshock 2 is indeed coming (and I think that it's reasonably established), it's my present opinion (which may change after I play the full game 1) that it should star a pre-collapse citizen of Rapture. Whether doomed to succumb to the plasmid-induced madness of the splicers, or to remain one of the few sane humans in the city, the character would be more or less doomed from the beginning, shadowing a utopian game introduction with that horrible, horrible feeling of impending doom. I think that this is narratively intriguing, and I think that it would reveal a great deal about Rapture as an intact, functioning city. Finally, I've been inspired by a friend's soon-to-occur spending spree to get a job, and immediately start dropping cash on a new computer. My challenge to myself is to build something equal and opposite in as many ways as possible, because building a copycat rig has little appeal, and also because I like to make simple tasks into complicated ones for my own pleasure.

Progress reports and pictures of the construction process will undoubtedly appear in this space

LOUD and distinct in a crowd!

Around the World in 80 Posts! -UPDATED x3

-This post has been heavily added to -

The Squeaky Wheel...

What did I tell you?

Attempt to hold the world hostage, and your punishment is? One million or more barrels of fuel oil! Take heart, terrorists: this could be your lucky day. If a promise to halt Nuclear weapons development netted North Korea such a l3w7 h4ul, imagine how much a one-year moratorium on jihad would be worth! All silliness aside, the North Korean settlement is a puzzling development. What happened to "we don't negotiate with terrorists"? Where is the drive to rid the world of "communist evil"? Why do we make no mention of "liberation" for the destitute and brainwashed civilians of North Korea? It seems that if anyone is backing down, it is the US itself. Confrontation and conflict have served as the vanguard of "free markets" and "democracy" since the right to keep and bear arms was entrenched in the US constitution. Why now does the Hegemon repent? I can only surmise that – as seems to be the case with the Iraq war – Republican senators' desire for re-election has supplanted their thirst for blood and/or oil as priority #1. The entire state of affairs distresses me, for a number of reasons.

The first is that this “deal” - or any “deal” - is a loss for us, and it is a loss for humanity. Kim Jong-Il wins, for what profit could he find in maintaining a Nuclear Weapons program save that which he has now achieved? The world has been blackmailed into rewarding the supposed end of that which should not have happened in the first place. Does the West profit? Mr. Jong-Il would face no better an outcome had he made use of a nuclear weapon than (Iranian President) Ahmadinejad (sp?) in a similar situation. It may be that we have averted death and bloodshed, but we have also allowed ourselves to be blackmailed. Had we ignored the threat, had we called North Korea's bluff, the situation would be no better. There seems to be enough desire for combat on both sides, certainly enough to send us once again on the path to war with no hope of an end. The only positive solution I can see is one that should have happened years ago. In order to lead by example, the West should have abandoned both the development and maintenance of nuclear weaponry. Every last warhead should have been dismantled, and the contents useful to science or industry used for said purposes. The critical elements for initiating fission should have been pulverized into fine dust. What of leaving ourselves “defenseless”? There is no defense from total obliteration, There is only the potential for retribution before the end.

It isn't too late, though. Disarmament means that Iran (another one of those "rogue states") can no longer justify a nuclear program with “we have just as much a right as you do”. Perhaps they would continue to seek nuclear warheads, regardless. Would a nuclear reprisal be necessary? Does there not exist within the US alone the ordinance to devastate a thousand Irans? Speaking of problems of our own making, it was the West meddling in Iran which led to it's present state as a shining example of why theocracy is NOT a pleasant form of government. As glad as I am to see that we are not following the same path with North Korea (to my knowledge), there is one concern which overshadows all others. I have yet to tell you who the real losers are in this deal. The North Korean citizens who will spend their lives in ignorance because of their government. The North Koreans whose children will be raised to worship Kim Jong-Il and his successors. The North Koreans who in all likelihood who will go on starving, no matter how much fuel oil we send to keep their funny-haired Great Leader at bay.

The bottom line is that any time we buy now is time to formulate a better plan to deal with the situation. The only downside is that 'solutions', in the Western political lexicon, seems to mean “resolution of an unsavoury situation in a manner characterized by a maximization of both short-term gain, and long-term backlash”. Perhaps the US did not start a war this time because they had already lost.

Did you Know That...?

Canadian Conservatives, unlike their US counterparts DON'T seem to want to be re-elected. In response to a bill passed in the House of Commons which would hold the Cons to abide by Canada's Kyoto commitment, John Baird said that if it clears the Senate, he would ask his department how to meet Kyoto “without spending any money” (the Bill does not mandate any expenditures). The Conservatives come into office without a clue that the Environment would become an important issue. They re-instate Liberal programs in response to demand for climate-change legislation. They spend all this time chastising the Liberals for inaction on the Environment. I now consider the failure cake to be fully iced and decorated. First, now the Conservatives can be accused of lacking even the DESIRE to attain Kyoto goals. Second, the Liberals can cook up some BS about them “taking action” to ensure that Canada's government met its targets. Third, John Baird, instead of graciously accepting the fact that he had been PWN'D, he decides to go on record sounding like a complete asshole. I humbly suggest a slogan for the eventual Conservative election campaign: Canada's New Government: hey, we sucked in new and different ways!

That's all for now. Coming soon are my thoughts on Intel's 80-core processor demo, Supreme Commander, and Rise of Legends. Also, HDTV/computer frustrations!

Explore Expand Exploit Exterminate

Well, it's mostly the first two which you are likely to find within my blog. The latter two generally decline to make appearances, due to some bad publicity of late. “Exploit” in particular has fought against negative connotations among the public for several years now. At the time of writing, “Exterminate” could not be reached for comment, instead issuing a pre-recorded statement vowing to fight all slanderous accusations brought against him by “unscrupulous parties desperate for a soap box”

The “Four Xs” can be found together mainly in galactic-scale strategy, with other strategy games offering various (often, sadly, lacking) mixtures. From my experience with the Supreme Commander demo, I can say that the final 3 will be taking up most of your time, which is quite condusive to intense combat. The campaign missions are solid, but ever since Warcraft 3 set the bar for story-character-mission interplay somewhere around the orbit of Pluto's moon, almost no strategy game has managed to satisfy on the campaign front. Ground Control 2 is an exception, as it lacks base building. Supreme Commander's base-building is fun (although having different levels of engineer unit which LOOK THE SAME is kinda daft), but combined with sparse narrative and lack of hero units, campaign missions never feel as cinematic as those in Warcraft 3 or GC2 did. The game shines almost entirely on technical merits, namely that the controls are useful (although the lack of an in-game tutorial in the demo annoys me, I sincerely hope the full game has one for at least the unique features), the graphics are stellar, and the battles are positively epic.

SupCom is alleged to have incredible graphics, but since I cannot run the game with the settings any higher than 'low', I suspect I do not know the half of it . Explosions (pretty and satisfying when its their ship or giant robot what gets deep-sixed) are plentiful, and unit caps are very high. I suppose I should also mention that I can run the game across two screens, which is every bit as cool as any previews you have seen or read make it out to be. My one complaint is that by the end game, both (independant) cameras, and therefore monitors will be very close in zoom level, until your giant army enters combat (at which point you use one for the sheer pleasure of watching shit explode). I think that with more practice, I could be using both monitors to their fullest effect at all times, but until then it is at least worth the marvelling at. Two screens of game. Fucking AWESOME!

Obviously having only played the demo thus far, I cannot produce a final verdict on the game. From what I have played, though, it seems to be a very solid RTS. It has a few unique features, but in the end it's C&C or Warcraft, but with robots, more eye candy, and a little sophistication. Maybe I need to play the original Total Annihilation before I understand how great this game must be for Chris Taylor fans. That, or maybe someone besides Blizzard or Massive or Relic (the middle developed GC2, the latter Homeworld) needs to learn how to tell a story in an RTS!

I gate in 30, Dostya out (SupCom reference)

Double Kill!

It's Sunday, which means that it has come time to score the above with respect to my Blog here and my homework...somewhere here. I have a pretty ridiculous amount for being scant few weeks into the new semester. Not one, not two, but THREE group projects due at various times, two book reports, and I have the ISU for one of my classes. This does not bode well for me if I enjoy having leasure time.

So I looked up the serial number on a then-unidentified 3dfx-based board that I scored for $5 at a used computer parts shop in Langley, BC. Turns out that it's a Creative Labs Voodoo 2 board of some description. I'm not yet sure if it has 8 or 12 MB of vRAM, but what I do know is that he day I bought that card was one of my luckiest ever. That was the day I acquired my Abit BP-6, a piece of Geek history, and possibly legend. The 3dfx card was a throwaway buy, because I thought it might be an also-legendary Voodoo 2. Well, so it is. Now all I need is another one. I wonder if a pair of these suckers in SLI could run a 3^rd display in WinXP. Unlikely, but hey, I have enough PCI slots to do it.

If you are wondering why I keep editing post 80 as opposed to creating new posts, it is because I fully intend to talk about Intel's recent demonstration of an 80-core processor. And doing that in the 81^st or 82^nd post would just be really lame. So there you have it.

It Takes a Child to Raze a Village

I can't believe I hadn't previously thought of such a perverse twist on the old saying. I ought to Google it, see if anyone else thought of it first. I wonder if it's as true as the original. Something about it rings false, to me at least. I suspect as many – if not more - vilages have been burned by the calculated malice of an adult conqueror than have fallen to angry children. In a metaphorical sense, suppose a 'village' represents all of the worst aspects of said: A village is small, it can feel restrictive, it may have an entrenched order. Who but a child would dare to upset the fragile balance of pastoral life? Clearly this statement requires further investigation...

Moving on...

Poetic Injustice

You may have noticed two new links over to this side ---->. Try to look past the fact that they are Livejournals, and see the often-fantastic work of two very good friends of mine. I just finished reading poems written by each, and I have to say that by comparison, I am a total poetry hack. Most of my work in that area rhymes, which immediately lends an air of silliness to the work that oftentimes it would be better off without. In the case of satirical/angry poetry it can be very satisfying to have such a quality, but if I were to attempt writing something prettier, it would cause complete and utter failure.

Perhaps my problem is that I am too quick to compare my achievements with others'. I'm not what you would describe as a competitive person, but I do have an intense desire for validation. The problem is that I invariably come across as a pale imitator, a cheap taiwanese knock-off, if you will, of whatever greatness to which I aspire. Case in point: Some weeks ago I recorded a podcast with some friends (if it ever gets edited properly, it may end up here), and one friend in particular is a very funny guy. Listening to the recording again, it becomes painfully obvious that I would die to possess his comic genius, because I try endlessly to be funny, to riff off his jokes...but I fail, rather miserably. Applied to the current situation, it means that now I should not be writing poetry, because whatever I created, no matter how good on its own merits, would be nothing more than the dull shadow of a vibrant original. The problem is that I have the greatest urge to do something when I have seen how successfully someone else has done it. I want to make that greatness my own, I want to prove that I can be just as good as they are. The only problem is, I can't, and I'm not.

Perhaps the worst, the least healthy place in which this damnable trait has reared its head is in my relationship with Star. Whether or not it is the truth, I see my friends in far more stable-looking, far happier relationships than my own...and I want that for myself. I want to be part of a couple that looks great to the world around, that jokes, laughs, plays around...but then if I had that it would all be a show. It would be there TO be there, not to make me any happier by what it would be. Being with Star is one thing I actually decided to do for myself, I had the desire to make her happy and to be happy with her. Now two years on and I'm threatened with the prospect of it being turned into a status symbol by my desire to be seen as being worth something. I hate the prospect, I hate the desire, and I hate having so little power to change either.

To round off this lovely deconstruction of my self-confidence, I am presented with an identity crisis. After all, if I am characterized by a desire to emulate the successes of others, what does that say about me? I don't think I can get away with saying that I have no identy period (such a statement would be rightly and harshly contested), but I can certainly wonder if I am not void of true personal aspirations. Am I the aspirational equivalent of the guy who says nothing but “I'll have what he's having” when out to eat? Am I one of those pathetic people who will swear allegiance to whoever looks poised to win, and who hopes every day to be recognized by that person? Or worst of all, am I simply cursed with a creative void, which I seek to fill by distilling the best of others' work and integrating that into my own, a plagiarist on the basest of levels?

That's enough introspection for now, what is there already encroaches upon the realm of fishing for sympathy – yet another form in which my desire for personal validation manifests itself.

And Getting to the Point

I suppose I had better get around to doing the thing for which I have been consitently postponing post #81: Speak my mind about Intel's demonstration of an 80-core processor (which must have been last week by now, but that's ok):

Intel's demonstration of an 80-core processor is an audacious and auspicious achievement, yet I find myself as much apprehensive as I am astounded. Intel now seems hell-bent to push the limits on the number of processor cores which can be loaded onto a die, just as it was with clock speed during the Pentium 4 era – an infatuation which did not end until it became impractical to pursue further. Initially, some may recall, the P4 was supposed to scale to 10GHz. What I am getting at here is that no matter how many cores Intel can cram into a processor today, there will be a ceiling past which the thermals become too great, or he circuits too small. Multi-core processing was one unexpected contributor to the downfall of high-clocked single-core processors, it would be foolish to believe that some comparable design change will come out of the blue to strike down multi-core as we know it. AMD seems to have an idea of what this will be, and should their product come to fruition, it could very well play the more efficient Athlon to the P4-like brute force approach of “as many cores as possible” (If such a comparison makes any sense).

There are a few variables yet unresolved in the equation. Number one is Intel's supposed plan to release a new microarchitecture every 2 years (beginning with Core 2). This could either prolong the lifetime of a many-cores approach, or allow Intel the flexibility to jump ship should it's current approach show any signs of slowing down in terms of performance increase. AMD's potential integration of ATI graphics hardware into a CPU core might begin life in the lower-end integrated-graphics type market, but as we are seeing with the current x1900 and Nvidia 8800 lineups, an ultra-powerful set of floating-point processors can be harnessed to achieve supercomputer-like number-crunching power with a vastly smaller number of computers. Should AMD take the lead in this respect, its processors may gain the upper hand in terms of raw FPU power. I'll reserve judgement on that until I see the performance nubers on their Quad-core parts later in the year. If AMD cannot regain at least parity in the enthusiast market, it may not be the end, but it will certainly put AMD out of the game for yet another generation of processors, which is something that company cannot afford.

Until such a time as AMD releases new procs, the field is Intel's to play. With their 80-core proc putting out a maximum of 62W of heat (3W less than a current core 2 Duo), Imagine the potential for overclocking newer Intel parts from 4 to 80 cores in future! If power consumption and heat output scale in a linear fashion, imagine how little power a dual-or quad-core processor might require inside of a year. It may become possible to build a computerized toaster with more power in it than an entire Xbox 360 (ok, hyperbole)!

I want the A.I. Toaster from Red Dwarf. I actually enjoy toast, so he'd whine less.

I believe this is the 80^th post's last hurrah, look out for #81, coming your way soon!

Scream of Rage and Frustration: Part One

A Thousand Volts of Fuck You, Programmers!

The day began like any other; I circumnavigated the usual crashes and slow-downs in Windows city...I made it to Office 97 half an hour late. Clippie, my girl Friday, was trying to recover some documents from a case I'd been wrapping up the previous week. She handed me a letter as I walked passed, and a cursory scan revealed it to be a letter from my father. I was intrigued, and promptly opened the letter after sitting down at my desk. In short, he asked why I hadn't decided to find a job closer to his pad in Linuxville...he hated the dingy, tangled roads near my office.

Reaching into my desk, I produced a pen, clipboard, and paper. “Dear Dad,” I began.

At this point, Clippie burst into my office.

“IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE WRITING A LETTER!”, she exclaimed “SHALL I GET YOU SOME STATIONARY?”

Why had I not fired the useless bitch on day one was beyond me. “No, thanks” I replied.

“OKAAAAAAAY!!!!11” she exclaimed

“Easy there, cap'n Crunk”, I said

“WHAAAAAAT?”

“never mind”

I opened the Office window, and began to write my letter. I told my father that what kept me here was the games. You could go to any number of Counter-Strike matches there, but the city only ever hosted teams from elsewhere. I promised him that if his city ever got game, I would move out of this hellhole post-haste. I signed the letter, and hoped it would make it to his inbox. That being done, I put my heels up on the desk. After a moment, I removed a hip flask from my trench coat, and “installed” alcohol 120%. The cheap hooch was a flaming river to my gullet (an entirely disconcerting image).

A number of years later, I was visiting my father. While he was at work, I decided to poke around, look for a prospective place to work, should I ever move here. I was feeling a little dry, and found myself at a WINEry. I talked to the cashier for a bit...and decried how I loved this place, this beautiful metropolis...but it had no GAMES, no WILD SIDE, no fun. And the guy whispers to me that this WINEry has made some good money this past year, and is looking to sponsor local players. I ask the guy if it'll work, an' he tells me that there are still a few hitches here and there, but the dealings go smooth on the whole. The guy passed me something called 'Beta', said it was on him. I went back to the pad, found it to be a little rough, but something about the sweet taste had me hooked.

This whole thing had me thinking about a long-open case file I had. One day, a little Roma woman – a gypsy – had come through my door with a little one in tow. The dame had said that her Mother, who had a fortune telling booth in a local park, had gone missing. She said this was a jolly old woman, who was very much in her right mind. I'd been looking for this happy medium ever since. Until now, I'd been perplexed...fortune tellers only say what you want to hear, which is not exactly how you make enemies. Now I saw the case in a new light: maybe Gran had seen the future, and the future was here, in Linuxville! I put on my Fedora, and hit the streets. I was on the case...

Kudos if you get all the terrible jokes and small references in there. I doubt many of you will, because one references a game I played on the Atari ST called “borrowed time”. It was a kickass text adventure (although it had optional pictures, which I always had on) in true Detective-story style. Good times...

Anyhow, I'm sure that the point of the above story has hit you over the head, but here it is straight-up: I'm trying to quit a destructive and expensive habit. No, the OTHER one: Windows.

You can scoff at this all you like, but the facts are the facts: Windows costs money (especially Windows 'arm-and-a leg' – errr, I'm sorry – 'Vista'!) where others are cheap, or even free. Apple sells OSX for as little as $40, I hear. Granted, they make money on (overpriced, oft-proprietary) hardware, and (overrated) Mp3 players and (DRM-shacled) Online music distribution services, but they're APPLE! Steve “messiah 2.0” Jobs could tell people that OSX is the third coming (he was, after all, here first), and set its MSRP at $APPLEION, even though that isn't even a number! But he doesn't, thank whatever God he believes fathered him*. My shots taken at Apple aside, I do have to give them props for resisting the urge to overprice for once. Linux, being free, gets far more credit, because no matter how 1337 you actually have to be to use it, you just saved as much as $200. That's the difference between a 7900GT and an 8800GTS! I don't care if Linux hasn't got DX10 like Vista will, because the GTS is still more powerful, and at the very least can be employed to perform SETI or Folding@home calculations with Unholy speed. At best, WINE (which I am getting to, I promise) will run a great many DirectX 9 games properly, and the 8800 series is going to be twice as fast. I know Gold may disagree, but I'll take more videocard power over another Windows license any day.

So yes, WINE. WINE is Not an Emulator, it is quite possibly the biggest threat to Microsoft which currently exists. Cue the Mac fanatics pointing out that Boot camp lets you run Windows on new Intel-powered macs. Cue me pointing out that such functionality is neither a threat to M$ (if you are so hard-up for Windows that you want to run it on a Mac, you won't just get rid of it and switch, I tell you that much!), nor is it all that economical (see Macs, overpriced hardware of). Wine is both, because it does not require Windows at all (at present, it helps to have some of the DLLs, and the font files are damn handy....but I have a feeling that work-arounds will show up for these dependencies), and works with not only PC hardware, but on OSX (linux core, essentially). The price is right, ladies and gentlemen. No one has any excuse NOT to try WINE. Not a power-user, don't want the fuss of Linux? It's called Ubuntu, and no matter how much Gold will try to tell me that User-friendly Linux is not possible, I'm entirely certain he hasn't used it. The truth of the matter is that Linux is only as scary as you want it to be these days. If you aren't sure, you can even get a little something called a livedisc, which loads the OS into RAM without installing a thing. For the not-technically-inclined among you, that means you don't have to make any permanent changes to your system to try Linux out. Download a .iso of Ubuntu (I'd suggest the alternative Kubuntu...same great user-friendliness, but with an interface widely considered to be superior), and burn yourself a disc already! If you don't know what a .iso file is, you can alternatively order a CD for free (you may need to pay for shipping, but then some places may have Ubuntu CDs lying around for free).

In short, any and all excuses you have used in the past to avoid spooky, spooky Linux are now rendered NULL and VOID. Wine is the keystone, because it blows the very last one away: “I can't run Windows apps, especially games, in Linux”

Now you can...sort of. I have a brand-new FC5 (ok, so it's an out-of-date version, but the install is fresh) install on my main gaming rig, and things are...ok, they suck at the moment. Keep in mind that my dad (the resident Linux guru) has “better things to do”, and the only computer-related stuff I have talent at is assembly, and, um, BASIC. Even then, I'm pretty bad at the latter, Also, at the time of writing, I could not access the internet, so I couldn't find tutorials or patches if I wanted to. My Steam account connected properly under WINE earlier, but I didn't want to wait for a three-hour download then, my DVD burn of all the files necessary for just playing Half-Life 2 has a single corrupted file (1 out of 340!), and only my Dad can mount the NTFS partition where this shit is already installed. So I have no fucking clue if anything will actually work.

At this point, you are probably wondering why I believe this “WINE” thing to be any sort of threat to Microsoft at all. That's where you're wrong. Just because I'm having technical difficulties doesn't mean other people haven't overcome them, or that you would have them at all. Counter-Strike (source? I can't remember) is said to run better on WINE, even, than under Windows!. Ok, so that has nothing to do with the simplicity of getting it to run at all, but it has everything to do with making said process worth it. Now, I am impatient, and I have no grasp of Linux or WINE as of now. If I took one day to read and practice, I bet I would have far fewer problems than I do now. I already know I have made some mistakes in how I have tackled this situation, and when I can tell you how to avoid the pitfalls I fell into, I will post the juicy details right here on my blog! Imagine what a dedicated person with a little less haste, and a lot less ADHD could accomplish with WINE.

Still, you say, Microsoft is pushing Games For Windows, which will make PC gaming easier by far! Why would I want to go back to the days when you had to manually configure everything for a game to run? Why is WINE a threat to a smooth experience? I have already made my thoughts on GFW clear, so I will content myself by posting a condensed version here: if you think that getting a game to run should be the least of your worries when you buy it, you are the very reason that Console gaming exists. When I finally gain the ability to topple Striders with my RPG under Linux/Wine, it will be SO much sweeter than if I just slotted in the disc and it worked like that. Making a game work is a game unto itself when you are a PC player. Disagree if you like, but if you read QC, you may recall a certain conversation comparing unwrapping a CD to undoing a Girl's bra. The message I am sending is the same: the more trouble you had doing it, the more triumph you feel when you succeed.

So why do I say “Fuck you, programmers”, if I am so fond of things being difficult? I'm only fond of the difficulty once I've beaten it! Right now, I can't get dual-head running in FC5, and I'm stuck with regards to WINE gaming (I have installed several games, and not a one wants to function!). I am pissed as fuck, because one actually working would be nice. As in games, the difficulty of getting this stuff working is a precious balance. I have to feel like I'm getting somewhere, have to feel even just a little success now and then to make it worthwhile (I am proud to say that I got 5 or 6 seconds of glorious dual-screen functionality before I decided that I wanted to get EVERYTHING set up properly!)

A day later, and a Gentoo Linux LiveDVD has decided to lock up on me. This hardly bodes well for my adventures into the land of true power-users. I should try again, but I would never remember all the important options that my dad knows to check, but I don't understand the importance of. Eh, maybe I'll give it a shot anyhow.

I'm sorry if none of the above made all that much sense. It was essentially written in a state of extreme frustration between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 this morning....well, yesterday morning, if you want to get technical.

I Cannot Decide Which Quote To Use!

I saw Clerks the other day. It was ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. If you take Nihilism, Existentialism, and some EXTREMELY funny shit, and stir them all together....you get Clerks. I'd write a review, but reviews only work when you have something bad to say about it. Even if Clerks is not perfect (and you can, I'm sure, argue such a point), just go see it...

Right now, I am lamenting that I cannot play HL2: Episode 2, Portal, or TF2. This really bites. I'd ask Valve to hurry up and release already, but quality takes time, you know. Instead, I will ask that they please not push the release date back any more. I should revisit my thoughts on Episodic gaming for tomorrow's post...see how the truth of things compares to the original promises.

Drudgery draws ever closer. This REALLY bites!

Also: I am happy to announce that I am indeed writing more of my Serial. If life will permit, I should have something by the end of the holidays, perhaps before.

Pure Aluminum Sex

So there is no new computer as of yet, but when the day comes, I have a luscious new Lian-Li PC-v1000 to house it in. In the meantime, my Athlon 64 3000+ is in residence. For a case with 2 120mm fans preloaded, plus an 80mm power supply fan, this thing is just pleasantly humming along beside me at the moment. Upstairs, a new ASRock motherboard gives life (and crappy integrated graphics) to our old Athlon XP 1700+. The upshot is that said integrated graphics have decent Linux GL drivers, so OpenGL games will run under WINE. Not well, but they will run. Glee!

(For those of you who hate the performance ratings, the 3000+ is 2.0GHz, with 512K L2 cache, and the 1700+ is 1.47GHz with 256K L2 cache.)

I will spare you paragraphs of praise for this wondrous new case of mine, and go straight to pictures. Due to being unable to find the USB cable for the digital camera, I had to improvise and use my TV tuner to capture from the camera's analog video cable. I apologize for the lower quality of the pics, as a result of this.

The Case Itself:

Lookin' sharp with the Very Fine Hat:

A boy and his dog case:

The case alone is quite light

The Lian-Li in it's n47ur4l h4b1747:

Not to forget a bonus pic from a while ago:

That's all for tonight. Political content and some Sci-Fi writing to come later on, time permitting. My dialogue needs major overhauls, but progress is happening.