EULAAAAAAUGH! (9/30)

In committing to these daily posts, I was trying to edge out of my comfort zone a little bit, write about some different topics. Today not so much, and I hate to drag you readers back toward anything that remotely resembles a copyright debate. A recent US ruling on software has got me rattled, though. Ars Technica analyses it here, probably better than I will. The short form is: the courts have decided that the bullshit EULA that you never read anyhow is actually enforceable, at least when it comes to resale.

I think this is ridiculous, for a number of reasons. The first and foremost among my objections is that the software industry should never been allowed to sell you a license and not a product in the first place! This kind of example is getting old, but the copyright that protects a book does so even when I own the physical object itself. The copyright doesn't protect paper; it protects IDEAS. When I take my ONE copy of a book and sell the whole thing without retaining any part of it (except, presumably, for memories and any little bits of cover that fell off if I read it excessively)...the ideas contained within are not harmed, modified, plagiarized, or pirated. I had a material possession and I sold it, the end. With digital goods, we think it gets more complicated. But this is buying into a fiction that just because something is "digital", it is not physical. The information stored in your computer is REAL and PHYSICAL. It exists as carefully constructed patterns in actual matter in your hard disk. Yes, digital goods are easily copied blah blah blah. I don't know about the actual legality of this, but if I photocopy the entirety of that book I own and sell that to you - but destroy my original copy - I don't think it's morally any different from selling you the original. I guess the book analogy can get old or preachy or whatever, but I think it's unfair to grant vastly different controls and protections under the SAME laws to different art forms. What the hell is so special about software that the developers get to tell me everything I can and can't do with it. Authors spend a lot of time and effort on their craft, and seem to be happy with less. They're happy with libraries and interpersonal loans, and second-hand book shops (probably? Or if they aren't they're kinda curmudgeonly. And fuck, I even saw a book by AYN RAND that had been donated - DONATED! - by an eponymous foundation to some school or other, in a second hand bookshop yesterday).

I think I might be rambling in all directions a bit here, so I'm going to try and get this in order. I don't like the idea of software as a licensed service unless software companies start acting more like they're selling services, and less like they're selling you products with legalese copouts stapled to them. If software lisencing is going to be upheld by law it needs to be regulated BY LAW, and it should NOT simply be protected by law by virtue of it existing. Just because I own property does not mean that I can do anything I want there. I can't kill people in my house just because it's my house, and software companies should likewise not be able to write all the rules for their software. I think there should be limits on their power. I think that resale should be protected by law. I think that companies should not be able to stipulate what constitutes "acceptable conduct" (some EULAs say that you can't use the product to disparage the creators thereof, etc). I think that companies should not be allowed to terminate or alter these contracts without warning. I think that companies should have a responsibility to all licensees for the complete and total duration of the license. Right now it seems that the software companies have all the leverage over you, the consumer, and that's not really how things should work. Without some rules for consumer protection, the market is going to trend toward restrictive EULAS, which hurts users, hurts the economy, and hurts creativity. Again: copyright should NOT protect anything other than the CONTENT of the book, program, film itself. Filmmakers don't get to tell you what kind of reviews you can write. Authors don't get to tell you that you can't make your own custom cover for their books. Software should be no different!

I may end up rewriting this for clarity and continuity. For now I'm tired, and upset with the courts.

LOUD!

Macintosh Empire

A certain someone for whom I care a great deal is celebrating her birthday today. You could pay her DeviantArt page a visit if you like, her work is fantastic - more than worth your time!


Seriously, I'll still be here when you get back!


I heard the other day - I think it was on last week's Maximum PC No BS Podcast - that Apple's market capitalization has exceeded Microsoft's, making it the largest tech company around. The podcasters mostly addressed the whole "underdog" versus "big evil corporation" shtick that may not play quite so much in Apple's favour, but they missed something. They mentioned iPads and iPods and iPhones throughout the show when supporting/mocking Apple, but no one said "this market cap thing is probably because Apple sells hardware devices, and lots of them". I don't know what percentage of Apple's business is what, but I do know that Microsoft doesn't manufacture and sell its own branded platform of computers, and I'm not even going to spend more than this sentence talking about the Zune. We have two companies with platforms that work in different ways. Consider that you'll hear grudging MS users talk about the "Microsoft Tax" when they have to install windows on a system for specific software, or because their company requires it...but that's only $100-200 on top of your base system cost which is maybe $1000 on average. For a $1000 Mac system the "Apple Tax" is 100% (or near enough) of the purchase price.


I would not go so far as to say that this the case of - pardon the pun - Apple v. Orange. We're looking at tech companies that see themselves as competitors, the differing nature of their platforms be damned! The rhetoric of their feud does - I think - have a reasonable analog in the rivalry of Coke and Pepsi. Coke doesn't compare itself to Pepsi in its ads because it doesn't have to; in fact, to do so would legitimize their opponent. Coke needs only be coke - the original, the iconic, the go-to beverage - something it has been for decades, and might be for centuries assuming we don't blow ourselves up before then. Apple and Pepsi, on the other hand, are operating in markets where even after years of competition there is a clear market leader who will not displace easily. Hence the "3/4 Canadians prefer Pepsi over Coke!" ad you probably saw a million times in the '90s. Apple with its' "buy a mac" ads look rather like a win for Apple on the surface, because hey look how hip and cool and secure and crash-free mr.Mac is! But in mentioning the PC at all, Apple has already acknowledged the uphill battle that it's fighting. If you doubt me, how about this: do you see Apple comparing the iPod or the iPhone to ANYTHING else in their advertisements? Of course not! Droid and the others have been saddled with the burden of proof in this case, and the sale is lost unless you can explain in 15 seconds why the customer wants your puny phone and not Steve Jobs' latest toy.


But I may be accused so far of avoiding the issue. It's not an unfair charge, because I'm strongly pro-PC. Yes, Apple is bigger than Microsoft, but I think that it's not so much a case of the tables being turned and all of a sudden MS users have to play the underdogs and talk about how "big Apple" is now the monolithic bad guy. Competition and adversity are necessary to avoid stagnation. If Apple doesn't ever pose a threat to the dominance of Microsoft, they retain the power to bilk us for the same shitty code year after year after year. It's evolution in action: if the Microsoft Entity can't adapt fast enough to preserve its own existence (something that it is at present in no need of, but one may hope) then it must perish. Again, that's far from immediate, but in the now they are facing a situation that does not make for the very best of PR. Who cares what this means in actuality? All most people are going to see is "Blah blah Apple > Microsoft blah market capitalization". It's not that people are dumb, just that most of them aren't economists or enthusiasts who care about the details.


I have just had a tragic epiphany. In this corporate rivalry our choices are between a corporate giant bordering on the soulless that carries a strong distaste for free code and free culture...and a slightly more stylish version of the same.


There are days when I just hate software.


-LOUD!

iRate

I am going to be a little unhappy writing about the Apple iPad.

Unfortunately, the internet is not going to shut up, nor will the device simply go away. So here we are.

At some point, and I am not sure precisely when this occurred, Apple gained what it - and others - seem to take for the power to decide what people want. If you buy into the theory of the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field" perhaps they had it from the beginning. It doesn't make a lot of difference to what I am about to say. I believe that the success of the iPod and iTunes have gone to Apple's collecitve head, and now it believes that it has the power to shape the market and succeed as long as there is enough, um, Apple? in their solution to a perceived problem or void in the market. I have probably commented on the glaring repeat omissions of the iPod (FM tuner/recorder and microphone, for the most part), but these are pretty trivial in light of what the iPod has and continues to have : a best (or near-best) in industry interface, a trend which they have managed to continue with the iPod touch and iPhone, and iTunes (the gold standard in digital distribution, despite what you could (and what I WOULD) say about DRM). In short, a smooth and cohesive user experience for most people. But the iPod is as much a historical phenomenon as it is a triumph of design and marketing; the arrival of widespread broadband combined with increasingly cheap storage and audio compression (and what I really mean here is the ultimate confluence of the three: Napster) pretty much set the stage for the popularization of portable mp3 player hardware.

Flush with the success of iPod as not only a product and a cultural phenomenon, Apple now had the ear of the common man and woman as never before. Presenting a unified brand that does not, and perhaps cannot exist anywhere else in the computing/consumer electronics industry, Apple has a unique opportunity: it can at once unify and attack a thousand disparate vendors ("PC") almost without reprisal. It is very hard to explain to a largely non-technical audience within its thirty-second attention span that the strength of the PC as a platform is not a single application or hardware device, but rather the plethora of options available to the consumer. Furthermore, it might be the truth, but it's pretty terrible advertising strategy to tell someone that they ought to choose your platform because - hey - you could also buy something similar from someone else at a competitive price! In war - in any conflict - the ability to choose the time and place of a battle is not the single greatest tactical asset, but I'm pretty sure Sun-Tzu ranked it as "pretty friggin important, you guys". Apple has that power.

Taken together, Apple's position looks pretty good: they can at least manufacture desire, and they can (metaphorically speaking) manipulate the terrain on which the battle for your dollars takes place.

Enter the iPad.

It's like an iPod touch for people with pockets of unusual size ("I doubt they exist")

I think it's funny that Steve Jobs should promote this device by trashing the netbook, because the iPad is going to take portable electronics down a path which will be just as unsatisfying as that which we embarked upon after the release of Asus' eeepc. In the case of the latter, the eventual problem which arose was that people sort of expected these tiny things to be like a notebook computer, only smaller. As it turned out, they were often too slow, had too little RAM, and probably suffered from less-than-ideal build quality. With the iPad, the thinking seems to go that Apple should be able to dodge this bullet by making a smartphone bigger and faster, rather than making a laptop smaller and slower. I don't think it's going to work (don't get me wrong: it's going to sell and it's going to be influential, but I don't think it will be magical), because what they are essentially delivering is pocket-sized functionality at messenger-bag size . The only way I could be wrong is if the ebook and online newsreading functionality finally catalyses the death of print media. The problem with that angle is that the death of paper is an event which I imagine will be concurrent with the advent of viable nuclear fusion reactors (which is to say, "perpetually 50 years away"). What I want from a portable device is either going to work on a smartphone ("where is the nearest indian restaurant, and is it any good?", "what IS the name of that song?", "what time is my flight?", etc) OR I'm going to want a laptop ("I want to go to this LAN party", "I want to write a blog post*"...). I'm not sure that the void in the market posited by Steve Jobs really exists. I do think that he has created a need for these products, but it's not you and me who need them; It's Apple's competitors.

*Only real keyboards need apply, smarty-pantses.

No one wants to be caught with their pants down when there's money to be made, so within days of the iPad's physical launch we are already guaranteed to see the inevitable Attack of the Clones. These will have more functionality, and less (depending on your measures). What they won't do - as we have seen with netbooks - is address the shortcomings of the form factor. My inclination would be to say that it could be done with hardware more akin to that of an ultraportable notebook (ie. the macbook air, which I will get to in a moment), but then convertible tablet PCs have been around for a while now and yet they still seem to 1) cost too much and 2) not be very prevalent. The price of the Apple tablet is at once commendible - because it seems to be a departure from the parsec-wide profit margin on most of their products - and contemptible - because that headroom is no longer available for other vendors to spend on cramming more stuff into their competing devices. The worst of it is that the feature I'd actually like to see catch on - the iPad's IPS* LCD screen - is the kind of part whose price is only justifiable if 1) you're Apple or 2) your customer base knows and cares what that means. The higher-quality display is likely the first thing on the chopping block when another vendor asks "how can I undercut this iPad thing?", in fact. That said, I wish Apple had also made a move to higher screen resolutions. 1024 x 768? What is this, 1990?

* IPS stands for In-Plane Switching. It is one of several approaches to building an LCD screen, and it is by most estimates the best in terms of image quality, viewing angle, and colour accuracy. Of course, it is also the most expensive.

Perhaps I have not made a compelling enough case that you will not have any real reason to use an iPad should you buy one. Allow me to quote my friend ELI  (whom you may remember), who was present for much of the time I spent writing this post. One of his first responses to my claims that the iPad would not be very useful was "no; it'll be good for doing...tablet things". Tablet Things, indeed. Later, he adopted the opinion that the e-reading functionality of the iPad and its ilk could be employed to reduce the mighty burden of heavy textbooks, which is not altogether a bad notion. There are probably small fortunes riding now on whether Apple can seal the deal that Amazon has yet to clinch with its own Kindle, and there is at least a potential analogy to the success of the iPod here. Of course, pre-iPod mp3 players were built by companes that you probably haven't heard of (Ricoh, anyone?). It would be hard to argue that Sony and Amazon are so obscure! Furthermore, while the iPad could indeed act as a pretty sweet textbook replacement, is it really going to stand in for your laptop when it comes time to write a paper? Is the interface so much better than that of a laptop for reading ebooks that you and your classmates would justify dropping AT LEAST $500 on top of what you already spent on a laptop (and then you STILL have to buy your textbooks, which aren't likely to be that much cheaper in ebook format)? Maybe if the universities could find out how to subsidize the readers, but what would the motivation be in that case? A grand corporate kickback from Apple? On top of all this, if you're a student you're going to "need" a cellphone, too, unless Jobs/Apple were lying and you CAN use the iPad as a phone*. I thought this product was supposed to be about FILLING a niche!

*Boy, if you thought the infamous taco-phone looked silly held to the ear...

I mentioned earlier the macbook air, which I'd like to examine in comparison to the iPad in terms of product launches. It didn't reinvent computing, it was just a laptop that you could fit in a manilla envelope. It didn't have enough ports (mostly it needed more USB), and the lack of an integral CD/DVD drive is kind of lame, but you make tradeoffs. What I think was good about the macbook air is that what it DID do was start an arms race where the goal was to contain the performance of an existing laptop within a thinner, lighter package. The 12-14" space is about the size where a laptop might not have gaming cohones, but can still support a real man's x86 processor and 4 gigs of ram and a keyboard that doesn't suck. In short, they issued a challenge to developers to make an already-useful platform more mobile (in some ways, more useful). If you'll note what I said about the apparent design philosophy of the iPad, you'll see where I'm going with this: Apple's challenge to other vendors is to take an already-useful platform and make it LESS mobile*.

* Even were someone to put laptop guts into a keyboardless slate-type device, that's just an instance of taking existing hardware and making it flat-out LESS USEFUL.

First, they came for the...

This is shaping up to be a bad week for civil liberties, and it's really getting me down. I've been kicking ass these past few days, so this bad news tempering my excitement? NOT appreciated! I refer primarily, of course, to the complete and utter failure of the state of Maine to uphold the right of same-sex couples to marry. I know only two people from Maine (and only one of them well at all), but I wish that as a sample they had proved to be more representative of the whole (they were both decidedly against the same-sex marriage ban)! My position on marriage is surely well-established by now, so I'll keep any reiteration short and to the point: I...I do and do not understand the idea that same-sex marriage could be threatening or offensive to a person. I mean, sure it might be against the tenets of your religion or something, but did you forget to read the damned bits of your constitution that address the separation of church and state? I mean, yes you could find an idea repulsive on a personal level, but I'm pretty sure that's not how laws work (well, it shouldn't be anyhow). I mean, Etarran hates zucchini, but I can at best imagine him joking about a legal crusade to outlaw its cultivation!

No, the whole miserable business is indefensible. One cannot pretend to live in an open and free society whilst all the while denying his or her countrypeople the same rights he or she enjoys. At best, that can be called hypocrisy. I think I call it tyranny, which is a good segue into another troubling assault on personal freedoms: the recent ban on violent video games in Venuzuela. This has also been an issue in the US, and I guess that it is fitting for a country which is more at ease with making war than making love that their citizens and courts should uphold the right of citizens to simulate all manner of slaughter, but not to marry whomsoever they choose. Wonderful, isn't it?

There's a wonderful essay written by a Venuzuelan on the topic, which can be read here. I'm not sure if I agree that banning violent videogames is tantamount to making protest illegal (although making the expression of views contrary to those of the government a crime? Yeah, there we go!). I think it might be something different, something more than just silencing protest. I think it's entirely possible that the Venuzuelan government is trying to silence an entire generation, regardless of what it is they are saying. If you're incredulous, simply imagine [insert your government here] bans text messaging, facebook, or twitter (hey, wait, hasn't that HAPPENED ALREADY SOMEWHERE?) It could be - at least on the surface - a move to silence particular voices of dissent, but you would realize soon enough I think that the real effect of such a ban would be to effectively evict our generation from home turf. "oh, POOR YOU, you'd have to resort to communications in person, how terrible!" I hear the parents droning sarcastically. No, for serious: That was your way, we have our own way now! It would be like taking away paper and quills before people had phones in their houses, or killing all the troubadours in medieval Europe. Back to videogames, though: I don't think they really express "dissent" of themselves, but they provide our generation with cultural anchors of a sort. Weirdly, I think that the backlash from gamers might be the source of more dissent than games themselves could ever be.

I think that for too long I assumed that 'socialist' meant 'good', and that Hugo Chavez was simply the victim of the kind of slander you're liable to hear about socialists when you live next to one of the most heartless capitalisms the world has ever known. Now, I'm not so sure what I believe. It would be too easy to say "well, now I know the opposite to be true", but I don't think that would actually bely a better understanding of the situation. What I do know is that I want to live in Venuzuela even less than I did before...

...and there's the rub. This is all very well and far away for me, but it's terrifying to think that it IS TRUE somewhere. My hard drive and collection of optical disks? VENUZUELAN CONTRABAND?!?! Weird stuff!

I wonder if there are any gaming speakeasies already in operation in Venuzuela?

Loud!

Far Cry 2: (if) Anything Goes (wrong with SecuROM, you're fucked)

Today's title is a not-so-clever play upon the title of one in a series of trailers for the inexplicably-named Far Cry 2. Inexplicably named?, you wonder, whatever could he mean? Put simply, Far Cry 2 has, besides being a shooter which takes place mostly out of doors with fairly remarkable human AI and semi-realistic weapon handling dynamics, nothing to do with Far Cry. Neither the game engine, nor the development team itself are constant between games. The closest analogue to the situation that exists with Far Cry, Far Cry 2, and Crysis was that of the Age of Empires series compared to the first Empire Earth. The latter was the far more audacious brainchild of original AoE developer Bruce Shelley, who split with Ensemble studios, whose plan for Age of Empires 2 was simply more of the same. Crysis in relation to Far Cry is very much like AoE 2 versus 1. Certainly some aspects of the design have been improved, but along the way the developers seemed to lose sight of what we all found so charming in the original. Where Crysis is essentially a punishing benchmark for the PC hardware elite, it looked to me as though FC2 was shaping up to be a little more innovative, a little less stale. I was (the operative word) looking forward to the ability to roam 50-odd square kilometers of map at my leisure, to experimenting with different approaches to combat, and to interacting with the various in-game factions.

Well, what really separates Far Cry from its successor in my mind is that I cannot, in good conscience, buy FC2. Even on Steam it is saddled with a 3-computer 5-time semi-refundable secuROM-based DRM solution. Let's break this down, shall we? Even if I buy the game on a platform with tough, integrated DRM, a platform that requires me to be connected to the internet, a platform that knows my name, a platform that TRACKS MY GAME-PLAYING HABITS...UbiSoft still doesn't think their IP is safe enough. For the record, if I'm going to go into the kind of trouble it must take to crack a Steam game, do they really think I'll stop there? SecuROM, like every other kind of DRM, has attracted the usual posse of gamer-hackers and pirate-hackers who for reasons ranging from legitimate (secuROM is notorious for butchering system performance and flat-out not working, or so I hear) to the morally ambiguous (they do it for the lulz) to the nefarious (read: piratical). So, what they are asking me to do is to potentially devalue the money I spent on the kind of kick-ass hardware one uses to play current games by chaining me to a stupid activation system that doesn't seem to offer any more practical security than Steam already does (you know, locks and honest folk and that...). Oh, but it DOES limit how much I can use their game. To me, this represents the height of irony. Game developers are going out of their way to create the potential for what they call “emergent gameplay”, they are trying to give the player more control over the interactive experience. At the same time, game publishers are working round-the-clock to limit the number of times you can install the games that YOU pay to use with YOUR money, and piracy continues unabated. In fact, piracy was marketed as ACTIVISM when Spore was released with unreasonable activation limits. “Make Spore the most pirated game in history,” was the rallying cry “show EA that this DRM shit does not fly with gamers”. I didn't pirate Spore, though. I can't say that after seeing gameplay past the cell stage that I really felt I even wanted to play it. Everywhere you see people variously toasting and lamenting the so-called decline of the PC as a platform for games. Everywhere you see developers blaming piracy, but I don't think for a moment that we should be so naïve. Games are getting bigger, prettier, louder....but shorter and costlier, in general. This has been a recognized pattern long before people started whining about piracy as they have in recent months. If you read the newsposts on Penny Arcade (I only read it for the articles, I swear!), you'll see that Tycho always says the same thing about PC gaming: people – not counting the small but vocal minority of hardware aficionados, ie. Yours truly – just want to play. They don't want to worry about the kind of issues that will necessarily cause problems on a platform so variable and diverse as the PC. Consoles are cheap, their games tend to sell better than PC titles, and for the most part they are idiot-proof. While the move towards hard drives and firmware updates and downloadable content may complicate the gaming console experience, I doubt that the “insert disc and play” functionality is going to go anywhere. Well, at least until game cartriges make their inevitable return to prominence, but even so maintenance will still be as simple as “blow on the contacts”. Truly, what would make the most sense for people who want a thriving market for games with the kind of complexity and indie content that only PC gaming can provide as present, the 90% of gamers who don't have a hard-on for their hardware should just buy Macs, thereby creating enough of a market to make development worthwhile. Macs, with their (generally) standardized hardware, could then move into direct competition with gaming consoles, and proceed to beat the stuffing right out of them. The power of Steve Jobs to make relatively unremarkable products look like Yaweh's own gadget collection, combined with the kind of market share that would allow Apple to exert serious power over hardware manufacturers (hell, they somehow have Intel half in their pocket already!) would combine to form a super-gaming entity that could somehow convince consumers to pay three times as much for a piece of hardware with identical capabilities and upgrade options to a gaming console. Of course, Apple's record of having pretty strict control over media (the plan not to allow third-party iPhone apps, anyone) might antagonize indie developers for a while, I think that the larger problem would be in the long term. The few of us who love to tinker with hardware would just suck it up and hack MacOS onto a gaming PC...but the supply of hardware would eventually dry up. The mac platform would, due to its homogeneous nature, be a potential coup for DRM, which could be encoded into ALL HARDWARE.

Where I'm going with this is that PC gaming would have to sacrifice the strengths of our platform in order to achieve mainstream success. It would lead to a momentary renaissance of gaming, but we would be effectively signing away our last vestiges of control over digital content in the process. The other extreme is the abandonment of DRM, making the PC attractive as a platform through an unofficial “try-before-you-buy” culture (for the honest folk, at least). The lifting of DRM restrictions would create a lot of good will in gamers, and it might even lead to a momentary jump in sales...but big-budget games would inevitably disappear from PC, which would become a sort of starting point for would-be game developers, releasing freeware and shareware content in a bid to land spots at a major label.

The reason I'm not going to buy Far Cry 2 is because I am following the third path, which I believe has the potential to lead us toward victory in our fight to remain a viable, free environment for gaming. Of course, it is marked as a “top seller” on Steam, so the fight may already be lost, but I object to the DRM enough that this won't change my decision. If gamers don't buy games that come with unreasonable terms of use (ie. The retail version of Bioshock at launch), game companies WON'T MAKE MONEY. When they decide to treat their customers like vermin. Pirating games may feel good, but it's not the answer. I contemplated buying FC2 and then pirating a version with the DRM removed, but UbiSoft would only see my money if I did that. They would not see the gamer, fighting to preserve his favourite hobby by any means necessary. They would only learn that they can get away with bullying us, and everyone who went to school knows that if you don't let the bully use you for his or her personal entertainment, if you refuse to react to their provocations, they will (hopefully) stop trying. If you continue to react, they'll only come back more and more often.

So if you're listening UbiSoft, you just LOST A SALE of Far Cry 2. I sincerely hope it's not the only one you lose.

In the interests of striking an emotional balance in this post, I shall now shift gears entirely.

To be succinct, I've got love on my mind. Stop. Did you click the link before continuing? If not, open it in a new tab and keep going. It is thematically consistent with what I am going to say, and it will also make the experience of reading this blog 100% more FUNKY.

DDR players who own Supernova 2 are excused now, although they're likely to have reached for their dance mat upon hearing the first strains of music after clicking the link.

Now that we're all groovin', I can continue. This thanksgiving marked for me an entire year of being single, possibly barring an incredibly mishandled affair around the holidays. You know who you are and in retrospect I'm really really really sorry, even though I'm pretty sure you're not holding a grudge. One year of being single has taught me that, well, I don't really like being single. It has also taught me that I don't hate being single either. If I were surrounded by happy relationships, or incredible-yet-too-intimidating prospects, I think I might be a wreck, but neither is the case. Being single is totally stable, and relatively functional. The impending visit of my Ex-girlfriend does, however, have me in a bit of a rush. I'd love to have a date for next weekend, not only for purposes of escaping the house, but as a show of strength, a defensive maneuver of sorts. Unfortunately, dating someone for those reasons is a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative – the long way of saying I am uncomfortable with using people. Relationships being organic as they are develop at uncertain rates, and with a week's notice I really don't have the highest of hopes. It's not as though I haven't been considering the issue since much earlier in the year, it's that I have yet to really find an individual of the female persuasion with whom I have the right kind of rapport, ie. The kind I can talk to naturally, without watching my words to make sure I'm not geeking out too hard. As you probably know, this would already be PRETTY RARE even if I wasn't beset with a terminal case of shy.

So boo-hoo, I don't really talk to girls. At least I don't pop my collars.

What I have at the moment are prospects, but nothing more. In each case there are too many unknowns to allow for a solid plan. Missing first year university here has been academically painless (although I think I'd be better off having taken FYP, that's another story), but it has the unfortunate side effect of alienating me from the social dynamics which have sprung up. All I know is that if people like my housemates they tend to be ok with me. This would be awesome if girls visited this place more than once or twice in EVER. The only other constant that I have become aware of is that if I meet someone at Dal, chances are it turns out they're a King's student anyhow. Some have voiced an opinion to the effect that this just goes to show that I attend the wrong school. I guess at least that when I meet girls at Dal my housemates will invariably know something about her.

Fifty bucks says that no matter who she is, it's always:

“Oh, her. She's dating a guy in my tutorial”

(or something to this effect)

• Loud!

PS. My heartache is over and indeed I can live without you.

PPS. Have you listened to Holy Fuck? That shit is bangin'!

PPPS. Maybe I should just take the hint* and get a haircut?

*assumption that there was a hint to be had? ASSUMED!

In which Loud muses about how to keep the free world rocking. And writing. And painting. And coding...

My housemate returns home tonight, and finds the remaining three of us in the midst of a heated debate. Naturally, he inquires as to what it is we are yelling about.

“We're having another copyright fight”

“Oh”

“Well, we do tend to have them every couple of days”

At this point, Etarran observes:

“We have them EVERY day!”

Which would be funnier if it weren't the honest truth. We had indeed argued about intellectual property rights the night before. It would certainly be funnier if it weren't my fault. As the token long-haired-hippie-anarcho-communist, I am something of a philosophical punching bag for the ...I guess liberal moderates? Who make up the house, and occasionally those visitors from outside the house as well. It's possible that this is for a good reason; the people who take issue with my positions tend to be more pragmatic, whereas I am an ideologue. Sadly, I think that in this sense I am an outmode, that policy and thought have to be guided by what rational observation can prove, and not by what an individual or group believes is somehow more “virtuous” than the next guy's “good life”.

When we debate intellectual property, as we do too much around here, it comes down to a fundamental difference in priorities. Etarran has observed of us that we “believe mostly the same things, only you believe them for completely the wrong reasons”. In common, I think everyone in the house is in agreement that no matter how you arrange IP rights, you need to both encourage and reward creativity. Past this, we tend to disagree entirely: I focus on the need to promote a vague “public good” - the benefit to people when they are allowed to enjoy art and participate in culture – by removing “unreasonable” restrictions on use of intellectual property. The others point out that making intellectual property less strictly controlled damages the ability of artists and publishers to make money, and therefore disincentivizes creativity. They assert that derivative use of IP under the current framework can be permitted by negotiating with the copyright holder, and purchasing it from them (or agreeing to pay royalties), and since this is at all possible the system does not need to change.

The way I see it, though, the economics of creativity are not the only thing that need be dealt with. While career artists do have to make a living from what they create, there is a whole world of non-commercial creativity that I believe is stifled when artists and corporations demand tighter restrictions on how we are allowed to use our media. For example, it makes economic sense for Apple to have iTunes dispense songs which are of a format exclusively supported by their brand of mp3 players. It makes sense for iTunes not to interface with mp3 players from other vendors. Apple has no obligation to increase the business of other companies, and it has a right to maximize its profits. Apple's policy in this matter may help Apple, but it is harmful to the public good and, I would argue, to the digital music industry. I believe that a free, open standard for music files (mp3, while ubiquitous, is not common property) and players would create a market in which users could buy music AND portable audio devices with greater confidence (I would suggest that they might buy more music, were this the case). Such a system would create market pressure for each vendor to produce the best, cheapest Open-Source Audio Codec (OSAC, not as catchy as mp3, but what can I do?) player, as well as the best digital delivery service. This intense competition would be a great boon for consumers, but perhaps costly for the technology providers. To this, I would respond “tough titty”. If each digital distribution platform used a unique key to encode songs bought through that service, consumers could be forced into being less fickle. HOWEVER, this would put quite the damper on another form of creativity, namely that exhibited by programmers of free or alternative media players. A decent compromise could be reached if users could pay a nominal fee (per song, perhaps?) for either the ability to transfer keys (encryption would be standardized, of course) to other programs, or perhaps – and this is already a reality – simply for unencrypted media files. I think that being able to pay to free your media from DRM strikes me as particularly fair. One, if it is money the companies want, then let them have money in exchange for free (as in speech, not as in beer) information, and Two, honest people who do not like DRM would be allowed to put their money where their mouths are. I think this sort of arrangement could work for all manner of digitally-distributed media. I would love for, say, Steam to be cross-compatible with other digital distribution platforms once I paid the fee. Valve might give up a certain amount of potential revenue, but as a fan of Valve's work, it's not like I'd give up lining their coffers. Sure, they might have to wage a couple of price and feature wars with other providers to get my every purchase, but they should have to do that anyway! Different companies make motherboards, BUT I do not have to buy an Asus graphics card when I use an Asus motherboard. I do not have to buy Toyota gas if I drive a Toyota. I do not have to buy a Warner Brothers' movie player to watch Warner Brothers movies. Standards are DEFINITELY beneficial to the public good, and it's high time that digital distributors cut out all the proprietary bullshit!

Picking up from thoughts of computer hardware and digital distribution of games, I would like to make the case that gamers, and gamer culture (at least on the PC) can be an example of an enlightened copyright regime. First, I want to be clear that I don't think that piracy as it exists in PC gaming is justified or enlightened. What I do think is that “piracy” of so-called “abandonware” games does have some certain merit. While in some cases the industry does produce means for gamers to play their old favourites again (ie. SNES emulators on a chip with all the old games preloaded), only recently have services like Steam and Gametap really, well, tapped into this market. Still, not every retro game will be profitable, and I foresee the utility of a small amount of file-sharing for the obscure, the overly complex, and the forgotten. Where gamer culture really shines in terms of IP is in the world of mods. When buying one game at retail allows you to access for free the creativity of many others who contributed content for the love of gaming (or in an attempt to get noticed in the industry), that can translate into additional value for the original creators and publisher. I think that if the model of mods could somehow be ported over to other forms of art (accessing derivative works is contingent upon owning the original content), we could make culture participatory AND fair to creators. “Institutionalized plagiarism”, you say? Hardly! Humans often learn through imitation/ My sister learned to talk by parroting my every sound (true story!), and while I'm pretty sure I found it annoying, you don't see me handing her a DMCA takedown notice! We retell jokes that we didn't make up ourselves, we relate stories that are not our own, we play games that we didn't make up but never paid for (remember wall-ball in grade 3 or so? Foursquare/king's court?), and sometimes we modify or embellish these things. Granted, these things are not new, but if you told me that no one's livelihood depended on them, I would laugh in your face. Imagine a world where you had to get permission to tell or modify any joke you told, or any schoolyard game you played, and tell me that YOUR livelihood would not be adversely affected (with a straight face and not dripping sarcasm). I think that if we enjoy a series of books, we shouldn't have to worry about whether or not the publisher wants to make an RPG out of it when we contemplate making a MUD on the internet based on said book. Maybe that's cutting into the potential revenues of the author, but if people are not allowed to celebrate what they love with just a little imitation (the sincerest form of flattery), something is VERY WRONG. What I cannot quite say is where the line should be drawn between what sort of derivations are fair and which are not. Maybe a MUD based on your favourite fantasy book is ok, but what about home-cooked rules for adapting, say, D&D or GURPS to be playable in that world? Such an action would be rather akin to making a mod of a computer game, based on an established franchise that you did not own. This happens all the time, and occasionally copyright owners will force the mod teams to cease and desist. While I respect the desire of, say, Lucasfilm, to make money on Star Wars: Battlefront, I think I would rather play a Battlefield mod coded by people who LOVE Battlefield and Star Wars instead of money. I think the ideal arrangement would be what happened to Garry's Mod, Team Fortress, and Desert Combat. Rather than a battle between quality and profit, the industry should embrace mod teams, and then commission them to help build, or even design on their own a bigger, better, for-profit version that the IP rights holder can sell. The amateur creation should be allowed to remain as a demo, free publicity for its better-supported official cousin. Of course, the practicality of hiring a mod team every time you want to exploit a franchise for profit is nil, but in other media the concept does exist in a sense (ie. Star Wars extended universe novels, although I'm sure they have a strict vetting/quality control policy on those). If multiple derivative works were being prepared at the same time, it only gets worse (although mod teams sometimes do coalesce on their own when this happens). The best answer I can give is that IP rights holders could always hire the pick of the modding crop when multiple projects were involved, and that franchise-based gaming could move away from being assigned to particular studios, and to contract work by modders? Still impractical, I suppose, so if anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear it.

I think that's all for now. Apparently posting about actual goings-on in Halifax was a lie. Maybe it will happen next time.

-LOUD!

Mesh Networks: the Best Thing Involving Mesh Since Fishnets!

I suppose a little celebration is in order, because sometime later today I will be receiving a new motherboard by way of Fedex. This system build has been hell (I have since socketed two or three LGA775 processors at work without incident, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault), but I can take at least a little solace in the fact that Asus was out of stock of the motherboard I bought and gave me the option of accepting an upgraded model, which I did with no hesitation. I doubt that Penryn support and PCI-E 2.0 are going to be all that big a deal for me (both will be outmoded by the time I have cash enough to upgrade or overhaul), but it's really just the sensation of getting something more after all this time, I think I would be positively crushed without it. This has certainly not been the most pleasant of projects for me, but I can now attest to you that if you buy some bum components from BFG or Asus, they're pretty decent about RMAs. For what it's worth, I'm a little bummed that the two companies I chose to buy from on reputation (well, the BFG 8800 was also on a CRAZY sale online, but I digress) were the ones which yielded the bad components which have so delayed my build.

The watercooling system will probably be drained and set aside for some time. I may very well elect to mount it on a practice system or two before I bring it to bear upon the mighty quad-core system.

I should feel more excited, but at this point I can barely remember why it should be so.

On the subject of computers, I read today that Intel is attempting to give notebook wi-fi connections the functionality of bluetooth, such that your laptop will be able to serve as a base-station for printers, cameras, and pretty much anything else wireless. Setting aside the obvious security threats, and the eerie prevalence of microwave-band radiation in an ever more wireless society, I want to look at the potential good of this technology and its future derivatives. I think the first thing people should look at with this tech is the potential for an OLPC-like mesh network, whereby everyone with a wireless-enabled device becomes part of a Great Chain, if you will. Wi-Fi can only extend so far from a base-station, but imagine what would happen if signals could be relayed from router to laptops to smartphones to coffee shops...it would, in essence, be like a cheaper version of Wimax, albeit a gigantic Kludge. On top of this, suppose these connections relayed more than data? What if they broadcast your mood, or anything else you wanted people to know about you? Peripherals are NOT ENOUGH, Intel! Everything from computing power, to a common interest in videogaming should be shared across the great wireless interconnections of tomorrow's laptop!

Where this gets really cool is when you overlay the two ideas. Suppose you want to know what it's like outside? The smartphone of a woman passing by the coffee shop window relays temperature data and a picture of the sky, or perhaps an amateur meteorologist has a whole set of instruments and cameras streaming content over wireless? Well, you could find that, too. The girl or guy in the corner thinks you're cute, and so sends a note to your wireless printer. You speak into your microphone, and the signal is broadcast to his or her wireless headphones, etc. Granted, this is a specific and idealistic case, but it would just be so damn cool if you could play with EVERYTHING wireless in a room. It could turn anything into a game, anywhere into a classroom, or a party, and hell, it could probably order your coffee for you! Maybe even report spills to the local roomba/scooba bots!

For crotchety people who hate new ideas and fun, you could simply build in a toggle switch to allow or disallow foreign access by hardwiring of some kind. Maybe use a different encryption scheme for public mesh networking, and then the toggle switch could physically disconnect the main Wi-Fi receiver part from the public decoder chip, or something. Not being a microcircuitry guru, I wouldn't know what to do.

Final Note: public party buttons. AWESOME

-LOUD!

8/7!

God playing dice is OK, D&D is frightening, (two words: "critical miss"). GURPS? Look in a biology textbook, and tell me that's not what He's playing

Applied Failure

Even as a reasonably tech-savvy geek, I sometimes find myself a little out of my depth. Going on a date is an excellent example, but rather non-pertinent to my present situation*. On this particular occasion, I remained blissfully unaware of just how out of my depth I was until it was far too late to do anything about it. After the disaster that was my search for a vendor who would supply me with a bare-bones laptop, I decided that it was time to return to my element, the clunky un-portable, much more cost-effective world of the desktop. At this point it had been several months since I had expressed the desire for a new computer, so naturally I wanted to make the end result worth the wait. It would be a quad-core, it would have enough graphics muscle to put the boots to UT3 and Crysis, and it would have more RAM than a 32-bit system could handle! Oh, and it would be liquid-cooled! Well, fast forward two months of watching prices fluctuate, a switch from crossfire to SLI, and then to just a single graphics card, hacksawing, drilling, AND wire-cutting my way through metal to make everything fit together and play nice, searching four local stores to get just one tiny part for the watercooling system, and....

...Nothing. Not one beep of protest, not one on-screen error message...nothing really. Somewhat ironic is the bit where my watercooling system is well-sealed and leak-free. Sure, inflexible tubing and a slightly cramped case forced me to abandon the idea of using a chipset waterblock, and I'm out $30, but at least my $50 non-conductive liquid coolant isn't dribbling out all over the floor of my case. The fans are spinning, the motherboard's "I can has power" light is on, my 8800GT's fan has spun up, but even a spare LGA 775 processor on loan from work has yet to coax any real life out of this thing! While my current gaming rig is completely functional throughout all this, I still resent being the owner of a $1600 liquid-cooled doorstop! I would normally be pushing and pulling at every component under the sun to discover the source of my misery, but to be honest I've left the tangle of wires and tubing well enough alone. There's something alien and unfriendly about it that I never really felt about my Athlon 64 system (which I think POSTed on its very first boot, thankyouverymuch), and so I go back to the security of my old standby, and wait for some kind of silicon miracle to breathe life into the silicon corpse splayed unceremoniously on my basement floor.

And to think that once this stubborn beast has been coaxed into fighting form, I'm going to be using WINE/Linux, which is a potential nightmare in and of itself. Still, I promised myself I'd do it, and here I am.

...Or here I would be, if my damned computer worked!

*Actually, I'm single right now, so going on a date wouldn't be so bad.

...And while we're talking about Failure

Remember when I said that Stéphane Dion was a P'tagh? Well, as much as I'd love to give the guy a second chance, he's done nothing but dig himself deeper and deeper into a dangerous hole. So the polls don't suggest a Liberal majority if an election were to be held today, so what? If Dion can't think of a way to turn one or all of THREE recent Conservative missteps into some kind of foothold, this guy is NOT FIT TO LEAD A POLITICAL PARTY! You have allegations of bribery, blatant censorship, and thinly-disguised preparations for an all-out assault on female reproductive freedom...what more can you want? A little corruption and a big hidden agenda are about all you need to make the Conservative party look scary again, but what does Dion do? He brings just enough Liberals into the House with him to make sure there aren't enough votes to defeat the Government on a confidence motion (and what isn't a confidence motion these days?) and then votes against the government, with bold defiance written all over his smug little face. In other words, the little pissant doesn't even have the balls to match his recorded vote to his actions. While I can't say it's conduct unbecoming of a Parliamentarian (what would that even be? Keeping a civil tongue? Refusing to indulge in boneheaded partisanship?), I can say that it was cowardly, that it was not good for the Liberal party (or it SHOULDN'T be), and it was not good for Canada.

I want to see the Liberal party win a federal election about as much as I want my wisdom teeth to come in crooked, but when I'm faced with a decision between ineffective, corrupt, but largely benign government, and the erosion of my civil liberties, well, clearly I'll vote Green and hope for a Liberal minority, but that's not the point. What I'd like to say is that the present Liberal opposition is baked fail garnished with looser sauce, with a healthy sprig of dickweed on top.

I would probably comment on my own immaturity, but it seems kinda apropos given the kind of vitriol that gets bandied about in the H-o-C. I thought we already had an institution devoted to mentally underdeveloped pricks trash-talking each other for money, and it was called "Television"?

Of course, cpac is kind of like TV, if TV were only ever about stodgy old white people and British tradition, and even then we already have that; it's called "Coronation Street".

Finally, for the sticklers who will tell me that even Canadian Parliament was around before Coronation Street, I'm pretty sure cpac wasn't.

LOUD!

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!

An Open Letter to Chipset and Motherboard Manufacturers

Dear Makers of Consumer-level motherboards:

Please visit this link, and observe what is there. It is a motherboard that supports BOTH SLI and Crossfire, thus removing the tyranny of the "Platform", this console-esque abomination that has been encroaching upon our formerly unrestricted ability to construct a computer as we - the end users - did see fit. I would like to ask you why, in an age when top-shelf motherboards can cost nearly $350, no one has thought to revive the spirit that brought us the legendary Abit BP-6, and tempt the wrath of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia by pulling some electrical-engineering-fu to allow both multi-card solutions on a single board. Abit's fortunes hardly seemed damned by their unsanctioned dual-celeron motherboard of yore, and I suspect that if a manufacturer with enough clout were to take on the project I suggest, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia would be hard-pressed to retaliate without consumer backlash. Such as it is, the prospective buyer is forced to make an up-front choice, which cannot be undone without great expenditure (ie, another motherboard purchase). While that may be wonderful for your business, it is hardly consumer friendly. It's time to stop screwing the hardcore demographic over!

Sincerely,
LOUD

BY YOUR COMMAND

Hack vs Slash

I had this glorious plan, going on...two months now? It's probably been more, I may have been planning this since the summer. I wanted to buy a barebones notebook, and create from scratch my portable gaming masterpiece, as a counterpart to my fully-loaded desktop in the big aluminum box. It would mean an end to running WinXP on a slowly-failing Celeron 950 (which went over a GHz until my dad stole back the good heatsink!) with 768MB of ram (two-thirds of which is borrowed) and an ATI Radeon 9600 256MB, which is my current secondary machine in the case of basement LAN action, which happens all-too-infrequently for my tastes. Then, on top of this, I was going to buy an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, and start enjoying some 1080i content (yes, 1080i, because I have a clunky old CRT television), with the aid of one or both of my computers and a little app called AnyDVD HD.

All this comes to a crashing halt for a few reasons, the first of which being that the laptop chassis I want comes in a few flavours, and getting the precise match would involve ordering from the US, enduring possible tariffs, delivery surcharges, and all those scary things that must be keeping our domestic industry intact by making it nigh-impossible to get what you want for cheap when it's not available in Canada. I guess I could break down and buy a lesser variant of this chassis from within the country, but it would feel as much like defeat as victory. The Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, well, not so much a problem as a question of who I trust on ebay. $70 for a buy-it-now? That just sounds like too good a deal...

The real kicker is that a reasonably-priced laptop by Acer is selling for $400 off at the future shop. It has everything I want except for DVI output and an MXM module, including an HDMI port and an HD DVD drive. It costs $800, easily half of the total cost of the DIY laptop and the HD DVD drive would cost separately. I may have to give in on this score, and simply buy the DIY laptop separately, but at that point I will have spent some $2000 on laptops, which would - if spent on a single laptop - probably get me a single unit with a RAID array, 17" screen, and SLI. Maybe I should do that, instead, although I cannot for the life of me think of where I might get a laptop IDE HD DVD drive for anything less than $800 on its own.

In short, I have gone from a single decision back to start, and I have to start this process of deciding the best course of action all over again. I am not the most decicive person at the best of times, so this really helps nothing.

Maybe I'll see if I can't cajole my dad into splitting the cheap laptop with me, if I can have the HD DVD drive. Now fitting THAT into a barebone chassis would be what I'd call a fun little project. Not so much hacking involved, but I'd probably avoid buying Tor 9x screwdrivers...

In the game of Hack versus Slash, why are the big box stores out to take away all of our fun?

The Moral Compass

So I did go and see a certain fantasy movie with supposedly atheist roots, and I have to say that I'm disappointed. You'd think that if a movie were going to raise religious hackles, it could at least have the decency to be a good movie, and more importantly, to be an atheist movie. There isn't any mention of a "Creator" or "God" figure, there's not even a Big Brother. The Magesterium is churchlike only in terms of its visual style, which is great, I love how the stern-looking clergyman type is the bad dude with the poison for once, and the free thinkers are the good guys, that's AWESOME. Like Sci-Fi Channel's perplexing "Riverworld" adaptation, the movie has only made me want to read the book, because it has presented me with some cool world-building, and not a lot else, which I expect the book will fix. This is a terrible trend in movies, because libraries will let you borrow a book for free, and cliffs notes to summarize it for you don't cost as much as movie tickets and overpriced popcorn. Visually, this movie is astounding, and I would gladly give armoured bear hugs to the concept artists and digital rendering crew, fantastic work! Now if only the screenwriters could have worked a little harder, then we might actually have CONTENT! Also, it would help if Daniel Craig and his Tiger had featured more in the movie, but you can just read any old review of GC and know that.

What saddens me about this situation is that an opportunity to bring atheist messages into entertainment has been missed. I'd like some entertainment that stands up and says that you don't need Jesus, or God, or Mohammed, or 4 000-year-old books to have morals, ethics, drive, determination, life, and happiness. I'd like to see something that challenges not just arbitrary authority, but the actual tenets of religion. This is not to say that we need to go about killing God in books for this purpose: positive messages are more desireable in the end. Better still, just look at the truth: the genetics, the selection pressures, and social life. Look at why religion might be beneficial, look at how it is not, in some cases. I think it's fair to say that any imposition of belief would place us atheists in bad faith, and so rather than bonking people over the head screaming "there is no God!", just lay down interesting facts and let them draw their own conclusions, rather than giving them rhetoric and scripture. Will that win "converts"? Not many, but then it's not like converting people to atheism is all that time-critical: belief doesn't really matter if there's no afterlife, so there's no "saving" people! There is only showing them that they can take control of their own moral codes.

The Review

So I've been working on a review of BSG: Razor, but it's not really been coming together. I end up listing every little thing about it, when really I only need to get a few points across:

1) If you like BSG, it's basically more of the same. For that matter, it's an incredibly ordinary mid-series miniseries, because it introduces cool characters and events, and then blows them up or away before the audience can say "wait, why weren't they in the series proper, if this was important" WARNING! CONTAINS GIANT SPOILERS!

2) If you haven't seen BSG, you don't want to start here.

3) Admiral Cain's relationship with the cylon 6 "Gina" is the best new character development. It places the infiltrator within the crew of Pegasus, it makes Cain human, it makes her descent into cold-blooded revenge so much more understandable, and also makes her treatment of Gina all the more horrifying. Even though BSG has played with sex scenes in the past, they don't go the easy route of sexploitation of two attractive female characters. Good move on their part, because it stands out as character development, and not ratings-grab. It's also presented with no bias. The only reaction is "It's just the admiral seems so self-sufficient". Tricia Helfer and Michelle Forbes have great on-screen chemistry, which is the crowning touch to this master-stroke. Brilliance

4) I really like Admiral Cain's original XO. It makes it very painful when she shoots him. Also Brilliant!

5) The new character, Kendra Shaw, is mad, mad hot, and ohhh that accent. Pity she dies in a stupid cliché involving a nuclear bomb that must be manually detonated

6) The cylon hybrid whom she destroys (along with a basestar) is cool. Too bad we still don't understand why the Cylons were compelled to become fleshy and have religion in the first place. Hell, we haven't a clue, even. Prophecies are cool, but the series really ought to back-fill in order to shed light on the origins of the organic Cylons.

7) Speaking of clichés, we have an entire plot arc revolving around...Something Adama saw or did earlier in his career, but neglected to mention even when it would have been pertinent. Anyone remember "Bulldog"? It's as if the writer's strike forced the crew to fill in the plot with no imagination, or something. Especially that nuke thing. That's from Armageddon, and it's even sorta happened in the series already (end of season 1 ish, before Boomer shoots Adama)!

8) They could have just had a bunch of Kendra Shaw beauty shots and that one scene where the Cylon says "By your command" with all the Vocordery goodness of the original show. It would have advanced the plot of BSG about as much as Razor.

More later, I promise

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!

Just Because (I Love You) - Loud Blogger feat. The Return of Funky Coloured Text

I'm posting again!

also, it supposedly helps to update a blog regularly if you want it to succeed.

Not much new today, although there was a humourous moment in which it was decided that being unable to see the end of the lineup was grounds for NOT seeing the Sistine chapel. Also, a hot, humid, and somewhat pointless trip to a closed Apple store, in search of a power adapter for a Macbook. All in a day's stay in Roma!

Speaking of notebooks, I'm really, really hoping to accrue a little cash and then indulge in some serious D-I-Y shenanigans involving myself, a barebones notebook, the requisite parts, and a whole tube of thermal grease. The only immediate problem is, of course, accruing "a little" cash to do this. I am in the midst of drafting (on paper, of all things) a post about my reasons for wanting a laptop, and the larger ramifications of being connected 24/7. Expect to read it upon my return. In the meantime, I have a decision to make. It is now possible to buy a barebones notebook which will support desktop s775 processors (dual-core only it seems, but then it could be but a BIOS update away from mobile quad-core support). The obvious question is that of performance vs. battery life. The power user in me screams for mobile overclocking, but then I would be condemning myself to an endless search for electrical outlets. Mobility seems the obvious solution for a notebook, but if I'm going to buy a Core 2 (and as little a chance there is of my getting money enough to buy one, there is NO chance of accumulating the pile o' simoleons required for two!) I sure as hell want to push it to the MAX. Notebook owners sound off, if you please... with your current experience in mind, what factors are "The Big Ones" with respect to your tote-able little sex machines (or clunky luggables)?

Zyzzyva, I'm looking at you and your luscious macbook pro...

LOUD and PROUD, dammit!

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's Blog Post Ninety-Nine!

Please DO NOT Sign This Petition

I feel almost filthy jumping on the bandwagon of speculation with regards to the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but something popped up in the news, and I consider it my duty to deliver whac-a-mole-style justice!

I speak of this petition, addressed to J.K. Rowling, to have her "resurrect" Harry - after a fashion - and write more adventures for him and his mates...regardless of the events of the supposedly final seventh book. The Citizen article which informed me of its existence provided worrying statistics, namely that some 66% of readers (total) desire more tales of the Boy Wizard's adventures after The Deathly Hallows is published. It revolts me that, when given a seven-book-long series detailing the adventures of a select few people in a vast and compelling world of magic which exists beneath the very noses of us Muggles, the majority of readers would rather have more of the same than deeper explorations into the depths of J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World! It's not surprising that this is the case, of course; people enjoy routine because it is comfortable, because it is easier than being perpetually on one's toes. Adapting to new characters means assimilating new information, means forming new emotional bonds, means using that lump of grayish stuff that occupies the skull - people HATE that.

I will concede that Harry Potter being the phenomenon it is has become more product than art, but I believe that what fans who sign this petition do not understand what they are doing. The Deathly Hallows will surely include the final showdown between Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Voldemort, and that means that ONE OR BOTH WILL DIE. Do these people think that it is a coincidence that J.K. has devoted many a page to discussions of how these two are intertwined? Harry can no more exist as a dramatic character without Voldemort than he can without Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Hagrid, or even the Dursleys! Without a central enemy, he has no motivating force, no perpetual shadow looming over his head, and no destiny. There could be other villains, but none would compare. Even if J.K. went as far as to create another wizard of terrifying evil, the lack of intertwined destinies would make this new malefactor a pale shadow next to The Dark Lord. If she chose to omit a hero-villain conflict for infighting, she would end up writing another sixth book, which to my mind was a jarring transition from angst-vs-evil to hormonal angst which felt forced and artificial. She has said it herself: Harry's story ENDS WITH THE SEVENTH BOOK. Dragging him out for another go-round would feel tired and limp, more so if he's already had to die.

What I WOULD like to see is a new series set somewhere else, because the particulars of the hidden world of magic intrigue me to no end. For example: How are spells made? How did the art of wizardry evolve? What were the circumstances of Hogwarts' founding? What is the daily life of the Minister for Magic like? What kind of dark wizard did Aurors apprehend before Death Eaters and the Dark Lord? See, THESE are good questions which DO NOT require the presence of Harry Potter to answer. I would sign a petition asking for more works in the same universe inhabited by Potter and Company, but I will NOT ask an author to go against her creative vision. Finally, I should point out that it is none other than a BOOK VENDOR which has created this petition. I trust it goes without saying what the true motive for this petition is?

PS: From an artistic point of view, a noble sacrifice seems befitting of Harry Potter. No, I DO NOT think he should be a Jesus figure, but that may be unavoidable, as he has always been something of a messiah to the Wizarding World. There, now you know what my theory is.

It Might Not Unfold Into a Giant Robot...

But my computer is still one of my favourite playthings, and so it is with great pride that I announce my most recent upgrades: A G5 laser gaming mouse, and not one, but TWO new [EDIT] Western Digital (gah, curse my random reflex-writing of "Maxtor" here) 500GB Hard Drives.

My financial situation being what it is, I didn't actually buy either of these; one is a substitute for the prize I am never going to get from the Ontario Reach for the Top people (I am suddenly reminded that I need to blog about both tournaments...), and the other is my Dad realizing that 120GB just doesn't cut it for data storage anymore. It makes these bittersweet upgrades, as much as my true connection to any computer should be through hands-on assembly, rather than purchase. If I'd been able to pay for either or both of these upgrades, I would have had a greater share of the computer ownership. Some people gauge their independence in terms of cars, I judge mine in terms of computers, it's as simple as that. When I buy every component of a new computer, I will feel just that much more sovereign. Moving out will help, too...but it's a great deal more expensive, and so naturally further down the line

I will need a job to accomplish either of these goals, of course, but with at LEAST 3 out of my next 4 weeks being spent on vacation, there seems scant hope or point to the acquisition thereof.

Ah, well. There's always the fall season...

Why do I get the feeling that come fall, I will be telling myself "there's always winter"?

-LOUD