emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
The general category for posts on this blog.
Want to read some zombie books?
I stumbled on a site hosted at one of those free sites a while back, and recently they’ve moved to their own domain. The ULTIMATE Zombie Book List is a great place to find zombie stories, ones you may know and others you might have missed.
Check it out.
No, really, I do. If you are one of those stubborn people who haven’t been watching Jericho or Veronica Mars, I hate you.
Veronica Mars, currently finishing up its third season, is probably one of the best shows on television. While other shows that ran season long plots often wound up with entirely unwatchable episodes that could never be watched alone, Veronica Mars managed to have every episode contain its own plot while still throwing clues and furthering the main season plot. It was smart and funny. And it has been cancelled because of people like you.
Jericho is in the same boat. When I first read the plot of the show, I was skeptical, but after watching it, they really managed to pull off the “Terrorists nuke a bunch of cities and throws the US into chaos” world brilliantly. Like Veronica Mars, every episode was tight and contained its own mini story, a plot resolved in one episode, while also serving the greater overall plot. It too has been cancelled.
Of course, I cannot lay all the blame at your feet. This season, the networks, and I mean all the networks, really screwed up by putting so many shows on a multitude of hiatuses. Seasons broken in half or in thirds, shows constantly bumped in hopes of getting higher ratings from specials and game shows. The one thing they don’t seem to understand is, the main reason a high rated show stays high rated is the ability of the audience to find and watch the show. Jericho did great until the hiatus… it never recovered. Even powerhouse Lost slumped in the ratings after a promising start. Standoff might have done better if they’d ever actually put it back on the air. It ran 11 episodes up until December 12th when it got put on hiatus to return on March 30th… wait, April 6th… now, June 8th where it will be on Friday instead of its original Tuesday slot for its remaining 8 episodes (maybe). Fans like me just wanted to watch the show, but I can’t watch it if they don’t air it.
As it is, many shows don’t even get that far. Runaway, Kidnapped, Vanished, Studio 60, The Black Donnellys, Drive, Day Break, Happy Hour, Justice, The Nine, Six Degrees, The Wedding Bells, Smith, Raines… Lots of these shows didn’t even start with full order seasons, or even half orders. Networks are often hedging their bets by ordering 6 or 7 episodes, and as a viewer if I know that a show may only run 6 or 7 episodes I am going to be less likely to tune in. Its seems that gone are the days of building an audience, if a show doesn’t come out of the gates booming with success its not likely to stick around, and with prospects like that is it really any surprise that the viewers aren’t showing up?
TV has one more season, if this fall is a repeat of last fall with all the show cancellations after one or two airings, they are going to lose me as a customer. They might get my business on the back end when a show goes to DVD, but they’ll never get my ad revenue dollars.
I honestly think the business model has to change. At a minimum, Sweeps Weeks need to go away. Networks should be rated for their advertising based on viewership average for the entire year. Maybe that alone would go a long way to ensuring that they took care of their shows all year long instead of just a couple a months scattered throughout. After considering it a while, I’d be willing to pay as much as $1 an episode downloaded to my TV without commercials through and On Demand like system, even on my Xbox360 if it had to be. Maybe networks should consider going that route, dump this 24/7 programming model that is full of trash anyway and focus on making a handful of solid engaging hours per day.
Whatever they do, mostly they need to recognize, you can’t have loyal viewers if you are not loyal to your viewers. Someone has to start, and since it would be stupid to ask viewers to watch things that don’t interest them, the networks have to start by letting shows that don’t launch fantastically stick around to see if the viewers can find it.
I’ve written about The Walking Dead before, and in my continued efforts to talk about my game idea without rehashing the same stuff over and over, I will write about them again.
There are six collections now instead of four as when I wrote before, and the story remains good. There are elements in here that just make sense to me, and are in line with the story of the world I would present in my game. If you haven’t read all the comics, I’m about to ruin one thing for you, so skip the rest unless you want the spoiler… its not that huge of a spoiler, so don’t get too bent…
In the comic, one of the things revealed that I really liked is the idea that everyone is doomed. See, The Walking Dead doesn’t refer to just the zombies. After an incident where someone who died through other means, never having been bitten by a zombie, comes back as a zombie, its apparent that whatever causes the zombies is already in everyone, just dormant. They are all going to become zombies, no matter how they die, unless their death involves the destruction of their own bodies such that they can’t rise.
This aspect will be integral to my game. I talked earlier about how players will have to manage food and resources, and how those will deplete even when offline. When you die, you are dead. There is no resurrecting or respawning, if you want to play more you have to start a new character. Then, if you want, you can travel to your old character’s hide out and kill the zombie-old-you if someone hasn’t done it already. When you die, you are undead. Your body will rise as an NPC, and if there are people unfortunate enough to be living with you, if they aren’t careful, they may be undone from within.
Not mine… I have no woes. My 6 Tuner Medusa PVR using Snapstream’s BeyondTV works wonderfully. But a guy I know has issues.
Its a problem I see many people with DVRs complain about, that oddly scheduled programs or late changes often get missed because the show listings on the DVR don’t get updated. That’s one thing I love about my Medusa. BeyondTV, however they manage to do it, is always up to date (as long as my internet access hasn’t failed). I’ve never missed a show because it ran a few minutes long, or even when the President decides he wants to assure the nation that he is not an idiot (or confirm to the nation that he is an idiot, you can never be sure which he is going to do).
The only time I’ve ever missed a recording was when the power went out while I was on vacation. Usually, power outages come in twos or threes. Power off, power on for a few seconds, power off… then it either comes back on again or stays out for a while, but its that little flicker that causes the problems. Sometimes its just the once like I describe here, sometimes its two or three flickers before its out for real. I set up my Medusa, all my PCs in fact, not to reboot on power failure because I don’t want them powering on and off repeatedly during the flickers.
Oh, and I missed a show once when a channel broke in with breaking news. Of course, I didn’t see the breaking news until three days after it had happened, so all it did was annoy me.
But back to the DVRs… I don’t think I would put up with that, it being wrong all the time, as it kind of defeats the purpose of it. Is it a failing of the software? of the service provided? Is it the DVR or the cable company? I’m going to have to look into it, because unless they roll out the CableCARD 2.0 standard and start supporting it, I’ll have to get an in-box DVR to be able to record digital cable channels. But there’s no rush, not until they decide to stop providing the analog cable feed.
Rapid Application Development is not a horrible idea. Of course, much like Communism, it is not a problem with the idea it is the implementation. When most companies get into a RAD style of work, the result more often than not is just flying by the seat of their pants. No project plans, minimal design documents… usually it is just a list of features and a deadline, or a dozen lists and a dozen deadlines, and the lists change daily.
Having worked for two years on one RAD project, and then two and half on another, I really would like to work on something with more structure, or at least be part of team that is doing RAD instead of people one guy trying to work on multiple phases on the same RAD project by myself. I go into one meeting about phase one in the morning, then in the afternoon I go to a meeting on phase two when I have to pretend that I am not aware that phase one is behind schedule… it really is quite maddening.
This is going to be a stretch, but maybe I won’t seem too off the mark by the end.
Monday, a man took a couple of guns to the Virginia Tech campus and killed thirty-one people. He wounded another twenty-nine. At least, those were the totals I remember from the stories I read. Immediately, before the bodies were even counted, the airwaves were full of people talking about why someone would do such a thing. Most notably, to me anyway, was Jack Thompson. I’m not going to provide a link, if you want to know exactly what he said you can find it. He certainly doesn’t need my help getting his message out there.
Jack, and he probably was not alone, came forward immediately to lay the blame heavy at the feet of video games, violence in the media and today’s popular culture. I’m sure if pressed he’d blame music and television and movies, but his favorite target is video games. He believes that violent video games are a training ground for violent action. He was blaming video games before the gunman’s body was cold, before we even knew the name of the shooter. Jack is a fool, but he’s a grandstanding fool who knows how to work his audience.
People… and I do mean to make a sweeping generalization here, because from time to time I’ve been known to do it too… seek out external sources for problems. They want to point a finger and say, “Ah ha!” They want to be able to identify a specific action or object that can be blamed for the problem so that it can be removed. But issues like these are usually more internal, more specific to the individual than can be dealt with by calling for blanket legislations and bannings.
People hate cancer. Cancer comes in three forms. The one cancer that everyone hopes they have if they get it is the kind that is someone else’s fault. Be it living next to power lines, or cell phones, or second hand smoke, or radiation they were exposed to at work, they want it to be not their own fault. That kind of cancer is, unfortunately, the rarest kind. The other two forms are the most prevalent. The second is self-inflicted cancer, the kind you get from smoking, the kind that comes from laying out in the sun too long too often, and people hate this cancer because they could have avoided it, probably knew the risk and ignored it. The third is the unknown cancer. You are in perfect health, don’t smoke, don’t lay out in the sun, don’t work with radioactive materials, live far away from power lines and cell phone towers, you’ve got no reason at all to have cancer, then one day you go to the doctor for an indeterminate pain in your gut only to find out you’ve got cancer. This is the one that scares the crap out of people.
It is scary because there is not anything you could have done to prevent it.
When there are shootings, like this one at Virginia Tech, or previous ones at other schools or other public areas, when one person just kinda flips their shit and kills a bunch of people, it is important to examine that person’s life and try to understand what the hell went wrong. But it is the kind of thing you cannot go into with an existing theory. If you approach it with the idea that video games did this to him or influenced him, then if you find video games you will assume that they had an effect. Jack Thompson would love nothing more than to find out this guy had a PC full of First Person Shooters or a couple of Grand Theft Auto titles for his PS2 because it would justify his theory. But the reality is that the games themselves are not justification, they are just evidence. The gunman is dead and can’t tell you if he even played those game. Now, of course, we know that he was an English major, and a playwrite, who wrote some very disturbing works and was even thought to be the school shooter type by his classmates. But at the time of the shootings, as all these talking heads took the airwaves, no one knew that. Now we know that he made videos and wrote things and had a sketchy medical history and previous encounters with faculty and staff, but even though from here it looks like a giant pile of “Hey! Look am me! I’m a nut job who is going to shoot people!!” you have to keep in mind that all this information, all this stuff, was in different people’s hands. No one saw a complete picture until it was too late.
There was a guy at my high school, he was a creepy kind of dude. Very tall, shaved head, ROTC gun nut kind of fellow… not that all ROTC guys are nutjobs, but I’m trying to paint a picture here… in addition, he was standoffish, not a whole lot of friends. I didn’t really know him that well. After graduation, during that first year when I was going to college and working full time, I woke up one morning to a horror story. This guy I didn’t know very well killed his parents and his sister. Sure, he was weird and a loner, but kill his family? His brother had escaped, jumping out of a second story window. This guy got caught, they piled up the evidence against him and his accomplice and threw him in jail. About a year later, I hired a new kid to work in my department down at the Kroger. It was the brother. After working with him a while, one night while closing up, I asked him about it. He paused, then after a couple minutes he finally spoke. Now this isn’t an exact quote, I mean, hell, it was nearly 15 years ago, but… “My brother killed my parents and my sister, and he tried to kill me. There is no question he did it. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. No one really expected it. He was weird and all, but the truth is all the stuff they found in the garage, the knives, the bows and arrows, the kerosene and stuff, it wasn’t his. He kept all his stuff in his room. The stuff in the garage was mine. Nobody ever asked me if it was though. Isn’t that funny?” And I clearly remember all the newspapers from back when it happened talking about all the things they found, the “indicators of violence.” But this kid, the brother who got away, he just liked target shooting with the bows, collecting knives and setting things on fire. Dangerous? Sure, but he was no killer.
I remember at the time thinking of a quote, that really doesn’t apply if you consider the context of the story that it comes from, but the words, the phrasing, fit. It comes from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles:
“And last—if it helps any, just think of me as a very crazy fellow who went berserk one summer day and never was right again. It’ll be a little easier on you that way.”
-Jeff Spender
And I thought of this again on Monday. Maybe this guy had his reasons. People will view his tapes and read his words and look at the pile of evidence and try to understand it. And maybe somewhere, somehow, it will make sense. But maybe it won’t. Perhaps it is impossible to know why he did it until you are afflicted like him, troubled like him, and if you are that troubled, that afflicted, would you act the same? Even if it somehow made sense, would you really want it to? Would knowing all the hows and whys lead us to the magic moment where his life could have been fixed if just one action had been taken, and one person could be blamed for not seeing the problem? I’m not sure that’s a road I want to go down.
You really can’t prepare for the extreme. You can’t prevent it, you can’t legislate it. You can try to keep the middle ground large and even, but nothing we can do can stop the determinedly broken from doing what they do, not without compromising the rest of us.
I think perhaps I’m better off believing that he was just a crazy fellow who went berserk one day and never was right again. It’ll be a little easier on me that way.
Next week I’ll return you to our regularly scheduled game design and commentary; book, movie and TV reviews; and the rest of the usual random crap that comes from me emptying my brain onto the internet…
The canned meat food product substitute is okay, and should the world go zombie overnight, you can bet your ass that I will be down at the Safeway hoarding the precious little tins of yummy life sustaining goodness. But when it comes to the internet, I hate Spam.
My blog here isn’t awfully popular. Even so, I get on the order of a hundred spam comments a day. Thankfully, being the slightest of blips on the radar means that my spam filter catches 99.999% of them. Once a week or so, I’ll have a few make it through, and I delete them within a day. One day, if I ever get an audience, I may have to install more protection as Akismet may not be enough. Sadly, it probably won’t matter since there are people like this out there.
Of course, emails are another story. I get over five hundred a day. Again, my filter gets alot of it, but some makes it through every day.
Then there is the joy that is fake websites designed to get you to click ads. Jeff Freeman has a run down of a particular offender related to gaming news.
And finally, there are the people out there who click on this junk… if you need viagra, see a doctor, don’t click a link in an email or on a website. Same goes for all the other drugs… and for loans, go to a bank or other lender, not something from your inbox especially if it is not actually addressed to you! People… PEOPLE! Please… pay attention, be responsible.
Buckwheats for the lot of them.
Over at Broken Toys, Scott has brought up an issue that was the butt of one of Blizzard’s April Fool’s Day gags. How much of a game’s data is public fodder?
Personally, there are only two valid reasons I can see for having the Armory work as it currently does.
Honestly, I could do without the dick measuring. There already exists enough of it within the pre-Armory game, but localized to servers. Now you can pull up the inventory (including bags, bank and talent builds) of any character anywhere. Do we really need that?
As for the harassment, sure my story is anecdotal, but that doesn’t make it less true. And if its not being used for this widespread yet, it will.
There is really only one “good” use for this tool, and that is statistic gathering. No game has ever made available (that I know of) this level of character information to the public. But this one good function would not be hurt by allowing players to “opt-anonymous” of the Armory. Show my gear and talents and bank and everything, just keep my name and my guild out of it. That would solve both of the aforementioned problems and have no impact on statistics gathering.
I’d really like to see Blizzard offer this option.
Most of my life I have been a skeptic and a pessimist. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
This is why I dislike Oprah.
I’ve gotten into a bit of a tiff with a friend of mine because I mistakenly used the word “hate” while talking about Oprah, and I appearantly wasn’t clear that my dislike has nothing to do with Oprah Winfrey personally but only with the brand Oprah that she has created. Much the same way I have a dislike for Microsoft, or any large brand.
If you read up on Oprah, she has done some wonderful things with her life, her show, her magazines, her charities… she’s made a few mistakes along the way, most famously is James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces where she and her people didn’t bother to do the minimal background work that thesmokinggun.com did that proved his book was a pile of lies. But, overall, she does good, and that’s why when she suggests or recommends something I give it attention and look into it for myself.
Sounds like I don’t dislike her, right? Let me continue…
Where I start to get uncomfortable is the cult like following that she has engendered and nurtured. There are literally millions of people who will take her at her word and do what she says without thinking for themselves. She says a charity is worth giving to and suddenly that charity gets record donations. She’s probably not wrong, but I am worried by the blind faith that people have… almost the same problem I have with many organized religions. Follow, don’t question.
Is it really her fault? Can she stop people from just doing what she says? No, not really… people like knowing that other people know better, following a strong leader is easier than trying to lead themselves. But what I dislike is that Oprah, as a brand, seeks to gain by maintaining this blind following, and not once have I ever heard her openly state that people should do research on these ideas, books and charities themselves before acting. It would be bad for business to give people advice and in the same breath tell than that you could be wrong and they should really figure it out for themselves.
Most recently, Oprah has funded the building of a school. The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Building the school is clearly a good thing, but to prove a point, I discussed the school with some coworkers, and while all of them said it was good, not one of them could tell me why Oprah felt the school needed to be built beyond “because they needed a school for women.” No one could tell me why that school, why there, why now… all that was lost in the Oprah publicity of the school being built and how great it was.
Along with that, I find I am put off by the fact that she puts her name in the forefront of everything, on everything. I watched one of the TV specials about something she was doing, it may have even been the school, but I completely lost interest because in the ten minutes I watched, Oprah was always center frame, even when she was talking to someone who, in the context of the special, should have been more important than her. With Oprah, it seems that the subject is never “Here is something worth knowing about…” its always “I’m Oprah, and behind me is something worth knowing about…” There is a distinction there that I think is very important.
In this argument with my friend, she brought up other brands (Microsoft, Nike, etc) latching on to the idea that it must be brands that I “hated”, not Oprah. But the truth is, I bring the same skepticism to those brands. I never buy software because its Microsoft, I buy it because I need the functions that it does and from my research it fills my needs. Microsoft Office is a great example, I love the product, but only because I’ve gone down the road of using other software. I’ve installed Star Office and used other email readers, and in the end, after trying dozens of other products, it turns out that Microsoft Office is the one that does everything I need in the best way possible for me. And Nike, well, I’m a skinflint when it comes to shoes and refuse to spend more than $30 for any pair. I’m rough on shoes, and spending $100 for a pair is like throwing money out the window. Again, I’ve done the footwork, pardon the pun, and realized that buying Ocean Pacific sneakers for $19.99 was a much better fit for my lifestyle.
In a way however, these companies are more honest than Oprah, because they are trying to directly sell you on their products… Oprah, on the other hand, is often trying to sell you other people’s work, their books, their deeds, their charities. And while you can look into Oprah’s eyes and see if she is sincere, she has put a layer between you and the product, potentially hiding from you if the original purveyor was sincere, and you have to trust that she has done all the proper background work, which she has shown on occasion that she (or her staff) has not.
So what am I trying to get at with this blog? In the end I suppose the core of it is that I am adverse to any person or group that encourages, actively or passively, people to stop thinking for themselves.