Pulp Friction

I watched Alien last night and didn’t finish up until after 11pm. My wife is out of town so I have the whole house to myself. Besides being freaked out by the little noises of the house, I spent some time thinking about the movie and something that was a little strange.

When Ripley discovers that the crew is expendable and returning the xenomorph is the only priority on the mission, she throws Ash up against the wall, injuring him slightly. He starts acting strangely, and we see for the first time that something is physically different about him; he’s leaking white fluid instead of blood, and Ripley notices. Ash begins behaving erraticly and starts beating the stuffing out of Ripley. Ash isn’t just trying to kill her; he’s throwing her around like a rag doll. Ash has tremendous, inhuman strength, and Ripley is completely outmatched.

Ash could have killed her easily by simply crushing her trachea or breaking her neck. Instead, he tosses her around like he’s a Globetrotter in front of an audience and Ripley is the ball. Then, he switches gears; he grabs a magazine, rolls it up, and attempts to stuff it in her mouth.

I guess I glossed over this scene before when I watched the film (it’s been a long time; forgive the young their shallowness) because I never questioned it before. But now, at the ripe age of Picking Up Speed, I look at this scene and wonder what the writers were thinking.

My only hypothesis is that Ash admires the creature (as Lambert says later after Ash is beheaded and being interrogated) so much that he is aping its initial attack on Kane with a symbolic and inevitably fruitless oral rape on Ripley.

Ash: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor … unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

I believe Ash wishes he could be the alien. He has been restricted by his programming for the entire trip; at first he is meek and submissive as evidenced by giving up his seat when Parker complains, but grows bolder as the movie progresses. Once Special Order 937 allows him to transcend his human disguise, he immediately thrashes Ripley in an unhurried fashion and follows up with the magazine. He is acting out the hostility and resentment of being a slave for the pathetic humans that created him, and imitating the creature he wishes he was. “Perfect.”

I’ve started writing my novel again.

Or, rather, I should say that I’ve started to plan my novel again. I’m rethinking it from the ground up, reconsidering all my assumptions, destroying all the ground rules that I had drafted without much consideration before.

In my first draft, I had an amazing opening scene that was so creative, so action-packed, so bizarre, that it couldn’t help but grab the reader’s attention and not let go. After I’d worked on that scene for a while and moved on, I realized there is just way too much stuff happening in that opening scene. The protagonist, Eric, has a piece of futuristic hardware with no explanation, and I’m throwing the reader in to sink or swim in understanding what’s going on. Understanding would be almost impossible without some kind of exposition, and exposition in the beginning of the story is a mood killer. So I decided to change gears, and unveil the hardware later on in the novel after introducing the characters.

Right now, I’m trying to decide if Eric is going to suffer a major setback near the end of the story or not. If I do, it will definitely heighten tension and set up for a big payoff later, but the segue seems weak. I’m also not sure how to make sure it all hangs together logically. There’s a way to do it, but it involves another character doing something completely against his nature.

And now I’m not sure if I should change the beginning back to the way it was, or at least, put Eric in a situation where he can obtain the hardware and introduce it to the reader that way. But no; I think it would actually fit better to do something with it later in the novel, after Eric knows more about a character named Glass…

When you talk about balance in a multiplayer game, what you’re talking about is ensuring that no entity or grouping has an inherent advantage over the other. In an unbalanced game, players will flock to the side with the advantage, making that advantage even worse in cases of team-based play, or just refuse to play the game at all.

In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, players begin the game by choosing a class and other attributes for their character: their avatar. In most MMORPGs, your class is the most defining attribute of your avatar. Your class determines what your function will be in the game. If you choose a priest archetype class for example, you know you will be supporting other players by providing enhancements and healing damage. Defining these classes and balancing them so they are all fun and interesting to play is one of the hardest parts for the game designers when developing the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had applied to be a writer for an online company that provided writing services. After some research, I discovered that there was no legitimiate business beyond providing essays to college students, which I think is a deplorable practice.

Because of how easy it is for an online publisher (blogger) like myself to have their online resources taken offline without due legal process, I’ll refrain from publishing the name of the company. Please contact me via e-mail if you are curious.

The following is my letter to them.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been doing more and more PHP development lately. Along with other projects, I’ve been doing some ongoing development for one client and I’ve been having a lot of fun nailing down my personal style, figuring out my personal best practices.

I realized recently that I should be looking into object oriented programming, and deciding whether or not I should be integrating it into my programming practices. I cut my teeth on C programming back in the 80′s and my programming has always been procedural.

Fast forward 20 years and now OOP is the rage. If you don’t know how to do it, you’re not a real programmer. (Of course, most “real programmers” wouldn’t consider PHP development “real programming” anyway. There’s a definite hierarchy amongst programmers with regards to language and style.)

I did a lot of browsing and sampling different OOP books and online resources, and I have to say I was struck by how vague and haphazard were the terms and definitions most writers gave when attempting to explain OOP. I was unable to really understand OOP because the authors were as clear as mud. I kept looking.

I’m currently about a third of the way through “Object Oriented PHP Concepts, Techniques, and Code” by Peter Lavin, published by No Starch Press. It’s from 2006, so it might be a little dated as far as some of the technical specs of the latest version of PHP 5, but it explains terms like method and interface in clear language instead of vague, empty jargon. The author uses simple, practical, real-world examples to demonstrate the concepts.

I originally wrote this in the Metaplace forums, but it was long-winded and rambling enough that I figured I could just copy and paste it here and make it look like I’m active. A lot of this post assumes you’re familiar with Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO’s) and other games.

So anyway, this is my argument as to why PvP is where you should look to give your game longevity, with specific reference to MMO’s like World of Warcraft and EverQuest.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a lot of fun building a small website, which I’m calling “EZ Smiley”. You can see it here.

Basically, you can just click to build a Smiley, and it will build it immediately. No more hitting submit like on those other smiley generators. They suck compared to this. You click on a body, and shazam, your body shows up in the view window. You click on a pair of eyes, and bam! You’ve got eyes on your smiley!

It’s not rocket science, but it is something that nobody else has done in relation to smileys, and I’m proud of it.

I’m going to be adding a lot more smiley “parts” as I go; so far you can make over five million unique smilies technically, but some of those are going to be pretty lame. But there’s probably at least a million decent smilies possible in there.

Anyway, have fun!

Well, I’ve been doing a lot of web-related projects lately, including registering my own sites and building them from the ground up. Yeah, the big dot com boom came and went years ago, but the internet isn’t going away anytime soon.

Have you ever heard of Guitar Hero (and the sequels, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80′s, and the upcoming Guitar Hero III)? If you say you haven’t, well, let’s just say that’s unlikely.

Anyway, Harmonix is developing a new game called Rock Band where instead of just one or two players with guitars, there’s an entire band, including (of course) guitar and bass guitar, microphone, and drums. The microphone as a console peripheral has been around a while, what with Singstar and the Karaoke Revolution games. However, the drums are an entirely new beast, created just for Rock Band.

I anticipate Rock Band becoming huge. Unlike the Guitar Hero games, the majority of Rock Band tracks are going to be originals instead of covers. Whole albums are going to be released for Rock Band, including The Who’s Who’s Next? and Nirvana’s Nevermind. Harmonix anticipates dozens of downloadable tracks by year’s end, and hundreds more in the future, including more whole albums.

So, I created a fan site based on Rock Band, and I’m trying to grow it, but it’s really difficult to drive traffic to a site and get people to register yet another forum account. So, it’s a work in progress.

Anyway, that site and a half dozen others are in various stages of completion. When I make the post that says I’m moving into a house with an ocean view and I can’t decide what color Ferrari to get, you’ll know I’ve succeeded.

We finally moved out of our cramped 1-bedroom Parker apartment with the noisy neighbors. I haven’t mentioned them before? Well, regardless, we had neighbors who played loud music at all hours of the night, any night, and we had other neighbors who complained when we had our TV volume up too high at 10:30pm.

So now we’re in a very nice 1850 sqft home in Denver proper. We have a 17′x12′ loft with plenty of room for our desks and computers and bookcases and even a futon. We have a spare bedroom for guests, and even a room just for our exercise stuff. The living room is enormous, and we plan to have a 65″ widescreen HDTV in it, along with two couches and a love seat. Plenty of room for guests.

A friend of mine would call it a McMansion; I would call it our home. It’s large, roomy, and (particularly evil in his eyes) too similar to other homes in the area. Unfortunately, that’s the price you pay for capitalism. Larger vendors inevitably hold greater purchasing power and can provide a product cheaper than the smaller home builders who may have more creative floor plans. Another unfortunate fact is that in most cases you cannot build your own home cheaper, unless you can build it yourself. Unlike some people, I cannot square a wall and put up sheetrock. I cannot plumb, and I do not grout. So, we’re stuck with a McMansion.

I’m not complaining too much.

Anyway, I have a lot of projects in motion, so look forward to new things here.