Pulp Friction

Alien Analysis

Supergeek — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:36:25 +0000

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.”

Novel Journal: #1

Supergeek — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:06:26 +0000

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…

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Supergeek — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:12:08 +0000

It Is Pitch Dark

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If this predicament seems particularly cruel,
consider whose fault it could be:
not a torch or a match in your inventory.

It got narrated at you in the second person.
Every time you booted up, it seemed you got another version
of your life told to you by a status line blinking,
the impossible people you could be without thinking
yourself insane of personality problems,
with a mop on a drop ship or trying to stab a goblin.

That don’t play in public life. You get arrested,
psychoactive medication daily in your big intestine
and attesting that the voices in your head
said the dwarf shot first, embedded arrow then you bled.
But doctors with needles posit repeatedly
that you knocked down that midget in the park unneededly.
This has seeded the idea that you should
never venture from the house, never get misunderstood
by the non-player characters inhabiting Earth,
none of whom are too concerned about Nord & Bert,
not one of whom ever aimed a fish around the room,
trying to get it in the ear canal because doom
beset the last planet they were on, or near
the verge of a set of poetics they wouldn’t hear.
Never peered at the clues with invisible ink.
No SM goddesses ever gave them pause to think.
Never piloted six robots, each distinct.
Don’t matter how many 2-liters they drink,
they’re not gonna follow what you’re saying at all.
They impugn and appall in the scope of their gall,
as you hide in your room in disgust with the lights turned out.
Turn ‘em on in a turn. Leave ‘em off for now.

You read a pamphlet from a mailbox that urges low cunning,
offers cursor and prompt: type >run and you’re running,
and parses what you tell it, pronouns intact,
abbreviations if you need ‘em (better keep it gramat.)
Better punctuate your sentences and never redact
the name of anything ambiguous. You’re about to get asked,
do you mean the red one, the round one, the crooked, or the blue?
Better keep that in your pocket, don’t know yet what it could do.
Could be the spray for the grue; you’re gonna need it if it is -
a situation that reloads, restarts, or quits.
Wonder how many points out of how many points
you’ve got to get before you’re done. Endeavor then to rejoice,
when you wish more ardently, identities shed,
for continuance, the rhyme forever voyaging. Fled
from all lights and colors, from all smells and sound:
just the lyric on the monochrome display and you’re proud
to make another verse appear by solving riddles.
If you didn’t have to sleep, you know you’d never seek acquittal.
You’d be ever in the middle and the midst of quest.
If it weren’t for >don the gown. you’d never get dressed.
In your underwear typing, just like Front,
keyboard attached up to my fingers – wrists bear the brunt -
as I seek to do stunts simply through their descriptions.
I think I went once to some sands that were Egyptian.
And I retain plane tickets, snapshots, receipts,
yet I stand unconvinced that this has happened to me.
I wouldn’t want to misremember or get confused.
Recall of crawling towards a pyramid appearing over dunes.
Recall of entering the thing and descending stairs.
Does it descend from there, adventure to nightmare?
Did I battle a snake? Was the treasure intact?
Or did the TRS-80 in my brain get hacked?
Thanks, Grampa, for buying it. Now my life’s ruined.
Twenty-two years later, head’s infested: got the grue in.
PLUGHing, XYZZYfying, trying to escape,
but I can’t ‘cause I’m up and around and awake.

Class Balance in MMORPGs

Supergeek — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:16:38 +0000

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.

In EverQuest, there are 16 character classes. Bard, Beastlord, Berserker, Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Magician, Monk, Necromancer, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Shadowknight, Shaman, Warrior, and Wizard. Each one has a unique combination of abilities, although many of these abilities overlap.

Some examples of classes…

The Cleric excels at healing and curing deleterious effects in battle, as well as providing beneficial enchantments (“buffs”) that supplement a character’s natural attributes. Although there are some additional things a cleric can do, this is what he excels at.

The Wizard excels at casting spells to do direct damage in combat. The wizard has some additional tools in his toolbelt, but they are secondary to his role of “nuking” the snot out of monsters.

The warrior is the archetypical strong man, attacking monsters with his sword or other melee weapon and keeping the monsters focused on him so the other players who are not as strong can dish out damage in safety.

The rogue is a sneaky character who likes to stay out of the limelight and stab the bad guys in the kidneys when their backs are turned. The rogue can’t stand up to a lot of punishment, so he’s wily and quick to stay out of their reach.

The enchanter is a caster with control over the minds and bodies of enemies and allies alike. He can bedazzle an enemy and keep it frozen, and he can also speed up the actions of friends and slow down enemies so they hit faster and slower respectively.

Each of these classes plays differently. You can stand back and cast spells, or you can get up close and personal with monsters. You can be beefy and take a lot of punishment for your group like the warrior, or you can roguishly launch a sneak attack when their defenses are down. You can soothe wounds like a cleric or sear the flesh of your enemies with a cascade of burning elements.

With 6 or 8 classes, balancing is fairly easy to accomplish. You need people with a few different abilities to fill the different combat roles required by the game. A beefy defender and a healer are essential for traditional combat models, with other classes adding damage to make your enemies die faster before you run out of endurance or casting juice (“mana”).

The designers of EverQuest had 14 starting classes when the game was released, and added two more classes through expansions later. Paladins and Shadowknights are beefy defenders like the warrior, but they have some unique abilities that assist them in battle and make their play style different but similar to the warrior. Rangers and monks dish out fast melee damage in their own way and with unique tricks to differentiate them.

Some of these classes have overlapping qualities, but they in most cases that is not a problem. You only need one defender (“tank”) and one healer in most group encounters. Because monsters can often bring friends to the party, “crowd control” is another popular role that can be filled a few different ways. Enchanters can mesmerize these “adds”, or monks and a few other classes can use their abilities to leave the friends behind and bring the monsters (“mobs”) by themselves. Beyond tanking, healing, and crowd control, the rest of the slots in your group can be filled with whatever is available. Duplicating classes in the three primary roles is usually seen as inefficient, so a group with two clerics is virtually unheard of, while a group with two wizards will probably kill many monsters quickly.

Here comes the problem; some classes only provide mediocre functionality in all areas, while offering no unique or necessary additional functionality. That may sound vague, but let me explain with an example. Would you rather have a surgeon and two nurses removing your appendix, or three general practitioners?

In the cases of classes with too many abilities such as the druid and bard, they may have a Swiss army knife with lots of neat gadgets, but none of the gadgets is enough of a replacement for the real thing. Other players perceive this as a weakness and decline to invite these characters to groups because they are taking up the space of a potentially more efficient class. Time is valuable, so players usually want to maximize the efficiency of their play time.

Reducing the number of classes would help solve this issue, but in the case of existing games like EverQuest with balance issues, the horse is already through the gate and into the next county by now.

Online Writing Jobs: Due Diligence

Supergeek — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:17:50 +0000

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.

I have reconsidered my willingness to participate in what I have discovered to be the defrauding of the educational system, and I will not be submitting an essay on William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.”

I have done some research on exactly what your company does, and I am disappointed. As the recipient of a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature, I find it despicable that you enable students to cheat on their assignments by providing them with cheap essays with which to dupe their instructors. I earned my degree honestly, writing all of my own papers. Anyone who utilizes your service to misrepresent their writing and analytical skills is a cheat and a fraud.

I have also learned that writers for your company are commonly told that their essays were plagiarised, or do not fit the requirements you gave them — claims with no basis in truth. The assumption is that your company usually passes the essays along to its customers regardless and pockets all of the money for the assignment instead of paying the writer their deserved portion.

I understand my response will not change your company’s activities one whit, but writing an essay for you on the morality of fighting against an authority that practices thievery and vandalism (reference the short story you assigned me, “Barn Burning”) would have been the ultimate in irony and hypocrisy.

Regards.

Beware of any online job offers; the easier it sounds, the more shady they are likely to be.

PHP OOP for the Procedural PHP Programmer

Supergeek — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:04:58 +0000

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.

Games: Player vs. Player is the key to MMO longevity

Supergeek — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:48:27 +0000

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.

AI Sucks

Without really sophisticated (and very CPU-expensive) AI, the best opponent you can ever face is another human being. NPC’s will always (well, until the singularity) be boring, repetitive obstacles instead of fun opponents. The proof is out there. Even the best single-player games have sucky AI, and they have CPU to burn that MMO’s do not. You can’t rely on your NPCs to keep players interested.

Raiding Sucks

This is a valid strategy for a specific type of player. Figuring out a strategy for an encounter and synchronizing the activities of dozens of players (“raiding”) is what keeps many MMO’s alive for years after their groupable content becomes played out, but many, many people don’t want to raid because that playstyle saddles the player with a lot of responsibility and stress that doesn’t cohabitate well with a “game.” Ok, so ignoring raiding, what other ways are there to produce content for your player to consume?

Quests and Skill Development

Yes, this is a valid strategy for extending player interest. MMO’s that want to survive long-term have traditionally had to have a LOT of content. Content that takes years to produce and requires 6, 7, and 8-digit development costs. How many thousands of quests are there in WoW? EQ1? SWG? MMO companies have development teams working year-round to develop new content (expansions) to keep people interested in their game. This is very expensive.

Player vs Player

Look at games like Starcraft, Warcraft (the non-MMO’s), Counter Strike, Team Fortress. These games have fans that play them for years because when you’re playing against someone else, the potential for unique gameplay (aka content) rises to near infinity. Add the ability to make new maps and mods to the game (graphics, weapons, new features, variations on gameplay rules) and the potential for variation and retaining player interest is enormous.

DAOC’s Realm vs. Realm and WoW’s Battlegrounds are two great examples of PvP that are limited in scope (on blue servers). We need more ways to compete with other people, without requiring the baggage that goes along with direct PvP (griefing, ganking, etc.)

I love the idea of competing with other people, but I don’t have the reflexes to participate in twitch gaming. I have the brains, but I don’t have the desire to micro manage my stats and memorize skill combinations. If you can come up with interesting ways to pit people against other people online, you are a goldmine. Most of the stuff in this diplomacy thread makes my eyes glaze over, but it’s an option that a lot of people might like, so go for it.

Ways to compete with other people that isn’t direct combat:

- Resource gathering. WoW has this, and actually required it for the quest to open up their first expansion.
- Diplomacy. I believe Vanguard does this? And there’s a big thread in this forum about it.

Well, that’s all I can think of for indirect (non-combat) competition. Direct combat competition:

- WoW battlegrounds
- DAOC RvR
- Typical free for all PvP
- Team PvP

Pirates of the Burning Sea has an interesting team-based pvp that I’m interested in seeing the outcome of 6 months after release.

We need more ideas for TvT (Team vs. Team). Rankings should play an active part in this, as community recognition can be an amazing motivator. Right now, very little is being done in this area, and I have a lot of great ideas.

- Periodic recognition: give short-term, near term, and long term updates on point accumulation (or whatever) on websites, and in-game

- In-game recognition for achievements. Town criers spread the news about your impressive activities and NPC’s greet you with words specific to your encounters. “Great job on killing the cyclops, Odysseus_05.” Some games list achievements on player web pages (Vanguard, EQplayers). That’s great, but most people don’t give a darn outside of the game.

- In-game job opportunities. No, I don’t mean becoming a wiz and being able to FOD people. I mean becoming a local sheriff, a mayor, a senator, a firefighter, an inspector — someone who can affect NPCs and other people with their actions on an administrative level. Vote to raise taxes. Change guard postings around the newbie areas. Conduct NPC raids on enemies. Decide where to build new structures.

- Earned character customization. Pirates o.t.b.s. allows for custom flags and sails on boats. Guild hall decorations (outside, so other guilds can be envious), custom housing, adornments, pets, vehicles, the list goes on. People don’t do this for themselves — they want to show off their creativity and accomplishments to other people!

- Systems. Build systems (like economies) that can be affected by player interaction, but don’t rely on players to function in a simplistic manner. Army movements, construction paths, resource lines (like caravans, trading routes, community expansion, sewage systems) etc. Let the players try to game the system to help it or sabotage it.

For example, let’s say City A has a caravan of goods on its way from City B. A player in City C who wants to sell their goods to City A at a higher price can sabotage the caravan, decreasing available supply of those goods with all of the subsequent effects that has on the economy (they can make a short-term profit, and maybe affect City C or their personal medium and long term rankings because of it.)

Whew, ok I’ll stop here. Anyway, thoughts?

EZ Smiley

Supergeek — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:38:38 +0000

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!

Uh, I’m back! What have I been doing, you ask?

Supergeek — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:14:54 +0000

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.

Goodbye and hello again, as always.

Supergeek — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:51:29 +0000

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.