First a reminder. I liked Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass well enough, and really enjoyed the next book, The Subtle Knife. I was excited to see how Pullman would finish things up in The Amber Spyglass, and now I know.

And the answer is…he doesn’t. Not really. Imagine The Lord of the Rings being written such that when Sam and Frodo finally get into Mordor, they find a “Crack of Doom Disposal Service” and hand The Ring over to it, and the rest of the book is about their friendship and no further word is ever heard of Sauron. Our last view of Minis Tirith is of the two armies coming together for a final clash, and never again do we visit that scene.

That’s how The Amber Spyglass works. I’m going to include some spoilers in this review, which I don’t normally do, but I can only hope that no one makes the mistake of getting involved with this series anyway. You’ve been warned, and ultimately there is nothing to spoil because the series has no real ending.

As the book begins we have Lyra and Will still traveling together. Remember that Lyra has been tagged as the next Eve, and there’s some huge prophesy about her that she’ll influence the next age of life on the myriad worlds. The church is determined to kill her so that she can never make some grand decision that she must make. Mary, from Will’s world, has been set up as the Serpent who will tempt Lyra/Eve from some new paradise. And oh yes, Asriel is making war on god/The Authority and means to kill him/it.

The first half of the book slowly builds to a huge climax, as you’d expect it to. This part felt slow but that was ok since we’re working towards the big payoff. And then in the midst of a climactic battle god dies, his first Lt. (who has really been running the show) is cast down. And suddenly the focus shifts to Lyra and Will and their discovering their hormones as they suddenly fall in love.

And that’s the rest of the book. Lyra & Will in discovering first love in some strangely vapid Disney-esque way. The church’s assassin makes a brief appearance but is taken out via a deux ex machina re-appearance of the angel Balthamos (spelling?). Neither Lyra nor Will are ever aware of these events. The two of them are with Mary, but all she really does is give them some food. She certainly doesn’t tempt them into doing anything. And in the end, well, nothing. The book ends with the two children going home, and that’s about that. The prophesy? Who knows? False, I guess. Unless it alluded to letting the ghosts out of the land of the dead, but really Will did that. And in the end, the angels repair the universe after Will gives them a quick “How-To” on window closing.

It was the most amazing let-down that I can remember ever reading; so much so that I found myself actually angry with the author. I mean, how do you manage to turn the death of god into a non-event? Or maybe that was his point, as an atheist…his way of illustrating that god doesn’t matter?

Maybe he wanted it to be a four book series and in condensing it he cut out a lot of the other happenings? I just don’t know. What I do know is that it was a terrible “ending” and I can’t stress enough that it makes the trilogy not worth reading. Which is a shame, because I was pretty excited at the end of The Subtle Knife.

A huge let down. Give this trilogy a pass.

Suddenly this is a food & drink blog. Random.

But Wired has a “How-To” on making your own flavored vodka (starting with plain vodka…this isn’t a distilling operation). I’m not a huge vodka drinker but this sounds like fun.

Had a craving for some Honey Dew Donuts iced mocha today, but when I opened my wallet a few moths flew out and that was it. So I took a shot at making my own and it came out ok. Wanted to capture the “recipe” because I have a mind like a sieve and if I try to do this again I’ll forget.

1) Made coffee in the french press. 4 scoops of fairly generic Folgers ground coffee.
2) 2 packets of Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate hot cocoa mix
3) 4 tablespoons of sugar
4) 12 oz boiling water
5) ~10 ice cubes

Combined hot cocoa mix, sugar and hot water in a pitcher while the coffee brewed. Got that all dissolved, then added the coffee. Mixed it up and added the iced cubes (just to jumpstart the cooling process). The coffee was made strong so that the iced cubes wouldn’t weaken things too much.

After a couple hours in the fridge, serve it over ice and add a couple ounces of milk to each glass.

Results:
It’s decent, but I think the coffee could be stronger and/or more of it compared to the other ingredients.

Via Boing Boing…

I don’t often talk about gaming here, but I might start coming back to it since my other site (Jaded’s Pub) is awfully quiet these days.

Normally I’m an MMO junkie but every so often I burn out on the endlessness of those games and need to take up something more finite. Lately I’ve been doing just that with Jeanne d’Arc on the PSP.

Last fall I splurged and bought the PSP-2000 (or PSP Lite) and it’s made the PSP more enjoyable to use. First it’s lighter, for standard handheld gaming. But curiously enough, I really like the TV-out feature. I know the whole idea of TV-out on a handheld seems silly to a lot of people, but there are times when my eyes are just too strained to peer at the PSP screen, and blowing things up to TV-size means I can continue to play in comfort.

Anyway back to the game. The genre here is turn-based strategy-rpg, a la Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s a genre I’ve always loved and as I get older I find I enjoy turn-based gaming more and more and action gaming less and less. The game follows, very loosely, the story of Joan of Arc…if France had been over-run by beastmen and wizards at the time.

There’s nothing really revolutionary here. Jeanne has a band of companions that keeps growing and growing, although battles are generally limited to 6 individuals at the max. You earn gold and skills during fights, and can spend the gold at shops to buy better arms and armor. Skills get equipped on your characters and offer either passive buffs or spells/actions that require Magic Points. After each battle, non-combatants get some exp too, so they don’t fall too far behind in levels.

I’m taking my time, trying to keep everyone leveled up. I don’t think this is really necessary, but the game is fun and relaxing and I’m in no hurry for it to be over. At any point you can backtrack and enter a “Free Combat” zone to get more experience, gold and skills, so I don’t have to worry about ending up gimped at the end of the game.

I can’t say the challenge level is very high, but my play-style has some impact on that, too. If I were pushing always-onward and never doing the Free Combats, I’m sure things would be more difficult. I have had a few tense battles and certain game mechanics (several of the characters can transform into uber-soldiers for a few turns) can really change the tide of battle drastically if used correctly, adding more fun to the game.

Granted I haven’t finished it, but I’m pretty confident giving Jeanne d’Arc a thumbs up. It’s been out for quite a while and has a metacritic rating of 87, so I’m not sticking my next out by saying its a decent game.

Here’s a neat tool I just read about: Instapaper.

The idea is actually pretty simple. You drag a bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. Then when you hit something you want to read but don’t have time for right now, you click this bookmarklet and the url and title to that webpage gets jammed onto you Instapaper page.

Essentially it’s just a way of tracking short-term bookmarks, really. But for some reason I find the idea compelling…

Anyone remember Jessica Alba in Dark Angel? It was a near-future sci-fi show where she played a genetically enhanced Robin Hood-ish character.

Anyway in the show the “Sector Police” used these hovering drones to keep tabs on the populace (and sure, the idea has been used elsewhere). It gave the show a good ‘future vibe’ so to speak.

Anyway, getting to the point… be very afraid because we have another sci-fi to sci-fact story here: Hovering drone could report for work at Miami police station - Engadget

Just had to share this video. I wonder if the plans for this contraption are online anywhere?

(Sorry for the [sometimes] gray teaser frame, but the video does play, and it is safe for anywhere.)

LifeHacker had a post about a new service called BookLamp. The 2 second pitch is that its Pandora for Books. The idea is they scan in books and parse them for various stylistic attributes. Then you tell them a book that you like, and they offer a list of books that are stylistically similar. I’m *fascinated* by this idea!

But rather than me drone on about it, why not watch this presentation by one of the guys behind the project. Get comfortable because its close to 15 minutes long, but quite interesting for book geeks.

I’m really hoping that this service becomes a reality!

Another video that has come to my attention via Boing Boing:

I’m amazed by this video in two ways. First, the technology. I mean, if you saw a movie with a mechanical pack mule like this, you’d assume it was a special effect. Or at least you would have a few short years ago. Sci-fi to sci-fact, indeed.

But second, it freaks me out how quickly I can start feeling empathy for a machine. When the guy pushes Big Dog to try to tip it over, my immediate reaction was along the lines of “That was mean!”. And when the robot stumbles and almost loses its footing and scrabbles for purchase, I find myself feeling sorry for it.

So am I a freak? Did anyone else have that kind of reaction?

When I wrote my review of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass I admitted being puzzled at all the fuss being made about its “anti-Christianity” message. Well now that I’ve finished The Subtle Knife it all makes a lot of sense. In this, the second book of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Pullman’s atheistic leanings become much more pronounced.

This didn’t bother me personally, but I can understand how it could be offensive to some. And frankly, without going on a huge tangent, its easy to point to all the quantifiable evil that has been done in the name of the church (the Spanish Inquisition springs immediately to mind), but its much harder to measure the good that comes out of peoples’ religion. How much evil has been averted due to a moral compass guided by faith? Well anyway, I’m about the last person in the world who should be taking on these questions, so let’s get back to the book.

Lyra Silvertongue is back in this volume, but she ‘co-stars’ with a boy name Will who is from our world, or at least a world that seems identical to ours. He is on a quest to find his missing father, and in the course of events he finds a window into another world. Not Lyra’s world, but a third world that felt like something out of a Star Trek episode mixed with a bit of Lord of the Flies. No adults, children bordering on going feral, and an unseen evil.

In fact there is some fairly intense violence in this book, and in general once again the concepts being discussed (elementary particles, dark matter) are going to go over the heads of most younger kids, so this is definitely for teenagers and older. Also once again, there’s nothing here to make it less interesting to adults; don’t let the YA tag make you think it’s just for kids.

No talking polar bears in this one, and in general things seem a lot less fantasy-ish. Will is a fairly normal kid, and the creepy kids-only world seems fairly ‘ordinary’ too, aside from those facets I already mentioned. Plus we transition back to “our” world a few times.

But I found this volume more compelling. Perhaps because I could relate to Will more, or perhaps because the “Big Picture” of what the trilogy is building towards became much more clear. And we do get a few more of my favorite Book 1 characters popping in.

The ending is, if anything, even more of a cliff-hanger than the ending to The Golden Compass. Make sure you have book 3 at hand as you wind down to the end of this one!

Boing Boing directed me to this:

In response yesterday’s post about game development for new/young programmers, Dave Briccetti suggested checking out Scratch and Etoys. So today during my lunch break I did.

I think I like these, and particularly Etoys, even more than Alice. With Alice, you need to use a model that someone else provides (unless you happen to have a 3D rendering program that’ll import into the system, which is unlikely given our target audience of young people). But with Etoys at least, you can draw your own sprites. Essentially you start with a blank canvas. You use a fairly typical ‘paint’ program to draw something and Etoys turns that into a sprite with a bunch of event handles.

What’s even cooler (albeit a bit scarier — adults will want to supervise this of course) is that you can share your workspace with other users and type or chat with them. Collaborative visual programming. I like it!

Scratch is neat because of its YouTube-like front end for sharing things you make. I haven’t dug into the building process for it yet.

Interestingly, both of these projects are built on Squeak, which is an implementation of Smalltalk. Squeak is being used to build everything from these game-building projects to web development.

This is what I love about the web. Someone leaves a comment with a couple of links and suddenly you’re in the midst of a whole new world to explore. Thanks Dave!

[EDIT] Actually I just visited Dave’s blog and he has covered this terrain well before I did (he is a part-time teacher). Check out his post on Teaching Scratch and Alice, and his blog in general, for more on this topic.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Normally, my relaxation time is spent playing games or reading. Mostly playing games, and even more specifically, playing MMOs. But lately nothing is scratching the itch for me. I spend all day at work bored and wanting to go home. Then I get home and I’m bored and trying to find something to do that interests me.

I finally took the time to sit down and navel-gaze about this. First of all, why am I bored at work? Well that’s pretty clear: I have no challenges. I was hired for a position I’m quite over-qualified for, and rather than use my skills, my manager (who really has no technical savvy) has me doing busy-work. On the bright side, the pay is rotten.

And I think this revelation leads me to why I’m bored at home, too. My brain is starving and playing games, which used to be my recharge activity, is just starving it more.

So I’ve decided its time to let my geek flag fly again. I was thinking maybe instead of playing a game, I’d take a shot at creating a game. But what language to use? I write PHP at work these days, and I’m tempted to build some kind of web game, but maybe I need a change.

And then I happened upon this post at Raph Koster’s site: Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old It’s a fun read, but as kind of an offhand part of the post, Raph asks his audience: BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?

Now I’m a good deal older than that, but often enough I can act like a 12-year old, so I was interested to see what people suggested. One of the things suggested was Alice, developed as a system to visually teach programming to kids. It’s pretty neat! Basically it uses methods that are tokenized into draggable widgets, and you ’stack’ these up to give orders to a 3D avatar. From some of the examples it looks like you can do a lot more, with collision detection for gaming and so forth. I haven’t dug that far into it. To me it was more a curiosity than a tool I’d use (I think!) but it was well worth a look to anyone with a taste for geeky stuff.

Another option mentioned was PyGame which is some kind of game development toolkit based on Python. I’ve never taken the time to learn Python and have always been interested, so I might give that a look. Some kind of open source UO emulator called RunUO was mentioned as well, but I’m not sure if that requires a UO client or what. Another item to dig into I guess.

Lots to dig into, and I’m still not sure that a web-based PHP game isn’t what I want to do. I have a rough idea of the kind of game I want to make: a turn-based dungeon crawler of some kind.

Anyone have suggestions as to other ‘get up and running quickly’ game creation tools out there?

Donald A Petrie’s The Prize Game turned out to be a very interesting little book. I’m not linking it here because its out-of-print and I imagine it’d be awfully hard to find, but the ISBN is 1557506698 and it was published by US Naval Institute Press in 1999. Petrie, at least at the time of writing, lived in Wainscott, NY and that’s probably why I was able to find it at Bookhampton in East Hampton some number of years ago. Local author and all that.

Turns out the whole concept of taking prizes in the Age of Sail was a way of warfare that had rules that were followed among many different countries. How different from today’s world, eh? The book talks about these rules and illustrates them by following the adventures of a few successful privateers. The book is heavily footnoted and if you flip to the back and read you’ll find Petrie got a lot of his information from actual ship’s logs from times, as well as from court documents and newspapers. Turns out that prize-taking was followed by the papers almost like a sport would be today.

If you can find it, well worth a read. I’ll be taking good care of my copy for future reference.

On a personal note, it felt good to read some non-technical non-fiction for a change of pace. I’ll have to make a point of doing more of that.