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!
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.
Last night I finished The Golden Compass, Book 1 of Philip Pullman’s YA fantasy trilogy, “His Dark Materials.” I have to admit this one never would’ve made it onto my radar if not for the movie version (which I have not seen) getting promoted all over the TV.
There was much to-do made about the book’s anti-Christianity message, and Pullman, as I understand it, is an atheist and did indeed set out to write a “children’s book” that set itself directly opposite the pro-Christian symbolism in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books. As someone not very much concerned with organized religion, I wouldn’t have given this aspect of the book a second thought had I not heard all the fuss about it. At the same time, I can’t in good faith (pun not intended) address the possibility of the book being offensive or troubling to someone with strong Christian beliefs.
I can describe the setting though. The Golden Compass takes place in a world parallel to ours. Land masses are the same, and many countries are familiar. Technology has advanced in a more steampunk sort of way, though scientists understand (mostly) the same elementary particles that scientists in our world do. At the same time it seems airplanes were never invented, and zeppelins still rule the skies. They don’t have electricity but they have “anbaric” energy (which seems to be electricity) and “naptha” (gas?) lamps.
The big difference is that every person has a “daemon” that takes the form of an animal and is intimately connected to the person. Essentially, these daemons are the souls of the humans in this other-world. These daemons remain in close proximity to their humans, and it is a huge taboo to touch another person’s daemon. It is unclear to me if this is what people of strongly Christian faith are bothered by — the idea of a soul external to the body — or if it was the fact that Pullman re-wrote brief passages from the Book of Genesis (adding daemons to the mix).
In any case, let’s talk about the story. Our protagonist is Lyra, a 12 year old girl who has been “adopted” by Jordan College at Oxford. Although she is of noble birth, she spends most of her time playing with the children of the servants of Jordan College, so when ‘commoner’ children start disappearing, including one of her friends, Lyra decides that she must do something to rescue them. Thus starts a whirlwind adventure taking her to “The North” where talking, armored polar bears rule (as far as we see, these polar bears are the only sentient animals in this world). Along the way Lyra starts to show certain abilities that may or may not be ‘magic’. She also learns much about the parents that she never knew.
It was an entertaining tale. As a YA book, I have to think it skews old. There are some fairly advanced concepts thrown around and the vocabulary is an adult one. For the most part it is “YA” only in the fact that the protagonist is a child, and that there is really just the one plot and one set of characters to worry about. There is violence, but no sex aside from one scene where we get a short voyeuristic glimpse at what happens between daemons when people become passionate.
Lyra is well portrayed; her ‘accent’ went a long way towards making her real in my imagination. The other characters don’t ‘pop’ so much, with the exception of her polar bear companion later in the book. Also about two-thirds of the way through, Lyra changed in a way that I found it hard to put my finger on. She started using “dear” a lot as a term of endearment, which felt odd. I suspect Pullman had put the novel aside for some length of time when he was writing it, and Lyra changed while he was gone. It’s a nit, but it has stayed with me and bothered me since I came to that change.
Take to heart that this is Book I in the trilogy, because it really doesn’t wrap up very well. It just kind of ends at a logical breaking point, but with many, many questions unanswered. At this point I’m not sure if I’d give the trilogy a thumbs up or not. If I had to rate The Golden Compass, I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 5. Good, not great.
Because I’m just not sure what to say about them. Do I like them? Oh yes, very much indeed. Can I describe them succinctly? Not a prayer of that. Erikson has built an incredibly rich fantasy world, gritty and often dark. And at the start of the first book he drops us in it and we must learn to swim or drown in its complexity. I learned to swim, barely. Not nearly well enough to give you any tips.
Humans are the primary race of the world, but there are others, some incredibly ancient. It’s an old, old world. There is magic, based on “warrens” which each have a name and, one presumes, particular characteristics. There are old gods, and “ascendent” godlings: mortals that somehow shrug off their corporeal bodies and enter the heavens (or the hells). You start reading these books and you’re immediately caught in a whirlwind.
While Deadhouse Gates takes place after Gardens of the Moon, either book stands alone (and I suspect this holds true with the rest of the series as well). Characters are sent ‘off stage’ in Book 1 to take care of a quest, and Book 2 is all about that quest. Characters cross-over mostly in the form of being referred to, reminding the reader that we’re peering at a tiny slice of this huge world.
I personally enjoyed Book 2 more than 1, but I think that might be because I’m slowly understanding the world better. I intend at some point to re-read Gardens
If you like big, meaty fantasy tomes where the good guys don’t always win and bad things sometimes happen to good people, and you don’t need to have everything spelled out for you, then I highly recommend checking out both Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates.
Well, I’ve gotten pretty far away from actually comparing the two games at this point, but that alone is indicative of my personal preference. Tonight right after dinner I fired up Rock Band and played until my hands started to ache. Yeah, just a tad addicted.
I finished out the Easy Mode career and unlocked all the bonus songs, then started on a Medium Mode career. When I made the jump from Easy to Medium in Guitar Hero 3, the difference was crushing…I just couldn’t manage to do Medium songs at all well. In Rock Band, I hit 4 & 5 stars on my first two Medium mode songs.
This felt pretty ‘right’ to me. Finishing up the hardest Easy songs and then the bonus songs on Easy, and then moving onto the easiest Medium songs…it should (I think) feel like a pretty seamless progression, and in Rock Band it does.
At this point it’s hard to imagine me going back to Guitar Hero 3 for anything. I’m just hoping for that patch that’ll let me use the GH3 guitar in Rock Band so I get some use out of the purchase.
Today was my day to test out the Rock Band drum kit. The biggest challenge for me here was setting it all up. Now everyone’s gaming space is different, but for me, I have a 52″ LCD TV, and directly in front of it, a couch and a coffee table. So the very first thing I had to do is drag our rather substantial coffee table out of the way. Then I needed someplace to sit. Really, if you’re going to do this drum thing seriously you’re probably going to want to invest in an adjustable stool. A quick Google search tells me you can spend anywhere from $20 to $200 for a drum kit stool.
Well, the best I could do in a pinch was a plastic Adirondack chair. So I dragged that into the living room, and spent some time fiddling with the arrangement of the drums and particularly with the drum pedal. Since the chair didn’t adjust, I ended up pushing the drum kit pretty far away from me in order for my foot to feel comfortable on the pedal (to where it felt almost like the gas pedal in my car). Anyway eventually I got something workable set up.
My first experience with drumming was pretty frustrating. I admit I’m no musician, but I can at least tap out a steady beat, and on Easy mode there’re a lot of places with long strings of evenly placed notes to hit, and I kept messing them up. Finally in frustration I called in the girlfriend for a second opinion, and she had the same kind of troubles. Finally I remembered that there’s a “TV Calibration” feature in the game. We’d had no problems with guitar or singing, but I tried it anyway. I just had to tell it I had an LCD TV and it calibrated automagically (there’s an option for a manual calibration as well). And that did the trick. I went from getting 2 stars to getting 4 stars immediately after the calibration.
Drumming is fun but requires a lot more real talent than the guitar does. And even though the drums aren’t as loud as I’d feared they would be, I think I was still subconsciously trying to hit them ‘gently’ so as not to disturb the neighbors. I think that’s ok for Easy mode, but if you watch the YouTube video below you’ll see that to get good you have to be willing to go for it.
I honestly think most Rock Band Drum Kits are going to end up gathering dust, at least with the casual players. I’d love to have a practice area where I could get a stool and set up the drums and not worry about bothering the neighbors, but that isn’t really practical for me, and I don’t think it will be for most people. And the reality is that I don’t see myself dragging furniture around after a long day at work just so I can relax with a little Rock Band. Right now you can get Rock Band in two configurations: the game only, or the set with drums, guitar and mike as well as the game. If that has changed by the time you read this, think long and hard about buying that drum kit.
After dinner, I picked up the guitar again and played some more of the solo Rock Band ‘career.’ I guess I’ve played through about 20 songs so far. One of the big differentiators between Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band is the play lists. I found Rock Band is pretty middle of the road for my tastes. There aren’t a lot of songs I just love, but neither are there many that I hate. GH 3 is more about the ups and downs. There are songs in that game I just adore, and some that are just horrible noise to my old ears. Now this is going to be really subjective, and I’m an older gamer. Suffice to say I’m really happy when I run into Rolling Stones or ZZ Top, and a lot of the bands I encounter in Rock Band I’ve never even heard of.
Of course ultimately you’ll have played through the careers and you’ll just be playing for fun, and at that point you can start buying downloaded songs, and cherry pick your favorites, so long-term I’m not so sure this is going to be a huge factor.
I’ll also reiterate that the learning curve in RB is a lot smoother. I’m still getting 4 or 5 stars on all the songs (and managed a 100% once). Over in the GH 3 camp, there are still “Easy” mode songs that just destroy me (Slayer, anyone?).
So I’m still standing by my preference for Rock Band. Oh, I did find one ‘gimmick’ here, and that’s “the big rock finish” which is a freestyle section at the end of some songs…you basically just mash notes as fast as you can to generate a huge pile ‘o points at the end of a tune. I could really do without this section since it generally ends up sounding likes two cats fighting in a 50 gallon drum. But it still isn’t as awful as the GH 3 Boss Battles.
Anyway, here’s a great video of someone rocking out like mad on the RB drums. It’s pretty long, but if you can, watch it at least until they cut out the game audio; it gives you a good idea of how loud the drums are.
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. 
, Book 1 of Philip Pullman’s YA fantasy trilogy, “His Dark Materials.” I have to admit this one never would’ve made it onto my radar if not for the movie version (which I have not seen) getting promoted all over the TV.
and I never did review the first book, 