Mushroom Life

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When I was back in high school, I remember looking forward to geometry. Why? Because we used graph paper in geometry, and that meant I could spend the entire period doodling out generate after generation of Life (as in John Conway, not as in Parker Brothers, or something deep and philosophical). I was fascinated by it then, and I guess I still am, because when I Stumbled Upon Mushroom Life* I was immediately drawn back into the whole wonder of it all.

In this version Conway’s simple cells are replaced by Mushrooms that grow, or die, depending on the rules that have been around since the 70’s. But as the mushrooms age, they mature, which is just a visual thing but it adds another layer of satisfaction to the game.

It was interesting to run into this at the same time I’m slowly churning through Darwin Among the Machines since in some ways the topics are related. But that’s for another day. Right now I need to go grow some more mushrooms.

 

*Editor’s note: This URL is shady. Go there at your own risk. [5 Dec 2018]

Another day, another widget…

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Today I’m testing out Lijit. It’s kind of a personal search engine that gathers content from your blog, all kinds of social networking sites you might be a part of, bookmarking sites, etc.

At least, that’s my understanding. I generally sign up for stuff like this first, then go back and understand it later.

Of course, I’ve got all kinds of links on here to places I signed up for then never used… for instance my del.icio.us bookmarks haven’t been updated in years.

Lijit Search

Well, it’s interesting but certainly not perfect. I tried searching on “Skellig” which is the name of a book I reviewed here some time ago. Search came up empty. Going to google and searching on site: dragonchasers.com skellig does return results so Google has spidered me.

Ah well, what do you want for nothin, right?

Med.ium Widget

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I just signed up for Me.dium, which is kind of part social network, part cyber-stalker-tool. I jest, of course, but what it does is let you see where on the web your friends are, and let’s you chat with them.

Honestly I’m not sure what the experience is going to be like, so I won’t talk a lot about it yet. But I got a “Widget” centered around this site and I wanted to try it out, so here it is:

OK, so there it is. But what does it mean? What is the relationship that Med.ium is finding between this site and the ones that ‘surround’ it?

More research required…

Blueprint CSS

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Warning: Incoming Geek Post

Blueprint is a CSS Framework that’s supposed to help you jump-start the design of a web page. As I’ve spent most of my web development years doing back-end code and not much worrying about display issues, it looks to be a good tool for me to use. Haven’t tried it yet, though.

Darren from gamemakker.co.uk has a post about his initial experiences with Blueprint that is well worth reading.

Captchas again

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A while back I wrote about an article on using CAPTCHAs to digitize books.

Well it looks like the technology has been launched!. I just encountered it when signing up (last one into the pool as always) for a Facebook account.

Anyway in my original post I speculated on how this would work. Well, this new post is just to pat myself on the back, because this is from the ReCaptcha site, and it’s pretty close to what I’d guessed.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

There’s a lot of smart people in the world but I’m generally not one of them, so when I get something right its cause for celebration! 🙂

.hack// Another Birth Vol. 2

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.hack// Another Birth Vol. 2Volume 2 down. Two more to go.

I don’t have a lot to say, though. .hack// Another Birth Vol. 2 continues BlackRose and Kite’s adventures in The World as they try to figure out what’s happening. More and more of The World is becoming corrupt (in the data sense, not in the political sense!) and, often accompanied by bubbly healer Mistral, they keep fighting ‘data bugs’ and trying to get to the bottom of things.

It’s unclear to me why they’re doing what they are doing. BlackRose and Kite each know someone who is in a coma from playing The World, but how fighting these ‘data bugs’ is supposed to help cure their friends, I’m not following. And things have gotten worse…now the system administrators are involved.

Fair warning… Vol. 2 has a “….to be continued” ending, so if you like Vol 1 enough to press on, make sure you have Vol 3 at hand before you start in on Vol 2!

.hack// Another Birth Vol. 1

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.hack Another Birth Vol 1And the binge continues…

.hack// Another Birth starts a new storyline in the .Hack universe. This time, it’s the same story told in the .Hack games for the PS2, only told from the point of view of (game) secondary character BlackRose. In PS2 land, the story spanned 4 games, and this is Vol 1 of 4, so I’m assuming each book will cover the events of a different game. I did play through the first game but never finished #2. From what I recall of the story, the book is pretty true to the source material although a lot of side characters have been dropped or are only mentioned in passing.

These books take place a good deal after AI Buster. Orca and Balamung, two minor characters from that story, have become celebs inside The World for being the team that completed the event “The Final Sin.” Now Orca has been attacked and killed in-game by a strange ‘data bug.’ Weirdly, when his avatar fell, the player himself passed out and lapsed into a coma. The same thing has happened to BlackRose’s brother, and she enters The World to find out what is going on and how to help her brother. Kite, the main character from the game and the secondary in this book, is a real-life friend of Orca’s and was with him when the data bug attacked. So he and BlackRose have a common goal.

On the plus side, Another Birth bypasses all the ‘how to play’ stuff that was in AI Buster, so we can get right into the story. However it’s very much a 4-part story and not much is wrapped up at the end of this volume. Also, Akira Hayami (BlackRose’s real name) is a high school student struggling with the jealousy of older girls on her tennis team and other teen-age girl problems that are about as interesting to me as watching paint dry. The tone skews even younger than the earlier books, too. I’m not sure if this is due to the source material or the translation (the book was originally written by a Japanese author) but I suspect its the translation, in the same way so many English anime dubs ‘dumb down’ the content since they figure cartoons are for kids.

And yet…and yet…. I will keep reading the series, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why. I think it still goes back to my love of MMOs in theory, and my inability to ever find an MMO that I’m truly comfortable in. Reading these books is like playing an MMO without all the annoying parts, in a way. I’m living vicariously through these characters, I guess. In general terms, though, I don’t think I could recommend this book.

.Hack// AI Buster 2

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.Hack AI Buster 2I just can’t help myself. I can’t eat just one! I’ve got all these serious books on my shelf that need to be read and here I am again, consuming literary junk food. But I’m just hooked on these .Hack Project properties. .Hack// AI Buster 2 is a short story collection, with the stories scattered chronologically through the .Hack timeline.

Some of them are good, at least one is pretty bad. None of them are very substantial. But somehow that’s part of the appeal. It’s like seeing a silhouette through a window shade. Shadowy images…enough to intrigue, but not enough to satisfy. Um, ok so now I sound like a voyeur. 🙂 In this volume we get more glimpses at the players themselves, which I find interesting. I think my favorite story was the first one, which showed the events of AI Buster 1 through the eyes of Hokuto, the newbie side-kick, who is much more interesting on the other side of the computer screen.

Still not great books. But another fun guilty escape. Lots of stuff going on in my life right now, and too often by the end of the day I’m just not up to facing the heavier reading on my bookshelf. In fact, I have a few more of these .hack books and I think I’m going to jump right into the next one!

Chore Wars

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Thanks to Penny Arcade for pointing this out. Chore Wars has to be the geekiest idea I’ve seen in a while. Ok, maybe since yesterday. Here’s how it works (I surmise, personally I’m much too lazy for something like this). You and your fellow house or office mates sign up. You create lists of household or office chores and assign experience points to each one. Then as you do chores, you mark them off on the Chore Wars site. Rack up major experience points and level up!!

I mean really, who needs World of Warcraft when you have Chore Wars!!?

Murder is so entertaining

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Maybe this is old news, but I just became aware of a new reality show. This show, and I’m not going to give it free publicity by mentioning either the name or the network, sets two teams of ‘normal’ people against each other in a competition to solve a murder case. The twist is that these are real murders. Each show comes “complete with a gruesome recreated crime scene and real crime footage” taken from the closed case files of homicide departments across the U.S.

Oh boy! So if you’ve lost a loved one to a brutal crime, you can at least take some consolation from the fact that the person’s murder will provide entertainment for millions of twisted TV viewers. (Note sarcasm.)

Really, it’s just one step closer to snuff films, isn’t it? But heaven forbid our children catch a glimpse of an exposed breast on TV. Now *that* is cause for great alarm.