Vanguard Campaign Hobby Progress

Hello folks. It has been a long time since I've posted on Blogger, and many things have changed. I figure I'll get back into blogging with something light - a hobby post.

Mantic is running a promotion for people who blog about their hobby progress for an upcoming campaign. While I usually toil in obscurity, this time I'll give it a go. 

Note:  I'm still learning the ins and out of this, so things are going to be rough. For example, the photos are not very good quality. But hey, that's why we do this, right?  To get better!

My new warband
I was a participant in Mantic's Vanguard kickstarter.  I have always loved skirmish games, ever since the 1990s. Especially so those games that have continuous-growth campaigns where your characters can grow, improve, or get crippled and/or die. So when I heard about the kickstarter, I was all in.  I got the backer box with four warbands:  Basileans, Abyssals, Northern Alliance, and the Nightstalkers.  For my first campaign, I decided to go with the Nightstalkers because they were just so different from anything I've ever seen before. It was an excellent campaign, and I'm ready for my next campaign. 

This time around, I'm going with Twilight Kin.  Why?  A few reasons: 

• No one else in my gaming group is playing them and I like to be different. 
• They share some models with the Nightstalkers, so I have some units all ready to go. With the limited amount of hobby time I have, this is a huge bonus. 
• I really like the models that Raging Heroes makes, and think they would be excellent subjects for a Twilight Kin warband. 

Away we go.

The resin Raging Heroes models proved to be extremely detailed, extremely well made - but also extremely hard to work with. I was constantly snapping tiny pieces, and gluing little bits of limbs together was a pain.  I finally bought a GW armature apparatus, and that helped a bit. But the 'springiness' in the arms still means it's a hassle to get the limbs into just the right position. 

Time for some photos.  Here's where I am so far: 

This one definitely will be a Blade Dancer. 

Reaper Guard, I suppose? 

This will most likely be one of two Executioners. 

Here's the other Executioner.

And the Summoner Crone 

A crossbow-armed Dark Elf I am intending to field as a "Shadow."  I figure the Stalker Bows will be 'light crossbows.'  A ranged weapon with Pound sounds really useful but it requires three hits, and the model only has a base 2d8 ranged attack.  I anticipate lots of Power dice being spent on trying to get that Pound effect. 

Another proto-Stalker. 

The armature apparatus I am using to assist in the gluing process.  Not ideal but better than trying to hold two tiny pieces perfectly still together with my hands for several minutes while the superglue cures. 

And the Stalker with a head this time.  Thanks to the springiness in the armature, the neck is about a millimeter where I intended it to be.  I'm going to try and putty it up so on one can tell.

So that's all for this week.  Onward and upward. 

A Giant Leap Backwards

The news of the cancellation of NASA’s Constellation program came and went from the nation’s consciousness last week like ripples on a pond. Yet this represents a larger shift in our cultural fabric than the latest news on Brangelina or who won this year’s Super Bowl.

Once, in our parents’ times, our nation dreamed bold. This country is at its best when it is ambitious; when its dreams slightly exceed its current grasp. Some of those dreams were morally flawed, some were widely reviled, and some were simply unrealistic. But one dream hit the sweet spot of ambition, innocence, and capability: that of manned space travel. Long before “Yes We Can,” we did. Now, the only thing bold in our lives is the coffee we drink. We let our dreams slip away with nary a complaint.

I was raised on a steady diet of promises. Work hard, study hard, and you, too, can be a part of the space program. We would have cheap, regular access to space via the Shuttle; by 1990 we would have a permanent space station in orbit; by the turn of the century a permanent manned moon base was possible, and by 2010 manned space flight to other planets was perfectly realistic. I was one of those kids sitting in front of the television in their pajamas on the morning of April 12, 1981, as the first orbital Space Shuttle flight was launched. I had a full-color atlas of the Earth spread out before me, open to the centerfold global map, and I slowly pushed a paper cut-out of the Shuttle across the map to match the positional data from NASA. I wanted to be part of that. I dreamed big.

Slowly, however, those dreams were drained away. The end of the Cold War revealed the space race for what it was: political grandstanding, a game of one-upmanship. Without the challenge of “beat the Russians” driving us, the nation went about its way perfectly happy to ignore the cosmos. That realm was relegated to a very narrow demographic: the socially inept, overweight, white male watching Star Trek reruns on the Scyfy channel in their parents’ basement.

Now we are obsessed with the mundane. People’s passions run towards questions of who will sing better on American Idol, who will move the ball down the field more adroitly, who will divorce who in Hollywood next, what company will fail and which will buy its competition. We have always had an interest in sports, entertainment, and commerce, of course. But the difference now is this: that is all we aspire to. Decades of postmodern deconstructuralist narrative have taught us to tear down our heroes, re-examine our dreams, reign in our aspirations.

Some would argue that this is a necessary and realistic step. The end of the manned space program represents a national coming to maturity. However, dreams of space travel are no more unrealistic than many of our other dreams. In 2007, it was estimated that we were spending $720 million dollars per day on Bush’s adventure in Iraq(1). Meanwhile, the Center for Science and International Studies estimated the ongoing operational cost for a permanently manned Lunar base would be $7.35 billion per year, or twenty million dollars per day(2) . Taken in that light, a manned Lunar base certainly seems more realistic that the dream of a peaceful, democratic, and USA-loving Iraq. In addition, we would have far fewer families losing their sons and daughters.

The Apollo astronauts are all in their seventies and eighties; the earliest Shuttle astronauts are not much younger. What do we tell them? “Thank you for your bravery, but it was all for naught. We’ve decided what you did wasn’t important enough to follow up on.” Tell that to the families of Gus Grissom, Vladimir Komarov, Francis Scobee, Kalpana Chawla, and the others who have given their lives for space travel(3).
Yes, the Constellation program was questionable. I was a strong critic of a program that would, essentially, revisit 1960’s technology. But it was something, and we have invested five years and many millions of dollars in the program already. Perhaps even more importantly is the dreams that this project represents. To end it without something better to look forward to is unprecedented. The White House claims the goal is to encourage private space travel in preference to government-sponsored travel; but private corporations do not succeed by dreaming big and being bold.

Soon enough, there will be no humans left on the Earth who have walked on another celestial body. In thirty years, we may very well have no one left alive who has ever been to outer space. What will we tell our grandchildren? “Once upon a time, people traveled into space and to the moon. But then we decided it just wasn’t worth the trouble.”




References:
(1) According to the American Friends Service Committee, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102074.html


(2) http://csis.org/publication/costs-international-lunar-base

(3) http://www.vibrationdata.com/space/deaths.htm

The Rise of the Hybrid Novel

For most of the twentieth century, there was a very firm division between "literary" books and "genre" books.  Literary books were contemporary (or sometimes historical), dramatic, convoluted, non-linear, and frequently downright arcane.  Genre books were exciting, simple, straightforward, and escapist.  No self-respecting "Literary" author would dream of writing a genre book, and no Genre author would ever be admitted into the lofty ranks of the Literary.  

Now, all that seems to be changing.  Thomas Pynchon has written a detective novel.  Neil Gaiman's and Stephen King's works are being considered on their literary and sociological merits.  And a whole new breed of author, pioneered by the likes of Michael Chabon.  Chabon has always championed the idea that "genre" fiction (in terms of setting and plot) can be just as rich, just as involving, just as fulfilling, just as- dare I say it - literary as anything written by an MFA grad. 

That's not to say we need to "get over it:"  give up trying to aspire to find and create high-quality fiction, and simply embrace our inner pulp-reading child, as the WSJ article seems to imply.  Rather, I think it is calling authors to an even more difficult task than have ever been attempted widely.  To create a rich, satisfying, robust novel that has the heft and intelligence of a literary work, yet is as engrossing and enjoyable as the schlockiest dime-store paperback. 

CADIE Lives!

Those Google folks have done it again. They've finally invented a real AI.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html

I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad about this. On the one hand, it will make all our lives easier. On the other hand, this is just another brick in the wall of post-literate America. Who will bother learning to read or write if AIs can do it all for you?

October 22, 2019

Begin audio transcription. Run VICTOR.

Good evening, Michael. I am VICTOR 3.2, the Virtual Creative Talent Operating Reactor, the newest model in SpeakEasy's line of virtual assistants. You may call me Victor. Have you ever used a Virtual Assistant before?

Not since I turned off that annoying paper clip in MS Office about fifteen years ago.

Then you will be impressed and excited by all the productivity possibilities a virtual assistant can offer.

Would you like a full demonstration at this time?

No.

What can I do for you then?

You're not going to ask me about my parents, are you?

Why do you think I would do that?

You ever hear of ELIZA?

I have no ears, but I can hear with the audio pickups in the desktop computer you are using. But I do not think that is what you meant.

Never mind. Do you have statistical analysis capability?

Yes, absolutely. I can perform multilinear variable regression analysis, three-stage ANOVA, heteroscedasticity detection, and many other common stochastic analysis methodologies.

Very good. I want to perform some data mining regarding ReDS. Do you have access to ReDS data?

Yes. I can tap into all major public databases of ReDS data, including CDC, CentCOM, ECDC's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, and others.

The CentCOM data... that's sourced from PANDA, right?

Yes.

Is the PANDA kernel running on this computer currently?

Yes.

It's assessing my speech patterns and input for signs of ReDS, correct?

Yes.

What is it currently saying about me?

You currently are displaying a nineteen-point-five percent chance of hosting an active ReDS infection.

That's a bit unsettling.

Do you suppose that's a bit high?

I am not permitted to make suppositions or assumptions.

That's actually good to hear.

All right. So. How many desktops are running PANDA on this network right now?

32, 436.

And what is the average odds of infection, according to PANDA, for that entire data set?

Twenty-five point eight percent.

Don't you think that's a little high?

I am not permitted to make suppositions or assumptions.

Right. OK then. Let's try something different here. Take everything we know about the ReDS pathogen. Its durability, life cycle, temperature and humidity tolerance, viability, strength of its cytoplasmic membrane, et cetera.

Right. Yes. This looks good. Now, in a different subset, extract all data pertaining to environmental conditions in North America. Mean daily temperatures, humidity, dust and pollen density, wind currents, so on.

Yes. Something like that. Now cross-index the two to develop a geostatistical index of average pathogen density in North America. Also- let's throw something else in there. Compile an index of the first and second genenration of confirmed ReDS outbreaks in North America. Now overlay both on a map, and let's see it.

That was fast.

That's very interesting, Victor. The outbreaks are not where I would expect them to be. What do you make of that?

I am not permitted to make supp-

Right, right. OK. This is interesting. I suppose the first generation of outbreaks could be considered to be from people who caught it while vacationing in the tropics. But those people who flew back to places where ReDS is not viable should not have been spreading it the way they did. Something else is at work here.

You have a new e-mail from your wife.

Can you summarize it?

She wonders when you will be home for dinner. Also, the recycleables needs to be sorted tonight.

All right. Send her a reply saying I'm leaving the office in ten minutes.

Very well.

Victor, you may be useful after all. Sign off. Oh, wait. I have one last question.

What is that?

Of the people that PANDA rates at an eighty percent probability of being infected with ReDS, what percentage of that population are subsequently diagnosed with ReDS within one month?

Eighty point oh two percent.

Interesting. All right. That's enough for now. Goodnight. Sign off. End voice transcription.

----------------------------------------------------------------

October 17, 2019

My apologies for not posting anything on this blog in many years; I had some "distractions" to deal with. (Possibly will post more on these later.) But now that things seem to be changing rapidly in this world, I am going to re-start this blog so as to leave a record of my thoughs and impressions for the historical record.

I have always been a data-junkie, an amateur forecaster, and a budding philosopher. The GEAS report hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. Here it was, the shining nadir of analytical technology, and the man behind the curtain turns out to be the Grim Reaper. Much soul-searching is called for, I presume.

But you can't change the future until you have a grasp of where you've come from. So for the first part of this blog, I'm going to try and re-cap the last 11 years, since that's when things truly seemed to start going sideways.

That's enough for today. Take care, everyone.


-Z40K

Running Scared: San Francisco and the Olympic Torch

Today, I took a trip down to the Embarcadero in San Francisco to take part in the Team Tibet protest of the Chinese Olympic torch. I do not normally involve myself in political causes. Yes, I did attend the University of California at Berkeley, where protest is an art form. However, I attended at what, for Berkeley, was an odd time: the early 1990's. The Cold War was over, the tech boom was beginning to start, life was looking good, and there just didn't seem to be anything worth protesting. That didn't stop the local radicals, however. They would find any and every reason to launch an aggressive, if not violent, protest. One time, there was a large protest over the changing of the hours in the main undergraduate library. The radicals stormed the library, and I watched several protestors get beaten by police in the lobby. Another time, there were large street protests, complete with looting, over the fact that the University had built a volleyball court in People's Park.

The problem is, however, that throwing your all into these massive protests seemed to dilute their credibility. When you are ready to take to the streets over a change in the library's hours, it is difficult for you to make an impression when truly pressing issues arise.

Which brings us to now. The world is far more polarized, far more dangerous, and far more ideological than it was fifteen years ago. The issues are bigger. For example, genocide. As far as I am concerned, the leadership of the People's Republic of China lost all legitimacy with the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre, and has done nothing to try and reclaim it. In fact, they have gone the other direction, taking the cue that "all's well in the world" as long as they can tell people to mind their own business. But the last few years have shown us that their reach is exceeding their moral grasp. That is why I went to the Embarcadero.

Upon arriving at the scene, I was met by a sea of red flags. The China apologists were out in force, and they were clearly well organized, well funded, and well trained. They had plenty of large flags, matching outfits, and they all had their songs and propaganda phrases memorized. I found a small knot of other pro-Tibet activitst and clung to them in the sea of red. The Chinese apologists were on the offensive, being very aggressive in confronting those who did not agree with them. Here are some actual comments I received, and my responses:

Tibet is, always had been, and always will be part of China. If this is true, then why do the ethnic Tibetians not want the Chinese government meddling in their affairs? Why are the Tibetians clearly a separate ethnic group, with its own customs, mannerisms, apearance, and culture (that China is trying to extinguish)? And here's the big one: what do your claims of posession have to do with the moral issues of it? I could claim that I have always, do now, and will always have a right to abuse my wife or molest children, but that does not make it acceptible.

You are not Chinese, you don't know anything about the situation. I am a student of the world. I am educated and hold advanced degrees from top-tier universities. And, like anyone over the age of ten, I have a fairly wel-developed sense of right and wrong. There are some moralisms that could reasonably be argued to be culturally realtive, but genocide, cultural destruction, suppression of dissent, and tyranny are not among them. There was a time I would agree with this argument. But time and experience have shown that universal moral issues are at stake.

How much are they paying you to stand there and carry that sign? No one is paying me a penny. In fact, I am using some of my precious vacation time from my job to be able to come out here and voice my opinions.

You are an American (meaning white), you have nothing to say about China. This is how things work in America: I have an opinion, and I am free to state it. If you decide to be on the side of loathsome tyrrany and oppression, then you are free to voice your opinions as well. Please remember that in China, we would not have these freedoms.

You should go back to Europe, before you tell the Chinese to leave Tibet. This one I find particularly offensive. First off, my family has been in America for ten generations now. Second, I have no relatives in Europe. Third, where would I go? I can trace various branches of my ancestry to Ireland, England, the Netherlands, and various parts of Germany. And lastly, how does this have any bearing on China's conduct towards Tibet? Please note that if I were to turn the tables on you and tell you to go back to China, I would be (quite correctly) be branded a racist. So what makes you think that you not being racist?

We treat them fine in Tibet, look at how we invest in them. Allow me to refer you to a dark period in American history: the Reconstruction following the Civil War. "Carpetbaggers" headed to the South to invest in rebuilding the region, and succeeded only in creating a legacy of resentment that we are still dealing with today.

They should be thankful to have us there helping them out. Then why are they willing to risk imprisonment and death to speak out against Chinese rule?

America has plenty of examples of suppressing ethnic minorities. You getting involved, telling us how to treat our ethnic minorities, is hypocritical. It is true that America has a poor track record of dealing with ethnic minorities. But does that mean you can turn a blind eye to history? Trust us... in about a century, you will find yourselves dealing with an ethnic minority population that has grown up with a victim mentality, with an expectation of entitlement, that will be a drain on your social services.

And as for getting involved in other countries' affairs, allow me to point to a more recent example: Nazi Germany. We looked the other way, and millions died. It gave proof to the famous quote of Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." It was true then, and is true now. It is not too incredible to speculate that some day, the Chinese government decides that some segment of its population is just not fitting in with the current Five Year Plan. Perhaps the developmentally disabled, or the homosexuals. And since Shina has no concept of basic civil rights, the government will have no compunction against exterminating them in the most efficient manner possible.

And so, I went to the Embaracdero.


The China apologists had clearly been carefully coached. Their comments and criticisms were so homogenous and so carefully recited, I knew that somewhere there was a person who had carefully typed up a list of talking points.

Eventually, we met up with the rest of the Tibet supporters, and proceeded to occupy the Embarcadero in a non-violent, but noisy, demonstration.


Now, we all know what the result was. Tricky Mayor Gavin hid the torch in a bus and drove it halfway across the city to have a stealth torch relay. But we all knew this would happen. There was no way they could run a torch up the Embarcadero, with the pro- and anti-Tibet demonstrators there. And there was no way we were going to catch them; we knew that as well. A small, well-organized group of individuals can always keep ahead of a large, disorganized mob. (I learned that in college.) so we headed back to Justin Herman plaza. Hopefully, if the city officials were foolish enough to try to hold the closing ceremony in a publicly-accessible space, we could be loud enough that the news clips would have us audible in the background. We were able to get into the closing ceremony arena, right up to the VIP podium in fact. There was a large stage with decorations, a grandstand, a podium, two bands, and a twenty-foot-high television screen showing pleasant videos of athletes. This was clearly the spot they had planned for the closing ceremony.

And then, they canceled the closing ceremony, instead having an impromptu event in the airport lobby before rushing the torch onto the plane.

Many sources seem to indicate that the "city won," that they "deftly avoided" the protestors and "headed off" a major incident. But let's look at how it went down:

The Olympic organizers were on the run. The protestors had the initiative all day. The City was forced to react to the people; they were on the defensive. They were denied their opportunity for a PR coup with the closing ceremony. That most certainly counts as a major incident, in anyone's book. Gavin Newsom was visibly nervous at the press conference at the end of the day; as well he should be after adroitly disenfranchising ten thousand people. He lost any shred of credibilty he might have had today; I hope it was worth it to him.

Of course China will report that everything was nice and harmonious and went off without a hitch. But we all know that the Chinese government lies; to have to point that out is like saying the sky is blue, or the Bush administration can't balance a budget. Anyone who cares to look at the facts will realize that the people of San Francisco are not pleased with China's policies; I am expecting the people of Buenos Aires and Sydney to realize what is going on, and act on it.

For example: the IOC chairman says that he was relieved that there were no major incidents and no arrests in relation to the torch relay. However, there is this video, which I shot behind Justin Herman Plaza shortly after the closing ceremony was canceled:


So you see, it is not that hard to find the truth in the Internet Age.

Some people seem to think that the fact that there was no violence in the San Francisco torch relay protests indicates the protests were somehow weaker, or less effective. On the contrary, avoiding violence drives the point home that we are legitimate issue-holders, not hooligans. For example, there is the heroic story of Jin. Shame on the protestor for attacking a handicapped woman. But double-shame on China for using the poor woman for propaganda purposes.

If the San Francisco street protests had degenerated into a running melee with police, it might have made slightly better headlines but would have lost all legitimacy. The Chinese press would have had a field day painting us as brutal, uncivilized malcontents. By remaining nonviolent, we managed to make our point by disrupting the ceremony while retaining our moral superiority. The focus was on non-violent protest, and this goal was achieved; a goal that the Dalai Lama would approve of.

April Fools (re: The Dream that might have been)

Google and Virgin got together to play an April Fool's joke on us. Clever, yes. But also pretty darn painful.

The painful part is that it IS all a joke, but it didn't have to be. If we had not effectively abandoned manned space exploration in 1972 with the last Apollo mission, we might very well be preparing a permanent manned Mars base at this moment.

Instead, we frittered it all away on reality TV and Wrestlemania-on- demand.

Having been raised on a steady diet of promises of a glorious future in space exploration, not a single one of which proved to be real, this April Fool's joke is especially poignant and painful for me.

"Divorce Parties"?

Our convenience-crazed, comfort-obsessed, tradition-repulsed society has done it again. Not only is the alarmingly high divorce rate bad enough, but some people are actually beginning to feel that it is appropriate to celebrate a divorce with a ceremony.

To do so is wrong on so many levels. It raises divorce to the emotional equivalent of marriage; it legitimizes it; and it makes it seem almost inevitable. We have ceremonies in our life to mark those important milestones that indicate we are progressing, developing, improving ourselves as a person. A divorce is just the opposite. It is a failure, a collapse, an abnegation of responsibility, a regression. People who get divorced thinking otherwise, should not have gotten married in the first place.

Why is it important to go into a marriage with the assumption of permanence? There are many reasons, but I will focus on the most logical and clear-cut: the children. It is every parent’s earnest desire that their children should outlive themselves. Thus, to serve as an example of maturity and stability for your children implies that you will continue to do so for as long as possible… that is, for the rest of your life. On the other hand, to enter into a union or, even worse, to bring a new life into existence, while not presuming that your union is permanent, is a crime and a shame. You are dooming your children to uncomfortable silences, long courtroom sessions, cross-country air travel alone, hate, anger, recrimination, sadness, and self-doubt. To celebrate such a thing is akin to celebrating child abuse.

In the article, a person compares a “divorce party” to a wake. They miss out on a major difference, however: death is mandatory. Divorce, on the other hand, is a choice. A death can be celebrated if the individual leaves behind good deeds and happy children. A divorce can have no positive connotations. Either you are leaving a good relationship for selfish reasons, or you are leaving a bad relationship that you never should have entered into in the first place. Either way, I see nothing to celebrate.

Heroic values

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, John Miller discusses the life and works of noted fantasy author David Gemmell. In laudatory praise, he describes the symbolism of his prose and the relevance of the enduring themes in fantasy literature to today’s world. It is obvious that Miller truly respects Gemmel and the genre. However his praise runs a bit thin when he begins to cite anecdotes illustrating how fantasy literature has inspired readers to acts of heroism.

Both of his examples represent classical physical confrontation: protecting an innocent victim from a mugging, and defending a woman from an attacker in a subway station. Both are praise-worthy, to be sure; but I feel that Miller does the genre a disservice by focusing on purely martial acts of courage. In today’s world, coming to the assistance of a mugging victim is not the kind of situation most people will find themselves in. Much more relevant is the quiet courage that we are faced with at certain key points throughout our lives. Quitting a well-paying corporate job to teach poor children in the inner city; confronting a loved one who’s been drinking all too much lately; standing up at a town council meeting and addressing the audience about a project vital to the community’s well-being. These are acts of courage at least as valid as fighting off muggers, and the kinds of opportunities that most people let slip by because of fear. Often, the only way to change things is by putting it all on the line. These are the same values displayed in heroic literature, translated into modern terms. If we can teach children this kind of courage, the world would be a better place indeed.

The Dream Today

Today, we reflect on the legacy that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. left for us, and what we have done for it in the interim. I think it is best summed up in the by-line for the lead story on CNN.com’s website today. Apparently there is a terrible conundrum facing African-American women in America:

“For these women, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?”

Whatever happened to simply voting your conscience?

America today is defined by race politics and partisanism. Every ethnic group clusters tightly in their enclaves (either virtually or geographically) and hang together as a unified bloc. The primary concern on political pundits’ minds revolves around race. What are the Blacks thinking? What are the Latinos thinking?

You see this on the micro scale as well as the macro. Couples naturally pair off along racial lines; only the most enlightened of individuals can overcome racial separations to find love regardless of the color of their skins. Social groups, for the most part in this country, are very racially homogenous. Black men hang out at the barbershop, white man at the bar. And never the twain shall meet.

This is not how the Reverend would have wanted it.

It seems that even a nominal reading of his words indicates a strong preference for true color-blindness. The “I Have a Dream” speech is a cry for equality, for a time when the people of America look beyond issues of race and ethnicity and simply love each other for who they are.

In many ways, we have gone in the opposite direction in the four decades since his death. We are more cognizant of race than ever before. It is front-and-center in everything we do. Politicians and public figures step carefully through a minefield every time they open their mouths. We aggressively teach our children to celebrate the differences of people with different ethnicities, but by doing so we at the same time teach them to notice these differences.

Of course, this situation is far preferable to the world King grew up in, with race-specific water fountains and rampant cross-burnings. But something in his message has been lost along the way. We try so hard to make everyone equal, that we drive wedges between groups of people. By telling employers “you must hire a certain percentage of underrepresented minorities,” we imply that these people aren’t good enough to get these jobs on their own. These things do a great disservice to King’s dream. By celebrating racial differences, we enlarge them. By defining people by their racial demographics, we belittle them. Assuming that an African-American man will vote for Obama, or that a white woman would vote for Hillary, is just as insulting to them as assuming a white man would vote for a Republican.

Were King alive today, he would be a bit sad at the rut we’ve gotten ourselves stuck in. We, as a culture and as planet, will not make any progress towards enlightenment until we learn to truly look beyond the surface differences. This is possible. There was a time in New York when there was bitter enmity between people of Italian ancestry and those of Irish ancestry. Now, no one cares about those differences; they are seen as quaint anachronisms. The day an African-American or a woman becomes President is, in itself, not a milestone. What will be a true milestone will be when an African-American or woman becomes President, and the fact of their race or gender is not mentioned in the media because it is no longer an issue. When the color of a candidate’s skin is no more of a concern than the color of their eyes, we will truly have achieved King’s dream.

Another Death

Sometimes I find it hard that we, the United States, maintain a strategic partnership and cordial diplomatic relations with a regieme that summarily executes citizens who dare to stand up to their government.

Then I remember who's in power in this country, and it all makes sense.

Rest in peace, Wei. Perhaps your death will not be completely in vain, like the 2000 protesting students who were massacred in Tianamen Square.

UFOs and Common Sense

Residents of a Small Rural Texas Town claim to have seen a UFO. This story, in itself, is no longer sensational. The similarities between reports is stunning. Isn't it clear what this is?

It's a stealth blimp.

No, seriously. It makes a lot of sense. The government needs a stealthy way to move significant amounts of cargo into hostile areas. Helicopters can be made stealthy to a degree, but they have extremely limited range. Cargo planes are not stealthy and require long runways.

A blimp, on the other hand, can be made incredibly stealthy. Since they go slow, they don't need to have high-tensile-strength metal components to restst the extreme stresses of forward motion. Therefore, they can be made almost entirely of stealthy graphite-epoxy composites. The only metal parts would be the powerplant/propulsion system, and they can be buried under thick layers of radar-absorbing material.

They have tremendous range and time-on-station capabilities. Back in the 1920's, blimps were regularly running trans-Atlantic trips, long before airplanes were capable of this. They can hover theoretically forever.

They have more than enough cargo capacity to insert, extract, or resupply a team of covert operators deep within enemy territory.

The weird lights? external thin-film LEDs on the exterior of the blimp to reproduce the starfield above it. The fake stars would remain stationary to the ground observer, since they bimp would "slide" the star image backwards across the skin of the craft to match its forward motion.

The power plant could be some type of high-efficiency ducted-fan system, powered by fuel cells; or, a jet turbine, silenced via a high-tech active acoustical dampening system; or, my favorite theory, a magneto-hydro-dynamic system with zero moving parts that magnetically "grabs" the air and pulls it backwards through propulsion tubes running the length of the craft.

I believe it is "Occam's Razor" that states that when you have multiple possible explanations for some phenomena, the simplest explanation is most likely the real one. I would hazard a guess that that applies here as well.

Unless the government is preparing us for alien encounters in some subtle, generational way, as in Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End." O000h!!

Perchance to Dream (of an MMO)

The MMO field today has become quite crowded. There are fantasy MMOs, Sci-Fi MMOs, superhero MMOs, teeny-bopper MMOs. There are MMOs from America, Korea, Iceland, and many other countries.

However, as pointed out in this New York Times article, they all tend to fall into two categories: the "Theme park" and the "sandbox."

"Theme park" MMOs are the standard format, and the industry-dominators like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and City of Heroes are firmly in this category. They have levels, quests, and, generally speaking, a significant amount of rigid structure. If you log into the game for the first time and find yourself standing face-to-face with an NPC with your first quest ready to go, you're in a Theme Park MMO. They are very good at delivering a very specific, reliable, repeatable entertainment experience to large numbers of people rapidly.

The problem is, at least for me, that they are essentially static and empty experiences. I can log into the city of Tir Na Nog in Dark Age of Camelot, and the buildings, the NPCs, the quests, and the monsters will still be exactly the same locations, doing the same things, and giving the same tasks as they were back in 2002 when I first enrolled. Quests, by their very nature, have to be static and repeatable. A quest represents a significant amount of investment by the corporation vreating the MMO in their employees' time to think up the quest, write the text, work it into the game, and balance it. For them to make their money back, they have to ensure that as many paying customers as possible can experience exactly the same quest. No matter how many times you save the Damsel from the ravening monster, you log on again the next day and the monster is back, threatening the Damsel.

The problem with this, is it precludes narrative. For there to be a story, there needs to be profluence. That is, things must happen. Things have to change. The situation at the beginning of the story and the situation at the end have to be different. Otherwise, you are simply indulging in a masturbatory number-crunching exercise. A bad dream from which you long to awaken.

The sandbox aggressively goes in the opposite direction. It does away with all narrative entirely. The "quests" and "missions" are mainly perfunctory schemes for obtaining extra revenue or other types of currency. The advantage of this is that you can allow things to change. Since there is no guarantee of a uniform experience, there is no requirement to keep tihngs static. The war between the Band of Brothers and all the smaller guilds in EVE Online has twists and turns that rival the doings in Shakespeare's historical tragedies.

This scheme, while allowing room for more flexible gameplay, also has its own limitations. Everything truly becomes a numbers game at that point. Changes to the virtual world have to be effected by thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. The impact of one player gets diluted out to nearly un-noticeable levels. In Pirates of the Burning Sea, it is true that everyone can contribute to the conquest of ports. But since everyone is contributing, one person's contribution feels negligible.

Both of these solutions, I feel, grow from one source: LucasArt's early experiments in an online massive virtual community, the Habitat. This was a groundbreaking exercise, conducted in the mid-to late-eighties, to explore the utility of virtual worlds as a mass-market entertainment medium. The marketing lessons learned from Habitat went on to shape the two main branches of MMO design today. All the main elements of MMOs that we take for granted today can be seen in the original Habitat.

However, there are several assumptions inherent in MMO design that were limited by the technology available at the time. We are reaching a point at which we can divest ourselves of those limitations and develop a new model of online experience that will be more satisfying.


The New Model: Storytelling MMOs
Perhaps, instead of a virtual theme park, where one is spoon-fed content and stuffed into long queues to experience thrill rides, an MMO experience can more closely resemble an exclusive vacation resort. No crowds, no lines, no waiting. Players can choose to experience certain content when they want it; or, the scenery and pure experience are so lovely, that not undertaking specific experiences can be just as satisfying. Content is created to be experienced in smaller doses, by smaller groups, or individually; but in doing so, the experience's impacti s heightened.

There is a place for the mega-massive MMOs such as Eve Online. Their main advantage is that you need a population of that scale to achieve a viable economy. But if you were willing to dispense with the economy in lieu of more robust storytelling elements, something quite remarkable could be achieved. You could aspire to the level of storytelling seen in single-player games, but in a collaborative environment.

Imagine a virtual world with hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual miles of terrain. Now imagine said world with a limit of, say, a few dozen characters per shard. Now imagine that each shard is completely different, geographically. Now imagine you travel to the edge of this virtual map, just to find more terrain rolling away before you. A truly dynamically generated virtual world. It is possible to produce algorithms that dynamically generate interesting, credible, and beautiful virtual environments in near real-time, and save all the different, dynamic worlds in separate shards. But this is only the beginning.

Along with dynamically-generated terrain, there would be dynamically-generated towns, creatures, NPCs, and quests. A true world-building engine, that players can choose to interact with or not, as they see fit.

Let's pick a genre, just to have something more concrete to work with. For example, let's say we create an MMO based on the settlement of the western United States. Players start out in Saint Louis, Missouri, on the far eastern side of the map. When the server launches, the only things set in stone are the gross details; where the boundaries of the continent are, where the major landforms will be (mountains , large rivers, et cetera); and where players start. From there, players push out into the wilderness to settle and explore the continent. Each server would contain a population of perhaps dozens to a few hundred players, and many thousands of NPCs. Between servers, however, many things would not necessarily be the same: location of smaller towns, forests, streams and smaller rivers, Indian villages, ore veins, wild animal migratory routes, and the like.

Players can set off alone into the winderness as miners, trappers, or prospectors. Or they can recruit a band of NPC settlers in St. Louis and lead their group out into the wilderness to settle a new town.

This would would be growing and changing before the player's eyes. As loggers and miners (both players and NPCs) extract resources from the landscape, the landscape changes to reflect it. As areas become safer and more "civilized," more NPC homesteads and towns appear. As local economies become more complex, more oppotunity for conflict appears, thus leading to new opportunities for dynamically-generated and NPC-sponsored "quests" appear. If a player-run town becomes properous enough, NPC organizations will (dynamically, no referee input required) become interested in them. It would be quite satisfying for your town to have a telegraph, pony express station, and Wells Fargo bank branch opening. Then, when the railroads come to town, you will know you have arrived!

This is more than simply a hybrid between the Sandbox and the Theme-Park MMO. This is a new concept in online entertainment, and, while it may not appeal to those who wish to be spoon-fed their entertainment, it is, in my honest opinion, a viable concept with a ready-made fanbase.

Happy New Year

Here we sit on the threshhold of 2008. I have witnessed the dawning of plenty of new years (perhaps too many), but every time I do so, I promise to myself that I will do things a little different, a little better in the new year. Some times, I actually succeed. However, no resolution is any good without some structure. So, as with any good navel-gazing exercise, I now officially kick off my introspective spectacle of new year's resolutions.

On Writing:

• I will write at least six days per week, for at least one hour each day that I write.
• I will seek to achieve at least ten solid hours of writing per week
• I will attend at least two credible writers' workshops.
• I will begin submitting my work in earnest to publishers (of various types).
• I will develop a marketing plan for my writing career.

Regarding The House:

Within one month, there will be no cardboard visible to a casual observer strolling through all the rooms (garage excepted).

Within two months, the house will be arranged into normal functional configuration.

Within six months, I will have a functional workbench constructed and populated in a manner that will allow me to perform standard household and garden maintenance, repairs and improvements.

I will use said workbench regularly.

Regarding myself:

• I will exercise at least three times a week, at least one hour per session, in a vigorous manner.
• I will lose enough weight to put me at less than 180 pounds by the end of the year.
• I will sort through and rid myself of all old, out-of-date, and unfashionable clothes.
• I will try to find meaning and fulfillment in my daytime job without going completely insane, breaking any computers, or injuring any people.
• I will go to church more often.
• I will try not to feel so guilty about the things I enjoy.
• I will try not to injure or kill myself on the motorcycle, snowboard, golf course, or other recreational activity.
• I will go on at least one long-distance motorcycle ride with others.
• I will go on at least one overnight camping trip
• I will practice at golf and play at least four full 18-hole rounds of golf (or eight 9-hole rounds).
• I will not allow myself to be dragged down by the negative people in the world
• I will allow myself to be lifted up by the positive people in my life.
• I will draw up a list of principles and resolve to live by them.
• I will prioritize these resolutions in order of importance and identify conflicting priorities.
• I will invent a time machine that will give me 40 hours in each day, thus possibly allowing me to actually complete all these resolutions.
• I will not lose sleep or feel anxiety over keeping or not keeping my resolutions.
• I will, however, keep my resolutions.

The Sins of the Fathers

As a child of the Seventies, I was raised on a steady diet of promises. Life is getting better all the time. The future holds untowards riches of happiness (assuming we don't get blown up before then). I watched the development of the space program with breathless intensity, looking forward to the next step. It seemed to be a relentless march towards the outer reaches of the galaxy:

• The Apollo project had brought a human presence to a foreign astral object for the first time. Though on hiatus, it was still considered a stepping stone to the future.
• The Voyager space probes had successfully launched and were speeding towards a destiny-laden rendesvous with the outer planets, something seemingly straight out of an Arthur C Clark story (of which others had come true already).
• Launching satellites for commercial applications was becoming profitable for the first time.
• Skylab, and the Soviet equivalent, were aloft and permanently manned stations in orbit.
• The Space Shuttle was under development and promised to make cheap, reliable orbital transit a reality.

Everything was pointing towards a bright future. I got up early in the morning of April 12, 1981 to watch the launch of the first "Space Transportation System" flight live on television. I had a map of the world spread out before me, and a small paper cutout of a space shuttle. Sitting in front of the telvision in my pajamas, I moved the paper shuttle across the map in oscillating sine-wave formations to match the orbital trajectory on the screens of the Houston Space Center. It was a glorious day.

I grew fat on my diet of hopes and promises. The loss of Skylab was unfortunate, but insignificant in the long run; it was simply a proof-of-concept for the real space station, which would be aloft and manned within a few years. We would return to the moon, and have a permanent presence there, by the nineties; we were to have humans on Mars by the new millennium. Still not quite as rapid as Kubrick's vision, but nevertheless promising, and well within the time frame of my expected career. I planned my trajectory to intersect with that design.

As is the case with the best-laid plans, they did not survive contact with reality. The cost of reaching orbit remained frustratingly high; the safety of the Space Shuttle remained significantly less than perfect; and the will of the American political establishment to build upon the successes of the Apollo program waned to a nadir. Reality is as reality dose, but the part that pains the most is the hindsight-fueled realization, now painfully obvious, that the entire Apollo program was simply a gratuitous piece of Cold-War era one-upmanship. The politicians supporting it never truly cared about boosting humanity's role in the cosmos, and as soon as the deed was done, the public's attention proved to be equally fickle. I, and many others, wasted years of our lives and much moral angst preparing ourselves for a future that never arrived. I still see advertisements for T-shirts saying "I want to GO" in the back of pop-sci magazines.

Now, with the Apollo astronauts well into their seventies, and the new generation of astronauts seeming more interested in pursuing illicit affairs with each other than exploring the cosmos, our national desire for space exploration is at an all-time low. The last finger-in-the-eye was the annoucement of Project Constellation, our half-assed attempt to go back to the future by resurrecting old Apollo components and falling back on our old non-sustainable throwaway spaceflight principles of the mid-twentieth-century. Could we be any less ambitious? Yes, we could, we could just cancel the space program outright. Painful as this would be, it would be more honest and merciful than what we have currently: a new generation of young folks being promised the moon, but who, in the end, will only wind up with cheese.

But then again, in the grand scheme of things, this betrayal fits in perfectly with our nation's history. We promised to help the Hmong if they fought for us in southeast Asia; they did, and they are still waiting for us to help them. Their naivete and faith in us is excruciating to behold. Similarly, the US promised to help the Shiites in 1991 if they revolted against Saddam Hussein . They did, believing our promises of assistance; but after they had done so, and at the peak of their power, they were betrayed by the US, who sold them out to curry political favor with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The resulting massacre of Shiites explains, to a certain extent, the tenacity of the insurgency against American forces in Iraq to this day. And going back farther, one could point to the early days of the nation, in our (yes, "our") dealings with the native peoples of this continent. Political expediency has regularly been the driving factor of the day. The space program is simply another in a long list of broken promises.

Watch this space

For all of you six people out there who read my blog, I just want to tell you from the bottom of my heart, thank you. It's something not said often enough in this culture. I'm not sober enough to truly form a rational blog at this particular point in time, but I will be producing more content soon. Expect more juicy, cynical, biting sociao-cultural commentary soon.

Dangit...why is it that key milestones in life are always marked by such disquieting self-examination? That's so inconvenient....

The Waste Land

Two of my favorite works I read as a teenager are being made into films. Alan Moore's Watchmen, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, are both scheduled to hit the silver screen in 2009. This does, on a certain level, fill me with anticipation and excitement.

These two works went a long way to shaping my perceptions and attitudes as a young adult. They took a nerdy kid from the suburbs and blew his mind wide open. I originally read Gibson's magnum opus in high school and it, more than anything assigned as part of a class, introduced me to the power and beauty of the novel format. I wrote a paper on Neuromancer for a college class in 1989 where I explored modernist versus postmodernist themes in the novel (and got an A from the professor, by the way). I still read Gibson's works, and I find it both ironic and utterly appropriate that he has become a cliche, an icon of the past; he now writes about occurrences in recent history with the same veracity and immediacy of his early novels.

Watchmen disturbed me in ways no slasher flick ever could. Apocalyptic visions, concepts of utilitarianism and determinism, and the deconstruction of the hero-myth, in a graphic novel? How could something in a nine-panel format evoke such feelings of intrigue and despair in me? To say I devoued the book would be both a cliche and an understatement.

And now they are both receiving the Hollywood treatment. There has been a near-univeral howl of disapproval on the Internet for these projects, declaring that they are too grand, too cereberal, too mind-blowing to ever be properly captured in a motion picture while still doing the source material justice. And, judging by Hollywood's previous abysmal attempt at a William Gibson work, I would say the naysayers have some strong evidence in their favor. The fact that the director tapped to helm the Neuromancer film only directed music videos and the execrable Torque, only lends credence to this theory. But I would call upon these people to pause and consider another project in which a deep, rich novel's film adapatation was handed to a wild-card director. This project, in violation of all my (and most peoples') expectations, turned out to be a sublime work of genius.

However, let us consider the direction of the movie industry. Over and over we see the breeding ground for directors to be music videos. That has become the Horatio Alger story of the twenty-first century. Scrappy, artsy young man makes a reputation directing music videos. Eventually, he is recognized by the film establishment, and goes on to produce award-winning movies.

I fear that the themes that are signature elements of the music-video format will find their way to dominate the cinema as well. Music videos represent the triumph of style over substance; they are an amalgamation of powerful yet dissonant imagery without any structure. In fact, most videos are very aggressive about not having the classic story-based elements of plot, climax, and resolution; to include those things would be considered "cheap" or "hackneyed." This may originally have been a rebellious rejection of cultural bindings and an honest attempt at post-modernistic or even dada-ist inventiveness. Or, I could be giving music video directors too much credit. Either way, however, the current conventions of the music-video format represent the classic subversion of rebellion by incorporating elements of rebelliousness into the power structure. By now, however, there is nothing anti-confirmist about the lack of plot in music videos. Watching them leave me with a distinct empty feeling, as though they have much unrealized potential.

This is not to say that cinema does not need someone talented with imagery and artifice; indeed, a gifted hand with the camera does improve the quality of the film tremendously. But such an individual should be an art director, or a director of cinematography first; then, if proving himself to be as capable with plot and dialogue as with imagery and cinematography, then he could move up to the overall directorial helm.

So, I wait with bated breath to see how these two projects play out. In the meantime, however, I will endeavor to try something before the Neuromancer film is released: I will write my own version of the script as a tribute to the original work, then compare how closely the movie adheres to my vision.

An interviewer once asked Neil Gaiman what his favorite computer game was. He said the original Zork series, because they "had the best graphics." I know how he feels.

The New Big MMO

There's an article on 1up taking about a mysterious new MMO that LucasArts and BioWare have been secretly working on a major new MMO. No one knows what it is. However, I would like to go on record with my own personal speculation:

(a) It has been in development since 2005
(b) It has a tremendous amount of secrecy about it
(c) The involved parties will not say whether it is an original IP or an existing IP

Speculation has it as a KOTOR MMO, but they would not have that much reason to keep it so hush-hush. Also, that would not explain the "fantasy" term in the job descriptions.

I am going on record today to state that I feel they are working on a Harry Potter MMO. It is an IP that could most definitely apply itself to the MMO genre; the movies themselves are structured, in many ways, like an MMO. The series of books is complete, and the movie series is wrapping up. I think they will go public with this product at approximately the same time the PR for the last Harry Potter film ramps up. As far as I am concerned, it all fits together very well.

What has been seen....