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.
Another Death
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:
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.
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.
eEugenics
eEugenics
The Neo-Nazi enterprise of Dr. Neil Clark Warren
About six years ago, I was a young, single man, looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song goes. Earnestly interested in finding a mutually compatible life partner to whom I could get married, I looked about for whatever tools I could find. I had never been a bar-scene kind of person; "pressing the flesh" was never on my list of core competencies. However, being on the tech-savvy side, I was titilated by the rise of dating websites. I tried some of the more mass-market ones, such as Match.com, and found them crass and shallow. I wanted something more sophisticated.
And then I heard about eHarmony. It sounded wonderful. Its scientific approach to matching couples for life appealed to both my geekish and my romantic sides. Besides, I had always enjoyed taking those Myers-Briggs type tests in college. What did I have to lose? So I lainched into the application process. I answered the questions earnestly, honestly, and conpletely.
Two hours later, when I had finished, I received a strange message: they "could not match me at this time." What, precisely, could that mean? Did that mean they might be able to match me at some point in the future? Perhaps my answers had been so nuanced, so subtle, that they didn't have algorithms sophisticated enough to deal with one such as me. As soon as they upgraded to eHarmony 1.2, perhaps, they would match me.
So, every month or so, I would log back into my account, and be instantly confronted with the same message. Odd, I thought; I would think they would have found someone for me by now.
A year after I initially filled out the form, someone told me an interesting fact. eHarmony rejects a certain percentage of its applicants, and once rejected, they will never try to match you.
Surely there must be some mistake, I thought. I created another e-mail account, logged back in, and took the test again. I answered the questions honestly and fully. And again, I was rejected.
This shook me to the core. What was wrong with me? I was a well-adjusted, early-thirties man, straight, emotionally well-balanced, mature, well-educated, eloquent, and with a good professional career. Well, my friends told me, the company was based on Christian values, so they reject non-Christians, that must have been it.
There's a problem with that theory, though. I am a lifelong Catholic, rasied in the traditional style, with twelve years of private Catholic education under my belt, and am currently practicing. So that can't be it.
So I created another e-mail account, went back to the eHarmony site again, and tried something different. I answered questions randomly. I gave totally haphazard answers, completely nonsensical responses, and gibberish.
And, guess what, this time I was accepted.
At the time, I laughed it off. This proved to me that their algorithms are about as good at analyzing personality as "ELIZA" was at psychotherapy. I went on my way, fording the shark-infested waters of the LA dating scene.
Then, some time later, I became curious about what eHarmony had to say on the matter. I started digging on the web. What I found was prtty disturbing. References to eHarmony rejects as "unmatchable," "damaged," or simply "unworkable." The monst damning was an eHarmony exec woh said that "some people just aren't the marrying type."
So, according to Dr. Neil Clark Warren, I was a hopeless case, never to find a soulmate, forever cursed to wander the world alone. But, I thought, eHarmony was a business, even if a highly hermetic one. Why would they not event want to receive my money, even if they knew that I was not destined for martial bliss?
The truth, apparently, goes much deeper than simply promoting a pro-Christian ideology (one that I would not necessarily say is a bad idea). eHarmony is clearly an attempt to re- institutionalize eugenics in a socially-acceptable manner. Simply put, eugenics is the idea that some people should reproduce, and others should not, for the betterment of the human gene pool. A fine idea on initial blush, until one remembers the ultimate expression of this philosophy. And here we have Dr. Warren, with his cherubic smile and his snow-white hair, expressing the very same philosophies as Adolf Hitler- that some people were simply superior to others, and therefore should be encouraged to procreate, while others should be actively discouraged.
Yes, discouraged. Despite eHarmony's earnest claims that they "simply cannot do anything to help you," they are actually trying to impose a burden of shame and gult on you for not measuring up to their high standards. Otherwise, why would they not simply take your money, and match you with other people who fell into the bottom twenty percent (whatever that means)? Through the implied message of inadequacy, they want you to give up on even trying to reproduce.
Well, I have news for Doctor Warren. Since then, I have found a wonderful lady (the old-fashioned way... in person), and she and I have gotten married. In the Christian tradition, no less, with a priest and church and marriage classes and everything. Our marriage is over a year old and going just fine. Turns out I didn't need Doctor Mengele... er, I mean Warren after all. I reject your rejection, and take the responsibility for building a loving, happy life upon myself. And I am the better person for having done so.
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