Category Archives: Activities

SOPA, Toast!, Facebook, and thoughts

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I’ve written in this blog more this month than the last two combined (if you include this post). And it’s only the 18th. Weird.

Anyway, you’ve probably been hearing about the various site blackouts today in protest of SOPA/PIPA. Given that I work for a tech company, you probably already know my stance on the issue.
It just occurred to me this morning that this conflict seems to be a lot like the kinds of conflicts you see in tech companies.
You have the management types (politicians, MPAA, RIAA, etc) with the money and the power, who want something to happen without really having an understanding of what they’re asking for. You have the tech people (Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist) who have a good understanding of why the request is flawed.
When a direct conflict between the two groups happens in a company, it’s not a good idea for management to blindly push ahead, insisting that they are right over all the protests of the people who really know what’s going on. Do so, and you come out with a crappy product. Do so too much and the company goes bankrupt, or all of your employees quit, and you’re pretty much screwed.
The same thing is happening here. I find it absolutely insane that Congress is attempting to draft legislation that involves so much technical detail, but refuses to listen to the people who really understand that technology. (Or, you know, dismisses them as “profiting from the illegal activities.”)
Sigh.

In other news, I had a birthday, and it was nice. We went to Toast!, and I got the tasting menu with wine pairing, and it was tasty. Probably not nice enough to justify the price tag, but still really nice.
I suppose I’m one of those people who can’t fully appreciate gourmet food and drink. Wine tastes like wine. Food tastes like food. A $30 dinner may taste nicer than a $10 meal at Orient Kitchen (one of my favorite restaurants here), but it doesn’t really feel like it’s 3x as good. So I don’t know.
Service was also not up to what I would expect from such a place. They forgot the wine pairing with my first course (but made up for it at dessert with an aged tawny port), forgot to switch my butter knife for a meat knife (so I pretty much had to fork my salmon apart; they seemed to get everyone else though), ran out of bread (which I suppose is excusable), and just generally weren’t as attentive as you would expect for a restaurant that was mostly empty. Part of it may be the late reservation (7:30). Part of it may be that I was expecting more from hearing people talk about the place (and how they gauge your reaction to each course when selecting the next). I don’t know.
I guess this means I should not attempt to make a trip to The French Laundry. I wouldn’t be able to properly appreciate the food there. (Although I’m sure a $270+ meal would at least not have issues in the service aspect.)

In other other news, I miss Facebook. This is not because I miss Facebook itself, but rather because I miss being able to contact people. It seems that, these days, AIM usage has fallen off and email is generally neglected. When I want to contact certain people now, I pretty much have to send a text message (and that doesn’t even always work). It’s kind of a depressing thought that Facebook has become such a central means of communication, especially over something like email. I don’t know.
I still don’t have plans to get a new Facebook account anytime soon. I’d rather be unable to contact people than deal with their crap again.

In other other other news, I ascended again in KoL to try out bumcheekcity’s ascension script. Apparently, not only does the script not eat or drink for you, it also neglects to find food or drink for you to manually consume. Which meant I was almost stuck with a super-crappy day 1 at level 3 with no food or drink. Luckily I was able to rest in my campground, use the MP to summon Alice’s Army cards and a snack voucher, and use the snack voucher for adventures to spend at the tavern. I’m wondering what other people do for the script. Or do they rely on having spleen familiars to get the adventures necessary? It’s my own damn fault for not ascending manually, yes, but meh.

In other other other other news, I was looking at Photoshop Lightroom as a potential upgrade from Photoshop Elements organizer (currently using version 5). Unfortunately, while Lightroom does have the ability to import Photoshop Elements libraries, it only does so for versions 6 through 9. So my options, if I ever want to upgrade, are to either buy a new version of Photoshop Elements as an intermediate step (to use to upgrade the album file), and then import the upgraded album file into Lightroom (that is, of course, assuming that all of the upgrades work as promised, or I’d have wasted $80 on something pointless)… or to reconstruct my tag library from scratch.
Neither of which is a good option.
Considering doing a small upgrade now to Elements 6, since that’s supported by Lightroom, and Amazon does still sell it (via third parties), and reviews say it doesn’t suck nearly as much as the newer incarnations of Elements, and the process of upgrading the album should work better than an upgrade from 5 to 10. But still, the entire thing has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Do people really not use software for years anymore? Do companies really expect you to be on the new version as soon as it’s out? Elements 5 is just over 5 years old. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of time to use a piece of software you paid for.
I suppose it’s also hypocritical of me to use Elements organizer when I decided not to get a Kindle because of the lock-in effect on Kindle books.
I do have all of my tags written to the photo metadata, so I could potentially switch to anything if I absolutely had to without losing them completely, but I would lose all of the organization I currently have of the tags (like categorization of people tags, separation of people tags from location tags, etc). That’s nontrivial when you have several thousand tags.
Sigh.

I guess this has been a list of things that have been making me sad lately. #firstworldproblems, eh?

Edit: From Ian:

I see SOPA in a very different light from you, I think. I don’t see Congress and media execs having any misunderstandings. They’re old, don’t have a use for the Internet themselves, and accumulating short term earnings for retirement. Fuck the rest of the world.

Yeeeeeah. :\

People Wars

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I started work on People Wars’ Booooth expansion today. I redid the templates slightly to give more room to the photo. I think it looks much nicer this way.


Investigations has also had a few new additions. I went through and screencapped the first episode of Torchwood today, so Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, and the first episode case have been added to the game. I should actually playtest the thing at some point. Anyone interested in helping?

Yay card games. Maybe I’ll get unlazy at some point and continue work on RPG Get!, which has pretty much been on hiatus since last January.

In other life things, Ben moved away last week for Seattle and his new job at Sage. It’s kind of sad since I’ve known him since my Sophomore year of college, and so few old people are left in Pittsburgh. He had a going-away party where we drank his random booze and ate his random meat.

I’ve been taking more photos recently (as shown by my photo stats). Perhaps I should take fewer photos. Although more photos means that I’m actually doing things, which I guess is good. Photoshop album tells me I have taken 276,797 photos since September 2000. Yay photos.

I’m glad the semester is starting up again… for me, it means Tartan on weekends and awesome Tartan people around for games.

Happy New Year

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So it’s 2012. That’s not allowed. How does such a year even exist? :(

life (both stats and life proper) have been updated. People didn’t change much in the last 3 months, so the stats update isn’t terribly interesting.

Life has been full of new music lately. My purchases over the past month have included Mylo Xyloto, Break the Spell, Own the Night, Redemption, Clear as Day, Don’t Waste the Pretty, and Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes Session.
I probably should branch away from American Idol contestants (especially since I haven’t watched the show since season 2, and don’t really follow it). There’s a lot of other great music out there.

Did some more work with the Investigations card game. I revamped the rules a bit (so it’s less like Memory now, with a grid of cards laid out), and hopefully it’ll be shorter to play now. A preliminary (and currently incomplete) website for the game is up at http://investigations.alanv.org. If you have some time, read over the rules and let me know if they make sense. :)

This break has been way too short. More time to vegetate needed. :(

Books and Cards

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I have been succeeding at my goal (from the last post) of being less computer-y. Each day I have gone outside, at least for a bit, and I’ve also been reading a lot… probably more in the past week or so than in the past 4 or 5 years.

A sampling of books from the last 7 days:

So yeah, generally a very eclectic mix of books.

Reading for pleasure again got me interested in buying a Kindle (and Amazon’s timing certainly didn’t hurt). Still, after some experimenting with Kindle books, I think I’m too unwilling to be locked down by DRM (and locked down to a single vendor and device) to justify the purchase. Perhaps this will change in the future, but for now, I’m happily reading my way through the bookshelves in the apartment.

On more computery topics, I’ve also been doing some preliminary planning for the next People Wars expansion, and the future direction of the game in general.
There are a few mechanics I know I want to include (or expand upon), and probably will start doing in this expansion:

  • Ways to exchange kill counters for points, and vice versa
  • More ways to retrieve cards from discard, into the deck or hand
  • Ways to drain cards from opponent decks
  • Ways to power up existing abilities (along the lines of Trigger Text from Student Wars)
  • “Addition” attacks and skills that are stronger when used by the appropriate characters (“+1 damage, +2 if this character is ‘Tartan'”)
  • Character-specific cards (so something that helps only a character named “Tim M.”, for example)
  • “Famous” characters (Al Gore, Randall Munroe, Michael Moore) that have extra traits but negative abilities (“Power: Save the Earth – When you exhaust this character, you must place 3 cards from your discard pile out of play, or you must kill this character”)
  • Larger card photos, particularly with characters, since this both allows me to cut out quotes (the hardest part of making characters right now) and makes the cards more visually appealing
  • More late-game boosts, similar to Anna’s attack from the base set that gets stronger when an opponent has 80 points or 10 kill counters

Along those lines, there’s a couple ideas I’ve been mulling over, and may try out in different ways to see.

  • Multiple of a trait requirements – Requirements like “Technology x 2” were very much a part of all previous iterations of the game mechanic. People Wars kind of naturally shirked that with its location-based trait tabs, and actually seems to be working out better for it. Still, I feel like there could be room for things requiring “Program x 2” or similar. This could be implemented as an addtional requirement in the card text (“You must also exhaust one of your Program characters to play this card”) rather than trying to clutter the trait tabs.
  • Dual-type items – Cards like “iPad” that provides computer and game or “Kindle” that provides computer and book.
  • Attachable Items – Items that bind to a character on play, can only be used by that character, but that refresh automatically with that character
  • Making KGB the “victory” faction – Each of the other factions already has a theme (Tartan characters can boost attack, Clustar characters can share traits, Kiltie characters can cheer). It would be interesting to make the “exchange points and kill counters” mechanics part of KGB. That said, I do want to see the game move more towards blended decks (as opposed to the attack vs task deck distinction that is fairly necessary today), so this may not be such a great idea.
  • Making KGB the “victory” faction – Alternately, have special KGB cards that would add alternate victory conditions. Immediate thoughts that spring to mind are cards representing KGB events (Get Board Get Carded, Steel Kage, Underground Tour) with different (potentially difficult) victory goals.
  • Locations – To further encourage blended decks, I could add a new card type that requires points to play, but that provides combat benefits. The initial thought was Location cards that played into a side deck, then used when an attack phase begins, that could provide offensive and defensive boosts for that round. Then again, this can also be implemented similarly with storage cards, or as events
  • Game-modification cards – Add a new “Seed” card type that is played during setup and modifies the game in certain ways (for example, establishing a victory condition of 50 points and 5 kill counters for you instead, or allowing a predetermined starting hand at the cost of deck discards before the game). This would also be a good way to encourage blended decks. I’m just concerned that the game is not large enough yet to support such modifications.
  • Another special item type – Adding a new type which is used for extra powerful attacks and skills, but whose item cards always have negative requirements (like damaging the user or discarding cards). The thought was to use the type for deck-replenishing and deck-draining skills, since those are both particularly powerful mechanics.
  • Group characters – Trios and quartets, in addition to dual characters, would seem to be beneficial for task decks (both due to higher HP and larger trait selection). Would be an interesting counter to some of the attack-boosting thoughts above.

I guess this post was mostly a brain dump.

If anyone has suggestions on books to read, game mechanics to try, or feedback on anything I have puked out above, please let me know. :)