The final death knell of Harshlands

Today I did my weekly login to Harshlands. I don't go in to roleplay or participate anymore; all I do is keep my cart stocked for the benefit of those players who use it as part of the Tashal economy, while slowly accruing silver I will need if they ever make caravanning possible.

But I don't really play. No, I stopped that a couple of months ago, as I wrote about in the blog. There were a number of reasons. A lot of them were flaws in the game, in what it was trying to do versus what the admins were willing to let it do. Some were based on the simple unprofessionalism of the admins, my exposure to which all ran back to one act of twinkery that went unpunished and almost ruined my character last year -- that act wasn't the real issue, though, it was the hostility that it engendered in the admins towards me. I continued to pour my soul into the game, doing lots of in-character development, plus serving as a volunteer coder, hoping that one day they'd make good on their promises to make caravanning work, and hoping that the other problems could be worked around or lived with. But instead, caravanning got less viable as time went on. Most of the people I enjoyed playing with left, or had their characters die and recreated in other places, or went dormant, or simply got themselves involved in things that prevented my character from running into them. Playing got to be no fun. But I stuck it out for months until I finally stepped away... announcing I would keep my cart stocked and be ready to caravan if it ever got viable.

So today I went to stock my cart to find that it had been robbed. Again. Now, this might not seem too odd, but you have to understand the situation. It's a two-wheeled peddler's cart; there's not really room to be on it, let alone hidden inside it, and it only has "interior" rooms because of OOC code limitations -- that's how the stockroom is handled. Here's a similar cart, only much larger because it's four-wheeled:



Bolted to the cart is a sturdy wooden strongbox with a hefty lock. Inside that is a sturdy chest with a lock. There's another locked area where the goods are kept (and where revenue is stored).

The cart is smack dab in the middle of the busiest square in the entire island. The room description specifically says that the square is crowded shoulder-to-shoulder even in the middle of the night, and that the whole square is brightly illuminated with lanterns. There are several guards posted there, in addition to the peddler who works the cart.

Months ago, while my character was a struggling journeyman trying to close the gap between the incredibly poor income rate of a peddler (mostly caused by game limitations) and the huge startup costs of a caravanner, his life savings was robbed from that chest. The admins explained away this impossible act by claiming that it was done at a time when the square was emptied due to an unprecedent invasion of undead. Fair enough, except that I read about that invasion hours before it happened. Trouble is I can't prove that. The admins never admitted, and still do not admit, that there was twinkery involved -- which is funny because the players involved have admitted it was twinkish. And based on that it was handled IC, including my character paying 3000 silver (a large fortune) for lifelong protection against further robbery.

Today, he was robbed again. This time, all three locks were picked, and it's probable merchandise was also taken (no way to tell -- either it sold and the silver from the sale was taken, or it was taken, or some of both).

Now, the important thing which will escape most people's attention is that this isn't about the robbery or the silver. As I write this, the issue of whether this is a twink remains to be decided, and if it is, I might get the silver back. I can't say I'm terribly optimistic given how badly this was handled last time. And yet, the last time might force them to handle it better this time, since they got caught screwing up last time and then refusing to admit their mistake and digging themselves in deeper, so they're extra defensive now. But it doesn't matter.

See, it turns out that the responses I got to my petitions were insulting in a way that defies even my low expectations. It's so far into childish it might be intentionally playful in a way that went very wrong, but even if you grant every possible benefit of the doubt, it still ends up painfully insulting. Amongst the more infuriating insults concerns my use of OOC rather than IC methods to deal with this and everything else -- a clear suggestion that I don't count since I no longer roleplay:

And if not well that is sort of something not
to handle in character.
No, would probably be something out of character.
Best to come in and not play really.
Just use the mechanics.
And stuff like that.
And when stuff does not work fix it.
And go on using the mechanics.
Would really be better that way.
No tension of roleplay and stuff.
And no in character out of character seperation needs.
For all would be out of character.
Another good idea.
Thanks.

Of all the people to be snarky to about handling things IC and contributing to the game, they are so completely off-base to pick me. Plus they deleted the post I made on the forum about it. So what do you think the odds are that they're ever going to feel like treating me fairly, live up to their promises, and make me welcome in the game again?

A tiny part of me wants to note that I still have coder access to their box and could cause an essentially unlimited amount of harm to the game if I wanted. Luckily for them I'm very much not the vindictive sort; this post is about the meanest thing it's in me to do, and that's mostly wanting things to be aired. Besides, I would never punish the other players; they're suffering enough as it is, and if anything I want to find ways to make things better for them on the way out. (The tiny part wonders if crashing the game might not make things better for them, though; maybe being forced out of the game is the best thing for them.)

I am currently "closing up shop" in the game so that my character's departure is explained, and his assets are used to at least benefit those who remain behind, continuing what little I was able to do to add to the game for the benefit of other players. It's frustrating and angering, and yet at the same time, it's almost a relief to close the door on this chapter finally.

Though when I say "finally" I must admit that I have made provisions to undo this departure in the extremely remote possibility that things change. In the short term, that'd mean them changing their tune and coming back with a very convincing apology. If that happened (and just after monkeys flew out of my butt) I'd be able to undo my departure with minimal IC explanation needed. In the longer term, if they stepped down as admins, in favor of someone with more professionalism, I could probably explain my character's return and start afresh.

But these are both very remote possibilities. They don't feel like not closing the door, just like the chance a new door could maybe be opened someday, but not likely. I still get the sense of closure.

The subject is not the first line

I was tempted to make the title of this blog post be "Did you ever notice how..." After all, how often have you seen an email, forum or newsgroup post, blog post, etc. where the subject was something like that?

There's a reason we have a subject field separate from the body of the message. The subject or title should summarize what the body is about. Having it in a separate place enables the reader to find the items of interest to him. It allows focused searches, effective threading, and indexing of entries. Imagine what a visit to your library's card catalog would be if every book's title was just the first five words of the book!

When you simply dump the first few words of the body into the subject, you're defeating the purpose of both. You're making it harder for me to read whatever collection of messages or items your entry is in: a forum, my email inbox, a blog, whatever. And that means you're making it less likely that I'll read yours.

So use the subject or title to record the subject or title of your post, okay?

But I want to want those things!

The ideal outcome of a hypothetical weight reduction regimen would be this: I would still want and enjoy and eat all the same foods I do now, but I would be satisfied -- genuinely satisfied -- with smaller amounts, and those amounts would allow me to lose weight and end up healthier.

But what about something where the net result of the procedure was that I no longer even wanted or liked some things I now like?

Obviously, after the procedure I wouldn't miss those things, any more than right now I miss brussel sprouts or pickles. I would be perfectly content. And people who have had gastric bypass and found that formerly-loved foods are no longer desirable tend to insist that they're glad they did it; they have no regrets.

Yet the me now can't help rebel at the idea. I get so much pleasure from, say, a good New York bagel slathered with cream cheese. A surgery that made me like only a small portion of that, that'd be fine; I'd still have the same enjoyment followed by the same satisfaction. But a surgery that left me no longer desiring it in the first place... I can't help feel like I'd be losing something. The pleasure I get now from that bagel would be simply gone, with nothing to replace it.

Any argument that a post-op person gives to defuse this "concern" feels hollow: it has the ring of someone who has lost something and lost the ability to know he lost it. I don't mean to sound overdramatic, but it sounds like someone who's been brainwashed. One can't help imagining that if a later surgical development restored to them the ability to enjoy those dishes they've said goodbye to, they'd be the first to say "thank heavens, I had forgotten what I was missing!"

I can't help imagine someday a better version of the surgery coming along that is like what I originally described: you like the same things, just less of them. And those people who have already had today's surgeries will not be able to "upgrade" (and may be so "brainwashed" that they don't think they want to).

And yet, the people who've had the surgeries almost all agree that they don't regret giving up those things. And so too would I not regret them if I had the surgery. Is it foolish, petty, and self-defeating to be even concerned about it now?

Gastric bypass surgery

This weekend I had a small job I picked up through RentACoder to record a TV show and do a transcript of the show, which entailed watching it several times. The show is called Action Hero Makeover, and it turns out it's about a relatively new variation on gastric bypass ("stomach stapling") surgery, as it was performed on Gil Gerard.

If you don't know me, you should know that I'm extremely obese, with a BMI in the 75 range. Most of the typical complications and correlated illnesses, however, have not been a problem for me. I've never had high blood pressure, and my cholesterol has generally ranged from acceptable to very good (with the exception of HDL which I just can't get to go up). I've shown no signs of heart disease.

In recent years I've been diagnosed with type II diabetes. However, I've also shown that it's possible for me to control it, even without meds. I've also shown that I can fail to stay in control. This progressive failure is mostly because of my own failures of willpower, but it's certainly true that my weight contributes: it's hard to be active and exercise when my weight itself is an obstacle so often, in the form of knee pain and general soreness at even modest activity, the difficulty of getting started, the cost of equipment that can hold up to me, and the general low level of energy I have.

Generally speaking I believe that it's possible to be "fit and fat", and that the medical community has assisted in perpetrating a number of fallacious ideas about overweight, the most pernicious being that if there are poor health conditions associated with overweight, that losing weight is invariably a means to solve them.

• First, correlation in the public at large doesn't mean correlation in any individual; for instance, my lack of blood pressure problems at my size is unusual, but it doesn't hint at a hidden problem.
  
• Second, correlation isn't causation; many of the ill effects associated with overweight are effects of a common cause, not effects of overweight itself, and trying to prevent them by eliminating overweight can be like trying to avoid sickle-cell anemia by bleaching your skin.
  
• Third, even when a health problem can be reduced or eliminated by losing weight, that doesn't always mean the health effects of attempting to do so aren't worse. Though rarely publicized, the ill effects of almost all forms of dieting are well-proven, and it's clear that dieting is not only rarely effective but usually counterproductive.

That said, I wouldn't mind not being fat one bit. There are lifestyle reasons; one feels petty talking about the thousand discomforts of being in a world that refuses to fit me, and one feels like arguing with the world and insisting it accomodate me rather than "giving up" and adjusting to fit it, but despite that, it'd sure be nice to be able to fit on planes and in cars, not have to apologize every time I try to pass someone in a restaurant, and be able to buy clothes cheap and easy. And there are health reasons like back and knee pains I wouldn't mind missing.

But the best reason is to be rid of diabetes. Yes, rid of diabetes. This is something I've really thought of as impossible, and that's what really struck me about that show I was transcribing from. Before the surgery, Gil was a very out-of-control diabetic, with fasting blood glucose numbers in the 300 range; we weren't told if he was doing anything to treat it, and it's possible he wasn't because other, more serious health concerns he was dealing with would preclude most forms of treatment. After the surgery, his fasting blood glucose was in the 100 range -- entirely normal, with no diabetes treatment at all. It's commonly said that once you're diagnosed diabetic you can only be "in control" or "out of control" but you can't ever not be diabetic, but even the doctors described Gil unequivocally as no longer diabetic.

I've known about variations on "stomach stapling" for years, but they were very dangerous and not terribly effective. Before I was diagnosed diabetic, I didn't give them much thought; clearly they were a lot of risk to solve not very much. (It didn't help that my father died on the table in exactly this kind of procedure; though it probably didn't hurt as much as you might think, given that my father was never very close to me, and that I am not the kind to obsess and worry and get wrapped up in fear because of something like that.)

Even after my diagnosis, I still didn't think much about them because they still seemed too risky, and I didn't think they'd make that big a difference: maybe they'd cure the discomfort of airplane seats, but not diabetes. I always had a general sense that one day the risk would be reduced to near nil, the efficacy improved to highly reliable, and the option would become far more accessible; and then I'd have to re-evaluate. But I didn't think that day was anywhere near yet.

The show made me wonder if maybe the time is nearing after all. Dr. Rutledge's technique, Mini-Gastic Bypass (MGB), offers some very compelling advantages even over the "state of the art" techniques now being done all over the country. The risk of dying on the table is now comparable to everyday surgeries like appendectomies. Other complications are very rare for the most common procedures, but for MGB they're far lower still, almost negligible. MGB also costs a good deal less, since it's a laparoscopic technique with a recovery time measured in hours, not weeks. I'm not just reciting the TV show's points; most of these comparisions between MGB and other bariatric procedures weren't mentioned in the show. But I've been doing a bunch of reading, and MGB simply becomes a more compelling option the more I read. Not merely by comparison to other bariatric surgery options, but more generally, as something that maybe I should seriously considering doing.

However, there are two big snags.

• Requirements: All forms of bariatric surgery require you to demonstrate extensively to the surgeons that you have spent years and years sincerely trying other methods of losing weight, and failing. While I have done "diet and exercise" for years, and it's easy to show I haven't lost weight and kept it off, I would have to lie to suggest I was trying to lose weight. Apart from the discomforts like back pain and difficulty finding clothes that fit, I haven't minded my weight; it's my diabetes I have minded, and I found that my control over that and my weight were barely correlated, if they were correlated at all. I did lose weight during my "in control" years even though I wasn't really trying to; but sometimes I gained it back, and my control didn't track my weight really at all. Would my attitude towards my weight be considered by the surgeons and therapists to be "unhealthy"? Would they refuse to consider me because I hadn't tortured myself enough with diets and done enough damage to myself before coming to them? Maybe I could parley my struggle with diabetes into something, but I'm doubting that could really live up to the kind of onerous requirements I'm seeing.
  
  
• Insurance: It'd be easy to prove to an insurance company that, if someone's going to be on their insurance for a long time, it'll make far, far more sense in the long run to let them get surgery like this than to wait for insurance to have to pay for the ongoing treatment of a chronic problem like diabetes, then deal with the complications. It's a no-brainer: $17,000 now versus tens, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions over the course of a life. But what's this, logic, in a paragraph that started with the word "Insurance"? What was I thinking? No doubt the insurance company is hoping that my employer will change insurance companies before then, or failing that, that I'll be hit by a bus. Or perhaps they still think that everyone who is overweight is so because they're evil. Either way, they don't cover procedures like this. Could one wangle an exception based on "medical necessity"? Uncertain. But given how it took months of stress-inducing, health-eroding arguing with them just to cover a better blood sugar meter, one can't help wonder if the cost they'd exact in sheer agony wouldn't make surgery seem like recreation by comparison. This is a doubly interesting question to ask right now since our long-time primary care physician is moving away, so we don't even know who our new doctor is yet. Who knows how sie will feel about us? Or how good sie will be at dealing with the insurance company, even if sie decides this is worth fighting for?

Yet through all of this haze, the image keeps haunting me of the idea of not being diabetic anymore. If this is going to happen, there's a lot of thinking, research, planning, struggle, and perhaps outright fighting, and a lot of time, in between me and it. I guess maybe it's time to start preparing to start prepare to decide whether I'm going to start preparing to do it. Maybe.

Poor Odysseus

After several years of wandering aimlessly around my house getting into messes, Odysseus, our Roomba Discovery, has found his way back to his charging base for the last time. iRobot made me wait two weeks for a firmware upgrade that didn't help, as I knew it wouldn't -- you can't fix hardware problems by updating software. Now they are willing to do an out-of-warranty exchange for $95 which gets me a fresh new (or at least refurbished) Roomba Discovery, while Odysseus probably gets refurbished too.

Meanwhile, Telemachus, our Roomba Dirt Dog, is filling in best he can for his dad. Telemachus is made primarily for basements, workshops, garages, and decks, and has no vacuum, only sweeping. He's not nearly as good as his dad is at doing the floors. But he does well enough that Penelope, the Scooba, can mop them effectively. It gets the job done, but I am really looking forward to having a proper Roomba again.

If Odysseus is gone, what should his successor be named? It's tempting to keep the name, since it's so appropriate, and since the replacement will be identical and a refurb besides, so is it really different from if he were sent off to be fixed? Besides, using the name of one of his suitors (probably Antinous) just seems too bleak.

But then the perfect solution occurred to me: Aethon, the name Odysseus affected while he was disguised as a beggar. So it won't be him, but maybe it still will...

24 Season 5

Did another marathon session of 24, though this time even more interrupted by other things and spread out over a slightly longer period of time. (Spoilers follow for Season 5.)

I noticed something amusing: we spent Super Bowl weekend watching a season where a big chunk of plot centered around attempts to get and hold the nuclear football, then we waited for the President's Day weekend to watch a season that revolved around the contrast between two presidents, one of which was assassinated. Maybe we should watch a season over Valentine's Day so Jack can finally get some lovin'.

Season 5 is very bleak compared to earlier seasons. It starts off with a "holy " moment and then throws a few more at you for good measure. But it's not just how many people die, or even how many named characters die. We also see a lot of Jack's wild behavior in the past catching up with him, long-deferred consequences hitting him hard, both in his personal life and his work. We see even fewer people we can trust, as the most cherished institutions fall one by one to treason, forcing Jack to actions even farther beyond the pale than usual.

But most of all, we go a long long time with no victories, even small ones. Season 4's plot was a string of separate crises that were actually tightly knitted together into an overall arc of threat, which meant we kept having minor victories mixed with our new threats. But a huge section of season 5 went by without a single victory to ease the tension, and when one finally came (Jack finally got the recording), it was taken away again almost immediately, and this time irrevocably.

Speaking of the recording, I kept being annoyed that no one would just make a copy. Jack could have played it through his cell phone the first time he had it. Maybe that copy wouldn't constitute absolute proof, but it would certainly ease some of the pressure of CTU not believing or backing him, and it would have been an unlosable backup. And who could believe that Chloe's first action wouldn't be to make a digital copy and then store encrypted copies of it in a thousand different sites on the Internet? But I can't really complain, because if you allow that, then you have to ask why Henderson didn't just step on the recorder, or put a bullet in it. So I guess the McGuffin absurdities cancel each other out.

I'd say I enjoyed season 4 more than season 5 on the whole. I'm not averse to bleakness or to seeing cared-for characters dying or to having to wait for my payoff. I don't think those are why it wasn't quite as engaging. I'm not saying 5 was bad, just not quite as good.

Incidentally, is this the first season without an appearance of Naked Mandy?

My 15 minutes of fame

You may have heard about how Congress changed when Daylight Savings Time takes effect this year, and a lot of people are scrambling to get computers to handle this properly. This is a real trivial thing -- the worst that'd happen is computers may show the wrong time for a few weeks, but it wouldn't even mess up their calculations. Calling it "Y2K lite" (as I've seen in the news) is just the media trying to hype a story out of nothing.

So in a completely humdrum bit of my work one day, I have a slightly older version of Unix for which no official patch has been issued, but that's no big deal. It's not a bunch of coding, just a configuration file, and that is in a common format for many versions of many releases of Unix. I tried to get one from a later version of my flavor of Unix, but couldn't get the archive to unpack, so I found one in a patch for a version of Sun's Solaris Unix which I could get to, and that worked fine.

The whole process probably took me two hours, though not straight through -- it was two hours of doing this and several other things. It was maybe 15 minutes of actual work. And it would have been maybe a minute if I spent more time doing Unix things; it was only unfamiliarity (my Unix system takes such good care of itself that by the time I have to do something on it, I have to remind myself of basics) that made it take that long.

It was a trivial thing of no import. It would be like if an auto mechanic couldn't find the right size wiper blades, so took ones a little too large and cut them to fit.

I happened to mention this in a post somewhere on a forum, I don't even know where, and on a very slow news day, a reporter for ComputerWorld named Patrick Thibodeau happened to see my post and contacted me. He was writing an article about the DST change, one which makes too much of a big deal out of the "threat" (because, of course, big threats sell news), and wanted some information. We talked a few times briefly and my sense was that he was looking to round out an article with "real life" examples from a few people. And furthermore that my story turned out way too uninteresting to be worth even a brief quote.

Skip ahead several weeks to today. At work, out of the blue, I got a call from the secretary of the technology editor of the Boston Globe who wanted to talk to me about the article I was featured in, and the incident behind it. When I agreed, somewhat dumbfounded, I was asked to hold for the editor, and then another person was talking to me. This is someone who is too important to dial his own phone, and he was talking to me about this.

Well, I restated that this was no big deal at all, and then once the call was done, went to look through ComputerWorld. Sure enough, I found this article in which I am prominently featured. I'm glad I come off looking good, not like an idiot, though I'm a little uneasy about being featured as having to administer an "outdated" version of Unix -- it's only one version behind a supported version!

So now my co-workers are making fun about how I'm famous, and I didn't even find out I was in this article until a week after it was printed, and it's about the most trivial thing ever. I hope all the geeks out there are rolling their eyes at the reporter, not at me, for making such a big deal out of nothing. And I'm just a little freaked about being featured in a prominent computer magazine and not even knowing about it. I just don't know how to react. I guess I kind of hope it's all just going to be forgotten tomorrow. But if I get another call from someone who is too important to dial his own phone, I don't know how I am going to react.

I guess it's good to get national exposure for being clever. I just wish it was over something where I actually had been clever. I'm not sure why this is freaking me out at all, but it is.

Snow final tally

We got just over 3' of snow at my house. The railings in this photo are 4' above the deck.



Okay, skiiers and snowmobilers, you got what you wanted. Now be quiet. That was the deal.

Snowed in

Like millions of other people in the States, I'm snowed in today. We've gotten two feet here already, I think, or near to it, and this is due to go on through the night. The woodstove is warm and the house is comfy, and I needed to take time off from work anyway as I was nearing my leave cap.

If only I had a good Internet connection that didn't go from bad (on normal days) to worse (in heavy weather), it'd be a great day.

The necessity of sunglasses

When I was a kid I played outside in the full sunlight all the time and never had sunglasses, but nowadays if I go outside and it's full sunny I need sunglasses. What happened?

Is it my eyes aging? (My acuity of vision is still as good as it ever was, though I realize that might not be measuring the same thing.) Is it that I live in a more northerly attitude so the sun is lower in the sky? Is it the thinning of the ozone layer and other environmental depredations making sunlight more intense? Did I always need sunglasses and just didn't know it, or got used to it?

A delightfully counterintuitive bit of math

Let c be 0.9999~. The ~ means "extending infinitely"; just as 1/3 equals 0.3333~.

Then 10c = 9.9999~.

10c - c = 9.9999~ - 0.9999~.

Solving the right side of this equation is easier if you line the numbers up like so:

9.9999~
0.9999~
---------
9.0000~

So 10c - c = 9.

So 9c = 9.

So c = 1.

Therefore, 0.9999~ = 1.

It doesn't "approximate" 1, it's not just "really close to" 1, it's exactly equal. They are two different expressions in numeral form of the same number, the same way 1/2 = 2/4.

It's remarkably simple and can be understood by anyone who's taken 7th grade algebra, and yet it's so counterintuitive that at least half of people, having seen the proof, refuse to believe it.

Here's another approach.

1/3 = 0.3333~ (nearly everyone believes that one)
Multiply both sides by 3, and you get...
1 = 0.9999~

I love explaining this to people and watching them get upset at how they can't disprove it, but they want to so badly. It's a mind-bending and hopefully mind-broadening experience for them.

Damn furriners

A recent episode of House let me learn a new word, gadje, which is the word used by the Romani people (sometimes called "gypsies") to refer to outsiders. Like many other peoples who have been persecuted (or even some who haven't), the Romani have a strict "us and them" separation complete with a special word to use to refer to the "them" side.

Here are some similar words I know:

• Gadje (Romani)
  
• Gaijin (Japanese)
  
• Goyim (Hebrew)
  
• Gweilo (Chinese)
  
• Guizi (also Chinese)
  
• Gringo (Mexican)

I can't imagine any good linguistic reason why these should all start with the same letter, and more significantly, the same phoneme. But I can't think of a single counterexample. Just a freak meaningless coincidence? Do you know a counterexample (or any more to add to the list)?

Turning in circles

You're sitting in your room and decide to get up, walk across the room, do something (check the thermostat, get some more drink, etc.) and then return to where you started. Depending on tiny details of the arrangement of furniture, your own personal habits, etc. you might find that your return trip completely reverses every movement you made, but it might not. Instead, you might have gone through a rotation before your return.

To picture what I mean, imagine this. An empty room, a chair facing a wall. You stand up from the chair and walk to the wall, then turn to your left to turn around. You walk back to the chair, then turn to your right to sit in it. Your movements have completely reversed themselves.

Now do the same thing but at the very end, turn left, not right, before sitting down. You're in the same end position, but now, you've done a complete 360° turn to the left (counter-clockwise, as seen from above) in the process.

On a trip around the house to do a few things before returning to your seat, you might do several turns in both directions. Over the course of a day, do you end up exactly cancelling out your turns? Probably not. I bet most of us turn more one direction than the other, and so gradually over our lives, we end up gradually accumulating rotations in one direction (probably clockwise).

Imagine if every time you did a full rotation, you shifted yourself into an adjacent universe, different only by one tiny slice of probability. Maybe most people rotate back and forth in a small set of adjacent, almost identical universes. But some people favor one foot or the other, so they tend to rotate gradually away from their original probability, and as a result, end up in a universe that differs from their own by too little for them to become consciously aware of it, but by enough that the dissonance makes them seem out of place. Maybe they end up geniuses or madmen or both.

Maybe you could learn how to do this on purpose, rotating the right number of turns to select the alternate probability curve on which you didn't just drop your cellphone on the floor, or the one where the fourth number on the lottery was 18 instead of 19. Though the more you did this, the greater the risk you'd end up too far from your original dimension.

What do other people think about while they're heading back from the fridge with a fresh cup of soda?

24 Season 4

Since the Super Bowl cancelled roleplaying and we had nothing particular to do this past weekend, we decided to do something I've always wanted to try: watching a whole season of 24 straight through. Well, not completely straight through -- we didn't do it in one sitting! I'm not strong enough for that, though I really wonder what it'd be like. But we started Friday evening and finished Sunday afternoon, without watching anything else in between.

Because of the crush of stuff to do we have fallen several seasons behind on 24, which we allowed ourselves to do because it's more fun to watch on DVD anyway. So we watched season 4. If you haven't seen that, spoilers may follow. Season 4, in case you don't recall, introduces Secretary of Defense Heller and his daughter Audrey.

I definitely enjoyed this season and I felt like watching it back to back enhances it more than the suspense of having to wait a week does. I liked it better than season 2 (which was nicely plotted, but veered too far into unbelievability at times) and season 3 (which felt scattered to me, though that might be my fault, I was a little scattered watching it; never figured out if it was unfocused and that's why my interest faded, or if my scattered attention is what made it seem unfocused).

Season 1 of course had that "first season" freshness and it didn't pull any punches or pander to its audience. On the other hand, its plot was a little uneven. For good reason: they only got a greenlight for 13 episodes with a hope to renew for the other 11, and in a decision that every science fiction fan can get behind, decided to set the story up so it would have a satisfactory ending after 13 episodes. Naturally they put hooks in for the other half, but of course the priority was on the episodes they had approved, to make sure they were good enough to get the renewal. Plus they couldn't get actor contracts through the whole season for all the incidental characters so they couldn't count on actors remaining available, and killed off some of the characters earlier than might have ultimately been ideal. So there was a bit of a lull in the middle of the season, then a few dumb plot twists (don't remind me about the amnesia bit!) before it wrapped up for a great ending. One can't help wonder how great season 1 could have been if they'd had the greenlight for all 24, but you can't blame the creators for the flaws.

Season 4 had tight plotting that knitted together a lot of stuff into a single story with a lot of twists but nothing (well, almost) that didn't follow from earlier stuff. There's hints in the early episodes about things that don't become clear until much later, and it's fun trying to figure out where it's going. It was also enjoyable to start with only a few characters from previous seasons (Jack, Chloe, Erin Driscoll, and President Keeler) and then start seeing others appear, but with each one being a plot twist of its own. And I loved the dynamic between Chloe and Edgar -- the scene near the end where they talk about Chloe's lack of emotional fallout from her activities in the field was precious.

One thing I can fault this season with, though, was a decidedly conservative slant on a few things. I should not be, and am not, really surprised that Fox would nudge the show in that direction, but it was still a bit jarring when it happened, especially given how liberal-leaning earlier seasons were (particularly in the person of Senator and then President Palmer). We saw a fair amount of it in Secretary Heller, who was definitely a conservative and who often got to depict his views in clear, strong words against others (most notably his son) who depicted their side extremely poorly. Heller also had the advantage of being put into fictional circumstances which justified all his attitudes and gave him a chance to be noble and heroic as he espoused them.

But where they got really heavy-handed was later in the season when they brought in an Amnesty Global (a very thin disguise for Amnesty International) lawyer working (unwittingly, at least) for the terrorists by demanding due process for a captive in CTU's custody. Our heroes needed to torture this suspect since he was their only lead on the terrorists (and we can set aside for the moment how torture gets good intel on TV shows like 24 but not in real life, since that's true no matter what the show's political leanings are). Eventually Jack had to go renegade just to torture the guy. The story didn't really follow what happened to him after that.

The show depicted this suspect as being able to almost but not quite get off entirely because he claimed that he had no connections to the terrorists. But CTU agents (quite a few of them) plainly saw him having cordial relations with the one he later claimed he did not know, and who attacked him and tried to steal his boat. Inexplicably, no one called him on this issue, nor on the fact that he was lying to law enforcement agencies.

Nothing in this would have forced him to tell them what they needed to know, of course. But the show depicted it as if CTU barely even had grounds to hold him. Realistically, even the Amnesty "Global" lawyer, on learning that the suspect had been seen by multiple credible witnesses doing business with a known terrorist responsible for attacks on US citizens on US soil, and then lied about it to law enforcement in his presence, would have advised his client to come clean and divulge whatever information he had in order to substantially reduce his sentence. (Brenda Lee from The Closer would have had him singing in five seconds without even looking cross at him.)

It didn't really ruin my enjoyment of the show; bigger plot holes get dodged like flying bullets in every act. But I hope that it doesn't continue to escalate in later seasons.

Weasel words

The canonical example of "weasel words" is this line you've been hearing in toothpaste commercials all your life: "Nothing gets your teeth cleaner!" Sometimes they even say that clinical studies show this.

Of course the true results of the studies, done decades ago and never repudiated, is that all the toothpastes were equal in effectiveness. Of course the advertisers don't want to say "exactly as good as all the other brands, even the cheaper ones", so instead they say something that sounds like it means their brand is the best, but doesn't really mean that.

My father liked to make fun of this by saying "Hmm, if nothing gets your teeth cleaner, that's what we should use, nothing!" As it turns out, the joke's on him, as well as on the toothpaste manufacturers. Dry brushing (without toothpaste or even water) turns out to be more effective than toothpaste for your dental health. (Though most people still use toothpaste for that clean feeling.) So by trying to deceive us, the toothpaste manufacturers accidentally have been telling us the literal truth all these years.

Spoilers vs. the storytelling art

I'm sure there are some people who genuinely love spoilers for their favorite TV shows, but it's my pet theory that a lot of the people who say they do, and think they do, only feel that way because they don't realize what they're missing.

Spoilers are an instant-gratification for the impatient. The story makes you want to know what's going to happen and spoilers are a cheap solution. But that suspense is part of what you were watching the show for in the first place! It's not something to be solved, any more than you should solve a rollercoaster's scariness by making it flat.

Making a TV show, movie, play, etc. is a very complicated art. There are hundreds of tiny decisions that go into every moment. A delicate balance of subtle, almost subliminal factors, ranging from the intricacies of facial expressions of a good actor to the precise timing of camera movements to the details of color in a costume, cumulatively (and holistically) have an impact on the mind of the observer. The producer isn't just tossing plot revelations at you; he's not even only telling you a story. He's crafting, from a thousand tiny brushstrokes, an experience.

Start tinkering with any part of that experience and you may end up diminishing the enjoyment you get from it, possibly even in ways you wouldn't consciously notice. For instance, watch it on a TV whose color calibration is way off, and you might miss subtle cues or have some aspects of the psychological impact of the scene diminished or removed, which can throw the whole balance. You may well come away thinking not "that seemed good but I didn't appreciate it as much as I could", but rather, thinking "that sucked! Why did other people say so much good stuff about it?"

It's my considered opinion that a lot of people are eroding their enjoyment of TV shows by embracing spoilers, without even necessarily realizing it. Inevitably they end up complaining about how the show has really gone downhill, and maybe it has, but I bet some of the time, it's at least in part because they've been changing how they watch the show.

Let the storytellers practice their art. That's what they're (hopefully) good at. They chose when that plot twist would be revealed for good reasons, to maximize its impact on you, to crank up suspense, to build up a payoff, to improve your enjoyment of the show. They went to school for this, they got picked out of a large number of contenders based on their talent, they spend all day every day thinking about how it can best be done. Let's do them the honor of trusting them to do their craft. Or at least have the decency not to bitch at them about how badly they do it, if we aren't even going to let them do it their way.

Jonesing for roleplaying

It's not a conspiracy, it just feels like one.

Of the last ten weekly roleplaying game sessions, we've managed to play on three. Between the holidays, illnesses, visiting girlfriends, and other causes, spread out over the entire group, we've flat-out cancelled seven out of ten. Next week is already pre-emptively cancelled due to the Stupid Bowl. And with another third of our group recently succumbed to the WoW zombie cult, my hopes for this turning around are dwindling.

When we do play, out of a seven-hour block of time, we usually get 3-4, tops. It takes minimum 2 hours, more often 3, for us to get through late arrivals, eating lunch, watching unnecessary TV, and assorted socializing. We often end an hour early too.

Where MUDs used to be a source for a cheap substitute, my terrible luck with them has rendered them unhelpful. I'm only playing one right now and that one is not really there for roleplaying. (And what little roleplaying I can get out of there is currently stymied by the eternal impossibility of getting a bunch of people to show up at the same time to do something.)

My efforts to set up an experimental conventional roleplaying game in SecondLife, as a means to fit roleplaying in when time and distance don't permit the old "gather in a room" approach, have completely come up dry. I could only get five people to even start on being interested, and I have not found a time that can get three of them, let alone all five. It's pulling teeth to even get anyone to say something as simple as "Saturdays are good but Sundays bad for me". I'm pretty near to giving up the ghost on it.

O roleplaying, why hast thou forsaken me?

Taking another stab at caravanning

I guess I wasn't too surprised when my almost departure from Harshlands did not lead to any renewed interest amongst the administrators in putting in the few hours of work necessary to make caravanning a possibility, and thus make my character playable again.

At some level I guess I was hoping they might say, "oops, I guess he wasn't bluffing" (since so often people "quit" MUDs "forever" on a regular basis) or even "oops, I guess more people were affected by him than we thought". Maybe I hoped they'd say "hey, some of these criticisms have some substance to them." I was even hoping they'd say "hey, the way we sometimes react to criticism by shutting down instead of addressing it needs to change". Most of all I hoped that they'd take my claim that they could have caravanning at a "good enough" stage in a few hours and just do it already, if only to set the stage for the improvements that'd make it better (and which I as a coder might facilitate).

Instead I think they mostly concluded, "good riddance, one less problem to worry about".

Independently, however, I had brought to my attention by another player a fan-written, but very professionally done, exhaustive, and complete, book on Mercantyling, a supplement I long thought was needed since there's very little about mercantyling in the existing materials. In addition to a plethora of other subjects, it covers the economics of mercantyling in detail, providing a step-by-step system to cover buying, selling, capacity, and profit, along with overhead costs, financial risks, and material risks.

I've posted a detailed analysis of this system's implications on the Harshlands forums. In addition to the wagon capacity being restored to earlier estimates, it corroborates a few things I had previously claimed should be the case: that profit margins should have a high enough average to justify all the investment and risk, and that profits should be very variable. It also helps calibrate precisely where those profits should be.

What I now hope most of all is that this, in addition to reminding them about the caravanning issue, convinces them that their fears that a level of profit sufficient to cover operating costs and justify the risk will not be game-imbalancing, inappropriate, or recommended solely based on selfishness, are unfounded. And maybe then they'll finally be willing to do those few hours of work necessary, no longer limited by the fear that this will break the game the minute some less-scrupulous mercantyler comes along.

I wonder if I'm being just as rosey-eyed as I was a few paragraphs ago?

If you could peer through time

Suppose it wasn't possible to travel through time, but you could instead pick a point in spacetime to observe and even record. Full sensory input as if you were there, but no chance to interact or affect. Where and when would you go?

This question got chatted idly about last night at Trivia (we won, by the way) and it soon became obvious the answers fitted neatly into two categories. First, we have the Tourism options: watch the signing of the Declaration of Independence, see an early Jimi Hendrix concert, witness the Battle of Thermopylae, get a look at the primordial form of the solar system.

Then there's the Mysteries, all those nagging things that we'll never know the true answer about. To make things interesting let's say you have to be able to specify a precise time and place; this means you can't find out whether the Beale cipher or Money Pit on Oak Island are hoaxes. Let's also say it has to be on Earth. What mysteries do you want to solve for once and for all?

The first two it seems everyone comes up with are the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the grassy knoll in Dallas 1963. Close behind is Jack the Ripper. After that we fall off into ones that are easy to think of, but that really, when I stop to think about them, I can't say I care that much. Where is Jimmy Hoffa? It was important then, but how much does it matter now? Amelia Earhart? The Lindberg baby? D.B. Cooper? Maybe Roswell would be worth looking at. How about the Princess Anastasia? What did Mozart really die of?

I'm mildly curious about all these things, but I have this sense that there's much bigger questions needing answers, things that somehow I can't bring to mind. Maybe that's just because the "you have to know the time" limitation I imposed on myself rules out a lot of good ones (like "what made the dinosaurs go extinct?"), but even with that, I feel like there's good ones just lurking outside my thoughts.

Earliest memories

The most irksome thing about childhood amnesia is that I can't even tell which is my earliest memory, or when it is, or whether any of the contenders are real memories or just memories of people telling me about things that happened.

The earliest memory I can clearly fix at a point in time happened just before my fifth birthday. (I read that the average age for a first memory is about 3½, as long as you talk to other people and confirm that the memory is real. If you just go on when people claim is their first memory, that's usually a year or so earlier. It's like how 80% of people consider themselves to be better-than-average drivers.) This memory is of when I was being babysat while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my sister, which puts it in May 1972. I remember my babysitter taking me for a walk down the block, and stopping at the corner by the street sign to talk about what was going on.

I have a few flashes of images that may predate that, including one striking one of a horseshoe crab turned upside down on the beach. But there's one in particular which is striking in its clarity of detail but which I can't place in time, or even confirm if it's real. This is one of those situations where it might be nice if I hadn't been disowned by my mother, because maybe she could confirm it.

In this memory I am with my parents and we're visiting somewhere in an oldish building, maybe an apartment building. We're leaving and it's late. The stairwell we're going down to leave is one of those ones where the stairs go a half-flight from the building's hall to a landing against the wall, then turns to go another half-flight to the next level, and so on in a huge rectangular spiral, like the ones you see in any high school in the world. You can lean over the railing and look all the way down to the basement down that narrow column between the flights. And that's what I'm doing in the memory.

Apparently, to keep me entertained during this visit, I have been given a small collection of toys, I think some kind of building block toys, which were in a rectangular Tupperware container of a particular faint jelly-like green color which, thankfully, is no longer being made. The lid was milky white, not the same green. And while peering over the railing, I managed to drop this container and it fell to the basement, spilling its contents.

I was naturally very upset and insisted that we get the toys back. My father was reluctant, because it was the end of a long day and he was tired, and it was quite a few flights down, more than he would have otherwise had to go. My mother insisted it was worth retrieving them, with the ease that comes of not being the one who'll have to do the job.

I wish I had some way to confirm if this was even real, and if so, when it happened. I'd like to know where this place was and why we were there. Above all I'd like to know how old I was at the time.

Going back on metformin

My hemoglobin A1c is up to 7.9 -- which is no surprise. I know I've been out of control for a long while. There are a number of reasons, including my knee making exercising non-sustainable, major slippage on our carb control (which I find hard to keep up alone), higher stress levels, and not testing reliably enough.

Getting started again, as I've written before, is very problematic. I'll get myself a head of steam to start again and I'll pick a day and say "starting on that day I'm back to doing everything I should", and I do, and then a day comes when I'm too busy or too tired or I have a cold or something, and it'll be easier to blow it off and break my streak because... I've already stopped before and started again, so what's the big deal about stopping and starting again? The date of starting was arbitrary, after all. And of course I know how stupid and self-defeating that is, but it still happens.

So here's the new plan, step by step.

1. I'm going back onto metformin. This is a very easy drug to go on, as its only side effect is that some people have gas and diarrhea for a few weeks while they acclimate to it. I already went through that once, so I might not have to go through it again, but even if I do, no big deal. Metformin doesn't do bad things to your body even if taken forever -- in fact, it's been proven to help with heart conditions unrelated to diabetes so it's taken by people who aren't diabetic. I always figured, when I went off it, that I'd be back on it someday (and that one day I'd probably be on insulin, too, unless medical science advances quick enough), so it's no big deal to be back on it. The idea here is that, if my control is so bad, it's hard to get encouraged because the little things I do barely make a dent in how bad my numbers are. Metformin can give me a kickstart so my control gets going again without me having to do everything all at once on the first day.
   
   
2. Then I start testing and recording my glucose every day and before and after most meals. I'm just recording, not judging. I have to be very careful not to look at each reading as a condemnation, not wincing at them.
   
   
3. Next I start recording carbs on every meal. Again, trying not to judge myself too much, just trying to record things. Eventually this is meant to get me to be more conscious of it and get out of the habit of splurging so often that it's not splurging anymore. (Key element in this is avoiding all the tasty, cheap high-carb snacky things we buy at Big Lots, which is hard for me when everyone else around me is having them.) But not to be so discouraged immediately that I react by stopping the recording.
   
   
4. Then I start very slowly at exercising. I avoid the treadmill since the knee pain thing was a complete showstopper. Instead, I'm trying out using a stationary bike at work. If it works out as it has in past tests, giving me the exercise without straining my knee to the point of pain, and (more importantly, and not yet tested adequately) it brings my glucose down appropriately (in combination with metformin and diet changes), I will buy one for home. (And someday a non-stationary bike too, for summer! Yay!)
   
   
5. Then the diet changes work their way in, little by little, not all at once. There are already some systemic changes in terms of using substitutions I'm still doing from before -- low carb bread and pasta, for instance. A few other things I've cut out already -- the reduced, but still too high, carb apple juice, for instance. The big challenge here will be the overabundant plethora of inexpensive carby snacks and sweets. The substitutes for these are all things that take a lot of effort and time to make, and in some cases, skills I lack. If you could buy Splenda-sweetened panna cotta and cheescake at the supermarket, I'd be golden, but you can't, you have to make it yourself. Not that it's hard, but when you're in the middle of something and just want to snack, a trip to the pantry is one thing, stopping what you're doing to cook is another.

Not even penny-wise

"We have to do something about this photocopier." (or printer, or computer, or fax machine, etc.)

"Oh? What's wrong?"

"It's old and out of date. It keeps breaking down and it's getting harder and harder to get support and parts for it. Supplies like toner also cost more than they used to as they get harder to find. Compared to the cost of a modern, more efficient, fully supported one, we're spending more to maintain this for a year than it'd cost to replace it, especially after you add in man-hours spent dealing with it."

"We'd better replace it, then. Order us a new one."

---

"Here's that new copier we ordered. What do we do with the old one?"

"Seems a shame to throw it away."

"How about if we put it in Cathy's office so she doesn't have to walk ten steps every time she wants to make unnecessary and wasteful copies?"

"Good idea."

That's when I got out the axe, your honor. I move that the case be dismissed on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

I already had my cold for the year!

It's not fair, having to have a whole second cold in the same winter and it's not even February yet. This one started with two days of headache and has progressed into that miserable endless coughing stage already. I wonder if I picked it up at my blood draw last week at the hospital.

I can't really take any time off from work, which is doubly annoying since I'm right at my leave caps on both annual and sick leave. But there are specific things to be done each day that need me here -- a doctor's appointment today, shopping tomorrow, and yesterday, recovery from a whole bunch of major system changes in our network.

Of course I have to admit one reason I'm reluctant to stay home is because my crappy Internet connection at home is so limiting in what I can do. So many things get saved up until my time at work when I have the speed to do them. I even consider spending off time at the office just to tap into that network. If I had a good Internet connection at home I would be more inclined to use my leave time. Isn't that sad?

Player-driven events in MUDs -- a different approach

Not sure why I have been thinking of how I'd run a MUD so much lately, though my repeated failures at being content with MUDs must have something to do with it. In addition to my thoughts about how combat might work and some thoughts on a setting, I've been thinking about the question of player-driven plots.

Those of us used to pencil-and-paper roleplaying games take for granted the idea that player actions drive the story almost completely. In MUDs, the tiniest crumb of player-driven plot, which even the most railroaded face-to-face RPG would have hundreds of, is taken as a wondrous new innovation and accomplishment. It's partially because of the limitations of coding. A MUD by its nature is more asynchronous -- admins and players log on and off at varying times, which is one of its strengths, you can always go play when you want -- which means things have to be built and coded ahead of time. There's a lot less room for improvisation when the admin can't just say "sure, that might work" without having to stop everything and go recode something or build a bunch of new objects whose need wasn't anticipated. The admins can't spend the time to build things that might not be needed that much because of limited time and resources. And it's even more non-viable to have an event able to adapt to unexpected player actions if it has to keep happening when the admins aren't around!

Ultimately it's a question of resources. Imagine a MUD like Lusternia which has a very active set of admins, builders, and coders, who churn out new stuff at an unprecedented rate. Yet the players complain because events are handed down from on high, rather than bubbling up from player actions, and are essentially linear, with only one possible outcome. As well they should; you don't get a feeling that you can impact the world you're in if it's impossible to do so.

Now imagine if they came down one day and said, "From now on, you will get only about 1/4 as many events, and everything else will slow down too -- new areas, new skillsets, bug fixes, etc. But in exchange for that, we will have player-driven events every month." Would people be happy or not? Hard to say -- people are always willing to say "we need more of X" but have a remarkable capability to ignore that the only way to get it is to have less of Y and Z.

So imagine how this might work in a new MUD where this went in from day one. I imagine a monthly sweepstakes; anyone in the game could buy a single ticket per month for a very low cost (say 5 credits). Once a month, 10 people would "win" the lottery. The prize would be 50 credits plus a chance to submit an idea for an event, in the form of a writeup of no more than one page. Admins would review these ideas and choose the best one, considering implementation difficulties, the event's "neutrality" (events that take the form of "my city has an idea for how to beat up the other cities" would be less likely to win), how well it'd fit into the overall story, etc. The selected proposal would then be developed, possibly with the player who proposed it taking an active hand in helping make it happen, both by roleplaying the stuff related to it in-game, and maybe even by doing some of the building if that's possible (though I think that part wouldn't likely work -- getting someone else to write room descs is often more work than doing it yourself, for instance; not everyone has the talent). The winner would also get another credit prize, say 200 credits, plus get to see the event play out -- probably going in directions even he didn't anticipate!

And these events might well lead to changes in the world around them. In fact, after the initial setup, the events might be the primary method of introducing change into the world; admins wouldn't even make their own events except in the rare case where they needed to do so for some kind of coding or balance reasons.

Naturally I see all kinds of problems that could crop up with this, so consider it brainstorming. I think a lot of those problems might be addressable, at least assuming that the MUD was otherwise able to succeed so you'd have enough players and admins to do it. But I like the idea in broad strokes. Wonder if it could be made to work.

I guess that's why they call it the blues

When I first heard the title of this well-known Elton John song, I thought, that's an interesting question. Why do they call it the blues?

I was very disappointed to learn that, though the song keeps saying "I guess that's why they call it the blues," it never makes even the tinest attempt to answer the question. There's never even anything to be an antecedent for "that". Worse yet, no one else even seems to notice.

Then I chuckle at myself for being such a geek.

But... why do they call it the blues, anyway? Wikipedia says this:

The phrase the blues is a reference to having a fit of the blue devils, meaning 'down' spirits, depression and sadness. An early reference to "the blues" can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798).

But that doesn't answer the question either. Why are the devils blue and not, say, yellow? For every image I can summon up in which blue is melancholy (a dark sunset, for instance) there's another where it's positively uplifting (a bright blue sky). The psychology of color is a fascinating subject I'd like to go into at more length one day.

Google as a knowledge multiplier

There is certainly a skill to finding pertinent information on the Internet, and it's something you can practice at, learn how to do better, improve at with practice. But there's a big factor often overlooked.

Someone who already knows some about a subject will always be better at researching that subject than someone who knows almost nothing about it. This is even true when the latter is better generally at searching than the former.

That's because knowing a little bit about a subject provides you with search terms, as well as enough understanding of the subject matter to quickly identify which of the search hits will be relevant and informative. The first 10% of knowledge in any field will make the biggest impact on search efficacy.

I might be reading too much into it, but isn't it interesting that this could be seen as encouraging a revival of the generalist, the "Renaissance man", a pattern of learning that went out a hundred years ago? Okay, so it's just Google, right? But computer-enhanced human intellect is not going to go away -- it'll become more pervasive. It may well turn out to again be a good idea to have a baseline knowledge in everything even if you have to also have a specialized knowledge in one thing, just to take advantage of that multiplier effect.

Designing a MUD combat system

Unrelated to the events in Harshlands I've been blogging about, I've been thinking about what I would do if I were designing a combat system for a MUD from the ground up, without having to worry about anything but making it cool and fun and interesting. While I like in theory how in Harshlands 95% of combat success comes from your character's skill, not yours, I also don't like how that makes combat an event to watch, not a game to play. What I'd end up with would look more like the Iron Realms model but with these major differences:

1. Complexity in structure, not quantity. Lusternia has hundreds of afflictions, attacks, defenses, skills, and other moving parts. The number of things you need to do before you can stand a chance in a real fight is impossibly dauntingly large, and discourages people from joining in. I would have about 1/6 as many "moving parts", but I would design them to encourage more combos and synergies, including ones that a single person, not just a team, could use. It's be more like Legos: a vast array of possibilities from a modest handful of building blocks.
   
   
2. Encourage systems. I would publish trigger texts and make them regular. I'd have very few skills that masked or faked afflictions, and those would be high-power, high-cost skills, rarely used. Curing would be difficult not through obscurity but through synergies of attacks and manuevers, making it a tactical game.
   
   
3. Explicit, limited teaming. I would not discourage team combat, but I would make sure size of team wasn't the trumping factor by putting limiting mechanisms on teams. Lots of skills would be designed to work within a team and synergize with others in a team, but a team would be something you'd explicitly create and join, and be limited in size to about five. I'd put mechanisms in place to make it hard and dangerous for a team to help another team, to prevent people forming "meta-teams". Might also give smaller teams a boost to help make up for the number differences.
   
   
4. Much, much slower. This is the big one. Everything would happen about 1/10th as fast. Everything. It would be possible to follow the spam without tricky techniques. You'd be able to use strategy and tactics during a fight. You'd even be able to talk with each other during a fight, and that'd mean leadership, cooperation, and team structure would become far more important. It wouldn't be a competition between tactics worked out ahead of time and coded into a system; it'd be a competition between the tactical wizardry of the players involved.

Can't help but wonder if anyone but me would like that. IRE's success comes from selling to a wide variety of people -- they're in it for the money. Would something like this, like many of my ideas, appeal to too narrow a market?

Not-quite-quitting Harshlands

Earlier today I reached a decision about Harshlands. Rather than quitting, which I've been on the verge of doing, I've decided to take an indefinite break.

It's become clear to me that Harshlands ranges from a source of frustration, to a simple source of boredom. The only reason I have found to log in is in hopes of running into someone who might further some bit of business, but with my business agonizingly on hold, even this is no longer compelling.

As I wrote previously, it's become clear that the failure of caravanning is entirely crippling, simply because everything else either has already failed, or depends on caravanning, for my current character. It's a pity that a single element of the game should have turned out to be such a linchpin; no one should have nothing to look forward to but their trade. But that's what it's come down to for me. For a variety of reasons, most (but not all) the fault of the admins making choices I consider ill-conceived, a lot of things have had the fun drained out of them. A lot of others depend on how much is made possible by silver.

So here's what I'm going to do. Right now, I'm less than a day from having a caravan trip to Azadmere either happen or fail to happen -- far more likely the latter. If it happens, I see it through -- no great hardship since, once we're there and I do the trade, it's a week with nothing to do until time to head back. While I'm gone, one of the employees of the Silver Plough tends my crops. Once I get back, that's when my break starts. If it doesn't happen, my break starts right away, though it's diminished at first since I have to tend my own crops.

Once the break starts, I only log in:

• to tend my crops as necessary; thanks to the stupid farming craft timers, that could take a while, logging on for a minute every hour for a while
  
• once every couple of weeks I might check in on my cart
  
• by appointment -- if I'm contacted by OOC means to log in for some RP or business purpose

And apart from that, I'm gone. No more logging into Harshlands. (My IC excuse is that Reb is staying home with his wife, turning inward to reevaluate his plans in life, and hoping the Gentle Lady will finally give them a child.)

Forever? Maybe. Or at least until caravanning is viable. Guess we'll have to see if that ever happens.

That means I'm also stopping (sort of already have stopped) doing coding for Harshlands. I'll keep reading the forums, until or unless that turns out to become no fun.

I find myself tremendously looking forward to it. I can't wait just to announce it on the forums, so it'll be real, a done thing, not just a plan. I kind of hope my caravanning trip doesn't go off after all. (If by some miracle it does, I'll probably still announce my break, once the wagons are in Azadmere.)

The fluttering heartbeat of caravanning

As I noted in the comments, after a turn for the worse in Harshlands, I had a talk with the admins which (just barely) appeased me enough to keep me walking out. Today I got another token gesture: it's now possible to buy object-type (not mobile-type) dogs for use as props, though still not for breeding without admin intervention. I'm not availing myself of it, partly because the idea of dogs just makes me ill after how it was treated in the past, and partly because Reb's money situation is now so tight he can't spend any money on frivolities.

How's that? He's an active Master of what is supposed to be, according to canon, the most wealthy and influential guild in all the Isle.

So goes the theory. But the nerfing of caravanning in Harshlands continues on apace; it is already far, far less profitable than, say, woodworking or hideworking, and looks very likely to be made even less so.

It's hard to explain how and why to people without making their eyes glaze over, if they're not already familiar with business concepts like capital investment, operating funds, profit margins, cost of storage, etc. And most of the time when I try to explain this, people don't even remember the most basic of all costs, cost of goods sold. I have literally been stopped at selling things because of how big gross revenue looked!

The key economic factors that everyone always forgets are:

1. Mercantylers add relatively little value, since they don't produce anything. Thus, their gross profit margins -- the ratio of gross revenue to cost of goods -- are far, far lower than in other trades. If a woodcrafter spends 100p on materials, the resulting goods will sell for 250p or so. If a mercantyler spends 100p on goods, the resulting sales will gross maybe 130p.
   
   
2. Mercantylers have much higher overhead costs. In fact, in Harshlands most trades have no overhead costs until master level, and few after. They pay no taxes, no transportation costs, no permit fees, and only pay rent after becoming a master. All they do is drop their completed goods in a particular place and they sell at full price. Mercantylers, on the other hand, pay out handsomely for guards (the lion's share of the costs -- no pun intended), tolls, food and other supplies, wagon repair, and now we'll also be forced to pay for teamsters and hawking permits. These eat away quickly at revenue, and since most of them are fixed regardless of the quantity of cargo, they force a minimum size on a trip to make a profit at all. (Which is why having my wagons stuck at 1/8 the size that I was originally told they'd be completely ruined so many of my plans... one of many times that changing the rules on me midstream has forced me to yet again reinvent my business to try to make it work.)
   
   
3. Mercantylers have probably the single highest startup costs. Only jewelers can hope to compare. As in real life, you need to have money to make money -- and you expect to get a higher yield when you do start with money, or else why bother to go into this level of investment?
   
   
4. Mercantylers also require a higher level of operating capital -- that is, liquidity of assets -- to operate. People expect a wide selection of goods of a variety of types from a mercantyler, so it's always tempting to load up your stock. But you have to have a lot of free coin on hand, too. To handle the considerable up-front costs of each venture -- buying cargo, paying guards whether it sells or not, etc. To be able to take advantage of chances to buy when they come. To be able to absorb setbacks like not being able to sell your cargo. For instance, Reb's second trip last season earned him about 1400p on the sale of grains, and then tied up almost 2200p in furs that, if they sold, would have made him another 625p profit; but since they didn't sell, as the caravan market in Tashal remains non-functional, the trip on the whole actually drained 800p from Reb's coffers. He has 2200p worth of furs as assets, but these are all but worthless since they do not sell (not even to vNPCs, since they always go for the 1p-and-less bin).
   
   
5. Mercantylers face a much higher risk than most trades. Both financially (the real risk of goods not selling as expected, which has bitten Reb time and time again) and physically (the risk of coming away from a venture wounded, maimed, or dead). High risk is like high investment capital requirements: the only reason people engage in it is for the chance of much higher rewards.

Of course, the factor that should, and did in real life, make caravanning profitable, even rich-making, in spite of all these, is quantity. The bigger your load, the smaller those fixed overhead costs become by proportion, and the more you can squeeze out of a razor-thin margin. And that in turn makes the need for huge startup costs and operating capital only bigger.

Despite all this, it seems like the admins look at the possible gross revenue from a single trip and panic and that's the end of the analysis. "160 bushels of wheat at 22.5p each means 3600p... we can't let someone earn 3600p! Especially if they can come back and do it again!" Except of course that the profit on that trip is only about 1000p, and you can't do it again for another year. If by some miracle I could make three two-leg trips a year, without ever having a cargo fail to sell and without ever being robbed by bandits, my net profit would be at best 6000p... which an active journeyman woodcrafter can make with zero risk, zero capital investment, and very little need for operating capital, in the same amount of time.

And that's just how things are today. Almost every variable that led to the 6000p possible annual income, is currently being considered for reduction.

In fact, right now, the admins are discouraging me from practicing my trade at all "until the work behind it is complete so it is setup properly". Admittedly, it's not even been a week since the last time we talked about this, and that week included Christmas. But it's been three months since I got my caravanner license. It's been six months since I was eligible to get my caravanner's license. It's been 14 months since I announced my intention to become a caravanner. When should I start counting from? Particularly when all the plans right now seem to be limited to ways to nerf caravanning farther.

The fact is, caravanning could be functional right now, according to the plans I posted last week on the forums, if someone finally made about three decisions, and then someone spent a few hours, maybe one day, on building. There are refinements that would take longer, but it'd be functional with just that. The same few hours of work I've been asking for for months.

I find myself feeling like I have to be on the defensive because the need for large profits on this or that trip to provide operating capital for the following trips comes off as rampant greed. Now, I've played Reb as having slightly absorbed some of the "ethic" of his guild; he's flippantly casual about sums of money that would have made him faint when he was apprentice, and he hasn't hesitated to spoil his wife with fine jewelry. But at the same time he's still the humblest member of his guild; all he's bought himself is a fine sword (which has probably saved his life already; he sees it as operating equipment, a business expense) and two suits of moderately nice clothes (but linens, not silk and lace and frippery). I still find myself thinking other people think I am money-hungry -- like I'm treating the size of my coffer as a score and I want to get high score -- and explaining the economics of caravanning does little to diminish that opinion, since no one ever listens long enough to become convinced. All I want is enough to make it work and keep working -- not my fault that that happens to be a very large number! That's the nature of the trade.

All this is, quite ironically and amusingly, entirely moot. Since even if caravanning were implemented and feasible and profitable enough to justify its costs, it's not currently possible in Tashal for a rather stupid reason: lack of guards.

The mercenary company in Tashal recently lost two people. Just two. But since one of them was the only one with high enough rank to order around the NPC members, all those NPCs are now also unusable. There's no IC explanation for why those NPCs cannot be used on missions anymore. By all rights one of them should be the new captain, in fact. As a result, the entire company consists of only two usable members.

Hire NPCs, you say. Good idea. Only trouble is, where canon says you can hire a guard for about 40p round trip (and even the Harshlands price list still says so), it now costs about 3000p to hire one. That's because you have to prepay for 10 years service, and you have to supply all the required equipment. Remember what I said about startup costs and operating capital? For me to get enough NPC guards to make a trip to Azadmere viable would cost all my profits from the next 18 trips. If I suddenly came into a huge pile of money, I couldn't earn back the investment for, at a minimum, six years. How could I even hope to ever raise that much -- particularly if the only means to raise it requires that I already have it? (Can't even go into debt to do it; maximum amount of debt I could go into isn't even enough to buy a single guard, even though I'm a member of the guild that makes the loans.)

At this point, with almost half this year's trading season gone, I'm reduced to begging every passerby who can hold a sword if they will let me overpay them to go to Azadmere, and almost everyone can't because they're all apprenticed to someone, or employed by someone. Even the Crimson Leopards, which includes the Royal Foresters, can only front at best three people.

As of this writing, if every single person who said they might come comes, we will just barely have enough to make the trip. If even a single person doesn't log on at the appointed time, we're screwed. I haven't even gotten a cost out of the Leopards, nor do I have a clear idea of whether I'll have to pay just the hawking permit, just the bulk markdown, or both, so it's possible that even if it does go off I will only break even.

But can I complain? No. If I talk about this, most of the time people just don't believe me. Without knowing about caravanning or even basic concepts of business, without any insight into the history of how caravanning has been changed in Harshlands, they just look at the large numbers and they're blinded by them. They're sure I'm just being a negative-nancy, defeatist, that I don't really want to find a solution. They start proposing ill-informed, half-baked solutions, and I shoot them down one after the other, and they get discouraged and blame me for it. Understandable, but it's not my fault! If there were an answer that obvious I would have found it. They get the impression that I'm not even trying, when what's happened is actually that I've been trying for a long, long time, and as unhappy as I am, I'm still trying from long before they tried and until long after they'll give up.

I don't mean to suggest that caravanning is the only reason for Reb to exist, for me to log in. But almost all the other reasons either depend on it, or are dormant for other reasons.

• The Silver Plough, Reb's charitable organization, has nothing particular to do; we're brainstorming tinyplots we can set up and run ourselves, but we can't find any that won't require at least admin permission, which I'm loath even to ask for, and any good ones would require admin support, which I can't even vaguely hope for.
  
• Besides, the only reason the Plough is not defunct from lack of coin is that I have not junked as much coin, food, and clothing as I ought to have by now, plus a few big donations; but caravanning's large revenue was the entire raison d'etre for the Silver Plough, so if that is dried up, the Plough is doomed, eventually.
  
• Reb's marriage and family life are entirely off-camera since his wife hardly ever logs in.
  
• His farm has had all the fun drained out of it by an exceedingly poorly thought out change to farming crafts; the only reason I planted this year is because the revenue from farm goods (enhanced by my ability to sell them at wholesale) is what's keeping me financially afloat, but I resent every time it takes me 10 game minutes to plant a single carrot seed.
  
• Hanging out in Tashal in hopes of roleplay, when farming doesn't make it impractical, rarely leads to anything these days: there are rarely more than a few people around at any time, since so many people have been splintering the player base into other locations, so we now have 5-6 pockets of 2-3 people unable to get anything started, where we used to have 2-3 pockets of 5-6 people engaged in somewhat vibrant roleplay.
  
• Plus a lot of complaining about people being AFK means people now log in, check if anyone's there, and log off if they're not, and when everyone does that, there are never people there.

What it all adds up to is simple: no reason to log in. Right now the only reason I'm logged in is the very, very remote chance that some cluster of able men-at-arms will suddenly show up and want to be hired on, so I can make this trip to Azadmere happen. Even though I know that will likely be a source for more frustration when I prove unable to sell the wheat, or some other caravanning-nerf ruins my plans mid-stream. I have to try -- that's how I got this far -- but by the same token, I've endured through enough reason to give up a dozen times already, buoyed up by the promise that I would finally, at least, arrive, and get to spend my time doing the things I wanted to do from the start -- the adventure of caravanning afield, the development of character when at home. Each time that arrival becomes again delayed indefinitely, it's that much harder to believe it'll ever come. Right now, I don't really believe it at all. Haven't for a while. I'm just going on sheer pigheadedness now. And pigheadedness is an affliction that doesn't last.

A new look for my blog

I used the new Blogger features for customizing your blog's layout (without coding HTML, like I'd done before). This unfortunately narrowed the main text column again.

I hate HTML layout that puts all the text into a narrow column, leaving most of your screen wasted. If I wanted a narrow column, I'd resize my window. Why do so many sites do this? I know it makes some HTML coding easier, but that's like saying it'd make it easier to write applications if you code your program to force all other programs to quit when it runs. But on the web we tolerate it.

Anyhow, this template uses the width that you, the viewer, chose. I'll have to get used to the links stuff being on the left, though. I didn't like the original color scheme associated with this template, but fortunately I was able to revise it.

The best rock album of all time

How's that for a pretentious title?

I'm not talking about the album with the best song on it, or the album with my favorite song, or the album with the most good songs, or the album that sold best, or the one that's most significant in the history of rock, or anything like that. I'm talking the album that is best at being an album, period.

Obviously I'm not qualified to really put the "of all time" bit on there because there's plenty of albums I've never heard. There's whole swathes of rock albums I'm not familiar with. There's a period of about six years I barely heard anything new, and then all the time since those six years, I've been still fairly out of touch.

But hey, this is my blog, so who cares about that? I'm going to post my answer and let everyone else post theirs in the comments.

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And the winner is:

Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell

The individual songs are each strong, without a single one that feels like filler or doesn't live up to the standard of the album. They fit together with one another, with a good sense of pacing and balance, allowing each track to lead into the next. As an album as a whole, I find this to be essentially without flaw. It's that rare creation where a large number of strong talents came together, but the result didn't feel like a hodgepodge, but like a single cohesive creative vision. Listening to this album, I cannot think of a single thing I could imagine changing that would make it stronger as an album, not even the tiniest of changes. And that's what makes it win: every other contender has some tiny thing I can imagine could have been done better.

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Of course there are runners-up that are very, very close. Ask me on another day and I might choose a different winner, they're that close. Here are some:

Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon

Probably the first choice to leap to most people's minds, and for very good reason. Holds together as an album even better than Bat does, providing an experience that is second to none. The only reason I am not picking it first is because I think that some of the songs don't stand as strongly on their own as each other, giving the album a sort of unevenness. It's a very slight unevenness, mind you, but it's enough in this cut-throat competition.

Led Zeppelin IV

Every song is a gem, and this album contains a few of the best hard rock songs ever written. And they hold together pretty well, too. But they don't hold together perfectly; there's some uneven pacing.

Boston

Never was there a better example of the freshman band that blew all its best work on their first album. Almost every song could have carried an entire album, and some of the instrumental work is spectacular. The pacing is good too. In the end, though, it's just a bit too shallow to win.

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

An inevitable inclusion if only because of its hit-generating, chart-lurking staying power. The breadth of the music on this album is remarkable, and almost every song feels solid, but it also feels a bit of a mismatched hodgepodge. While that has its virtues, it's not what I was going for with this ranking.

Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I'm including this mostly so I won't get lynched. I don't deny for a minute that this is a seminal piece of work, a breathtaking breakthrough. But I really don't think it belongs on this list. Maybe it made all the other things on this list possible, and it was certainly the winner at its time, but it was soon surpassed as an album -- personally I think Abbey Road is the best Beatles scorer in this competition, in fact.

U2 - The Joshua Tree

I've come back to add this one to the list while wondering why I didn't add it before. When the album first came out, I didn't like it that much, but after I came back to it later, it really wore well and became my favorite U2 album by far. The last song is a little weak, though.

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Now I'm looking forward to being told how wrong I am. I am sure my #1 choice will not be agreed to by many! Plus I'm sure there are a lot of albums that I've never heard that will be nominated. Have at me!