Rocket Scientist

I am tired and low on creative energy. I cannot write an entry today.

However, feel free to write the entry you think I should have written today in my comments.

That's what I said to myself when I found out a new Vlad Taltos novel was out from Steven Brust.  And it's exactly what I did, picking up a copy of Iorich Monday afternoon and moving it to the top of my reading pile (analog and digital).  It was, to my mind, definitely worth the promotion.  Brust remains one of my two or three favorite authors for a reason.  Seeing Vlad kicking butt in His City again is, to my mind, a return to the strengths of the series.  Vlad is great when he's doing the fish out of water thing, but it was nice to see him in back in his element.  Even if he's still on the lam.

Last night was the first post-holiday game session.  We were playtesting some of the D&D stuff for OwlCon and it went well.  But between my usual post-game adrenaline and a copy of Brust's newest (Iorich), I was up too late and I'm really feeling it this morning.

I kind of hope we get the snow and sleet that's a (slim) possibility for tomorrow, just so I can try and catch up on my rest a bit.

I like staying at Crystal's house. She has unguents.

Crystal's bathroom is special because it is ornamented with an abundance of shower gels, body washes, facial scrubs, and ointments. As such, the shower becomes a special luxury; I go in old, frumpy Ferrett and come out anointed with unearthly scents of payayas and sea salt and cookies. I dabble in everything she has available (but not too much, no, I never want to be a bad guest; I scrimp out just enough to get a taste for it) and take luxurious showers where I am transformed into some sort of perfumeried chemist.

When I come out, only I know that I am suffused with cranberry, my skin exfoliated, my hair scented of lavender. It is a secret known only to me, since when I am at Crystal's I am at work, and the long amorous hugs that would give me away are few and far between at StarCityGames.com.

I might load my own bathing parlor with such scents, but they give Gini fits of sneezes and rashes. Plus, it seems like a lot of work, buying all that stuff from Lush. I don't have time to wander through malls and shopping forms, finding just the right hint of jasmine-infused cream to soothe my aching feet. That's not my lifestyle; I'm too busy beating Dragon Age to search for emollients.

Still, for a day I can wander through the banquet. Today, I smell like banana bread. AND NOBODY KNOWS BUT ME.

In debating large numbers of people on the Internet, you almost run into someone's mother. And it's difficult to get around her, even though she obstructs rational debate.

See, most people have a few strongly-held opinions on their upbringing. And why not? The circumstances that forged you helped make you who you are. And one of those strongly-held opinions tends to be about their parenting. For a lot of folks, their momma did a great goddamned job, or Mom was a worthless wastrel who held them back from their true potential.

The problem is when the mother in question is exceptional in one circumstance or another, and the child (now grown up and participating in discussions) cannot realize this. To wit:

"HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT CRACK-ADDICTED MOTHERS IN THRALL TO THEIR PIMPS ARE, ON THE WHOLE, LESS DEVOTED TO PARENTING? MY MOTHER WAS A CRACK HO AND SHE WAS A SAINT!"

Or:

"HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT BEING WEALTHY AND BEAUTIFUL IS USUALLY BETTER THAN BEING POOR AND UGLY? I CAME FROM DANBURY, CONNECTICUT, LAND OF PLASTIC SURGERY AND SOCIALITE BRIDE TANTRUMS, AND YOU SHOULD SEE WHAT MY MOTHER DID TO ME!"

The problem of Your Momma is not restricted to Your Momma; it's basically any circumstances where someone has a deep-seated emotional tie to what is, on the whole, a circumstance that is either a) really, really rare or b) so personally painful that they are blind to the idea that other circumstances might be even worse. It doesn't have to be Your Momma; it could be Your Body, or Your High School Experience, or Your Sexuality. Regardless, the Your X issue really makes it difficult to carry on rational debates.

Because every debate, at its core, has to involve generalizations. That's because the really good debates, the ones that can't get settled, involve people, and people are such a multifaceted array of personalities that you cannot come up with any set of circumstances we could inflict upon the planet that would make every last human being happy. No matter what you did successfully, someone would gripe.

Thus, the best we can do is try to discuss what's going to make the vast majority happy. This involves discussing the things that will, in general, encourage people to make good decisions and finding the things that are bad decisions. That's tricky enough as it is, especially given that trying to find that majority and then discuss what's going to motivate/thrill them is a task that's almost impossible for humans and their small-numbers minds to encompass.

But it gets more difficult when you have people who are clearly from a background that's exceptional who cannot recognize that ("My mother was a single, paraplegic, out-of-work leper, and how dare you say that mothers like that are unlikely to provide a decent home for their kids?"), then you're placed in a position where you're not debating with them - you're debating with a formative event in their lives.

So it's almost always impossible to get across the point that "Look, what happened to you isn't what usually happens to people in that circumstance" (or worse, "What happened to you is indeed very terrible, but other people in even more horrible situations may have had it worse") without triggering all sorts of emotional landmines.

You're dealing with the core experiences that have shaped people. If someone feels good about themselves out of the gate and their Momma was a devout Christian who taught them the Bible, well, Christianity is very likely to be something that person feels that every right-thinking household should have. And if someone spent years recovering from the wreckage of their childhood and their Momma was a devout Christian who taught them the Bible, well, they're quite likely to be convinced that Christianity is a plague upon the Earth. And neither one is likely to acknowledge the pros of the other side and the cons of their own.

I'm not sure that's entirely bad. Our personal reaction to things is the only way we can analyze the world. A society of people who quoted statistics, ignoring their own personal experience, would be inhuman and rather creepy. And the fact that marginalized peoples - who, horrifyingly, are often told that their experiences are not only fringe cases, but do not even exist because majority idiots often believe that a minority existence is some kind of illusion that doesn't really happen - use this furor to push their way into the mainstream means that Your Momma has some good power behind it, too. Sometimes, that exceptional experience needs to be highlighted even if it's not the norm. (Sometimes because it's not the norm.)

But still, it does mean that it's almost impossible to find what the majority of people think because nearly every edge case is convinced that their way is just How Things Are. Any attempts to show other folks that that hey, maybe their formative experiences aren't representative of the entire galaxy will result in an argument that will inevitably feel like a personal assault - and flames, flames, flames.

I don't remove myself from this circumstance, of course. I had a sister-in-law who we spent two traumatic years battling insurance companies, trying to save her life because she had a rare kidney condition and scumbag insurance folks who we could not affect. I've done a lot of research to see that my circumstances are not that exceptional, at least in America. But at the same time, whenever I debate this fact of what is clearly a very poor insurance scenario involving a disease that only fifty people on Earth have had, I feel my own blood rising because goddammit, you had to be there and see what those assholes did to her. This is why I don't post about health care as often as I should; I'm simply not capable of holding a rational debate beyond a certain point.

It's my Momma. And what am I gonna do? I'll tell you what I'm gonna do: I have seeded this very essay with tons of outs, strewing it with "some people"s and "a lot"s and "most"s. And now even though I've written an entire essay on how people in edge cases often cannot recognize that they are the product of statistically-anomalous circumstances, and allowed room for those edge cases to flourish, I will brace myself for the inevitable barrage of comments on how, "Well, I don't feel this way."

Good for you. That wasn't the point.

Am now running under Snow Leopard, also known as Mac OSX version 10.6. There is really very little that's outwardly different from regular Leopard (10.5), other than a better interface for fooling with folder stacks in the Dock. You can also play movies inside Cover Flow view, which I never use and neither does anyone else I know, so who cares. However, it's also supposed to have plenty of bug fixes and general efficiency improvements, and that's something I support (my favorite Adobe Photoshop upgrade ever was, I think, 5.0, when they did very little beyond making the whole thing much faster.) So there we go.

It's probably worth mentioning that installing Snow Leopard doesn't automatically upgrade your development environment, for those of you using Xcode. You need to install Xcode 3.2; I'm given to understand it's on the Snow Leopard disk, but you can also download it from the Apple Developer Connection if you want to be sure you have the absolute latest version. After I did so, I was able to load, compile, and run my old game engine project without trouble -- beyond, that is, the awkward fact that a few things I was using, such as functions needed by my .WAV file loader, are seemingly deprecated and nonfunctional under Snow Leopard. Ah well, who needs sound, right?

...Apparently not OSX game developers, given how much of a pain in the butt it is to work with sounds if you're programming in straight-up C++. Well, anyway.

Also saw Sherlock Holmes today. I'm not sure I'd say it's a classic of the modern cinema -- you know, like Die Hard or Con Air -- but it was a good time. Longstanding Sherlock Holmes fans, in particular, should relax, as the movie does a pretty good job of being faithful to the characters. I did have to laugh, though, at the presence of Irene Adler, turning up once again like a bad penny. (For those not aware, Irene Adler is the only woman to ever get the best of Holmes, and in the course of the original stories the only woman he ever seemed to have even the remotest interest in beyond that of a detective-client relationship. Given the dearth otherwise of important female characters in the canon, she perforce appears in just about every modern Sherlock Holmes story.)

This one is about staying on target when the day is off-track.

Also, I'm about to be really irritated with the Dell people about my lovely new computer. The "a" key keeps flipping up and showing me its underbelly. Not coming off, but not exactly a tight fit. Grr.

And gods am I tired. I am trying to make it to 8pm before going to sleep. It's touch and go whether that's going to happen.

Here.

In conclusion, I give you the most adorable Burly Brawl ever.

• 11:02 @ThatKevinSmith Fuck that, its their own damn fault if a child reads your Twitter. Maybe they should start parenting then point a finger. #
• 11:28 @ShebaJo @Slickriptide Damn right, us and bacon! Bacon grease as lube, make bacon clothing, the possibilities are infinite! DO IT WHORES! #

This morning, the new site opened under our management.  From an IT perspective, I give us an A.  Maybe an A+.  Very few issues, and those that did crop up were minor.  Probably the biggest one was underestimating how long it would take for our network management software to run updates on all 38 machines.  As a result, some of the computers were still periodically shutting down in order to reboot after an update.  Frustrating, but not insurmountable.

By the time I left at 4 (having been there since 7 AM), things seemed to be running smoothly.

At Living Graciously

Should I keep mentioning these, or is it just annoying?

Today's challenge: clean my office. Dear gods, I don't wanna work today. But I'm just starting off with "clean my office and get all my filing done." That's pretty much a whole day. Ugh.

None of this is helped by poor sleep and intestinal distress. But it's okay; I can pout while I clean my office.

I like girls who've slept around. A lot. The more they've been with other people, the more I'm likely to want to be with them, for a very simple reason: I figure they're more likely to know what they're doing.

It's no guarantee, of course. Some novices just know how to move, while others can sleep with a thousand men and still never learn a damn thing - but in general, those who've had a lot of sex generally have the experience to be better in bed and in a relationship. They have new techniques to show me, are less inhibited, are far more likely to tell me exactly what they want emotionally and physically.

Which is another way of saying that I have always been attracted to slutty women.

I'm a little uncomfortable with that term "slutty," of course; I've never understood why having a lot of sexual experience was supposedly a bad thing for a girl, whereas being a virgin was something desirable. It just doesn't make sense to me - because logically, all other things being equal, the girl who's been around the block should be the one you'd want.

Let me be clear here by saying that in an ideal world, for long-term relationships, sexual experience shouldn't much matter. If you're looking to date someone, it shouldn't matter how much or how little they've slept around - what's important is whether you like them. What happens after you've tumbled in the sack? Can you carry on a good conversation, laugh at the same jokes, dance to the same music? Sexual compatibility is an element of any relationship, of course, but if you don't actually enjoy spending time out of the sack then all the hot monkey sex in the world won't make you a good dating partner. (A magnificent booty call, perhaps, but not a boyfriend.)

So for me, "sexually experienced" is like a +1 on a scale of one to ten - a preference, not a dealbreaker. It's not going to make me want someone I find loathsome, but it can push someone over the top from "meh" to "hello there."

Yet there are guys I know who are obsessed with finding virgins, or ideally sexually naive women - the minute they find someone who's slept with another guy, they're turned off to the point where they have to be talked into dating them, like a deflowered girl was some battered Datsun on a used car lot. They can't date anyone who's been touched. They can't bear to hear that their partner's been with other men.

And why? What does a virgin get you?

I mean, yes, it's cool to introduce someone to an activity for the first time - you get to watch their excitement as they go, "Wow, this is cool! Who knew?" And that is, I grant you, pretty neat.

Yet you also have to teach, and answer a lot of questions, and endure the inevitable awkwardness of someone exploring stuff for the first time. I mean, it's fun to introduce someone to the game of tennis, too, but I think all things being equal you'd want a partner who's at your skill level, rather than trying to train up an endless series of newbies. (Not that making love is anywhere near as complex as tennis, of course, but a good sex partner can show you things you never knew how to do.) And you deal with people who may not be used to the emotional pitfalls of sex, of which there are many, which can bite you in the ass if you're not careful.

The Cult of the Virgin seems to spring from a lot of issues that I'm deeply uncomfortable with: first off, that as a guy, your goal is to get to women first and mark your territory. Your whole goal is to basically treat women as though they're some kind of fucked-up Pokemon ("You use HOARY PICK-UP LINE on Hymenestra! It's super effective!"), collecting them because of some trait they possess as opposed to who they actually are.

It's as though women don't really exist until you come along and validate them with your amazing schlong. At which point they only exist as long as you possess them.

Second, by sleeping with someone, that attitude puts you in quiet competition with everyone they've slept with before - and if you can remove that competition, thus making her worship you by producing these feelings and knowing that no one has ever surpassed them, that you are somehow now superior. It seems to be a desire born out of a fragmented ego, the terror that maybe your dick isn't the magical holly wand with the phoenix feather core, the concept that your best way to satisfy a woman is to hunt down someone who doesn't know what she's doing and, via social pressure and studied insults, keep her so that you're the only one she ever knows. Congratulations, Bluebeard. You've done it.

Third, it's kind of a passive event. Not to knock anyone's virginity, but the reason I like sexually aggressive women is because in general, they know what they want and have had the motivation to go get it. One suspects that if a man of the virginical persuasion were to find a woman who actively wanted to be deflowered, without having to go through a song and tapdance to change her mind, he'd be repulsed. It's as though these guys get off on the mind control aspect, the thrill of breaking down someone's defenses in a kind of brainwashing thrill, and then pouncing on them.

Me? I'd rather be pounced upon.

Keep in mind that I'm not knocking you for what you may have or haven't done. If you're a virgin, I'm cool with it; it's not something I find really attractive in a sexual partner, but by God if you're going to get upset every time some pudgy, toothless forty-year-old with a blog says, "Well, I'm not that into your type," well, you should learn to pay a fuck of a lot less attention to me.

Still, the concept that virgins are the best thing to have just strikes me as being, well, illogical. If anything, a sane society should hold up a woman who's had some experience as being a finer thing, since the experience will make it more likely (if not guaranteed) that your relationship will work inside of the bedroom and out. (And ideally, it would be done in such a way that doesn't lead to teenaged girls then bashing virgins the way they currently mock sluts - but goddamn, humanity's so stupid that if there's any slight difference they'll turn that distinction into a way to make you wish you'd never been born. The "if one choice is good, the other must be bad" paradigm has destroyed more innocents than I'm comfortable with.)

So down with the Cult of the Virgin! Up with the Mild Preference for the Experienced Woman! And guys, get used to the fact that you're not there first, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

• 00:23 @Slickriptide We talking the drink or the drug? 'Cause bacon is already too addicting without cocaine's help. #

Today was about as low-key as expected.  Apart from finishing the install on one problem machine, we pretty much just went around and made sure all the profiles are set up like they should be.  Things start bright and early tomorrow.

New post at Living Graciously. Input welcome - help me stay on track.

I was tracking my XBox achievements on True Achievements the other day when I realized I had statistical proof that DJ Hero wasn't a very popular game. Specifically, my multipliers are ridiculous.

First, some mild geekery: when you accomplish certain tasks in an XBox game, you're given achievement points, or "G." Finish the first level, you might get 10G. Kill all the enemies on a level using only your fists, you might get 50G. The harder the accomplishment, the more G you should get.

...in theory. In practice, since developers design their own achievements, some games are overly generous (in one Simpsons videogame, you get 5G for just pressing the start button) and some games are ludicrously stingy (if you can find all 200 glowing balls in Prototype, you deserve more than 50G). So some of the hardest accomplishments may well short you on G, whereas a game that's generous (usually kids games) hand them out like candy.

So to even it out and have your score reflect your actual gaming talent, True Achievements evens it out by assigning multipliers based on how many people have this game, as compared to how many people actually got this achievement. For example, that Prototype achievement may be only 50G - but True Achievements sees that only 12% of game owners have actually gotten this level, and multiplies that achievement by 2.88 for an "adjusted" total of 115G.

(Of course, since you have to sign up for True Achievements before it starts tracking, it means that 12% of the most devoted gamers in existence have gotten this achievement - the actual number's probably closer to 2%.)

Though DJ Hero has some fairly easy accomplishments, there aren't a whole lot of people who've gotten them. Which means that compared to other games, there aren't a lot of people who've picked up DJ Hero and really gotten into it. In other words, it may have been purchased, but it's not getting played.

As a game publisher, I'd be fascinated by those numbers. The paradox of the sales is that the sales are roughly equivalent to quality, but not exactly. A heavily-hyped game could sell a lot before people realize it's not good. The sequel to Halo 3 (or ODST) is going to sell a zillion copies even if it's a remake of Pong. What the Achievements can tell you, if you structured them appropriately, is whether people enjoyed the game once they bought it.

Just as a quick example, one of the fine tricks of any rhythm game is your choice of songs. Did you get the mix right? Did people, by and large, feel that this is a good mix? Well, if you put in an accomplishment that could be achieved incidentally, like "Played all songs," then you could see what percentage of people thought your songs were good enough to play all of them. (It wouldn't be strictly true, since there are idiots like me who'll unlock everything, but you can filter me out.)

Likewise, you can see what level people got to on average before they quit. Was that level too hard? Did the story flag here? Regardless, you could analyze those breaking points and try to find out what stopped people, and fix that in the sequel. Or to see whether this game deserves a sequel, regardless of the actual sales up-front.

There's whole worlds of data to analyze. And then I think about Netflix streaming, where you can see not only how many people watched the movie, but how many got to the end - and the points where they gave up. What happened at this point in this film where people flung up their hands and said "Fuck this," and how can you fix that in future movies? Obviously, there will be anomalous points of data, where the baby started crying and they just figured what the hell - but with enough viewings, you can see where people paused, where they walked away, giving you some clue as to what they liked about the movie. And you can see what movies get rewatched, and what sections of movies get rewound, and you can use that.

I'm not a data miner. But if I was, man, I'd be drooling over the access to all of this. It's incidental tracking to see how you reacted to something, anonymized, and usable. I'd like to think that someone was putting all of this glorious data to good use.

• 18:00 @LifeExperimentP @Samuraiko I'm guessing killing zombies and their bodies get flung around by a Singularity's gravity well? #

Is there a better way to spend New Years' Eve than alongside some of your closest friends, watching bad movies with the aid of the Cinematic Titanic guys?!! At this point in time I am kind of doubting it. If Cinematic Titanic comes to your town, you need to see it. I am not stating an opinion, nor making a recommendation; this is simply a rock-solid scientific fact, up there with evolution and universal gravitation. The DVDs are enjoyable, but seeing Joel and co. do their thing live is on a totally other level.

(Additionally, I have a certain professional interest in this topic, since I'm part of the crew that performed Mystery Anime Theater for several years at Otakon. As a chance to see the true masters at work, this event did not disappoint.)

Have acquired juggling book. And practiced the first couple lessons. Yes, I really am serious about this resolution.

Update: I am now successfully dropping and chasing three balls! Go me!

Updated update:Am I completely weird to think that juggling is sexy?