This is exciting! It’s one of those technologies that’s been almost there for as long as I’ve been paying attention, but never quite. If Carmack’s started to take an interest, that’s encouraging. Because he hates latency, which is the thing—more than resolution or weight or looking like a dufus—that’s made head-mounted displays unusable.
The CT Red Plenty seminar has begun. And will continue for… a while, depending on how fast they decide to post it. They’ve got a bunch of good people, and the CT seminar is a good format; I’m eager to see what they come up with. (still plenty of time to get and read the book!)
I remember the tech demo for this, a million years ago. I’m glad it’s finally coming out. (I’m firmly back in the shooters-must-be-on-PC-ffs camp these days, so it’s not unalloyed gladness.)
The far end of the scale caught me off guard! I guess that’s the wrinkle that makes it patentable.
(Source: contextfreepatentart)
Quintin Smith on D3’s hardcore mode:
It also makes the first and only real lesson of Hardcore mode: watch your sodding health bar.
Outside of actually dying, the health bar is responsible for the other bad thing about Hardcore mode - the near miss. You come out of a little scrap with a half-dozen vomiting trees, hoover up the loot, and then see it: you’ve only got 15 per cent of your health left. To a regular player, this means nothing. To you, it’s the apocalypse.
You almost died and you didn’t even know it. You pick the metaphorical bullet out of the metaphorical bible in your vest pocket, and realise that you were lucky. But screw luck. The Hardcore character isn’t about luck. He or she is about bravery, caution, and most of all skill. When you tell somebody you’ve got a level-40 hardcore character, what you’re saying is that you’re better than them. To come out of a fight knowing you drifted close to death, ignorant of the danger, devalues your character. It leaves you feeling a little bit sick.
It really is a terrible feeling.
Of course, when I finally died, it wasn’t an accident. I got sloppy, rushed in against enemies who were too tough for me, and watched my health bar the whole way down.
[posting mostly to say: rip yellsalot (lv. 18). you killed many things.]
From CT commenter Area Man on Madeleine L’Engle:
I can’t remember which book it was, but in one there’s an explanation of how mitochondria work, which relied on something called “farandolae”, or something like that. Their dysfunction was making Charles Wallace sick. Of course, these things don’t really exist.
What I didn’t appreciate until many years later, when I was in grad school, is that the inner workings of mitochondria were a huge mystery back when Madeleine L’Engle was writing her books. Everyone knew they provided cells with energy, but no one knew quite how. It was the holy grail of its time. One of my professors lamentably told us of conferences where scientists would jump out of their seats and yell and scream at each other over the theories of membrane potential vs. substrate phosphorylation vs. other ideas. “Lamentably”, in that he missed those days, like there was nothing quite that serious that we’ve argued about since.
It puts L’Engle’s work in better perspective. Although the physical basis by which mitochondria provide cells with energy is a simple concept to us today, it’s easy to see how it was a window into something mystical back then.
Also, Lucas is doing his best to piss off his Marin neighbors. As someone with Marin neighbors myself, fuck those guys.
Is the reason Google+ never took off (yes yes this can and will be argued by G+ nerds) that the big “Circles” selling point - split yr social media life into discrete private groups - had been organically pre-empted by the thin but real walls between identity across niche platforms?
i.e. Google’s…
Google also simultaneously (right?) killed off the comment/share/follow functions within Google Reader. That really pointed the way toward a wholly different kind of social network rather than a pale tweak of Facebook. Facebook instantiates your IRL relationships in a single online space, and gloms on any content or issue enthusiasm on top of it. A “Super-Reader” could have done this in the opposite direction; branching groups of people based on what they are into, getting to know each other regardless of who or where they are. Instead of chasing after FB they could have gone after Reddit.
Maybe they still would have “lost”; I’m just pissed those functions disappeared.
Yes! The anthropologist Mimi Ito - who knows a lot more about this digital identity stuff than I do - talks about “friendship networks” vs “interest networks”. Facebook is a friendship network - which are usually strongly real-life rooted - and its success means people think “well friendship networks are where it’s at”, but I reckon people don’t NEED more than one online friendship network. Whereas most of the big niche networks and post-FB growth stories - Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, arguably LinkedIn - can be and are used as friendship networks but work best as interest networks: connecting you with people you don’t know already out of a shared interest in stuff. Interest networks are good at different things so there’s no problem with being on several.One thing about interest networks is that “real” identities are much less important - consistency beats authenticity, whereas in a friendship network you do need some guarantor of identity. So when G+ made such a flap about real names, and demolished the G Reader interest networks it had already built, it was sending very clear signals - on purpose or otherwise - that it wanted to compete on friendship network terms not interest network terms. And that meant Facebook.
(Which is odd since if there’s one thing Google knows about and is (in theory) good at it’s interests!)
Ha, this reminds me of the Metafilter thread recently on Google+, where someone speculated, as Tom is here, that a “friendship network” is a natural monopoly. I felt, when it first started up, that Circles failed to be a compelling differentiator from Facebook. In other words, what they were trying to do was too similar to what FB was doing, and to have really succeeded they ought to have tried for doing something different.
RIP greader-sharing ;_;
Circles would be a great idea if they only matched how people actually compartmentalize their online identities, but they just don’t. It’s the subscription model in reverse: the broadcaster has to decide who’s interested in what, and then they staple it all to your real name just to make sure you won’t say anything interesting. (Which is a long way of saying I think Tom is right.)
It’s worth having different services for different communities of interest, but also for different kinds of message. Even if my Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and (sharing-enabled) Greader bros were all the same people, I like having a separate channel for each size of textbox. Interleaving tweets into any of my other feeds wouldn’t make them more useful.
I’m also a little butthurt on google reader’s behalf: it doesn’t even get a spot in the top bar thingy.
I cannot choose. Sometime he angers me
With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,
Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,
And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff
As puts me from my faith.
- Hotspur, Henry IV part 1
There was a post on Penny Arcade recently which discussed China Miéville’s books. So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to put down my experience with the well-regarded Perdido Street Station.
Perdido Street Station hurt me. And when I say hurt, it’s not with my luvvie hat on, I really mean it caused emotional damage. Not much; it’s a book. Still, that’s a pretty dramatic thing for a book to do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
[spoilers ahoy]
Reblogging for an honest, clear-sighted, and funny discussion of a problem I’ve thrown myself against more times than I care to remember and never managed to wrestle into submission. I’d always thought of it as the Happy Ending Problem, but thanks to Prunescholar I think I shall now file it away mentally as the Apple and the Razorblade.
I’ve added a few of my own thoughts under a cut, in a regrettably stream-of-consciousness manner, for anyone who’s interested in this kind of highfalutin’ purpose-of-art stuff.
And now I am piggybacking on pT’s discussion to bring it back to China Mieville, for no reason except that I did absolutely love Perdido Street Station when I read it—because my friend handed it to me and said “Just so you know, the ending to this book is FUCKED UP.” (It suckerpunched me anyway—it’s that kind of ending.)
An interesting discussion! A couple of notes:
- Tycho’s dislike of Mieville surprised me! They play around in very similar territory. He might be jealous that Mieville has a stronger command of Latin roots, or perhaps the way he is playing around but also taking things seriously is kind of embarrassing/uncomfortable? Who knows; taste is taste.
- There’s a strain of spy novel/geopolitical thriller where, like, some dude has evidence that will completely shake up DC/London/the Middle East, bring down the corrupt, and increase justice and goodness. Our heroes spend the first two-thirds of the book identifying him and convincing him to testify (or vice versa). In the final chapter he gets on a plane/bus to go where he needs to be; there is a plane crash or car bomb. Everyone sighs wearily into their tea (or coffee in the off chance that it’s abnormally cynical Americans instead of Brits) but did you really expect things to change? This is some of what Emma is getting at: when the deck is stacked against you, what happens is that you lose. That’s life and it sucks.
- That’s only some of what Mieville’s doing in Perdido Street Station. On rereading, I definitely got this feeling that if there were a genre X such that X : fantasy :: horror : urban fantasy, that’s where PSS would hang out. There’s a lot of creepy shit in there! I think as fantasy readers we’re used to reading “unknowable transdimensional entities with their own agenda and incomprehensible thought processes” and we translate that internally to “actually secretly your bros who will help you out in the final battle and perhaps bonus hugs” but that isn’t what’s on the page. That doesn’t keep me from being angry at him for taking it out on Lin!
- As far as politics, revolution, and the end of Iron Council goes, you should definitely check out Mieville’s response to the Crooked Timber seminar. I personally love the messy aftermath of actual revolutions, but I respect his copout here.
I RECEIVED MY COPY IN THE MAIL JUST AS I FINISHED THIS COMIC
FATE???
(Chopped it up for better dashboard viewing. Happy Launch Day, everyone!)
I got into the game just before 1 AM; Baldy has punched many things. Jar of Souls! :D
I have progressed from Error: 37 to Error: 300008. Diablo better watch out, I will be punching him in the face ANY MINUTE NOW.
