Scary stories

Just the same as most reasonable people, I like stories and games involving zombies and vampires and ghosts other scary stuff.  Also psychological horror.  I don't much like the more modern gross out or torture stuff like SAW or Human Centipede.  B-movies can be charming but they have to be witty for me to like them- I prefer Evil Dead to something like Texas Chainsaw for example.  Tops in horror however has to be metaphysical horror, I like the whole uncaring universe, madness inspiring lore about old civilizations and weird dream realms and un-knowable alien races vibe in general.  I like that kind of horror way more, including where it crosses over into Fantasy or Sci-Fi like in Karl Edward Wagner's Kane books or in movies like Pandorum or Alien.  I dig that Cthulhu style mythos - but you know I hadn't actually read much Lovecraft.

Then I got my phone.

I haven't really made the jump to reading many books in electronic format.  I have grabbed a bunch of free books from Google Play including a Japanese fairytale book, Dracula, some Mark Twain and The Backwoods of Canada by a Canadian woman written in the early 1800s. Some good stuff there for sure but I got a lot more downloaded than I have yet managed to read. I have however found that the book clients on my phone to be a perfect platform for reading short stories.  For less cost than cup a coffee, I have got a copy of the Definitive H.P. Lovecraft from Kindle and am reading along with the HP Podcraft literary podcast.  This podcast is a light-hearted look at the stories of H.P Lovecraft done in the order they were published and is well produced and has some really good readings.  The commentators generally have some post story analysis and/or historical footnotes too - so is a great way to get into the writing.  It's also pretty funny and they bring in enough analysis to place the works, but not so much as to be dry.  I'd consider reading along with the podcast a light independent study type introduction, and it's a great way to catch up on your Cthulhu.  See I'm bettering myself.

I think I'm on episode 14 now - I just finished reading The Street and I'm going to download the episode tonight so I can listen to it in my car tomorrow.  I think there are 80-90 episodes so I have a way to go yet.  Good times.


*I need to brush up on my Robert E. Howard reading too.

A Grab Bag

I haven't posted anything here for a while so I'm just going to ramble on for a bit.

The top referring link to this blog is some Russian skin care site which looks really legit and great.  Oh yea.  Really I can't even fathom how that spam business works since they just jam up everything with broken or weird looking links.  Do people buy stuff from them or do they just hope you miss-click on their links?  Well if they want to increase page references are they barking up the wrong blog.  I do apologize if there are legitimate Russian skin care enthusiasts who also follow my infrequent posts.

Minecraft is still a thing.  I get a kick out of playing still and a couple friends and our kids have popped in and are doing stuff so it's a shared world that is fun to visit.  It's fairly low impact gaming compared to a MMORPG or even a co-op shooter like Left 4 Dead or Battlefield - because aside from the occasional tricky situation (last night Bingo and I found a fortress in the Nether and got killed by blazes!) it's pretty easy to pop in, do some stuff, then pop back out.  You don't have to dedicate an hour to it, which of course means you end up playing 3 hours...  It's a lot of fun though.  In the past week I've found a village up in the north lands and had to set them poor buggers up with some decent shelter and fencing so they wouldn't wander off and fall into a cave, or get killed by zombies.  They thrive now due to my generous guidance - all hail Lord Hobo.  Bingo also taught me how to tame wolves to get dogs, and we found out how if you do PVP dogs are a good thing to have.  I hit him once and his dog still growls at me days later.

I started funding a couple kickstarts (small K as one was actually on Indiegogo) for RPG material.  I missed out on the Kickstarter for the black box Glory to Rome which I regret but I did manage to get in on the Parsec RPG which looks to be pretty cool which I don't mind supporting since it's a small press doing good stuff. I am also signing on to get a hard cover copy of Lamentations of the Flame Princess which was something I wanted to buy in stores except there was no such thing.   I noticed that Steve Jackson is Kickstarting a big box deluxe print of OGRE which looks so awesome but which is a bit out of my ROI range.  That's something like the last BloodBowl reprint or the War of the Ring Collectors edition which I wished to purchase but just couldn't justify.  They look so nice and would be great to have on display in a stately gentleman's condo, but I wouldn't get the value out of having them sit on a shelf.  Crowd-funding is a huge revolution in product production - especially the publishing industry.  Between  kickstarts and PDF publishing, the whole industry really has turned inside out and the small nimble companies seem to have the edge if they can work with the smaller margins and still get their message out.

I was also reading some Facebook threads where people were shouting out chess moves at each other.  To me that's like using the telephone to send morse code messages to people. Really get a digital room guys.  It reminded me of all the great boardgames people are not playing online - like Colossus and Conquest and M.U.L.E - or that fine Diplomacy.ca site where you can play diplomacy with folks - spending the week emailing threats and promises to people and then sending in your orders and having the site execute them all  and update the board.  It even has an online conference board for planning sessions.  And that's all just web - don't even get me started on tablet and smartphone games.  Also Google + is awesome good for playing RPGS.

Ah Internet FTW.

And they shall inhabit a new and glorious land

I go the Minecraft server set up.  I also got the Minecraft client to run on my younger daughter's laptop, which was surprisingly hard considering.  I used to play/program a game called crossfire and it had a java map editor and I managed to get that to run on a laptop with 32mb of ram.  Minecraft however balks at running well on a laptop with 1GB of ram and really the graphics are not a huge sight different*.

Run you poor bugger, run!

When I set up the server I had quickly rushed around to secure myself before nightfall and had build a small hold, which had gotten blown apart by a creeper. After barely surviving that night, I had built a much nicer hold in the side of a nearby mountain.  I also built a couple monuments with torches to mark deep holes to avoid in the dark and to investigate at a later time.  All in testing the server you realize...  Anyway, when my girls first appeared in the game world they spawned close to the ruins and they immediately looted the torches - the little rogues.  Everyone spawns in the same general area when they first start, or when they die, and that was in a field not too far from my mountain home.  I went out and led them back to the mountain hold and then explained a few basics of crafting to them, as well as handed out stone axes and swords.  I logged out and told them to go exploring and gathering food, but they started fighting right away and the older killed the younger one because she was digging holes in the hold wall.  She spawned back at the start and could not remember the way back and it was getting dark.  Much shouting could be heard over this, so I had to log back in and lead her back to the fort while avoiding the zombies.  It was pretty tense actually because it was also supper time so we had a deadline and could not afford to get killed again.  Despite this altercation, the kids liked the multi-player survival mode.  They asked their mother to join in but she politely declined, even with the promise of keeping her own chicken farm.

After supper we logged back in and I took my older daughter on a tour of the natural caves below the hold.  We packed a pile of torches and went exploring the deep, mining coal and a little iron as we found it.  We also fought a bunch of spiders, skeletons, zombies and a few creepers.  The caves were pretty extensive and we found a couple waterfalls and natural amphitheatres before we ran out of torches and had to turn back.  We were just using text to communicate and when I asked how she liked the caves her comment was "Scary".  Good scary I think, the finest kind of gaming brings immersion that gets your nerves tingling like this.  She wasn't playing Webkinz now!  We returned to the hold with our loot and I set her to refining the ore into iron while I ran out to get some food.  I found a herd of wild cattle in a nearby valley and returned to fry up some steaks on the stove.  I had enough iron to made iron helmets and iron swords for us.

Then it was bed time.

This was a lot of fun and I was thinking a lot about it.  Getting the kids involved in this kind of gaming is fun for me and I think it builds some procedural logic skills that will be useful for them.  I was very tempted to set up a home Crossfire server as well and let them run around on it.  I think that that game might have a bit too high a learning curve at the moment (tons of key bindings to keep up with the mostly text command parser), but I am certainly keeping it in my back pocket.  Crossfire was an excellent experience for me because it got me into the guts of team programming (especially exposure to C and Python), and I've taken a lot of those concepts into the workplace, even if I'm not doing much programming.  It will be interesting to see if they get into programming via video games like I did.

Oh yea, and the WASD control scheme will train them to play Left 4 Dead with me too!





*ok it is 3d and there is lighting effects but still it's all regular polygons here and Minecraft must have incredibly inefficient code to require so much RAM.

Minecrack

Behold a new and unspoiled land!

My oldest kid has been playing minecraft in her browser, that's how you play the older version.  She asked me if I could get her the new version with crafting in it and I thought that might be fun so I looked into it and picked up a copy.  I also picked up a copy of the portable version for android.  I also got the minecraft server so we could set up a shared instance to play on.  I also got a big needle full of smack ready to ween myself off this later, because it's super addictive.  I was 'testing it out' for her and I ended up testing most of the day.  I tested how to get killed by spiders and how to kill a chicken and how to run from zombies.  I tested getting wood and digging a safehole.  By the end of the day we were swapping recipes for torches and stoves and talking about the dangers of eating rotten meat and dark caves.  It's pretty fun.  I haven't got the server set up so we aren't doing multi-player and we have 4 different worlds going on at the moment, one on the tablet, one on my phone, and two on our computers.  The portable minecraft doesn't have crafting in it but it works very well - even on my phone.  On the Transformer Prime tablet it runs like snot.*  My daughter prefers creation mode but I'm hard into the survival.  There is a real story in there surviving your first night in a dark hole while the zombies shuffle just outside your makeshift wall of dirt.  Crafting refines that experience, gathering wood, finding coal and making my first torches was an amazing experience.  Penny arcade did the perfect cartoons for this:

I can see me and the kids sitting around with headsets on fortresses and building crap on our home minecraft server.  It must be said that it's a hell of a lot cheaper than Lego.





*that means good in case you didn't grow up in Northern Ontario.

Transformer time

So I think I'm liking this android tablet.  One thing right off is that I am writing this post from it which is something I couldn't do from the Ipad.   OK, I guess I could have but the few times I tried it was grueling.  The blogger forms were spartan, the keyboard was both too large and had too few characters on each 'tab' for real typing, and I couldn't figure out how to post pictures.  With the android, the blogger interface is the same as on a PC, I installed beansoft thumb keyboard which is great, can be resized and has 'long touch' characters for numbers and punctuation, and cursor keys. Heck I can even use the blogger spellcheck.  All in all this tablet does the web better, or at least more consistantly, although not any faster (flash ads need to be banished!).

My other criteria for a tablet were Netflix, books, pdfs and comic readers and I'm happy to say this tablet can do all that.  ezPDF is not as good as Goodreader (it gets slow with big files) but it is pretty close, and Netflix and books from kindle work just the same as their iPad verions.  lt's pretty snappy playing all sorts of media and its nice to manage that media the same ways I do on my PCs.    I can keep my files in folders by type and the apps seem more integrated around the content instead of the mishmash of types and access Apple apps can have. Being able to access files from microSD cards is great too and really expands on the initial 32gb internal storage.  It came with very little bloat ware installed and I was able to stream files from my SAN right out of the box.  It was also nice that all my phone apps were available to install on the tablet and that most of them not only worked perfectly but looked great too.  Instead of blowing them up in size (although you have that option), somehow Icecream Sandwich stretches them out without distorting them.

Is it better than the iPad?  Probably not.  Its not as simple as the visually consistant iOS interface (but really they are both just touch and swipe). But it's as good as an iPad I think, and you can choose how you want to customize it, and for me I think it's a better fit.

Bye iPad

I sold my iPad and am tracking down an Android tablet to replace it.  I really liked having a tablet but I wasn't so enamored of the Apple offering specifically and really like the Android phone I have (a Nexus S).  Almost all of the fantastic apps available for the iPad are uninteresting to me and they don't share data and sorry but they don't just work unless you just pay for new hardware and stuff all the time.  I'll try the Android and hopefully I'll like it better.

I would have held onto the iPad but someone I knew needed a present for her husband and it seemed a perfect fit.  I had pretty much decided I wanted to pick up an ASUS Transformer Prime but there were none available anywhere except at Staples and only online.  So now I'm waiting.  Staples has one day delivery and sure enough they 'delivered' it in one day - the problem is that they came to deliver it when I wasn't home - between 9am and 5pm any day of the week.  Seriously that's the time they gave - sometime between 9 and 5.  Man I have to work and I can't take a whole day off to sign for a package.  I called them to try to change the order or deliver it to the store so I could pick it up and they said there was nothing they could do.  No depot to pick it up at, no way to change the address, no way to cancel the order.  They will try to deliver it again... some business day between 9-5.  They try to deliver it three times and if they can't they cancel the order.  Isn't that great, such a waste of time and gas and effort for everyone.  Hows that for a green policy?  That's so crappy and they need to fix their home delivery system.  Can you imagine Amazon or Futureshop pulling that shit?

Yes I could have had them deliver it to the store.  Yes I will do that if ever there is a next time.  But this is system is broken and the solution is so easy these days with mobile access to data that it should be fixed.

So I'm waiting for my new tablet and missing my iPad.


**UPDATE**

So sure enough I missed the delivery which is why I wrote that sad tale of first world woe.  I was resigned to this being a real cluster fuck and seriously considered just ordering another and having it shipped to the store.  Well around 6:30 there was a knock on the door and there was a nice gentleman with my tablet!  He was the delivery person from Staples and he said he was in the neighborhood and thought he'd check in again to see if I was home now.  I was very happy to say the least and went online to their customer site to give him a proper kudos.  Staples home delivery service still sucks balls, but it is not the fault of their staff and this guy went out of his way to deliver their package despite (probably because of) their crappy system.

Saturn and Varley and Movies

I was reading an article based on a link I followed from Facebook about a large cylindrical object pictured near Saturn's Rings.  Turns out this bit of weird space news comes up from time to time and people tend to forget things so it seems like this news comes out of nowhere but it doesn't.  A fellow wrote a conspiracy book about this phenomena back in 1996 called The Ring-Makers of Saturn.  I really haven't looked into this topic enough to get a sense of what is actually going on here, if this is people arguing over image artifacts on a camera lens or if there are oblong ice moonlets in that part of the ring due to explained/unexplained processes, or even if these objects are moving or stationary relative to the rings.  I do get the impression that it's not new news however.  Yes, people tend to think that everything they read on the web is new and I wonder how much of that is because we're simply skimming the cream off the top of the Internet and calling it knowledge these days.  Back when people wrote books, things had a little more place in time maybe.  This isn't about how bad the Internet is however, more just commenting on how lazy we can be.

The story did remind me of John Varley's books about a large world ship orbiting near Saturn called Gaea.  The series was called the Gaea Trilogy, or The Titanide, and consisted of three books, Titan, Wizard and Demon.  He wrote the first book in the series in 1979 and I wonder if there was a co-responding news items in astronomical journals in the 60's or 70's about long cylindrical objects in Saturn's rings that might have triggered the idea for him.  As for the books, I really enjoyed them when I first read them and I still enjoy them now when I revisit the series.  The first book has quite a different tone than the second and third.  The first is much more in the physical exploration vein, while the second and third are much more interested in social issues. I think that the series got better when it started exploring societies (large and small) instead of the Gaean landscape, but I like both themes really.  The characters were very good, I'm not sure I want to read more Titan stories because worlds can grow too large to sustain stories, but I do miss hearing about the characters actually, just like you'd miss hearing news about good friends.  I feel much closer to the characters from the Gaea series than I do about the characters in Varley's other books, despite some of those stories and worlds (and even characters) being better realized.  If you like a good Science Fiction book you should check out some of his other stuff as well, especially his short story collections, and Steel Beach which is a huge callback to the The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and a real evolution of that theme.

Thinking about John Varley got me to do two things, the first was to see if there was anything interesting he has worked on that I hadn't heard of.  I grew up reading authors like Burroughs, Niven, Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov and I got their books from second hand books stores, and most of what I read was printed some years before I was born.  I am not used to my authors being on the Internet and I forget to look them up.  This is good and bad because when I do hear about a new book or series, it's usually in the book stores and I don't have to wait while it gets written, but it also means I often tend to misplace authors as well.  I popped John Varley into Amazon and saw indeed he's written some stuff in the last ten years I missed out on.  I didn't think I wanted to read his 'Lightning/Thunder' books just now but I dropped his book Mammoth on my wish list for later. It looks like something I could get into.

Anyway the second thing I did was to look him up on the Internet and I found he has a website.  The John Varley website is a bit of a mess visually but it has a bunch of stuff on it and really it's the content that counts.  I've only spent a few minutes on the site so far but he has the usual new book info, a bio, the bibliography and some interesting essays on there.  The big thing I noticed is that he's reviewed a frigging pile o' movies.  I think that's great and I will be eager to see what he thought of movies I've watched.  That's something I never considered before I saw it but hey, it would be good to compare notes on something like movies with a writer you have enjoyed.  I wonder what an Issac Asimov movie review blog would be like.