Yoroshiku!

PC Gods Angry! PC Gods SMASH!

2007-05-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks, I've been contemplating a PC upgrade - there's been a recent RAM and CPU price drop, and there are a ton of games coming out that I'm dying to play, but that my current PC really isn't up to.

However, I couldn't really justify dropping that much cash, so I decided to buy an Xbox 360 instead. I picked it up on Friday, and had a blast the whole weekend smashing zombies in Dead Rising and playing various demos.

But, of course, I knew my defection would not go unnoticed by the supernatural powers that control the PC Gaming world. So I was not surprised when my wife's PC died on Sunday morning - I could tell by the crusty brown ooze that had leaked out of several capacitors that she was yet another victim of The Bad Cap Scandal.

So at that point, I had a choice - rebuild her PC for a couple of hundred bucks, or give her my PC and build myself a new one. I'm weak, so I decided to build a new PC!

She needed her PC by Tuesday morning, which pretty much eliminated any chance of shopping online, so I headed down to Fry's in Renton, wandered down the aisles filled with Fabulous Products (peppered with loss leaders which were invariably out of stock), weathered the gauntlet of belligerent East African salesmen who didn't actually know anything about the products they were trying to sell me, but were quite willing to say anything I wanted to hear to close the sale, and came home with a pile of merchandise that was invariably priced 20-30% over what I would have paid had I just ordered from NewEgg. Plus a shiny new copy of Vista Home Premium, Upgrade Edition (queue forboding music)

Now, for the fun part - building the PC! So, the first, easy step is to move my PC from my giant case to a smaller case that fits under the Darling Wife's desk. No problem! Um, except it no longer boots. So I reseated all the components, and...it crashes booting into Windows! Several hours later, after swapping components around, etc, I finally figure out that it's some kind of ESCD problem (whatever that is) and putting the components back exactly how they were lets me boot to desktop.

Whew.

Now to do a fresh install of Windows XP on the PC...except Windows XP doesn't support hard drives > 128Gb without SP2, which isn't part of my install disk. So I create a new install disk that includes SP2, and we're off to the races. One down, one to go.

I nervously unpacked all my components from Fry's, including the budget motherboard I picked up because It Was Just So Damned Cheap! put them all in my new PC, plugged everything in, turned on the PC and....everything works. It just boots right up, and starts chugging through the Vista install. Maybe the most painless PC build I've ever done, until...Vista asks me for my product key. No problem, I enter it, figuring it might ask me to insert my Win2K CD (since it's an upgrade CD) or maybe enter my Win2K product key.

Nope. It wants me to run the CD from within my Win2K installation, basically making the "upgrade" CD worthless if you are simultaneously upgrading the hardware (especially since it's incredibly unlikely that Win2K would support my new SATA drive, etc).

Once again, Google and Paul Thurrott came to my rescue - the trick is to install Vista without a product key (which puts it in a 30 day trial mode), then "upgrade" that Vista installation using my install DVD. Voila!

This may be the last home-build I do, though - life is just too damned short to spend hours building PCs anymore.

P.S. Oooh, almost forgot - I mostly play my 360 using headphones, and I got this fun little gadget to help me. It's a tiny, battery-powered amp from penguinamp.com, and it sounds great:

The web is a fickle mistress

2007-05-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

So I've been doing some extracurricular web development work lately, and I figured I'd share what I learned:

1) The internets are filled with lies!

I'd mocked up a site using Ruby on Rails as the backend, and I'd gotten some new assets from our graphic designer to use as menu rollovers. I decided to do a little research to see if there was anything built in to Rails or Scriptaculous to help automate this task, when I came across a "usability" message forum, containing gems like "Don't use images in place of text!" (sure, maybe when the Browser Gods give me more than 3 fonts to work with).

Anyhow, one of the posts on there said something along the lines of "I can't stand it when I see noobs still using Javascript to do their menu rollovers instead of CSS", and I thought "Well, I certainly don't want some random stranger on the internet to think I'm a noob! I'd better check this out!"

Anyhow, the idea as outlined in the forum was to setup your links with a forced width/height in the CSS, and set a background image on them. You can then use the a:hover or a:active CSS elements to specify a different background image when they are rolled over or clicked on.

Brilliant! ...except it doesn't quite work, because some browsers don't gracefully cache background images, so they get loaded from scratch when you rollover them. And even the ones that do cache background images still result in flickering when you rollover the item.

Anyhow, it turns out that there's a workaround that my random forum friend didn't know about - you basically combine all your rollovers into a single image, then use CSS to change the image offset to swap images when you want to display the rollover. It's darned clever, although in the end I think it would've been faster for me to just roll my own Javascript preloader/rollover handler than muck around with all the images.

Of course, when editing the images, I couldn't help but notice that there was some significant artifacting on them, which leads me to:

2) JPEG is a piss-poor format for images with text in them!

Yeah, yeah, I knew this already (it's for photographic images, people!), but that's the format the graphic designer gave them to us in. At first glance they looked acceptable, but the more I looked at them, the more I couldn't stand it. So I had her regenerate the images as PNG, only to discover:

3) PNG has problems also!

So this is probably old news to anyone who has worked with the Macintosh, but the Mac uses a different gamma function than the PC. This means that if you have an RGB value, it'll look lighter on the Mac than it does on the PC - it's built right into the video drivers.

The creators of the PNG format, in their infinite wisdom, thought "hey, this is bad - our images might look different on different systems!" so they decided to put gamma information directly into the PNG file so when viewed with a well-behaved application, the image would look identical on different systems.

Sounds great, huh?

Except the rest of the world (like HTML) doesn't come with customizable gamma functions. So when your PNG file contains gamma information that doesn't match the built-in gamma function for your system, then the colors in the PNG won't match the other colors in your web page, even though they have identical RGB values. This is bad, if you want the background color of your image to match the background-color CSS setting on your page, for example.

Turns out that Photoshop inserts this gamma information automatically, and there's no good way to keep it from doing this. The Mac version of Photoshop inserts gamma information that matches the Mac's gamma function - this means that everything looks perfect on the Mac (which is what most graphics professionals are going to use) but then looks off when viewed on a PC (which is what most web developers and the rest of the world use).

4) The internets will save you!

So of course a few minutes of searching on the internet yielded dozens of solutions, ranging from the inane ("don't use PNG!") to the obscure ("Go into this random File Info dialog in the latest version of Photoshop and delete this random chunk of file information!") to the pragmatic ("Use one of these free utilities to strip out the gamma info!"). I went for the pragmatic option - Ken Silverman (creator of the PNGOUT utility), I owe you a beer, man.

Good things...

2007-04-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

There are many good things in life:

Peggle!
Puzzle Quest. Oh god, yes, Puzzle Quest
My new LCD monitor
Not having a sick baby. The only thing worse than being sick, is being sick *and* having a sick baby. And wife. Yeesh.
Puzzle Quest, again!
Ruby on Rails. It almost makes web development tolerable again.
Coffee.

Of these, I'd have to rank "not having a sick baby" and "coffee" at the top of my April list :)

I have had it with these mutherf--g babies on this mutherf--g plane!

2007-02-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

So, we took a flight to Chicago for my granny's 90th birthday. Travelling with a 13-month-old was about what you might expect:

The outgoing flight was relatively painless, since we had to wakeup at 5AM and the boy sacked out pretty early and slept through the flight.

The return flight, however, was less fun, and was punctuated by Blake grabbing a fistful of hair from the lady sitting in front of us and refusing to let go, followed by him laughing maniacally and grabbing my Darling Wife's hair while she yelled at him in German.

Luckily Mario came to the rescue, and the boy sat in my lap and quietly watched me play Mario Kart DS for 20 minutes until he fell asleep. Yay, better living through Video Games!

I've promised her that the next time we travel, I'll book a separate seat for Blake, but it's kind of a moot point as there's no way I'm getting on a plane with him again until he's 3.

Angry Garden

2007-02-07T11:51:00.000-08:00

everyday terror
soaked up
like a seed in an angry garden
until the fear is indistinguishable
from the plant
is the plant

a lifetime of washing
can't remove the welts
and a lifetime of heartfelt apologies
can't put the plant
back in the seed
to grow again

and who would want to, anyway?

so we put on the gloves
and once more
turn to tend our own garden
and hope
that the mistakes we make
are our own

Falling off the wagon...

2007-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

So, it's been about 7 months since I've played WoW. And I'm holding the expansion pack in my hand, ready to take the plunge again.

It's funny - you can't just jump right into an addiction once you've broken free ; you kinda have to sneak up on it. If you are a recovering alcoholic, you don't just say "Fuck it!" one day, grab your keys, and drive to a bar - you have to work yourself up to it, look at it out of the corner of your eye while you rationalize what you are doing.

My approach went like this - I was going out to pick up some lunch, and I figured I'd stop by Office Depot to pick up some things I needed. And, you know, if they were selling the Burning Crusade then maybe I'd buy it. They didn't have it, so I drove on to order my lunch. I had about 15 minutes to burn while I was waiting for my burger, so I figured I'd stroll on over to Barnes & Noble and browse the books there. And, of course, if I should happen to come across the game while I was in there, well, cool, I might pick it up. And naturally they didn't have it either.

Sony Style? Well, I've still got a few minutes, I can look at those HDTVs...nope, no PC software.

Bartell Drugs? We are out of Baby Tylenol, so I'd better go in and pick some up...no software again.

At this point, my food was no doubt getting cold, so I zipped over to pick up my burger. Heading back to my car, I saw it...The Apple Store (tm). They'd probably carry it, and if I recalled correctly, the Mac and PC versions come in the same box.

I don't own a Mac, nor an iPod...hell, I don't even own a turtleneck, so I had no justification for going in there. So all rationalizations were gone now - I was an addict, and I was walking down that dark alley to get my fix, not to take a leak.

"Hi, welcome to the Apple Store! Are you looking for something in particular, or just browsing?" asked the perky clerk.

I muttered something along the lines of "Shut the fuck up and get out of my way, lit major", shoved my way past the dorky Mac-heads looking at the meager Apple software lineup, grabbed my copy, and stomped out.

Now I just have to figure out how I can accidentally install the damn thing.

Oh, game...

2006-12-30T13:09:00.000-08:00

Apparently all these years I've been stifling my inner German - he's an unassuming, efficient little man whose hunger for reams of statistics is equaled only by his thirst for galactic conquest. But he's been set loose.

I've discovered Ogame.

Ogame is a browser based game. No, not one of those inane little flash-based time wasters. This is a Thinking-Man's game. Or, to be precise, a Worry-About-His-Fleet-All-Day-Man's game.

On the surface, it's a traditional 4x space exploration game. From the moment you log in, you are peppered with little pictures of space ships, planets, planetary defenses, etc. But don't let that fool you - this game is really just about numbers: making your numbers as big as you can, and using them to bludgeon poor saps with smaller numbers, at which point you take their numbers and add them to your own. They might as well take down all the space-themed pictures, and replace them with photos of puppies.

The crux of this game is that it operates in real time. You want to research a piece of technology? It'll take 2 or 3 hours, in real time. You want to colonize a new planet? You send your ship off, and when it arrives 14 hours later the planet is yours. The higher you research your "computer" technology, the more stuff you can do in parallel (attack other planets, etc) - there's technology that allows you to research or build things faster, have your ships travel faster (so they arrive at their destination in a shorter time, etc). But in the end, it all comes down to the numbers - when you attack a planet, how many of the different kinds of ships do you have, vs how many "defensive" units the planet has. Whoever has more is likely to win (after taking into account things like ship statistics, various relative technology levels, weaknesses of certain units against others, and good old-fashioned random luck).

It's complex enough that in a close battle it can be quite difficult to figure out how it will turn out...so the crafty German player base has come up with a set of tools to simulate battles and give you reports on how they will turn out (since there is an element of luck, the simulators tend to run hundreds or even thousands of times and provide best/worst-case results). Here's an example:

Since it all pretty much comes down to numbers, there's a definite food chain where the top 50 players prey on the top 250 players, and the top 250 players prey on the ones below them, and so on, and the smallest fish can almost never beat the larger ones in a direct fight (you can still do guerrilla-style hit-and-run raids on their bases while their fleets are away, but mostly as a small fish, you try really hard to stay below the radar of the big fish).

And that's where the true evil of this game comes in... Ogame has a persistent universe (actually, it's dozens of different universes, each of which has thousands of players). That means that while you are sleeping at night, someone who is stronger than you (and there is always someone stronger than you) can find your base and/or fleet and attack it. Bases that are attacked just lose resources (and 30% of your defenses are permanently destroyed), but if someone destroys your fleet...poof, it's gone. Weeks of work down the drain.

To counter this, Ogame uses this simple mechanism - fleets that are in transit are safe; only fleets in orbit around a planet can be attacked. That means that if you want to go to sleep, no problem, just send your fleets on an 8 hour trip. Want to go out to lunch? Send your fleets on a 90 minute trip. Just don't oversleep, or pick a restaurant with slow service, because as soon as your fleet returns, it's fair game. And if you wake up early and want to play, your options are limited because your fleet is still off on a mission.

The end result is that the serious Ogame player is forced to divide his day into two sections - times where he cannot play, because his fleets are off on safety missions, and times when he must play, because his fleets are at his planets and are vulnerable. And god forbid that the hapless player should have a windstorm which knocks out internet service for several days (*cough* me *cough*) because he'll inevitably freak out and have to drive to Kinko's to rent a PC to save his fleet.

The combination of having an increasing investment in the game (my fleet has been accruing for nearly 2 months now) with this "you must play, or lose everything" mechanism is crushing me, actually. It's even worse than grinding PvP in WoW was, because you can't even take a day off.

It's actually kind of a brilliant hook, when you think about it...

Squaresoft, busting my balls by proxy...

2006-11-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

So, I've just gotta rant. Why do DS RPG developers seem to love wasting my time?

Case in point - Children of Mana. The combat in CoM is pretty smooth, in the "gauntlet" vein - you wander around levels jamming buttons to whack things till candy comes out (literally). Simple and fun and polished.

But outside of that, it's one menu after another.

You finish a dungeon and want to sell something? OK, then:
* walk through the village to the market
* sit through an unnecessary 1-second fade transition
* go up the stairs to the vendor and hit the A button.
* Vendor asks "How can I help you?"
* Hit A again.
* Unnecessary 1-second fade transition
* Choose between "Shop" and "Chat".
* Unnecessary 1-second fade
* Choose "sell an item"
* half-second menu animation
* There's no "sell everything" button, of course, so let's say you want to sell 4 swords you just picked up. You use the stylus because the button navigation sucks. You press on arrow buttons to select "4" swords to sell, and click Sell, Get a confirmation, click OK, and you are done selling the swords.
* When done, you hit "B" a few times to get out. The vendor gives you an obligatory "Thanks, come again!" statement, which you have to acknowledge with an A keypress ("B" doesn't work). Followed by yet *another* obligatory fade transition before you are plopped back in the market.

So some of this stuff, I totally understand. I don't mind walking through the town to a vendor - it's part of the game world. But for god's sake, developers - don't put fade transitions in menus that your players will see like 300 times over the course of playing the game, and don't force your players to sit through canned salutations on every single interaction.

In my day, RPGs would throw up menus faster than you could hit keys - it was understood that menus were what stood between players and the gameplay, and the quicker you could get them out of the way, the better. I don't know when this changed, but I'm sure it's all somehow Square's fault. I mean, when you make a series of wildly successful games where 70% of your time is spent navigating menus and watching canned battle animations, it's not surprising when the rest of the industry follows suit.

Victory at last...

2006-11-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

A few days late on this, but I've been in a post-election night euphoric state. I got to scratch my liberal itch by voting for a full slate of Democrats, plus higher taxes, alternative energy, and strip clubs. Pure nirvana.

To my fellow Americans: Thank you, and welcome back to the reality-based community.

To the Democrats: Time to man up and show everyone you actually can govern this country. And I've still got my eye on you, Cantwell, you slippery wench - you got a free pass this time around despite your vote for the Iraq war, but it's time to toe the party line.

To the Republicans: We r in ur Congress impeaching ur doodz! Where is your God now, bitches?

Goddamn crybaby...

2006-07-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

I happened to come across a link to a Wired article asking whether a video game could make you cry.

One of the moments he mentioned was Aerith's death from Final Fantasy VII. At the time, it didn't really affect me very much, as I'd already read a spoiler for it and so it didn't really come as a surprise.

You can check it out here, if you like. Go ahead, it just takes a second. I'll wait.

My reaction after seeing that video was...OMG, is that *really* what pre-rendered video looked like back in 1997? I'm certainly not one to get turned off by cartoony graphics (*cough* manga addict *cough*), but it's hard to read much emotional content into the characters when the limit of their expression is blinking their eyes and frowning. Ah, well, I thought - it's not as good as everyone remembered.

Then, for kicks, I clicked through to a short clip from FF:AC (the movie Square-Enix published a year or two ago reprising the FF7 characters). And suddenly the music starts, and it's Aerith's Theme, and...queue the waterworks. I guess that game affected me more than I thought :)

But I guarantee you there's not a single song from FFX that will make me cry...unless it's the background music for that damn balloon dodging Chocobo race I had to run a few hundred times...

Pure, unadulterated lust...

2006-06-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

Let me preface this by saying, I'm a fairly crappy consumer. My secret shame is that I really don't do my part to keep the Mighty US Economic Engine purring along by buying lots of fun but ultimately unnecessary crap.

Case in point, I have not bought a TV in almost 20 years - yes, I still use my crummy 27 inch TV that I bought in college. Yeah, the one where I lost the remote, and where the front cover that hides the little knobs and dials broke off, and whose power cord was chewed through by a rabbit over a decade ago, and I happily spliced it back together with electrical tape.

And, yeah, I'm still driving my beat-up old Miata I bought back in 1990. It's got 100K+ miles on it, is impractical as hell (only two seats) and smells like an old shoe, and despite the fact that if I showed any inclination at all to buy a new car my wife would shriek with glee and personally drive me to the dealership, I have no desire to get a new one.

And yet, inexplicably, every few years even I am driven mad with consumer lust. It happened with my car (the first time I saw a Miata, I knew I had to have one, even though I'm too tall and have to slouch to keep my head from hitting the roof while I drive), it happened with my Asteroids Deluxe game, and now...

First, a little background. I've never been a big fan of portable gaming - in fact, over the course of my long gaming life, I've owned a single handheld game: the original Mattel Football game.

You old folks will remember this - entirely LED based, you were a little red dot that dodged other red dots. Sound effects consisted of a ticking timer, and a dismal little "Doop de doop" tune when you scored a touchdown. Looking back on it, it's inconceivable that someone would spend their hard-earned cash on something like this, and yet they sold millions. I mean, it's hardly even a game, really, and required about as much skill to play as it takes to spell "BOOBS" on a calculator (hint: 80085).

In the intervening years, I've encountered a few other handhelds. My daughter had the original Gameboy, and I spent an enjoyable flight to Montreal playing Pokemon Yellow, but when the plane landed I had no desire to play with it further. Likewise, a coworker bought a PSP (with the gorgeous, gorgeous screen), and after playing Lumines for a few minutes I yawned and handed it back to him and never gave it another thought.

But then...there was this:

Yeah, the DS Lite snared me. The more I read about it the more I had to have it. And now that I own one, I can hardly bear to set it down - I just want to sit and fawn over it, Smeagol-style.

The screens? Beautiful and bright. The features? Incredible - wi-fi for multiplayer, touch screen and microphone for unique gameplay. The polish? Unparalleled. It's like an iPod for gaming - it just feels good in your hand. I setup the WiFi connection last night, and while testing the connection it plays a little tune that could best be described as the sound of Fairies dancing. The games? Ranging from unabashedly old school (New Super Mario Bros and Mario Kart DS) to funky new genres like Trauma Center and Osu Tatakae Ouenden (did I mention that Nintendo didn't do any region lockouts, so you can play import games without modding your system)?

It's frankly impossible to justify buying another gaming system - it's not like I really needed to play games "on the go" (my Darling Wife's comment when I showed it to her was "Great, so now you can sit in the back seat and play games when we go on long trips, like the rest of the kids"). And yet, every time I play Mario Bros and close the lid, I can't keep a big goofy grin off my face when Mario says "Bye Bye!"

Worth every damn penny.

WOPR was right

2006-06-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

One day last week, I did something I haven't done in months...

I didn't play World of Warcraft.

Barring the occasional server outage, I think the last time that happened was when I was in the hospital during Blake's delivery last year - I didn't always play alot, but at the minimum I always found the time to log in, check the auction house, farm some shards, take a flight path, whatever.

But last week, I finally called it quits...well, technically, I can't actually bring myself to officially quit just yet, so I'm telling myself that I'm just "taking a break". But the writing is on the wall.

What brought me to this sorry state? Funny you should ask...

One evening I was sitting down to my normal "couple of hours juggling playing WoW and family/relationship time", when my Darling Wife walked by and said in an exasperated voice "Oh, you're playing that game again???" - I'm sure that most serious players have heard this question, oh, a few hundred times. For whatever reason, it actually sunk in this time, and I thought "Yeah, I am playing this game again...wtf?"

Around the same time, I was talking to my brother on the phone, and he mentioned that he was still playing WoW, and in fact was part of a guild that was raiding MC, and we were laughing about whether he'd still be able to keep it up after his baby was born. He thought he'd probably be able to do it, because he only raids twice a week, and his raids only took about 6 hours each...

And then there was this, further driving home the point that WoW requires an insane investment of time and effort...

Finally, one of the things that's been keeping me plugging away at WoW these last few months was that I had set a goal to hit Rank 10 in PvP, whose reward is some fairly snazzy gear. I finally did the math and realized that it was going to take me about another month of 15-20 hours per week grinding to make it to Rank 10. In fact, since I am competing with the rest of the server population for that rank, it might even take longer since the bulk of the population will be enjoying their summer vacation by playing 8-12 hours per day.

If you look at the canonical "four types of MUD players", I'm pretty squarely in the "achiever" category - playing WoW for me has been all about setting goals for my character, hitting those goals, and then setting new ones (those goals seldom had anything to do with "level", interestingly enough - "levelling up" was just something that happened as I pursued my various objectives, which is why it took me a year to hit 60).

Thanks to all of the above, I've come to the sad realization that progress in WoW post-60 requires a level of dedication that I don't think I can bring to the task any longer. And playing without making progress has no appeal to me (I love PvP, but PvPing without at least Tier 1 gear is suicide) - as a result, I'd say that a good 50% of the time I spent playing had become not particularly fun. So...I stopped. As in, didn't log in, didn't read the forums, nada. Zip. Turns out, the longer I was away from the game, the less I wanted to play.

Unsurprisingly, removing WoW left quite a hole in my brain - I know this, because I filled it up with lots of shiny new things:

Other games!
Turns out, there are other games out there. In my rush to jump into Azeroth, I left some unfinished business, so I finally got around to bringing the hammer down on Officer Tenpenny as well as the Prophet of Truth and his misguided minions.
My game queue is once again fully stocked: Darwinia, Shadow of the Colossus, HL2: Ep 1, Civ IV, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines... Good times ahead. Heck, I may even go back and finish God of War.
Arcade madness!
A year or so ago, my DW's PC went on the blink, so I bought her a new one from a guy on Craig's list, who sells PCs out of the trunk of his car. Surprise! - it was a piece of crap, with a wonky prototype/defective CPU and a budget motherboard that didn't even have an AGP slot. I ended up just buying new motherboards and CPUs and rebuilding both PCs, leaving me with a new low-end, but still fairly beefy computer to play around with.

Thanks to the magic of The Internet, I quickly filled it with pornogra...I mean, illegal classic arcade ROMs, with the idea that I'd turn my arcade cabinet into a MAME box.

Unfortunately, around this same time the monitor on my arcade cabinet went out...and I started getting serious about WoW, leaving all this stuff to collect dust. Once WoW was out of the way, I had time to put a capkit in my monitor, configure an arcade UI for the machine, and order/install/build hardware to let the PC talk to my cabinet's monitor, control panel, and speaker. And now, my cabinet plays over 1000 old arcade games...which if you ignore the nostalgia factor, is not much different than having a PC full of shareware.

Ah, but that nostalgia! I already owned many of these games, so I can vouch for the fact that the emulated versions are so close to the originals that you can't tell the difference. It's just incredible how well it turned out (ignore the blurriness of the pictures - I don't have a tripod).

Here's the front end (1672 games! Of course, most of them are bootleg versions of Space Invaders and Pac-Man):

And good ol' Robotron:

Ms. Pac-Man (it's a vertical game on a horizontal monitor, which makes the purist in me want to cry, but it still looks/plays great):

My old fave, Gauntlet:

And, last but not least:

Of course, no mention of Dragon's Lair is complete without the obligatory fan-service shot of the delightful Princess Daphne:

I thought I'd grown immune to the arcade bug, but apparently not. Next up is a new set of joysticks (I can't very well play Ms. Pac-Man with a standard 8-way joystick), and either a spinner (for Arkanoid/Omega Race/Star Trek/etc) or a trackball (for Marble Madness, Centipede, Missile Command). I only have room for one on the control panel, sadly... decisions, decisions...

Of course, that assumes that I don't just start playing WoW again...

The same old grind...

2006-05-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Alas, no baby pictures this time around, as I've been forbidden by my Darling Wife from posting any more pictures where deviants and other scoundrels can see them.

However, our dog has taken to sleeping in the baby's chair whenever possible, so the baby looks pretty much just like this, only with less hair and a diaper:

Feel free to drop me an email if you want *actual* baby pictures.

Life on the home front has settled into a rather comfortably boring routine:

We hired a nanny! Her name is Jennifer, and she is absolutely great with Blake, and as a bonus she's even taken a liking to Gruffydd, who absolutely adores her.
Still no sleep around here, for a couple of reasons.
Turns out, Blake is not one of those modern Super Babies that starts humming Mozart and sleeping through the night at 3 months. He's thoroughly old-school, in that he insists on the traditional 3AM feeding. And 4:30 AM. And 6AM. And, of course, we must never ever sleep in past 7AM no matter what, as there are untold wonders happening out there in the world which he must absolutely participate in.
More significantly, my Darling Wife has gone back to work, which means that her life revolves around pumping milk. Constantly. From dawn until the wee-hours of the night. Her dedication to the task is almost super-human, actually, but it does cut into our sleep a bit. Speaking of super-human achievements:
Cryptana hit 60! Now that I've beat World of Warcraft, I've moved on to other games....actually, of course I haven't. The game changes very little after 60 - it's just that your nice little "XP" bar is replaced by a "Faction" bar. Faction is just like XP, except it takes much longer to gain faction, there are multiple groups you need to gain faction with, the faction bar is "green" while the XP bar was "blue", and once you get to the top layer of faction you get some kind of little goodie (some epic armor or a recipe or what have you). Kinda monotonous, but as a wise man once said, if clicking on things and watching a progress bar go up isn't your idea of fun, you might want to think about a different hobby.
As an idea of how long it takes to gain faction... I'm trying to get to Exalted faction with Warsong Outriders now, to get some nice bracelets. You need something on the order of 45000 faction points to get there (3000 to Friendly, 6000 to Honored, 12000 to Revered, 24000 to Exalted). You gain Faction by playing games of Capture the Flag. Each game of Capture the Flag can net you between 50 faction points (if you lose) all the way up to around 200 (if you win). So we're looking at having to play between 225 and 900 games of capture the flag, each of which takes between 10 minutes and an hour. And that's just for a single faction (there are two other PvP factions, not to count grinding PvP rank itself).

If you do the math, you can see that I'm spending lots of time in my uber-leet PvP gear, pictured below in front of the Horde's precious, precious flag (that fishbowl on my head is a Goblin Rocket Helm to stun would-be flag stealers, and that handsome fellow on my right is my Felhound, to sniff out stealthy druids and rogues). And that blade, peeking out over my back, is a Scythe - the coolest looking weapon in the game. Much cooler than some dumb epic hammer from Molten Core that certain do-gooders like to carry around.

Anyhow, at least grinding PvP faction is pretty fun - most other forms of grinding faction have you killing the same monsters over and over again.

Half Life 2 Episode 1 comes out in 3 weeks. Maybe that'll save me from my WoW obsession...

Coming up for air

2006-02-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

It's been a month, now, since Hurricane Baby hit these once placid shores. And I've learned a few things:

4-week-old babies are covered with acne, they smell like sour milk curds (thanks to having surreptitiously spit up on themselves), they grunt like a trucker in an outhouse, they have calluses and blisters on their lips from constant suckling, and their noses are clogged with dried breast milk. But I'll be damned if I can't stop cuddling this little guy - he's so damned cute! Biology At Work, I guess:
My WoW days have not come to an end. Turns out, if the boy is snoozing on my lap, then I'm not actually playing WoW, I'm Watching The Baby. Plus, the early exposure to flickering lights and low-level electomagnetic radiation will no doubt turn him into some kind of super infant.
The dog has gone through a number of attitude shifts regarding the baby. At first, there was intense curiosity ("What is it? It makes noises! Is it prey? Is it a squirrel? YES! They brought me a squirrel!"). This changed to resentment and moping ("Nobody likes me anymore - they just keep playing with that damn squirrel..."), followed by Establishing the Pack Order ("Ha! Look at me! I'm sleeping in the squirrel's bed! Who's the Alpha Dog now, Bitch!"). The next stage was Boredom ("Aw, Christ, that squirrel is screaming in the middle of the night again - I'm gonna go sleep downstairs on the couch").

I think we're at the final stage now - we let our guard down for a minute, and the dog finally grasped the glittering Holy Grail he'd been pursuing for weeks: he jumped in the bassinet with the baby and for 30 glorious seconds got to sniff and lick the kid from head to toe, before we rushed in and broke up the love-fest. I think the dog has finally figured out that this isn't actually a squirrel, but is instead a really ugly, hairless puppy.
It's amazing how quickly (and slowly) the kid grows. In one month, he's gone from a little guy who literally could not find his ass with both hands, to a tiny tyrant who howls when he doesn't get his breakfast right this goddamn second! and who can projectile vomit distances exceeding 12 inches. Of course, he still doesn't sleep through the night, which brings us to...
A few years ago, when a friend of mine told me that he was occasionally sleeping in the guest bedroom while his wife took care of the baby all night, some part of my brain thought "sheesh, what a jerk".

This week, I spent my first night in the guest bedroom.

I felt amazingly guilty, but too many consecutive days of 5 hours of sleep were just destroying my ability to go to work. And, uh, besides, women are more biologically suited to go without sleep and take care of babies, right?
Breastmilk is sweeeeeeet. Like honey mixed with water. Ick.

Baby baby baby

2006-01-07T15:22:00.000-08:00

Taking care of the baby isn't really that hard, the first week. There isn't that much to do. But, somehow, everything you do, no matter what it is (dishes, laundry, paying bills, etc) just seems to take longer - the net effect is that it feels like the day is only 8 hours long...

The heir apparent...

2006-01-03T20:37:00.000-08:00

A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins.
Nor is he early.
He arrives precisely when he means to.
- Gandalf the Grey

After a seemingly interminable wait, on January 1st at 11:04 AM I had the privilege of seeing my son, Blake, draw his first breath.

I'll spare you the obligatory photo of a red-faced, misshapen newborn, because it really doesn't do him justice - instead, let me describe him: he's a stout 9lbs 6ozs with a fierce appetite to match, and has a mighty grip belike a descendent of the Dúnedain.

To say that I am incredibly proud is a severe understatement. I can't think of anything I'd rather do with the rest of my life than watch this little boy grow into a man.

When I'm done with you, you're gonna be able to spit nails.
You're gonna eat lightning and crap thunder!
-Mickey Goldmill (Rocky)

The waiting game...

2005-12-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

So, for those of you who were wondering...no bebe yet.

But we have entered the home stretch, and we're about as ready as we can be (my Darling Wife is more than ready at this point to get that kid out). But I'm kind of enjoying how easy it is to sleep with the kid on the inside.

My Fickle Fellow Citizens

2005-11-29T23:13:00.000-08:00

I'm reading through the news, and I come across this: Bush Approval Rating Falls To 36%.

I've resigned myself to the fact that 52% of my fellow Americans decided that Bush was the best man to lead our nation for the next 4 years. But it kills me that now 15% of his supporters have changed their mind about him over the last year. It's insane - with the exception of Hurricane Katrina (which one can only vaguely blame Bush for, in a sort of "the buck stops at the President" fashion), things have pretty much been going according to plan. Even the most avid Bush supporter couldn't have expected our current situation to be any different - anyone with half a brain in their head knew that a year after the election the economy would still be sputtering (thanks to $3/gallon gas), people would still be dying in Iraq (we weren't going to pull out in 12 months no matter who won the election), the Republicans would still be pushing tax cuts for the rich and cuts in social services (duh), and Bush would try to fill the supreme court with judicial conservatives.

So I've gotta ask myself - why the hell did these people change their mind about Bush? What were they expecting? Were they not fucking paying attention during his first term? As I said, I could accept the fact that a majority of the voters supported Bush - I thought they were misguided, but OK, they have a different set of values than I do. But when a significant portion of them change their mind 12 months later, I have to figure that they don't actually have any values, and are just a bunch of gibbering idiots who don't put any more thought into their vote than "I'm gonna vote for the guy with the folksy twang in his voice".

How I broke a teenage boy's heart...

2005-11-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

So, it's been a while - funny how spending your spare time remodelling the nursery, preparing for a new baby, and...*cough*levelling your warlock to 45 in WoW*cough*...can eat up your spare time.

As I've related previously, I mostly play an undead female Warlock named Cryptana - she's my "main", as the kids would say. I role play my character as a female, but I make no secret of the fact that I, the player, am a man. And yet...

A few weeks ago I was in a group in Scarlet Monastery - I'd just left my previous guild, so one of the guys in the group noticed that and invited me to his guild. I thought "what the heck", and joined him, and so began an interesting friendship. This kid was astoundingly nice - he'd always greet me when I logged in ("Cryptana! Hi sweetie!"), we often hooked up to do quests together, and he was always paying me the oddest compliments ("Wow, you're really cool for someone middle-aged", etc), which maybe should've tipped me off. But I just figured he was a nice kid who liked to play in character and enjoyed interacting with adults...

So we're out in Tanaris killing pirates the other day, and he mentions that he's going to have to log soon, as his mom gets mad when he plays too long. I laughed and said that I'd had a few conversations like that with my wife. And after a long pause, he writes back "Wait, you're a man?!?! But...why do you play a female character?".

And suddenly, everything is very, very weird.

Everything clicks into place, and we both realize that he's been trying to flirt with a 38 year old man for the past two weeks. And it's not really clear where the conversation goes after something like that...

As an experiment, a few years ago I played an online game where I pretended to be female (not just playing with a female name [Princess Dye], but I actually stated that I was a female player) and it's amazing how differently I was treated. The skills that made me a mediocre (at best) male player, got me no end of compliments as a female player. As a male player, I was just one of a faceless crowd, but as a female player, I was greeted enthusiastically whenever I joined the game, and had an entourage of faithful, gallant companions that would follow me about and fight by my side. I'm reluctant to draw any dramatic conclusions from that experience, but it was enough to convince me that a woman's experience in our world is very very different from a man's (duh).

So I guess we both learned something from our little encounter. I learned that people believe what their eyes tell them, so when someone sees my little female avatar, their brains tell them "woman" and they react accordingly, even if intellectually they know I'm not. And my young friend learned that if someone acts like a man, sounds like a man, and says he's a man, he probably is a man, even if his character looks like a girl. Very few women call themselves an "old man" as a figure of speech, it turns out.

Take me out to the ball game...

2005-10-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

I stopped following baseball several years back. Growing up, I was always a White Sox fan, thanks to my Grandfather - he was definitely their #1 fan, and my earliest sports memories are of taking the train with him to Comiskey Park (back when it was big and dank, before it was rebuilt) and watching the Sox play. He'd watch the games on TV with the sound turned off so he could hear Harry Caray's play by play on the radio, and I'd sit and commiserate with him about their latest loss, or talk about how the Red Sox batting averages were skewed by the tiny little ballpark they play in, or sing along with Harry during the 7th-inning stretch. And make no bones about it - the Sox were pretty much never in the running for the Pennant, and hadn't won the world series since Gramps was a toddler, so rooting for them was an exercise in futility. Truth be told, the White Sox weren't even really loved in their home town - people may root for the Sox, but they love the Cubbies. Except for Gramps.

Gramps passed away about 10 years ago, and I lost interest in baseball at about the same time (to be honest, I never approached Gramps' love for the game - it's a little too slow paced for me, and I discovered Basketball and Football in college). And then I turned on the TV a couple of nights ago, only to find the White Sox playing in the World Series. I was stunned - I honestly never expected to see the Sox make it to the World Series. Losing just seemed like one of those things that was foreordained for the team, like Sisyphus pushing that stone up the hill every year but never reaching the top, like Wile E Coyote never catching the Roadrunner.

And then today I read that the Sox had won the series. And suddenly, I'm crying and I can't stop, because there's only one person I know who really gives a damn, and he's dead now, and I can't call him to celebrate.

Then I realize that I don't really want to celebrate. I just miss that old man, and the older I get, the more I appreciate how much he meant to me growing up, and how much of who I am today is thanks to him. He taught me how to play cards and shoot pool, he took me to my first bar (when I was 4!), and got me my first "businessman's haircut" (which my Mom and Grandma were appalled by, but which I loved, because it looked just like his), and provided me with a healthy collection of corny jokes and limericks. And he taught me that I'm someone worth loving, and that I can be proud of myself, and that I can be strong and still cry.

I'm not a religious man, but I still can't help hoping that he's out there somewhere celebrating. So, Congratulations, Gramps - it's been a long time coming. I love you.

Baby school!

2005-10-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

I spent all day Saturday in my childbirth class, aka "Everything you always wanted to know about labor, but were terrified to actually find out" class. Really truly interesting, horrible, fascinating, terrible stuff. From a biological standpoint, there are these competing evolutionary pressures:

The evolutionary pressure towards babies having larger and larger brains (large brain = smart human = more likely to survive). Larger brains = larger heads.
The counter-pressure coming from the mother, because there's a limit to how large of a head a woman can squeeze out through her pelvis.
Both of the above put pressure on the baby to be born prematurely (premature = smaller baby), but there's obviously a limit to how early you can pop that kid out.

So you end up with a baby who is as premature as it can possibly be and still survive, with a head that is as large as it can possibly be and still have a decent chance of making it through the birth canal. The comfort of the mom does not really figure in the equation, it turns out.

It's all first-time parents in there, and there's this really weird mindset, where everyone intellectually understands that they have a kid, but haven't yet taken on the role of a parent. As a result, you have women asking whether they need to start changing diapers right away, or if the nurses will do it for them (the instructor/doula gently broke the news that since this is indeed your child, you should expect to perform all non-medical procedures on it, starting right after birth). Even my own Darling Wife was concerned that perhaps the doctors would swoop up our kid and secretly circumcise him without our consent, when the reality is that your kid will basically not be out of your sight the entire time you are in the hospital.

There's also this interesting cognitive dissonance going on - the doula states that nearly 90% of the women who give birth in this hospital ultimately choose to have an epidural. 90%. And yet, when asked, nearly every woman in the room did not have an epidural in their birth plan. Frankly, knowing what I know now, I'd have them put an IV in me as soon as I walked into the birth room, so as soon as I hit 4 cms I'd be ready for the anesthesia if I want it. It's great if you want to avoid having an epidural, but given the odds, you are probably going to ask for one when the pain gets unbearable, and when you do, you'll want one as soon as possible so you should plan accordingly. But in the face of all the information to the contrary, everyone still thinks they will have an unmedicated birth - good luck, sister.

It also struck me as I looked around the room that there were a bunch of weird guys in there. You know the type - not necessarily nerds per se, but just kinda odd - they laugh at the wrong times, or make inappropriate comments. One guy was a "fast talker" with a red face, another guy had a dorky mustache, a third guy thought it'd be funny to hide the "mock placenta" from the doula. Just weird stuff. On the way home, I mentioned this to my Darling Wife, and she gave a little nervous laugh that immediately made me suspicious. Narrowing my eyes, I looked over at her and innocently asked, "So, was I one of those weird guys?", and I could see the truth flash in her eyes. Goddammit, I am one of those weird guys! She did say that she thought I was the coolest of the weird guys, which is some comfort, I guess.

On the bright side, I got to try to provide support for the doula as she play-acted her way through a contraction while in active labor. So basically, I'm massaging this complete stranger's hands while she's moaning and gyrating around on the ground, at which point she starts screaming and I have to resist the urge to run right out the door. I mean, I wanted to be anyplace in the world other than in front of this crazy screaming woman.

I'm sure I'll get over that by the time my Darling Wife is in labor, though...

Rolling an alt...

2005-10-12T18:31:00.000-07:00

After several years of trying, Mary and I are finally pregnant (well, OK, technically she's pregnant, and I'm just a bystander, but you get the idea). We'll have a bouncing baby boy arriving sometime around the new year (per which my grandmother helpfully pointed out that if we can time the arrival before January 1st, we can claim the baby as a tax deduction this year - I guess you don't get to be that old without being pretty damn pragmatic...)

Anyhow, it's been a long road getting here (and this is just to get to the start of an even longer road). Some random thoughts:

In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to get a vasectomy in my 20s :) I was a smart guy, and I thought it through, and did my research before getting a vasectomy, and I really thought it was the right move for me. But what I didn't realize then was just how much your life situation can change in a few years - you may have a new partner, or you may just change your mind about having kids, or who knows what. I thought my life at 28 was how my life was always going to be, and (thankfully) that turned out not to be the case. A vasectomy is a permanent solution (duh), and as someone who's undergone a couple of painful, expensive, and only moderately successful reversal surgeries, I'd be really leery of making that kind of decision so early in life.
It really helps to have a sense of humor if you are going to go through infertility treatments, as you are basically letting medical professionals with whom you are only slightly acquainted into the most personal parts of your life. And nothing gives you a new and profound perspective on the relationship between reproduction and sexuality like sitting in a room with a bunch of other men, waiting in line for your turn to masturbate for a lab technician.
Fertility clinics have the worst porn. The discriminating patient brings his own.
Our friends and family were generally pretty supportive about the whole thing, which we really appreciated. But for some unknown reason, a few people felt compelled to give us unsolicited advice, which I found really frustrating. Look, we're both successful, college educated adults with a healthy supply of disposable income, who are both really motivated to have kids. We've done more research on the subject of infertility than you can possibly imagine - it's great that you have a baby, but this does not make you a goddamned fertility expert. And, for the record, yes, we already tried: wearing boxers, taking vitamins, using ovulation kits, tracking basal temperature, checking mucus consistency, trying different positions, having lots of sex, having very little sex, relaxing, not relaxing, doing yoga, drinking herbal teas, taking zinc supplements, having sex at high altitudes, going on vacation, taking shorter showers, and pretty much anything you could possibly suggest to us. When my wife is already taking daily hormone supplements to force ovulation on a specific date so we can do timed artificial insemination and we are researching fertility clinic success rates through the CDC and trying to decide how many embryos we might want to implant if we use IVF, you sound really fucking stupid when you tell us to try doing it "doggie-style". And it killed me to have to smile and thank you for your well-intentioned advice instead of telling you to fuck off.

Whew. At least now we can stop worrying about fertility, and start worrying about day care :)

Sun + Google = TL 4 evar?

2005-10-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

So a friend of mine waxed poetically about how the Sun/Google alliance was going to usher in a new age, replete with rocket cars and busty robot housekeepers.

Interesting news, except:

1) Sun's software universally sucks. It's one of the reasons why the industry has shifted to use Linux instead of Solaris, even though Sun is now giving Solaris away for free. Open Office is already free (www.openoffice.org), so I'm hard-pressed to understand why magically stamping the Google name on it is going to turn it into a Microsoft killer.

2) OpenOffice isn't what people want. People already have Microsoft Office (you have to go out of your way these days to buy a PC that doesn't already have the basic Office apps built in). What people want is a browser-based (AJAX) suite of apps with data stored somewhere in the bowels of Google's server farm on the dark side of the Moon. OpenOffice ain't that, and it isn't even something that can be evolved into that. It's just another downloadable application suite, but this time written by someone other than Microsoft - it's great if you aren't running a Microsoft OS on your desktop machine, but those people are few and far between.

At some point Google will provide the apps you want in a browser, but for now the OpenOffice stuff is not going to make you give up your trusty MSFT Office apps. If you want to see an example of a *real* Microsoft killer, check out Zimbra (Outlook in a browser) - I guarantee you that Microsoft isn't losing any sleep over OpenOffice, but they should definitely be losing sleep over apps like Zimbra.

I'm really hard pressed to understand why Google is teaming with Sun anyway, other than the fact that the Google CEO (Eric Schmidt) used to be the head of Sun. The fact is that server hardware/OS software has become a commodity market. You can build a Linux/x86-based server that runs just as fast and reliably (if not more so) than Sun's offerings, for a fraction of the price. As a result, Sun's days as a force in this industry are over, and they are pretty much just coasting on inertia now (it takes a long time for a big company to die).

And having worked with their crappy OS, I'm not going to cry any tears for them.

That unfamiliar taste in my mouth is...humility?

2005-10-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

I've been doing Kung Fu for a few years now, and while I'm not going to give Bruce Lee a run for his money, I've definitely picked up some skills.

Our system has 6 levels: Basic, White, Blue, Green, Brown, and Black. I've been a blue sash for longer than I can remember, in large part because my last big hurdle to moving into green sash (the sparring test) is given once per month at most. Given that Kung Fu was probably my least favorite sport, I found lots of reasons to miss classes, which meant that I... well, no excuses, let's just say I've been a blue sash for a long time, and it's entirely my own doing. It's almost embarrassing how long I've been sitting at blue sash, to be honest.

Anyhow, after blowing out my ankle, I decided I'd get serious about my Kung Fu again, so I started attending classes regularly, and set myself a goal to finally get my green sash. I knew that they'd be giving the sparring test this past weekend, so I tore myself away from my customary "sit on my ass and play Warcraft" weekend morning ritual, and went to class.

Sparring is actually my favorite part of Kung Fu, as it is one of the few times we can really put everything together (offense, defense, punches, kicks, movement) and see how it holds up. The sparring test basically consists of putting on sparring gear, then spending a couple of minutes going up against various opponents - in my case, a brown sash, a green sash, and a fellow blue sash. At this level, they aren't looking for you to do anything spectacular - just stay low, have a strong base, keep good form and distance, get your punches and blocks out there, and that's about it.

My friends, I don't have to tell you how ready I was for this test. I'd been looking forward to it for the entire month, I'd been training for years, and I knew I was going to pass. I felt great, and was totally pumped when I stepped into the circle.

And, naturally, I failed the test.

I won't go into the details of why, as they are fairly esoteric. But what surprised me most of all was how much it hurt. Not physically (I really never even got touched), but emotionally - I couldn't believe how disappointed I was. I was so goddamn sure that I was going to pass, that I was mortified to find out that there's this gap between how I perceive myself as a martial artist, and reality. I guess I need to train harder.

I'd heard about this humility thing, but didn't really have much experience with it until now. It kinda sucks, to be honest.

When worlds collide...

2005-09-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

Let me give you a little background. I am, unabashedly, a huge Harlan Ellison fan. I love his writing, everything from the ostensibly misogynist A Boy and his Dog to his enormous body of work as an essayist. His prose just leaps off the page - it's got an energy and flow that few writers can aspire to, even when you are reading an ancient riff on a long-cancelled TV show like "The Mod Squad". If you'd like some examples, check these out. His SF/Fantasy work is universally thought-provoking and can be a little tough to digest - the closest analog to it that I've found is Neil Gaiman.

He's led an incredible life - I'll spare you the details, but if ever there's somebody who has "walked the walk", it's Ellison (OK, maybe just a few details: ran away from home, served in the army, joined a street gang to do research for a book, lived in LA during the 60s when southern california didn't suck, marched in the civil rights demonstrations in the South, walked the picket line with his fellow writers during the Writer's Strike in the 70s, married and divorced several times and lived to tell the tale, etc).

I found out that he was going to be at the Foolscap convention, across the pond in Bellevue, and I was sorely tempted to attend. The things that stopped me were:

I didn't quite "get" Foolscap. It's not a typical convention, apparently, but I didn't know what it was, and I couldn't tell exactly what was going on there and whether it's really a good use of my time.
I'm really leery about meeting artists in person, so I was pretty ambivalent anyway.
I'm an idiot, and forgot about it. Sort of.

The thing is that there's a big dividing line between the work and the artist that I'm really reticent to cross. Reports on Ellison portray him as either a tireless, principled crusader for justice, or a short, petulant, elitist asshole, with very little middle ground. It's fair to say that he doesn't "suffer fools gladly" and that it ain't too hard to find yourself in the "fool" category. I really didn't want to have to reconcile Ellison the auteur with Ellison, the wrinkly old man with a bad attitude (and, frankly, it's enough that he has provided us with his work - he's under no obligation to have to shuck and jive on stage and be my buddy as well).

Anyhow, what got me thinking about this was reading about the Penny Arcade guys' run-in with Ellison. Now, I've met Mike and Jerry before (I helped Mike fix his arcade game, and his wife baked us some very tasty cookies as I recall), and they are both what I would call "nice guys". While they come off as kind of brash on their website, in real life they're like any other smart-ass nerds you might know -- smart, funny, but basically harmless.

And yet, it pains me to hear them rip on "that old coot Harlen Ellison (sic)". Lord knows that Ellison doesn't need me or anyone else to stand up for him, but the guy is a bonafide literary giant. Mike can joke about Ellison "writing Star Wars novels", but the fact is, as the editor of Dangerous Visions 1/2, Ellison is more responsible than nearly anyone else in the industry for making Science Fiction into a legitimate literary genre (not to mention his contributions to the graphic novel genre). Without people like Ellison, science fiction would be all Star Wars novels today.

And as fond as I am of Mike and Jerry, no, they haven't earned the goddamn right to rip on Ellison. Maybe when they've lived another 40 years, and have put their ass on the line multiple times for something more important than making jokes about video games, they'll have the gravitas to criticize anything the man has done.

Ellison once wrote that for the young, "nostalgia is what they had for breakfast". It's all too true. And I guess nihilism loses its charm at some point, too.