Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 20, 2008

Filed under: Random 75 comments

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There was an amusing meme floating around a while ago. It began with a question posted by a user to Yahoo! Answers. The question, without embellishment or editing, appeared thus:

HOW IS BABBY FORMEd?

HOW GIRL GET PRAGNENT

There were several informed responses to this question with links to relevant articles. But they were modded down as “unhelpful”. Instead, the following response was rated as “best answer”:

They need to do way instain mother> who kill thier babbys. becuse these babby cant frigth back? it was on the news this mroing a mother in ar who had kill her three kids. they are taking the three babby back to new york too lady to rest my pary are with the father who lost his children ; i am truley sorry for your lots

Anyone who has spent any amount of time on the internet has seen this sort of thing before – barely literate people hammering out badly spelled nonsense to each other in a futile attempt to communicate. Someone took the question and the answer and turned them into a dramatic reading, with hilarious results. Even now it’s impossible for me to read the words without hearing the voice of the two Neanderthal thespians.

But what really interests me is just how horrible and broken Yahoo! Answers manages to be. Raw, pure, information got modded down, and outright gibberish was modded up. We’re talking about a system that suppresses the signal and amplifies the noise. It’s interesting because the system of user-rated comments is supposed to do the opposite. It usually does. I’ve never seen this sort of thing happen on, say, Slashdot. This is not to say Slashdot is a pure and serene forum, a place where people may go and pit their ideas against one another in an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity and mutual respect. It has the same collection of idiots and asswipes you’ll find elsewhere on the internet, but there the mod system works well enough to drown out the noise. The comments that survive moderation are usually coherent and somewhat relevant. I’ve never seen anything as bad as the answer above make it to mod “+5 Insightful”.

Some places on the internet – and yes when I say “places” I’m acting as if a URL represented some sort of corporeal location where one might stand, a ridiculous metaphor which we all accept without questioning or indeed, even noticing. Let’s try again: Some places on the internet are like Slashdot – rough neighborhoods where you can function if you know to steer clear of the dark alleyways and avoid eye contact with the trolls. Some places are like gaming or webcomic forums – civilized suburbs where you can make friends and enjoy a conversation. And other places are like YouTube or Yahoo! Answers – the sewer system of the internet, where likely as not you’ll drown in a septic tidal wave of idiocy and spam.

Some of the problem is scale: The bigger the community the more idiots you’re bound to have. There is some ambient level of morons that you just can’t get rid of. If you think of idiots as a contaminant, then it may be useful measure them as a portion of the whole. Say: Idiots Per Thousand. The IPT of any given site can’t go below a certain base value: The level of background idiocy on the internet. But idiots have a tendency to drive normal people away if they are allowed to run unchecked, thus increasing the saturation of IPT.

But scale can’t account for everything. Some places just suck and are overrun with illiterate vermin, to the point where to solve the problem you’d have to burn the whole thing down and begin anew. Some places operate for years and remain useful, and others spiral into a spam-infused oblivion. I wonder why. Is it subject matter? Moderation policies? Recruitment practices? (Sites that beg everyone and anyone to join do seem to be worse off than ones that require forethought to join.) Is it the age of the userbase? The perceived attitude or “voice” of the site?

Perhaps I should post the question to Yahoo! Answers: how is comunaty formed? how does wabsite get peepole

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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The Misery Drug

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 19, 2008

Filed under: Personal 69 comments

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I get migraine headaches from time to time. Some are debilitating, some are just really painful. During the worst ones I usually sit in the dark with ice on my head. Neither of these things really lessens the pain, but they give me some sort of comfort while I wait for the thing to blow over. The pain tends to come in waves, always behind one or both eyes. I’ll have a constant dull pain punctuated by short periods of more intense pain every few minutes. When the wave hits I usually get nauseous and close my eyes. I’ve never found any drug that helps, short of knocking me out. Most headaches last between four and eight hours.

The headaches first appeared when I was nine or ten. I’ve spent many years tracking behavior, diet, weather, mood, stress, and other factors looking for the cause of the headaches, but I’ve never found anything conclusive. I just get them. Sometimes I’ll go for months without getting one. Sometimes I’ll get three in a week.

What’s interesting is what happens when they end. Sometimes I get this wave of mild euphoria. I’ve been suffering so much that the mere absence of pain is pleasure. It’s a kind of sensation of inner peace. I walk around droopy-eyed, breathing this sort of constant sigh of relief. This period might last up to an hour. It’s pretty nice, although nowhere near worth the price I paid for it. I’m in that phase as I write this at 5:30am on Wednesday morning. It’s enjoyable, although even now in the midst of the it I’d gladly trade it away if I could have my night back, headache-free. I had things I wanted to do, which included getting a full night’s rest.

The reason I bring this up is because I was thinking about how drugs and alcohol work just the opposite: They give you a period of pleasure, followed by an interval of misery. I remember getting drunk a couple of times when I was in my early twenties. The last time I was drunk I found myself puking my guts out. As I sat there on the floor of the bathroom in my parent’s basement, leaning my head against the wall and looking down into the toilet, I wondered, “What in the hell is the sense in this? There is no way this was worth it. Not even close. How can people do this to themselves?” It was the last time I was ever drunk. I still don’t get it. Do other people hate hangovers less, or is drunkenness the result of a repeated failure to do cost / benefit analysis?

But it makes me wonder what would happen with a drug that worked in the opposite direction. What if there was a drug that worked like my headaches: It makes you intensely sick and miserable, and when it wears off the “hangover” is euphoric pleasure. Assume the intensity and duration of the high and the crash are the same as regular recreational drugs, just in reverse order. Would people do it? Would people take the drug? If it was habit forming, would the habit be easier to kick? Would it spread socially like other drugs? Dude, take this. You’ll feel horrible for a couple of hours and totally hate me for giving it to you, but then it’ll feel awesome.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Indie Game Development

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 18, 2008

Filed under: Projects 64 comments

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently working on an indie game for a small Canadian studio. For a while I’ve needed to be vague on the details, until we could be sure that everyone was comfortable with me blabbing about it here, to what is often thought of as a large audience. (Apparently I sometimes underestimate the impact of my traffic, but only because I’m too busy looking at all the sites ahead of me.) But now we’ve reached the point where I can speak freely…

The project I’m working on is Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled from Studio Archcraft. (The game was called “Project Exile” during development, and that’s still the name you’ll see on the website in various places.)

I’ve actually only played the first couple of hours of the thing so far. I know it’s unfair to compare it to something like Final Fantasy VI, which is older and has earned its place of legend among titles of the past, but as a recent newcomer to both titles I’d say the start to Black Sigil hooked me in better than the start to FFVI. It’s a shame, really – I’ve read the Black Sigil design docs and I know how the story unfolds, which kind of ruins it for me.

The game began development as a GBA title, and has since moved on to the Nintendo DS. It’s been in development for a while and I’m only getting involved now as the thing gets ready to cross the finish line. The bulk of the work I’ve been doing is simple stuff: Scripting pre-written dialog and choreographing cutscenes. It’s not creative work, but it’s important and a natural way to get to know the technology and tools. I’ve also been doing some writing and game design stuff for another project, but that stuff is still in the preliminary stages and hasn’t evolved very far past mere brainstorming. It’s the kind of stuff I live for, but the scripting needs to be done first.

Actually I shouldn’t call the scripting work “simple”. I know from experience that no system is ever as simple as it looks from the outside, but being aware of this truth and being subjected to this truth are always two different things. The work was actually rife with eye-crossing complexity until I figured out what I was doing. In my very first session with the tools, it took me something like two hours to get a couple of NPC’s to have a little conversation – five lines of dialog – in front of the player. This is the sort of experience that will bestow humility in short order.

Being introduced to a new toolset has several distinct phases:

This is very confusing. There are so many buttons! Why does this have to be so complex!?!?
Okay. I sort of get it now. I guess I can live with this system.
You know, this thing is actually pretty powerful and well-organized once you understand how it works.
This tool is the best for this particular job, the standard by which all other tools should be judged. You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I’m somewhere between steps 2 and 3 right now. I do not claim to be at all proficient with the thing yet, but I’m at the point where I can make the characters have a little conversation without expending an entire evening in the effort. A lot of this stuff would be done in minutes if I could somehow download, Matrix-style, the knowledge and familiarity normally acquired through repeated exposure.

This demo movie is pretty old, but this is more or less what the game looks like, and should give a good overview of the plot:

Since I’m not going to be playing the game normally, I don’t plan on doing a regular review series for this. That would be pointless anyway, since the game isn’t out yet. But I do expect to talk about the game more as it nears release. The usual disclaimers apply: I’m working on the game and have a certain attachment to it at this point. Calibrate your perceptions of my words accordingly.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Robot Dog

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 17, 2008

Filed under: Movies 38 comments

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The robot spider from last Friday? Bah. That’s nothing compared to the Robot Dog:

Finally, a dog you can kick without guilt. That buzzing noise has gotta go, though.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Chainmail Bikini Hiatus

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 17, 2008

Filed under: Personal 14 comments

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So, Chainmail Bikini is on hiatus. I know how it often is with webcomics: Some go on hiatus and never return. I know this because it seems to happen to the ones I read on a regular basis.

Making a webcomic (or more specifically, drawing a webcomic) is a time-consuming deal, and unless you hit it really big you’re not likely to make money in any meaningful way. Under ideal conditions, you’ll bring in enough cash to pay for the cost of distributing the thing, which is like working at a job which pays you by reimbursing you for your commute. Sooner or later you’ll wake up on a Monday morning and realize that if you stay home you’ll be no worse off than if you go. So if you’re going to go to all the trouble of getting out of bed you’d better love the crap out of that job. I did, but my task was easier than most and I only had to do it for a year.

If you’re lucky enough to have something left over after rendering your debt to the keepers of bandwidth, then the likelihood you’ll be happy with this surplus is directly proportional to how bad you are at math. If you take your surplus and divide it by the number of hours you spend not playing World of Warcraft because of your comic, you’ll probably notice the resulting number is less than what Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. will pay you to stand beside shopping carts and tell people to have a nice day – a job not easily distinguished from loitering. Again, you had better derive some sort of euphoric delight from drawing the thing because there is stuff out there that is easier and pays better.

I don’t know if this is how Shawn sees things. He’s got some basic real-life issues intruding on the comic and so we’re going to take a break. Some people have asked – with varying levels of politeness – what would happen to the comic without Shawn, should he be obliged to withdraw entirely. I thought I would answer these questions in one post rather than enduring weeks of questions and speculation during the hiatus.

I’ve always said that the comic is a joint thing between Shawn and I, and I don’t have any desire to continue without him. Shawn has a distinct visual style. It’s one of the strong points of the strip, but it also means that Shawn is about the only person who can draw it.
If the comic were to end prematurely for some reason, I would most likely post the rest of the story as text, in the hopes that this would give readers some sort of closure. I’ve had the story of CB written from the start. While ideas have been added, the initial story arc has remained unchanged since the very first strip.

So that’s where things stand. If all goes well we’ll see you April 7^th.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Robot Spider

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 14, 2008

Filed under: Movies 33 comments

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No time for blogging today. Allow me to distract you with this. Some kind robot spider thing. I found this movie at Dan’s Data by way of Chizumatic.

I don’t know why people keep building stuff like this. It’s the start of the slippery slope. One day you’re building little robot spiders for fun, the next thing you know automated factories are cranking out earthmoving hunter-killers like this one:

When the robot uprising comes, I think these people will have to answer a lot of difficult questions about which side they’re really on.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Mass Combat Rules

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 13, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 48 comments

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A few weeks ago I mentioned the homebrew mass combat rules we used in our gaming session. Several people expressed an interest in seeing them, and I’ve finally gotten around to obliging. Here it is, for the curious.

This system is designed around the idea that the armies are of relatively equal level and ability. If you have Orcish Warriors with great axes vs. Peasants with semi-sharp sticks, you need to either accept that the peasants are going to equal to the Orcs or you need a more complex rules system. This one is built for simplicity, not wargaming simulationists.

The goals of the system are:

Allow large numbers of forces to fight without too much paperwork.
Allow for interesting and varied strategy.
Allow heroes to shape the battle by mildly boosting the performance of their troops, without overshadowing them.

This system is designed for a group of players who like fast, uncomplicated combat, and is thus not hardened against rules-lawyering weenies. If one of your players argues that his army of Wizards should be able to cast Mage Armor on themselves, turn invisible, and then fly all over the battlefield, raining down death with impunity, then realize that if you give in you will be defeating the purpose of using this system. Pretty soon everyone will be arguing for more complexity in a way that favors their heroes. (Or your weenie player will be overshadowing them with his uber forces.) Do make sure your players are comfortable with these approximations and simplifications.

If they start dragging their epic gear and supernatural abilities into it, then it’s time to brew some coffee and grab a big fat rulebook of established, playtested mass combat rules, because using this system is going to ruin your friendship.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Combat Rules”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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