5 posts tagged “boring stuff that no one wants to read”
As per usual when I've had a distinct lack of posting I usually start things off with a fumbling excuse of how life got in the way. My friends know this for what it is (lack of enthusiasm/motivation to actually make an effort mostly) but I've been so scarce lately that you folks might have forgotten what I'm all about.
Either way, life happening does sometimes provide some interesting stories to tell.
There's a funny thing about owning a Mac laptop; Windows users automatically assume you're more tech savvy then they are. I think this is because they assume we're smart enough to know better than to buy a PC.
This was the case on my last job site. The management staff of the work site saw me with my mac and started asking me questions about how to get their windows machines to do what they wanted. I'd help them along and explain what the problems were and show them how to fix them, and they kept calling me back for more assistance. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me that I was good enough at this that I had become the unofficial IT support guy, a role I was greatly appreciated for.
The management were so appreciative that when the job required a medic with a higher level of training than I have, they immediately made some calls to make sure I was transferred on to another excellent job site, which is quite unprecedented in my line of work. So last week I packed up from the last job-site and this week I started at the new one.
However as the cliche phrase goes: "Pride cometh before the fall," so this weekend some gremlins decided to pay me a visit to make sure my tech hubris would remain at reasonable levels.
One of my office managers had asked me to burn him some workout video's that I'd come across, however due to having reformatted from a particularly nasty virus infection 2 weeks before, my burning software wasn't up to snuff. I had to do a bit of minor copyright infringement to fix this problem, and as can happen I stupidly let in a new virus for my efforts. (One of the hazards of copyright infringement I'm afraid. You can call it karma if you like.)
So long story short, new virus was a particularly tenacious one that after several failed attempts to remove it, the only successful attempt locked up my OS to the point where I couldn't get past the welcome screen. A format was needed but I'd never actually formatted a PC myself, it was always my tech guru who did that sort of thing, but he was out of town, and behind him I was the second most PC savvy person I knew...
By this point the girlfriend was extremely frustrated and was venting that frustration by attacking my IT helper pride, and this being the only time where I could honestly say it was my fault the computer was infected I worked out how to format the drive. It was interesting and enlightening...
Have you ever had to do a task that you always felt would be quite daunting only to find once you attempted it that your skills and understanding far exceeded what was needed and you found it quite easy? Well formatting was like that for me, the biggest barrier was me deciding to actually do it. I'm not flush with experimental pride or anything, not about to try flashing my BIOS or anything silly like that, but I found that a PC format was far easier to do than I anticipated.
So by Sunday afternoon I'd formatted the windows drive and got a trial of a new anti-virus scanner that a friend recommended and things were looking up, so I went out to dinner with the inlaws, thinking all would be well. However once out of the house the gremlins returned...
I came home from work to find out that my liquid cooling had shut down my computer because the processor water-block was leaking fluid inside my case. Thanks to an unusual case design this was not catastrophic to my computer in that the processor was located at the bottom instead of the top (which is standard layout) so the leak didn't fry every component of my motherboard.
So for the 2nd time that weekend I started a computer task I had never attempted before, removing the water block without splashing coolant all over my computer. Which I managed to do, I'd been wanting to drop the liquid cooling for a while now (it was too noisy for a computer that we use to watch movies in the living room) so I set out to buy a nice big conventional heat synch only to find out that I no longer had a plastic mounting bracket needed to mount it on... tech guy had it, and this wasn't a component that was easily gotten off the shelf.
So anyhow, computer has been dormant for the past week and I'm still not 100% sure what caused the water block to leak, I originally thought it was cracked, but it seems more likely that the screws holding it together were coming loose now. Either way it's not as cool or prestigious as it once was and the drawbacks are definitely exceeding the benefits so I'm moving onto a skookum heat synch instead...
Anyhow, to tie all that boring babble back to my original story... all these trials and tribulations have been overcome and are simply serving to improve my knowledge base. The gremlins may have won that little battle, but they're about to lose the war.
In an earlier post I mentioned that Canada's government is in shambles, I'd like to quantify that a bit more, though I probably won't have a proper article about it until after Christmas. What's going on is this, Canada isn't quite a democracy, it's actually a constitutional monarchy (not an official title but that's what it amounts to). Basically we're allowed to self govern until we've proven for whatever reason that we can't do so. Then a representative of the Queen steps in and makes the decisions for us. The Governor General's position is often largely ceremonial, they usually find causes to get behind and maintain "etiquette" in parliament. However, in situations like right now the Governor General has the opportunity to fire our elected Prime Minister and put in someone else. In this case that someone else would be a Liberal Party leader who's incompetence has his own party voting him out leaving him in power for 5 more months.
Canadian politics isn't like American politics. American's only have two parties which are just basically frameworks for a set of political values. In the US it's the candidate who gets voted in and sets up the executive branch, even if that candidate doesn't necessarily toe the party line in it's entirety. The only reason there aren't dozens of parties being voted into Congress is because the Corporations in the US prefer having a unified entity to pay off. Some people might think that it's a "two party system" but really it's just the powers that be like it that way.
In canada the executive branch and the legislative branch are the same, and there are more parties to contend with. (There's a Marijuana Party in Canada if you'll believe that.) Some don't have seats in the Cabinet but right now there are 4 parties who do, the Conservatives, the Liberals, the New Democrats (NDP), and the Bloc Quebecois. There is a Green Party as well who didn't win any seats but snapped up almost 7% of the vote in October. The Libs and Conservatives are roughly the equivalent of America's GOP and Democrats, with the NDP being a group of more progressive liberals strongly opposed to any sort of Canadian military action (or funding in many cases), and who generally work to ramp up government spending by bloating the bureaucracy. (Yes, I admit, I'm biased against the NDP, my Province had a New Democrat gov for 8 years and it was disgusting.) The bloc are separatists, meaning the 3rd largest Political entity in Canada's political system doesn't want to be a part of the country.
The thing is, because the executive branch and legislative branch are the same, and because there are so many parties there isn't a lot of deviation from a given party line amongst the Members of Parliament (MPs). This means that functional governments here are almost always majority governments. However for the past decade we Canadians have not been in accord, three consecutive Liberal governments through the 90's and into this millennium created a corrupt political party, and after some sponsorship scandals we elected a Conservative government into power for the first time in my lifetime. For 3 years that conservative government governed as a minority, outnumbered by the Liberals, the small NDP and the Bloc, then just after Liberal party leader unveiled a Carbon tax wealth redistribution program that would have crippled the Canadian Oil and Gas industry, the only healthy industry left in Canada the Conservatives smelled blood in the wind and called an election early, even though two years earlier they'd passed a mandate to prevent voters from having to put up with that sort of opportunistic politicking.
So the Conservatives came away from October's election with a slightly strengthened minority, and they got cocky. No stimulus plan for the Economy, no Automaker bailout, and the final straw was a political gamble to pull funding from the parties in an attempt to strike a deathblow to them. This backfired, and in the face of these audacious maneuvers the three parties making up the majority of the seats sat down and formed a Coalition with the intent of passing a no-confidence vote against the conservatives and kicking them out of power.
What this means is that despite what Canadians might have voted for we will now have a government aligned with a group who want to separate for the country. Millions of taxpayer dollars have been promised to the NDP and Bloc in exchange for their backing the coalition, and you can bet that a good portion of that money is going to Quebec to fund their goodbye party. Despite the validity of their claim to the seat of power these three parties are going to destroy the country if this no confidence vote goes through. Here's how:
a) Canadians will have no confidence in their democracy anymore.
b) Quebec's separation will be funded with federal taxpayer money.
c) The Western Provinces, having been a disenfranchised Conservative stronghold for over 3 decades will be furious as the first move a new Coalition government will be to kneecap their finances by redistributing tax revenues away from them (see: Quebec separation) and passing legislation to inhibit the oil and gas industry. This will result in a strong backing for a western separatist agenda.
In a nutshell Canada faces a democratic crisis that will either force my country to hold another election 6 months after the last one, or be forced to endure an unelected administration with sympathies for a group of rebels. (No, offense to Quebec, but that's what it amounts to.)
The worst part about all this is that I don't have a solution, other than things need to change. We need to look over our constitution and decide if we want to be a democracy in name only, a bunch of small nations with our bums planted firmly against the wall as the USA hands out wigs and lipstick, or a first world nation, strong and secure.
This past week I've been neck deep in copywriting my friend's old game system, it's frightfully dreary, and a little exciting while making me a little nostalgic all at once. My newfound work ethic has come from a new personal policy I enacted. Whenever I feel compelled to open an .AVI file on my laptop and watch a movie or a TV show I open the files on my current project first. It's weak and undisciplined I know, but it's yielded results so I like it.
Last night my dad and I had another e-mail conversation about the state of Canada's federal government. It's bad, our government is well and truly in shambles, it literally is no better than some banana republic where it's too hot for anyone to think straight. If things continue the way they're going Canada will split, likely into three parts. But that may not be too bad, it'll give you guys more options when global warming makes your country unlivable. On this contenent you can stay with the frenchies (wimpy and but tell good jokes), the midlanders (arrogant and that country's idea of cologne is bug-spray), or us westerners (like your eccentric uncle only with too much money). I'd say the north part too but even if it became a tropical archapelego, you don't wanna live there, the natives... they're not pretty. It's said they're a dying breed, and I don't think it's that they're dying so much as you wouldn't want to breed with them.
Anyhow that's my life at the moment. Peace Vox homies.
I'm back to working on my friend's RPG that he gave me kuz he wasn't doing anything with it, and I'm wondering what I could do to make the writing more compelling. Most Role Playing Game books are so dry that I'm unable to read more than a few paragraphs of one in bed before falling asleep. I don't want any game I'm writing to be that way so I've been thinking up ways to make them interesting.
Idea 1: "Arrogant Bastard" edition. Imagine a textbook written from a condescending position of authority, maybe not against the reader, because the reader is obviously a superior being for reading this particular book, but against all other books of the same type. I would enjoy channeling all my frustrations over other games inadequacies through this.
Idea 2: A running story told through the example paragraphs. Role-playing games describe rules for play like any other organized game, sometimes the best way to clarify a rule or system is to show an example of how it's used. Since these games are story based it fits with the theme to tell an overall story through these examples, if the story is compelling enough the reader will want to go all the way through to find out how it ends, and in the process he'll develop an excellent understanding of the rules.
Idea 3: Easter Eggs. Easter Eggs are found in video games where in a certain dark corner one finds a pop culture parody, or an item that's out of place but in a fun way. Game books could have them too, pop culture references adopted to the setting in a unique way, a nod to a pioneer or inspiring force in the game, interesting quotes, that sort of thing.
Idea 4: Cyclical Writing. This may not be the right term for it, but what if an example of what the rules can do was presented on page 1 in a very compelling manner, a lead-up to the climax of a story if you will. A high-tension action scene played out on text before your eyes showing keen examples of what the systems in the book can do... thus leading into how you the reader could do it as well.
Those are some ideas I've been considering, any of you copywriters or advertisers or story writers out there want to input suggestions, feel free. I'd welcome the assistance.
It's winter and gaming is on my mind so I'm going to be starting some running commentary about games for your reading pleasure. This is the first of my running rant about Dungeons and Dragons, note that even though I personally can't stand this game, I have nothing against it's players or their opinions and will be happy to hear contrary opinions on the matter, though I can pretty much guarantee you won't be changing my mind.
#00001 It's Considered the Standard RPG
Can you imagine if when someone discovered the potato, he created fries and then everyone decided that was the only food that could be made out of potatoes, french fries, homestyle fries, salted fries, twisty fries, crinkle fries... that's it.
That's how I feel about the modern computer RPG's. I acknowledge that Gary Gyjax was a pioneer, but 25 years after he developed D&D, modern computer RPG's are unable to move beyond some of his most rudimentary and simplistic designs even when it's obvious that a variant would serve their purposes better. D&D is always level-based, it is always Tolkeenesque, which I find quite absurd. Can you imagine if all science fiction writing had to include Romulans and Vulcans to be accepted as a viable Sci-fi space setting? So why does every fantasy setting have to include Orc's and Elves? Sure, they're fine as ideas go, but there's no rule anywhere that says that every fucking fantasy setting has to have them, it's just that one series of games that only a tiny portion of the world ever played plagiarized them from one author, and they're suddenly considered the standard, anything else just wouldn't survive as a fantasy concept in the computer gaming world.
There were games invented that have succeeded that aren't level based, they don't have elves and dwarves and orcs, they don't have rolled stats and they are actually playable without banning a certain class from play, or needing a dozen house rules just so things make sense. But for some reason these ideas get tossed by the wayside in favor of the same old Tolkeenesque, clunky level-based concepts with no consistency in the rules, or grounding in reality.
So that's the first reason I don't like D&D.
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