All the News That Fits

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a nice piece deconstructing a recent Thomas Friedman column (for the New York Times) on the National Ignition Facility, a controlled fusion experiment being carried out in Livermore.

I happen to live in Livermore, so I’m naturally curious to know what my friends and neighbors are up to.

In the course of the piece, however, Hugh Gusterson says this: “Surely New York Times readers have a right to expect more from a high-profile columnist than an embellished press release.”

As they say in Internet-land, ROFL. Hugh, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that’s the entire function of the New York Times, in a nutshell. Especially the op-ed pages. I don’t read the Times, but I know which side of the bread has the jelly on it.

Learning TADS 3

Conrad Cook recently started a Google-based Study Group for learning TADS 3. So I’ve been learning some meta-lessons about learning.

T3 is easily the most powerful system for writing interactive fiction. It’s sophisticated, it’s dense, and it’s not easy to learn. There’s a reason why Inform 7 has become vastly more popular: I7 is ultimately less powerful and arguably more idiosyncratic, but it’s also far easier to get started with, perhaps especially if you’re a novice.

More than a dozen people have joined the study group, and messages have been flying back and forth. What I’ve been observing is that the frustrations I found myself mired in three or four years ago, when I first looked at T3, are mirrored or echoed by some other people in the group — people who are now approaching it for the first time.

T3 comes with five or six book-length manuals, each with its own raison d’etre. There is some overlap, but each manual is different. And there’s no overall index that covers them. Part of the learning process is discovering what’s in each of the manuals, so that you’ll know where to look when you get stuck. Because you’ll

Little Things

I’ve been wondering why I enjoy something as bizarre and pointless as writing interactive fiction. But ultimately it’s no different from a lot of other creative hobbies.

There are people (mostly men, I imagine) who build quite elaborate model train layouts for fun. Such a train layout might fill an entire bedroom. In the evening you might find the guy building a trestle out of popsicle sticks and then painting it rust-red so it looks authentic.

In each case, what’s fun is creating a tiny model of the real world — a model that has light and color and sound in it, and where things move around. The human brain seems to like building models.

A community theatre performing Shakespeare is the same thing, isn’t it? There’s more social collaboration than if you’re building a model train, but the result is a tiny model of the real world (the life of Richard III, for instance) that includes color and sound and movement.

Wishing for an Atheist Messiah

I wish somebody would come along who had the magical persuasive ability to actually cause religious believers throughout the world to see through their own childish, irrational drivel. Somebody who could make them all wake up.

I can’t do it, that’s for sure. Once in a while I try to have a rational discussion with a believer, pointing out a few of the contradictions and barbarisms in the Bible. They never listen. Their faith insulates them against reality.

Mostly I don’t even try. Why be confrontational, when you know it’s not going to do any good?

Very sad.

Reading: Connie Willis

Many years ago I was knocked out by Doomsday Book, Connie Willis’s novel of time travel to the dark days of the Black Plague. But then I tried another of her books, found it disappointingly shallow, and gave up on her.

This month I decided to give her another shot. I borrowed To Say Nothing of the Dog from the library, rolled up my metaphorical pant legs, and waded in.

Imagine a Victorian sitcom. Imagine Lucy and Ethel wandering around in Victorian England, trying to fix up a mixup that just gets worse and worse.

The history department at Oxford is using a time machine to travel back from 2057 to 1940 in order to do a blazingly trivial bit of research (the whereabouts of a spectacularly ugly vase that vanished during the Nazi bombing of Coventry Cathedral). But there are complications, so the narrator takes a detour

The Greatness of Nations

I have no use for patriotism.

Good things and bad things can be said, in a rich mix, about absolutely any nation, and the question of whether one can legitimately say more good things about one nation than about another is complex and not even faintly interesting. Everybody lives in a nation — you have very little choice in the matter — and the lines on the map that constitute national boundaries are often quite arbitrary. Most people have a (usually unjustified) feeling that their nation is somehow special. It’s boring.

Today somebody posted a sort of politico-sociological screed (actually, it was a free-wheeling reminiscence of the ’70s) on rec.games.int-fiction as part of a promo for a game. Somebody else replied with a rant that ended with the following bit of silliness:

“Faith-based belief systems played an integral — if not irreplaceable — role in the rise of the United States in becoming the world’s most prosperous, politically free, and militarily strong nation in the entire world and probably in history.”

This view is not, I believe, uncommon, so perhaps it’s worth analyzing in detail.

We need to start by decoding it a little. “Faith-based belief systems” means “religions,” and since the only religions of any significance in the early United States

Networkin’ Coolness

A couple of readers of this blob suggested Remote Desktop Control as a way to circumvent an irritating problem I was having with computer ergonomics.

After a tiny bit of research, I downloaded TeamViewer, which is free to individuals, though pricey for businesses. I tested it by connecting my MacBook Pro to the wired router, and found that running the Windows machine from the Mac was a piece of cake.

So I popped for an $80 wireless router. Installation seems to have proceeded without a hitch (I still don’t trust this wireless stuff…). Tests indicate TeamViewer works just as well wirelessly, though it’s not quite as fast as wired. Since the program I want to use is mainly about typing text, a bit of time lag is not an issue.

Now I’m set: I can sit in my easy chair in the living room with my Mac on my lap and operate Windows software on the PC in the other room. Sometimes everything does work the way you hope it will.

Hobbyist Programming

Trying to get back into TADS 3. It’s an incredibly powerful language in which to write interactive fiction, but it’s not for the faint of heart. The first time I tried learning it, I found myself crying, “Classes and templates and macros, oh my!” By now I’ve written one long game in TADS, one shorter game, and one medium-sized game co-written with Eric Eve, who is not just a TADS expert but the TADS expert.

But that was last year. Now I’m trying to re-learn what I’ve forgotten and nail together what I never knew. Tonight I got hopelessly frustrated trying to create an odor. TADS has not one but two classes for the purpose — Odor and SimpleOdor. There’s quite a bit of documentation (written by Eric) on how to use them. And I still couldn’t figure it out.

Eventually I got it working, but I’m sure my code is very amateurish. I tend to use a ballpeen hammer for tightening screws.

Yesterday I was working out how to cause the player character to automatically sit down when the player types ‘get in car’. If you don’t take care of the posture change, TADS will report, “Okay, you’re now standing in the car.” But changing the PC’s posture can have side effects. That took an hour too.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with this stuff. It’s as much work as building a ship in a bottle, and at the end of the day, what you have is about as useful as a ship in a bottle. But it beats the heck out of watching Jeopardy.

Never Satisfied

This is a sad story about technology.

I own two very nice laptops, a Mac and a PC. The PC is my office machine, and is normally hooked up to a second monitor, a Firewire audio interface, a USB hub, a router via Ethernet, and so on. The Mac sits by my easy chair in the living room, and I use it mainly for idle hobbyist stuff in the evening.

This week I wanted to do some idle hobbyist stuff with a Windows program called TADS Workbench. Fortunately, I picked up a free copy of Crossover last fall, during Codeweavers’ one-day giveaway. So I can run Windows programs on the Mac.

Sort of, but not quite. Workbench loses its preferences every time it’s shut down, and its Options box doesn’t display properly. A bigger issue is that I would like to use a very nice freeware applet called AutoHotKey, because there are some QWERTY keystroke combinations I like to use in Workbench. And AutoHotKey is so system-level that it won’t run at all under Crossover.

So last night I turned off the PC, unplugged its cables, and took it into the living room to mess around with Workbench. Now I’m happy with the software side, but the hardware is driving me crazy. The PC laptop has a quiet but annoying acoustical 60-cycle hum, apparently due to a physical connection between the power supply (or possibly the fan motor) and the exterior case. Also, it runs hotter, so my lap gets a little toasty after a while.

While I’m using it, I can’t check my email or do anything on the Web, because I’d have to buy and configure a wireless router to do that. And when I’m finished playing around with Workbench, I have to hook up all the cables again.

Buy a cheap PC laptop just so I can fiddle around with Workbench? That seems strangely misguided. Plus, it would take hours to set it up. First I’d have to verify that Workbench and AutoHotKey are even compatible with the new OS.

I have two powerful laptops, and I’m still not satisfied.

More on Musika

A few days ago I posted a piece detailing my attempt to suss out the services offered by Musika — according to their banner, “The nation’s leading music lessons provider since 2001!” Okay, I like to stir up a little trouble once in a while, and I’m naturally curious about the competition.

I also care about music students. Whether they’re studying with me or with someone else, or are only looking around for a possible teacher, it’s important to me that they get the best, most qualified instruction available.

Musika’s website claims to be able to line you up with a cello teacher in Livermore — someone who will come to your home, even. So I filled in the form with a fake name and told them I wanted cello lessons for my nonexistent daughter, Jessica.

Musika was entirely unable to find a cello teacher for little Jessica. They list two cello teachers on their site, but quite obviously these are fake names, not real teachers.

At least they were straight about not being able to line up a teacher. And prompt. And they didn’t ask for money up front. That’s the good news.

What mystifies me is how they think they can make money on a nonexistent service. On their Jobs page, the site says very specifically, “We are currently not accepting applications for teaching with Musika at this time. Please try again at a later date.” So … they claim to be able to hook you up with a cello teacher in Livermore, but they can’t do it because they don’t have one, but yet they’re not looking for teachers. What kind of sense does this make?

I’ll let you dream up an answer for yourself. Maybe they’re just terminally clueless. But they do seem very businesslike, so that theory may not hold water. What sort of people would operate in a businesslike manner, yet provide no visible services? Hmm…