News You Can Bruise for 2008 May

(2) Thu May 01 2008 22:01 Space Game: I had an idea for a game and immediately started expanding the scope of the game beyond all reason, but let's keep it relatively simple. This is a game where you run a space program. You've got a mission, let's say putting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely. You get to design the spaceship, landing module, etc (I think we're at a point where you could design these in a fair amount of detail and it could be made fun). Then you do the launch, deal with any problems that come up, and try to carry out the mission.

I'm pretty sure there was a "space race" game in the 90s that let you manage a space program on the large scale and probably had some budget challenges, but I doubt it let you design spaceships in a meaningful way. What do you think of this game idea? No pressure since I'm not going to actually develop such a game.

Hm, actually it could work as a space-race role playing game.

Fri May 02 2008 08:26: The problem with directly comparing the amount of time people spend watching TV with the amount of time spent writing Wikipedia is that a big chunk of Wikipedia is status reports about what happened on TV. Great article though.

Fri May 02 2008 19:31 The Legend Of The Legend Of Zelda: So a while ago I finished the Wii Zelda game I borrowed from Steve Minutillo, and yesterday I finished the Gamecube Zelda game I borrowed from Adam Parrish. I think Wind Waker (the Gamecube game) is my favorite Zelda game. This is partly because of its use of the Zelda myth.

The prevailing fanboy approach to the Zelda series is to try to put the games into some chronological order where there's an eternal recurrence of a hero archetype who keeps being reborn to fight the same evil over and over. In fact this is also the official approach, but it doesn't hold together very well. The details don't match up. Look at the intro story to Zelda 2: what should be a straightforward sequel is already a mess.

I prefer to think of every game in the series as being a different culture's telling of a myth--literally, the legend of Zelda--each emphasizing different things. Example: sometimes the hero visits a parallel universe, sometimes not, but in every telling with a parallel universe, the nature of the universe is different. It's like playing through all the video game adaptations of Journey to the West. On this view, trying to put the Zelda games in chronological order is like trying to unify the two creation myths in Genesis. It misses the point.

However, the Zelda myth is not that interesting on its own: it's the myth of The Kid Who Collected A Bunch Of Similar Things. Like if three-quarters of Lord of the Rings was Aragorn slumming it up and down Middle-Earth trying to find all the pieces of the Sword That Was Broken. I still need to play the N64 installments of the franchise, but Wind Waker had the best riffs on the myth of any Zelda game I've played.

First, the Polynesian-style setting was totally different, and it worked well. I think the ocean squares could have been reduced in size by about 25%, but it made the game world interesting the way loci of activity were scattered more or less uniformly across the map.

Also, in the other games I've played Link doesn't have much of a character arc. In Twilight Princess he starts out as a Luke Skywalker farm boy type who's thrust into greatness, but it doesn't really work because he's got the emotional range of your Kathy Ireland. He's a lot more expressive in Wind Waker with its cartoony graphics. He's also younger; his hero clothes are itchy and he's terrified, but he goes and is the hero anyway. It's typical Joseph Campbell stuff, but other games in the series don't even come up to that level. And it's especially effective with the Wind Waker backstory, in which the world is in the state it is because the last time someone ran through the eternal recurrence and told the myth, the hero didn't show up.

Bonuses: it's got a character who's effectively a coffinfish. I named my character "Zelda" in a tribute to the original NES Zelda game, which yielded yuk-worthy dialogue like "Hurry, Zelda! We must reach Zelda!". And while researching the much-loathéd character of Tingle, I discovered Freshly Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, the game that's a ruthless parody of the Zelda myth in addition to being a big "screw you" to fanboys everywhere.

(2) Sun May 04 2008 01:32 They Said I Prob'ly Shouldn't Fly With Just One Eye: While waking up yesterday morning I had one of those semi-sensible waking up ideas, where I revamped my pretty-much-abandoned memorial page for my old BBS to reuse the actual old screens from the BBS. So the file listings would be colored text like they were on Da Warren, the homepage would be a copy of the BBS's main menu, etc. I could even put up ports of my WCCode masterpieces like The Online Hedgehog Detector and Eliminator, and Are You Online?

Well, looking at those old menus, that's probably not going to happen anytime soon because it would be a very confusing interface. But! To give the menus a proper look-see I ended up writing a program that converts my ANSI files to HTML. If you have any old ANSI files lying around it might work on them too. It even supports blinking ANSI, using the much-maligned (greatly-maligned?) <blink> tag. Well, the CSS equivalent.
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Here's the source: ansi2html.py. I've released it into the public domain.

Strangely enough, this program didn't already exist--HTML::FromANSI works for color codes but doesn't handle the CP437 extended ASCII characters that were a staple of DOS-based BBSes. There was a last burst of enthusiasm for ANSI files in general around 1999, when ansi2gif was released, but that seems to have been before web browsers had Unicode support, so nobody thought of putting it in the browser. And nowadays most people interested in ANSI art are into the scene stuff that mostly uses the block characters, and instead of cheap HTML translations you get cool things like lightboxes.

I wanted to bring all my tacky BBS screens into the browser and share them with you. Then I got this program working, actually saw all my tacky screens for the first time in years, and thought better of it. I will share one of my old Da Warren screens with you, to give you an idea of what the program can do. I've put it up at the ANSI2HTML web page. The graphics aren't bad because it's a plagiarized parody of someone else's ANSI advertising their pirate BBS. I used it as Da Warren's login screen occasionally.

There are a couple problems with the script. The first is that it needs some line-wrapping logic to simulate an 80-column screen. The second, which might be related, is that some ANSIs look crappy when it converts them to HTML. And--I'm embarrassed that this never occurred to me before--I'm not sure how an ANSI file is supposed to distinguish between an \x0a that's a newline and a \x0a that's INVERSE WHITE CIRCLE. Right now I treat 'em all like newlines.

But, at the very least I hope someone will get some use out of my Python dict mapping the IBM PC's special characters to numeric HTML entities. I forsee a renaissance of ZZT-style ANSI art games, old door games ported to the Web, etc.

PS: the official Unicode name of the ⌂ character is "HOUSE". I never mentally gave it a name, but "HOUSE"? Seriously? I'd have called it HOME PLATE.

Update: Added support for the simple cursor movement codes that can be simulated by adding newlines and spaces, which makes basically all ANSIs convert well enough that you can see what they are. Getting more complex than that will involve creating a virtual screen and drawing the whole thing on that before converting the finished product to HTML. Not worth it for me right now.

Uh, one more bit of art. This is how I signed my name in one of the BBS bulletins:

(2) Mon May 05 2008 19:12: It's two years since my mother's death. When someone dies you're left with your mental model of that person. This is a kind of immortality but as immortality goes it's really terrible, because your mental model of another person is never good enough to give any satisfaction. It's the difference between a real person and ELIZA.

Except in dreams. The people in our dreams are simulations run by the brain, but we don't notice at the time. I dream about my mother all the time, and for a while I fool myself into thinking a few mental images are a real person. And I wake up and it's painful, like it always is when you realize you've been fooling yourself.

But that's not as bad as it gets, because sometimes I dream that my mother dies. I wake up and realize it was a dream, and I'm relieved. And then I remember that the dream was accurate, and it's worse. The mental-model sort of immortality is mostly good for keeping the pain fresh.

Mon May 05 2008 21:45: On Saturday I went with Evan to see the pretty decent Dave Eggers-curated exhibition of cartoonish art, "Lots of Things Like This". Here are some pictures from Saturday, including L.H.O.O.Q., first in my mission to take my own pictures of Duchamp's major forgeries. (Duchamp retouched L.H.O.O.Q., probably to make the Mona Lisa's face more like his own, betting that you wouldn't notice because you'd be distracted by the moustache; dare to compare.)

(3) Tue May 06 2008 21:25: It looks like someone's setting up an office in my apartment building.

(9) Thu May 08 2008 18:46: I'm not really interested right now in writing the kind of weblog entry I usually write. I apologize since I assume you read my weblog for that kind of entry, but this is not some lame "I'm not going to write much for a while because I'm so busy.". I'm no busier than usual and I like writing, but at the moment I want to focus on creating new things and doing research. Most of my writing at the moment is fiction.

So here is the deal. If there's something interesting or helpful you think I could find out or create, tell me about it in a comment. I read a number of weblogs that do something similar (eg. waxy, Request Comics) and the results are always interesting.

Thu May 08 2008 20:09: Speaking of things I read on Waxy, check out Dino Run, a synthesis of the ludological concepts I've developed through years of Game Roundups. Specifically, 1) "a flexible set of techniques to use towards your goals, and lots of random variation within well-defined parameters"; and more importantly 2) "replace the humans with dinosaurs".

Disclaimer: in the interest of scientific accuracy I should point out that, like many animal-themed games, Dino Run uses as a game mechanic a totally inaccurate model of evolution. It also depicts the K-T event as something you could outrun, which seems about an order of magnitude worse than having an action hero outrun an explosion.

Thu May 08 2008 21:15: Ryan Ginstrom, who just sent me some Beautiful Soup money, has a cool weblog about Japanese-English translation and Python. From the weblog I found out about maru batsu. Has it reawakened my longstanding love of punctuation‽

(4) Fri May 09 2008 19:51 Request Weblog #1: Bureau of Statistics: Ben Heaton requested: "I'd like to see a weblog entry based around counting types of objects in the room with you." Here it is.

Books: 299 (for a loose definition of "book")
Books written by me: 2
Greatest number of books by a single author: 6
Visible maps: 5
Rutabagas: 0
Legible copies of the word "rutabaga": At least 4 (counting that one), probably less than 10.
Rupees: 2825.5
Printouts of things I'm supposed to have read and commented on by tomorrow: 3
Light bulbs: 4
Guitar strings: 47
3D representations of animals: 13 (not counting Ganesha or Jabba the Hutt, but counting the frogs Jabba the Hutt eats).
RAM: 1.9 gigabytes
Subway cards/tickets: 8 (4 cities)
Pieces of dirty laundry: 71
Disposable plates: 17

Sat May 10 2008 10:18: Filmmaking has abandoned its roots. It's time for Dogme 1895! Just think of the possibilities: you can show something that actually happened, recreate a historical event, or tell a fictional story! But don't employ any technique or film element first used after 1895. See this handy guide. No artificial lighting, color, scale models, kissing, stunts, credits, or feature-length films. Synchronized sound is okay.

(1) Sat May 10 2008 14:11 Magazine Haul: Evan requested to hear about "recent books bought, read, and/or stopped in mid-read". I'll answer his question properly later, but here are some magazines I got half an hour ago. We went to the Build It Green! NYC Swap Fest to recycle busted electronics and get rid of CDs, clothes, non-busted electronics, etc. that have outstayed their welcome in our house. Having swapped that stuff out, we discovered a huge multi-crate haul of Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines from 1984 to 2002. We went through them, semi-randomly picking ones that looked good, and ended up with about thirty.

Wow! Amazing find! Nobody else at the Swap Fest seemed to care about science fiction magazines so we didn't feel bad about taking so many (plus we took only about 10% of the total). As you might expect they were all from one guy's collection; searching for his name I see that he probably worked for the Federal Water Quality Association and that he put his name on the Stardust microchip. I hope he's still alive, but that's exactly the sort of thing that ends up at a Swap Fest after you die.

(2) Sat May 10 2008 20:15 Request Weblog #2: Reading List: As previously mentioned Evan wanted me to write about my recent interactions with books. Rather than give a list (I already keep a list here, albeit not very consistently) I thought I'd write about some selected works.

Right now I'm halfway through Summerland by Michael Chabon. I thought there would be more alternate history and less fantasy; I think I confused it with The Yiddish Policeman's Union. I'm not really concerned with science fiction and fantasy's class ranking vis-a-vis other kinds of fiction but nonetheless I'm glad that Michael Chabon writes fantasy and then says to the literary world "yeah I wrote fantasy and you liked it!" Kapow!

The last book I read was a 1963 science fiction novel called Star Surgeon, not to be confused with the 1960 science fiction novel of the same name, or indeed the 1968 Silver Surfer ripoff Star Sturgeon. It's a really good read, as the abovelinked review indicates similar to the Culture novels in many ways, but there's a never-explained subplot where some horrible disease struck humanity and made all the women subservient and unambitious. No, wait, that's 1960s science fiction. Jiminy Cricket, this guy writes a believable asexual empathic insect doctor and he can't get a human woman right.

I also read Finite and Infinite Games recently. I don't know why I read these books thinking they'll have game theory in them. It was just 80s self-help stuff.

My previously-written mini-review of VALIS: "This book showed me that Dick is a master of plotting. He's written a novel in which he appears as the narrator, the main character is also himself, the narrator is unreliable and both main character and narrator are insane. But you always understand what's going on in the plot." Well, maybe that just makes him a master of exposition; the plot isn't that great actually.

Books recently bought: I rarely buy books because I've already got about 200 unread books. I guess the last one I spent money on would be Matthew Yglesias's book about recent American history and politics, Heads In The Sand. And a while back when I was out with Evan, I bought Stephen Mitchell's translation of Gilgamesh. I do use Bookmooch to request rare books from my wishlist. In the mail right now are A Complete and Utter Failure (Kevin's favorite book) and The Evolution of Useful Things, both of which have been on my wishlist for years.

Books that I stopped reading: I rarely just give up on a book. Last year I gave up on Floating Worlds, which I had high hopes for, and gave up on the Thomas Covenant series after slogging through the first one. More recently I stopped reading In Conquest Born by C.S. Friedman because everyone was acting like Klingons and it was boring. I'll give that one another try but I might give up on it. More recently still I stopped reading Vast by Linda Nagata after a couple chapters. It was the third book I had earmarked for subway rides, and that's just too many to juggle at once. I'll pick it up again soon.

I usually don't decide in advance what to read, but continuing the theme of you telling me what to do, leave a comment and you can tell me which of my unread books I should read next. (Do a tag search for 'unread', just like in that largely-bogus unread-books meme; I can't seem to link directly to my list.) Fine print: Leonard retains veto power. Limit two books per bizarre abdication of autonomy. Member FDIC.