DEATH MOUNTAIN

For a previous blog, I had a script that collected all of the links I bookmarked on del.icio.us that day and put them in a post. As time went on and I wrote less and less, those link roboposts became about 90% of the content.

That was bad for the blog, so I stopped doing that. Here, I’m doing something that feels similar, but it’s game stuff that happened to be presented to me in person. So, it’s as if I went out and physically gathered these links for you. Appreciate!

Summoner Wars

I discovered this at PAX East. It looked like any other card game, except it was played on a grid. There was a lot of orcy fantasy art on it, with the fonts that customarily accompany that kind of art. My friend Tim and I were walking by its booth, and the game’s designer invited us to try it out. I said sure but was skeptical.

The designer, Colby Dauch, did a great job of walking us through a first turn, and it did turn out to be a very good game. It’s an elegant tactical combat game that centers largely around positioning, as most tactical combat does, but also involves resource management and acquisition. Like in chess, you win by defeating the enemy’s key piece. Like in Magic and Dominion, you have a deck of cards that provides your guys, all of which have different abilities that can be coordinated in many different ways. The guys in your deck can be summoned using your magic points, which are obtained by killing your opponent’s guys.

You can build your own decks, which adds another dimension to the game, but we played with the prepackaged decks, all of which had a very distinct flavor. We played the hell out of this game at PAX, and I think it’s the best game I played there. Colby said an iOS version was in the works, so I’m looking out for that.

Spell Tower

Spell Tower’s another game I saw at PAX. It’s an iOS game in which you make words out of a tower of letters. When you connect a string of serially adjacent letters to make a word, they pop off and the rest of the letters fall to fill the void they leave. It’s vaguely Tetris-esque. You have to consider where you’re making words because you can cause letters to pile up in concentrated spots. A tall pile is bad because when a pile reaching the top of the screen ends the game. Making words in this context is fun, but also compelling. And by “compelling,” I mean it can create compulsion, which I’m ambivalent about.

The developer, Zach Gage, talked to me for a bit about its development. He got a working version in a surprisingly short amount of time using Open Frameworks. This was a surprise to me because I didn’t even know there was an iOS port of OF. Zach’s made a wide variety of software art with it and has a library for working with sprite sheets.

I was tempted to get into it, but I have enough fluency in Objective-C right now to express myself fairly well and am generally short on time. If ofxiPhone had been around three years ago, I would have been all over it, the same way Ruby people are all up ons RubyMotion. If you’re coming to iOS development from a C++ background, you should check it out.

Letterbrush

Finally, a couple weeks ago, I went to a Game Dev Night where I met other people making tile-based game maps with ASCII in plain text. The host, Greg Smith, presented us with Letterbrush. Plain text is relatively easy and simple to work with, but it does involve some annoying arrow key-dancing to specific columns and rows. Letterbrush gives you well-known drawing tools so you can skip all that foofawing.

Well, I think there were more, some non-game ones, but I’ve forgotten them. So, I hope you enjoyed those.

If you have been within earshot of any technology blogs in the last few years, you’ve probably heard about static web sites being a good way to power a blog.

It makes sense. Most weblogs are just for reading. They need to change when there’s an update, unlike a web app like Health Month or Mint that needs to change every time you visit. At most, updates need to happen whenever a new comment is posted, but that’s if you have comments and if your comments aren’t handled by an external service like Disqus.

Why should a bunch of PHP stuff and database queries run every time someone wants to read something? All that does is slow things down, and if you had a lot of traffic, it would cost you money.
 

A bit of last weekend and some of today, I decided to move Death Mountain to a static weblog. I didn’t truly need to do so; I don’t post that often, and I don’t get much traffic. However, I do have concerns about my current web host, and I’d like to not be tied to hosting that provides WordPress.

Mostly, I think that I wanted to do a bit of low-stakes messing around. Non-sequitur tinkering, you could call it. It’s sort of like working on your car, or the Hackintosh hijinks discussed in this Salad Days episode. (Or making a bunch of stew even though your wife doesn’t want any. Like I’m doing right now.)
 

Jekyll is a nice, lean static blog generator. However:

• I already have this blog looking the way I want, and I don’t want to painstakingly recreate it.
• There’s also that should Death Mountain leave a web host that uses WordPress, Bravest Ever would leave it, too, and I don’t want to mess with the way Katt does posts (via WordPress).
• Also, I liked posting using the WordPress iOS app the one time I’ve used it so far.
• I like WordPress’s thorough cross-linking by dates and categories.

I wanted to keep the WordPress design and input methods while also having a static site. Maciej, the Pinboard guy, said something about this in passing quite a while ago.

You can use a program like wget or curl to generate a flat HTML version of your website from this local version, and then upload these files to your public server to share them with the world.

 
Here’s how to do this in practice:
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I completed my first week as a full-time independent developer. Things I learned:

1. It’s easier to get solid concentration going in the morning if I work somewhere outside of the home. Concentrating in the afternoon is not as hard at home, especially if I have momentum from the morning. I still need to learn how to get going in the morning at home, though. Coffee shops cost money.

2. Having a broad plan for each day of the week helps. This way, you don’t spend too much time thinking and re-thinking what you should be doing. (I had guessed as much from my experience with meal planning, which severely reduced our decision fatigue.) You also cut career existential doubt out of the loop completely.

3. I can kill ideas that are unlikely to work by starting to plan out the work for it. It might not be a true death, though, as they keep popping back into my head. But at least I didn’t spend time on them.

4. I thought I liked listening to podcasts and music while working, but that turns out to only be for work that I have to push myself to start. I think they distract me from my resistance to starting. If I don’t have a problem starting, though, as is the case with a lot of what I worked on this week, podcasts and music are just distracting. The sounds I’ve enjoyed the most this week are near-silence and background chatter that’s busy enough that I can’t distinguish individual conversations.

5. It is really good to have an “American dream”-style weekend in which you don’t expect to do much work and thus are not disappointed when you don’t. When you’re a part-time indie, concerns over whether or not you really are getting as much as you should out of the weekend hover over you like a cartoon stink cloud. They’re a lot easier to dismiss when you know you’ve put in a solid week.

Edward Sung dove deep into the well of consciousness, inspired by the age old question, “Do teleporters kill and recreate you, and if so, is that really you?”

It got me thinking about how ill-defined consciousness is and why we care so much about it.

Sometimes, I think consciousness is important, but other times, I feel it’s narcissistic for us “higher” order organic systems to make a big deal out of consciousness.

We’re systems that sustain ourselves for a period of decades. When these systems operate, the layers of reactions that are furthest from outside the system manifest as consciousness.

When we observe other systems that take actions in response to stimuli in a way that is similar to ours, we assume that those other systems work in a similar way and assign it the status of being conscious.

When a system such as, say,

• A plant
• A unicellular organism
• A virus
• A tire fire, or
• A star

does not respond to stimuli in a way similar to ours, we say that it is not conscious.

However, they have their own ways of sustaining themselves, and they have their own particular internal tensions and reactions. How can we be sure that these are really that different from what we have labeled consciousness?

This article provoked quite a few thoughts, but I don’t think it’s worth the time to write an essay. I don’t really have any solutions to these problems, so an essay-style piece would just be pretty wrapping for fragments anyway.

But here’s my fragments:

- I thought manufacturing in Shenzhen was mostly a matter of costs for technology companies. It’s not.

In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend.

…

Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.”

I would have loved to buy a “fair-trade” iPhone that cost $600 or so. But it turns out not even that is possible.
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On Todd Glass coming out on WTF (a good episode, BTW):

Katt:
Came out like he’s gay?

Me:
Yope.
He’s an established comedian/podcaster.
I’m always amazed people can be secret gay for that long!

Katt:
It must be really hard.

Me:
OTOH, it’s probably sorta cool to have a surprise to unleash on people.

Maybe I’ll come out as Batman.

Katt:
You’re not Batman, honey.

I recently packed my old blog, Notes of Chaos, into a PDF. While slowly re-reading it on my iPad, I came across this review of Autofac.

Short version: If you want to know how it feels to debug a program or hack something, read Autofac.

Capturing realistic technical struggle
2002-06-11 03:47:16

I read Philip K. Dick’s Autofac last night.

The Autofacs (autonomous factories) were designed to get humanity back on its feet in the event of a nuclear holocaust (“Total Global Conflict”), which happened five years ago in this story. They do this by gathering natural resources and then manufacturing and delivering all of the goods that people need.

Unfortunately for humanity, there is a huge bug in the Autofacs: they harvest all of the natural resources and will back away from them only when human productivity matches that of the Autofacs’. That level of productivity is kinda hard for humanity to achieve while the Autofacs are taking 100% of the resources. Thus, humans must depend completely upon the Autofacs unless they can be shut down.
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I figure that, without context, this works as some kind of William S. Burroughs thing.

Me:
Yo, you gotta crush a lot of content if you wanna be cool like Bowser!

Katt:
Don’t they mean Middlebury?

Me:
He crushed it up into a berry!

Katt:
Also, I guess if your name is Gomer, you feel pressure to be even more cool.
Dragonair ate his Middleberry! His Critical Thinking skill goes way up!

Me:
Oh, man, we gotta play that!
Well, once we get a TV.

Katt:
Pokemon Education Revolution!

Me:
Also, a pro-Bowser blog written by the candy stand guy would be good.

Katt:
Oh yeah. I wonder if Bowser ever visits his stand.

Me:
What? Squirtle is getting a master’s degree?
Probably just to pick up from the vault.

Katt:
What? Ivysaur is evolving!

Me:
He’s, like, yeah, yeah, crunch some candy. Let me see the receipts.

Katt:
Congratulations! Your Ivysaur evolved into UNEMPLOYED MFA!

Me:
deer yahoo answers how come my iveysor power went down

Katt:
u sent him to art scool dumass he needs to be a laywer

Me:
loyer stone is xpencive tho

That was a great fight. Any fight involving two people with perfect proprioception is bound to be. But the outcome bummed me out more than I thought it would.

Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the fight yet.

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Me:
OK, I have no interest in playing Battleshoot, but knowing they render croissants makes me kind of interested.

Katt:There’s a game called Battleshoot?

Me:
It’s actually called Battlefield.

Katt:
Awwww man.