TOM FRANCIS
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Villainy Like It Oughta Be

That is a Ben And Jerry’s joke.

I’m playing City Of Villains more than anything else lately, and I hate it. Well, no, I just resent it a lot. I don’t know why my fellow Heroes-lovers rate it so highly. After Heroes, I thought Cryptic were prepared to do brave, liberal things to make sure their games captured their themes gloriously. Then when their next theme was, excitingly, the polar opposite of their first, they refused to change anything at all. They just did a search-and-replace operation on the word ‘hero’ for ‘villain’ and charged full-game price for it. It’s not that I didn’t love Heroes, it’s that I still love Heroes, and I can still play it, so what the hell is the point of this new thing?

I’m talking in degrees, of course – there are some small token additions in Villains, there’s one new class, one half-new class and three recycled classes. But it’s not nearly enough, and when Heroes’ instanced missions were already absurdly repetitive, to give you utterly indistinguishable ones in Villains – usually against the exact same villain groups you were fighting in CoH – is criminal. But I’m not here to bitch, I want to explain why this is so disappointing by describing what would have been great.

Classes

The new class in Villains is the Mastermind, who has minions to do his dirty work. Ace. I’m not playing as a Mastermind, though, because the power sets are absurdly limited. In their bizarre attempt to cram the whole rationale of villainy into a single class, they’ve had to make your primary weapon and your minion type part of one power set. In other words, if you want ninjas, you have to use a bow. What the hell? Couldn’t it at least be a ninja-y weapon, like throwing stars? Anyway, clearly all classes should have minions of some type, and clearly you should be able to choose your weapon separately from your minion type, and clearly you should be able to customise your minions’ appearence with the costume editor. In fact, let’s separate minions from class completely – you choose a primary power set similar to the existing ones, then your next choice is what type of minions to have, and all classes can have any type. Here’s what the options would be:

Mob: A steadily increasing gang of lackeys, dumb cannon fodder but nevertheless an intimidating presence. They don’t increase in power by as much as you per level. Each new power is a new lackey, and each lackey has somewhat different abilities, but not necessarily better ones than the last. If one dies, you can res him by activating that ‘power’, but it has a longish recharge time. By max level you could have nine of them. Each time you get one, you get to design his appearence. The default is the same as the last lackey, so you can just make few or no alterations if you like.

Posse: Right from the start, you’ve got three loyal servants. They’re weak to begin with, but every new power is an upgrade to all of them, giving them all a new ability or resistance. You never get more than three, and their abilities are always identical to one another. You design their appearence, but it’s a uniform for all three. You can res one at a time, but the power has a long recharge time.

Henchmen: You have two bodyguards, potentially with different abilities and appearence. Each new power you get is an upgrade to one or the other, alternatingly.

Lieutenant: You just have one trusted right-hand man, but he’s every bit as powerful as you. You even choose a class for him from the same options you had, so he can be designed to compliment your own abilities. Each new power is just a new power in that set.

Twin: You’re one of a pair, so your associate is identical to you in appearence and abilities. Each new power you get for yourself, he gets too. The actual ‘Twin’ powers are ways to help each other out: the ability to resurrect him, for him to resurrect you, synchronised attacks that do more damage than the sum of their parts, linked health, and eventually the ability to switch which one of the two you control. These make up for the fact that, unlike a lieutenant, your twin’s powers don’t compliment your own.

Missions

Again, they had one nice idea and didn’t use it much. Getting missions from the newspaper – carrying out personal vendettas, responding to false stories about yourself, building your rep as a bad guy – is all great. But so futile since none of these missions have any continuity, and the thing they build toward – a bank robbery – is the same each time. So you end up doing Contact missions most of the time, just like Heroes.

Paper missions should be the only ones. You’re not working for anyone, you’re a super-villain, not a grunt. The ability to rob a bank should stay, but you should – and I know this is going to sound a little extreme – get some money for it. As it is, you get a ‘clue’ saying “I scored half a million from that job – not bad for a days work!” No you didn’t. There is no money in Villains. There’s a currency called Infamy, of which you received a tiny amount, but the rest is all in your head.

You should have actual money. Infamy is an equivalent of Heroes’ Influence, which made sense because heroes don’t work for money. Villains do. I should be getting money, especially if I steal a load from a bank. I should also be able to mug innocents by hitting them a few times (I understand if I’m not allowed to properly kill them – it’s a kid-friendly game). Beating up heroes too low level to give me XP should get me money, too. I should want to beat the hell out of more or less everyone I see.

The instances themselves only really need two improvements: a logical random level generator and no missions against villains. At all. Currently ninety percent of all the missions I’ve done have been against villains – many of them against the very villain faction I work for. Which doesn’t feel like betrayal, since most of them attack me on sight in the streets anyway, even on my way back to their boss to be trained to the next level. Idiotic.

Missions against heroes should be a case of beating up cops to get to something to steal it, fending off small groups of powerful (NPC) heroes who enter the instance to stop you, or beating up innocent people to make a scene, baiting a specific hero to come out and be ambushed. Villainous things. Defeating the evil snakes because someone asked me to is a god damn service to society, not a nefarious caper.

That’s why it disappoints me. The reason I’m playing it anyway is that the Always Black forum has a supergroup, and I was never really in one of those for Heroes. And it’s fun, in so far as it resembles Heroes.

FEAR

Wrote this back when it was relevant. I hope enough time has now passed that I can post it without pretensions of currency.

Central to FEAR is this idea of being surrounded by armoured grunts in a classy office, bullet trails streaking in all directions in slow motion, dust and sparks exploding all around, then blowing one of them in half with the shotgun and launching into a flying kick at another while he shouts a slow-mo deepened “Fuck!” They got that exactly right, and it’s one of the all-time top ten essential gaming experiences everyone should have before they die.

But it sometimes feels like they didn’t know what to do around that. Their attempts to deviate from that formula for variety’s sake – excluding the horror sections – are all rather awkward. The extra-tough enemies are dull, the turrets are a chore to destroy, the flying robots are desperately incongruous and almost impossible to defeat stylishly, and the psychic demons that can hurt you and be shot are a catastrophic midjudgement. Instead of being scary and fun to fight, they’re neither – that they’re vulnerable to bullets makes them mundane, and that they zoom mindlessly towards you makes them insultingly poor opponents.

The one exception is the stealth troop type – they’re both genuinely different and great fun. But even that gives rise to a further frustration – they’re horribly under-used. Especially given that they are both scary and fun to fight, and that’s clearly what they wanted from the later levels. Instead, they’re replaced by the aforementioned physical demon things in the last levels, and then and there FEAR drops from one of the best games ever made to merely something with a lot of potential. All other quibbles are barely that – quirks, more like; blemishes in a beautiful skin.

It still feels like a 90% game to me, despite everything, so I shall specify some of the things it does better than anyone else ever before. I hearby give FEAR the following awards:

• Best FPS Combat – a big one, but well-earned.
• Best Enemy ‘Barks’ – for ‘Fuck!’, “Shit!’, “Fuck, shit!”, “Shut the fuck up!” and “No fucking way!”. I honestly never thought I’d have to take this award away from Far Cry’s mercenaries with their twin classics “Yeah yeah!” and “I’m going to shoot you in the face!”
• Best Costume Design – the grunts are all functionally identical, but they sport a range of genuinely stunning uniforms. They’re sleek, they’re formal, they come in tasteful colours (particularly the crimson/white/black one later on) and yet they look like they mean business. Sadly there isn’t a specific credit for costume design in games, since technically they’re not costumes (“These clothes are my skin!” – prize for placing the (mis)quote), but I’m inclined to credit these outfits to John Turner, Senior Character and Weapon artist.
• Best Shotgun – sorry Half-Life 2, but holy shit this is a good shotgun.
• Best AI – I know it has its flaws, but the deciding factor is that these are the only enemies that continually surprise me.
• Best Explosion – and I mean ever. I’m not even restricting this to games. This beats Akira.
• Most Arbitrary Plot Twist – for the one after the credits. “Er, okay.” I’m willing to be corrected on this one – I know there’s a lot of hot competition.
• Best Enemy – for the grunts. If I have to be specific, let’s say one in a blue-grey/white uniform, using a shotgun. Cool, challenging and incredibly satisfying to beat up.
• Best Enemy In A Supporting Role – for the stealth dudes. Creepy, cunning and brilliantly acrobatic.
• The Sands Of Time Award For Worth-Copying Contribution To The Genre – for the melee combat. Take note, everyone: we need melee moves, they need to be powerful and we need to be able to do them without switching away from our regular weapon.

Battlefield 2 Stats

I’ve now killed a thousand people. I’ve died fifteen hundred times doing it, but I’ve saved three hundred and fifty lives along the way. It’s taken me forty-six hours. I’ve won a hundred and one games, and lost ninety-one. That makes me a positive influence. If you see me on the enemy team, you should think “Uh oh, they’ve got Tom. That makes them more likely to win (than they would be otherwise).” I’ve killed twenty-four people with the knife in seven minutes of using it. My single worst-performing map – the one on which my win-to-lose ratio is lowest – is the one that comes up most often in the rotations on the servers I play on. I am cursed.

Battlefield 2 stats are interesting. More interesting is the game itself, my love for which was rekindled tonight when trying out Special Forces. Virtually nothing that’s new in SF had a bearing on the match, so it was basically just a revival. I hadn’t played online for months because Craig, Steve and I had discovered how much fun it was to try aerial stunts on a private LAN server – jumping from one helicopter to another in mid-air, for example. It’s completely different to the normal game, but somehow replaced it in my affections, leading to total neglect even after we stopped really doing the stunts thing too.

Tonight I played Medic, as I always do. I’ve spent less than fifteen percent of my time as classes other than the Medic. Sorry, it’s hard to shake the stats thing. It was a spectacular, incredibly tense and fiercely competitive game tonight – me, an excellent player on my team, and the star player of the enemy team all jostling for the top spot, all pretty sure we’d get a medal (Bronze, Silver or Gold) but all extremely ‘interested’ in which one it would be. I began swearing a lot, even though I was ahead. But somehow my complete jerkishness when playing Battlefield 2 never detracts from what I’m actually doing to get this score up – killing bad guys and saving lives. That remains an utterly pure, deeply instinctive and almost medatative act. When I see a black bar – a dead ally – the defibrillators come out seemingly without me moving my fingers, and he’s resurrected and his foes killed in almost the same motion. Even as I ask the enemy if they like that, cocksuckers, ha, didn’t think so, I care profoundly about the friend I’ve just saved, drop him a medkit in case he gets hurt again, respond to his manly “Thanks man,” with a stoic “You got it.”

I am a pure force, tipping the balance in our team’s favour in both ways – giving to one, takething away from the other. And I score one and a half points per minute.

Brain Storm’s New Clothes

Brain Storm is back, in a sleek new costume and with three burly ghost men bodyguards. She’s now in her mid-twenties, and openly superheroinic. You might remember shots of her in a previous post looking rather ordinary – the original concept was a heroine who just looked like a normal person – albeit with a bandana to hold her radioactive brain in. It worked well at early levels, beating up thugs and using her brain-snapping powers to do favours for the city, looking like a minor vigilante. But then she was blinding everyone in the room with a gesture, summoning spectral armies and rendering herself completely invisible. She was acting way too much like a superheroine not to look like one. At level 20 you get a second costume slot – a chance to design a completely new costume, but still be able to go back to the old one when you like. So it was time for a redesign.

This second generation of your hero is a fantastic idea – even though your costume has no bearing on your abilities, it’s a far more integral part of your character than the latest piece of armour you’re wearing for the stat bonuses in WoW. Making a new one is a chance to redefine your hero’s personality. Brain Storm started out as a woman with the unusual ability to make people imagine they’re more and more horribly mutilated until they black out from the trauma. She was generally a nice person, but if you were trying to wrestle a young woman’s handbag from her in broad daylight, you could expect to find your skin bursting open in septic lesions until you fell unconscious with the pain. Now that her abilities were more spectacular, more diverse and frequently more cruel and unusual, she needed a look that would announce her awesomeness, but also reflect her not entirely serious personality and avoid the machismo or pomp of heroes who can take or dish damage – she does neither. Thus, this:

I agonised over it for nearly an hour. I’d hit a huge problem in that the bandana, the previous costume’s only distinctive feature, came with long hair that you couldn’t change. All long hair – about half of the female hair styles – conflicts with having a cape; the two move freely through each other and it looks deeply wrong. When I’d finally got around it and finished the costume, I worried that it was too generic – black and white are not terribly adventurous colours, and essentially what I’d created was a woman in a standard superhero costume – she even had an Incredibles-style black eyemask. I needn’t have worried – the first person to see me when I came out of the costume shop immediately said “Holy shit, nice costume!” He was a giant in a blue and yellow leotard, which reminded me: no-one wears black and white in City Of Heroes. No-one wears sensibly cut trousers, a simple eyemask or a cape with subtly different patterning on each side. I stood out more as a hero with an unexuberant costume than I did as a normal-looking person.

The point of the new costume is to look imposing (for a small lady), smart (everyone I team with looks good bashng goons, but I’m the only one who could attend a post-goon-bashing soirée without having to change), tasteful (to distinguish myself from the many scantily clad heroines created by their male players for their own ‘entertainment’), and yet very subtly casual (because I’m no square). Hence the shoulder pads, the black, the full-body-coverage and the white boots that look like trainers under the trousers – respectively.

That’s the look. The changes in Brain Storm’s abilities since her vigilante beginings mean that she’s now an extraordinary crowd-controller, a mistress of chaos. Her opening moves on any given mob leave them freezing, terrified and set upon by powerful, indestructable yet entirely imaginary assailants. Actually killing them after that is a trivial matter, best left to the menial executioners of other classes. Also she is invisible and can punch people in the stomach or head.

They say City Of Heroes is shallow, but your heroes certainly aren’t. Every level mine becomes more complex, more distinctive and gains a little more backstory and personality. Now let me tell you about my World Of Warcraft character:

It’s a level 33 Warlock.

Fahrenheit

Okay, I have five draft posts accumulated here, and I came on to write something about the gigs I’ve been going to this month, and even that isn’t the most important thing to say here right now – which is that you should go and see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang before it disappears from the cinema, it’s one of the funniest and cleverest films I’ve seen in years – and even that isn’t what I want to write, because I’m burning to gush about City Of Heroes (pointedly not Villains) because that’s what I’ve been doing in my week off. But it’s twenty to three in the morning, and this ancient draft post looks finished to me, so I’ll just post it. More, different, better stuff tomorrow.

Great Things About Fahrenheit

• You Do Stuff: It’s amazing the difference between walking up to something and pressing ‘use’, and walking up to something and performing a small mouse gesture which very abstractly represents the motion you want your character to perform. That tiny trace of logic, that faint connection between what you do and what your character does, makes it a tactile experience that gets you into your character’s life in a profound way. Fahrenheit also takes every oppourtunity to make you do things, automating nothing and sometimes breaking actions down into almost painstakingly small parts, each performed in sequence. But the effort and intention that requires from you gives you a connection to your character that’s beyond normal control.
   
• Private Lives: Since you have mental health rather than regular health to worry about, Fahrenheit has to let you do things that aren’t stressful (for your characters) to get it back up. So you play their lives, deciding what they do in their down time, manually performing comfortingly humdrum activities or basic life maintenance. Or swallowing the Little Book Of Calm. They’re welcome punctuation between the furious action bits, and that you decide how to while away the time means they’re frequently more fun. While bits like this work best as a backdrop to a dramatic story, it’s these you end up looking forward to more than what actually happens next. You get to see how every major character lives, talk to their friends or partners, know their apartment, sleep in their beds. It even gets unpleasantly intimate if you play your cards exactly right with the love interests in their lives, but apparently the American version spares you this realistically awkward fumbling.
   
• Atmosphere: Fahrenheit depicts New York in a blizzard with loving artistry. The snow defines every scene, making indoors cosy and comfortable; the streets lonely or chaotic. It makes wonderful escapism, and means you don’t have to care about the plot to want to go back to this world when you’re away from it.
   
• Music: Whoa, it’s like they got professionals to do it or something. It’s got both perfectly pitched incidental music, ramping up the spookiness or tension massively where appropriate, and actual songs for fun or quiet scenes. Carla’s apartment in particular is brought to life as much by the song playing on her hi-fi as the actual design of the place. Usually games fumble an awkward hybrid of incidental music and songs – it’s too featureless and watery to be songs, but it just plays mindlessly on a loop, rendering it irrelevant to what’s going on on-screen. That Fahrenheit does it the movie way, and gets it right, is a huge boost to your emotional engagement with it – one that dwarfs any excitement the actual mini-games might hope to introduce.

Awful Things About Fahrenheit

• The Flashing Colours Minigames: Walkthroughs – which yes, I have used – refer to them as the Simon Says type; it tells you what to do, then you have to do it. In fact, you have to do it or it’ll kill you. That’s not a game, not even a mini-game, that’s slavery. Unlike the mouse gestures, it’s frequently at odds with the nature of the action, simply because they use the same system for every damn thing. It even ruins some of the Private Lives appeal, because as Lucas the most relaxing thing you can do – sitting down and playing your guitar – is made a galling chore. In the action sequences, Simon Says becomes a case of ‘keep pressing the right thing to keep watching the cut-scene’. But it’s even worse than that – they require you to concentrate intently on the colours, meaning you actually miss the cut-scene going on behind them almost completely. It’s like being forced to read a book in the middle of an action film or get kicked out of the cinema. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad at them – and I’m good now – they’re an ugly, pathetic, demeaning placeholder for a real game. They try some neat tricks to try to make up for it – matching the rhythm to that of the action, throwing some curveball colour combinations when your character does new things – but these are icing on an absent cake. There is no game here.
   
• The Left/Right Minigames: These are actually worse than the Simon Says ones, but they’re not the game’s staple so they don’t take top spot. They are, however, crippling difficulty bottlenecks for anyone who doesn’t specialise in PRESSING TWO KEYS in rapid alternation. It’s the kind of thing an ape would refuse to do on principle. I love games, so I’ll do demeaning stuff to see the next bit of one I’m interested in, but it’s when these get harder that the insult becomes too much to bear. You fail, and have to start again, because the game finds your PRESSING TWO KEYS skill lacking. Worse, the metre conceals a secret time limit that has no relevance to the actual situation, so overcoming the natural decline of the energy bar you’re mashing up isn’t enough – you have to make it hit maximum before an imaginary countdown finishes, or it’ll act as if you let the bar hit zero. Worse again, that dirty trick isn’t understood by the game’s difficulty system, so it’s as annoying on Easy as on Hard. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am not good at these bits, because I do not take particular pride in my ability to PRESS TWO KEYS. The game’s guff about representing the physical exertion of your character would be a lot more convincing if what they were doing ever had anything to do with PRESSING TWO KEYS. The difficulty of these doesn’t increase the physical exertion anyway, and it’s their difficulty that makes them a problem.

Your Points Are Very Informative, Tom, But Is It Actually A Good Game?
No. There’s so much out there that’s a joy to play, and this is so often a pain. Doing something interesting and new is commendable, but Fahrenheit screws up so much of the basic stuff (like making the game part fun) that its novelties only outweigh its frustrations if you’re desperate for something new. More simply, if you hate games, you’ll love this. If you actually like games, and play good ones a lot, Fahrenheit grates. It’s still worth playing for the interest factor, or as a glimpse of what a good Revolution game might be like, but it’s potential rather than fun to me.

Sorry

For a while there NaNoWriMo was consuming my spare writing time, starving this blog, but then I stopped doing that too, and now the less creative pass-times that I engage in to avoid Wri-ing my No-vel are replacing posting here. Shame, because I enjoy posting here, and I don’t enjoy writing my NaNoWriMo book. Curiosity: SATISFIED.

Meaning, I no longer have novelist ambitions. I fundamentally disagree with the format. I don’t read many books myself. The only thing that excites me about the form is that anyone can do it on their own, but now I realise I can’t. Most of all, I don’t like it. I feel like a fraud, covering for the fact I don’t have any real ideas, I don’t honestly care what this character looks like or how he phrases things, I’m just making stuff up to get the story over. I haven’t decided whether to give up entirely or just try truncating it dramatically – I still like the idea behind my novel, but it no longer seems novel-worthy. It could become a short story, though I’m too late for WriAShorStorWe.

Anyway, I am a bit late with this news, but I’m now officially a professional writer. The new disc ed, James commenter Graham, is settling in well, and I am making words from magical brain waves instead. It is very cool. More than the change in the type of work, what I’m looking forward to most is being able to pitch ideas for features and the like without the grim dread of involuntarily volunteering to write them, thereby neglecting the disc for just long enough to create a chronic crunch period out of thin air. One random idea I had this week – last weekend, actually, in preparation for my first day as a writer – just paid off dramatically today. I have fantastic new information on the next games of two of my favourite developers of all time that no-one else in the world has. I keep studying the screenshots of one of them, gleaning new joy out of tiny figures or details that hint at wonderful aspects of the game. The other, by N creators Metanet, is less specific and unillustrated, but will feature at its heart a mechanic I have loved since almost the start of my gaming life, and only ever seen attempted twice before – both with brilliant results. Metanet are more talented and intelligent than the developers of either of those games, so this is going to be something super-special.

I can say absolutely nothing revealing of either, so I apologise for teasing, but my excitement is desperately seeking an outlet here. The full skinny, also known as the straight dope, will be in our next-but-one issue (the next to hit the shelves has already gone to press).

Also in Awesome this month, I was visible on the BBC six o’clock news last night, in the background of an interview with the Deputy Editor of Edge magazine, for some reason conducted at a PC Gamer desk. Mr Walker theorises that this is because the story would otherwise be largely true, so some form of misleading element had to be manufactured. We propped up our latest issue and plastered stickers all over the desk beforehand, so we ‘pushed the brand’ appropriately. You can watch it here – I do have a link for a better quality video that doesn’t require the hateful RealPlayer, but it’s at work at the moment. If anyone has it, could they comment?

The BBC are bravely covering games more and more, but this report rather suggested that they should attempt to grasp the English language first. If Hugh Pym’s last few sentences made sense to anyone, could they draw me a diagram? And has anyone ever seen an ‘internet site’ that was made of cardboard bushes in a physical room? I know it’s easy to get your language in a twist when talking about the metaverse, but shouldn’t their reporters at least be told what a website is before they go on the air? Anyway, I’m not really complaining, except in the sense that I am. My forehead was on TV. Someone even recognised me and e-mailed us.

Quote From What I’m Watching

“Ah, it’s so nice to be eating with a fork instead of sticking one into someone’s neck. Heheh, I’m kidding. I’m a government accountant! Why would I kill that guy in Budapest?”

NaNoWriMo – Hard FAQs

I wrote the chapter plan for my National Novel Writing Month novel tonight, and in two minutes it’ll be November and I’ll write the first sentence. Then I’ll pass out because I’m really tired.

I’ve decided I will post it online, but not here. It’ll be to an unlinked page on this site, which won’t get indexed by Google, but absolutely anyone who’d like to read it should e-mail me or comment here (and fill in the e-mail field – it won’t be published) and I’ll send them the URL. In other words, it’s not secret but it’s not public either. The first chapter will hopefully go up two nights from now. I’ll upload it chapter by chapter I think.

Mockba

Mark: Who wants to go to Moscow?
Me: What’s the game?
Mark: It’s not just about the game, it’s about getting to go to Moscow.
Me: I just want to be sure that I would be the best person for the job.
(All laugh) Continued

First Night, Second Life

Second Life is a Massively Multiplayer Online… Place. There’s no goal, so it’s not a game, but it lets you create things – potentially of enormous complexity. People make games within it. Somewhere, I’m told, there’s a hangar in which people are still playing a World War II MMOG they recreated in SL after the real one got scrapped. A basic Second Life account is free, and with that you get a few hundred virtual dollars to buy and make stuff – on top of which, a lot of groovy players give away copies of the stuff they’ve made for free. Continued

Disappointing Results

9 people found this site, last month, by searching for the word ‘disappointed’. I’m not sure they found what they were looking for, but in a sense, doesn’t that mean they did? Is it logically coherent to be disappointed by the results for the word ‘disappointed’? In fact, is it even logically coherent not to be?

I decided, once, that all logical paradoxes were solvable. If a barber can only cut the hair of men who cannot cut their own, can he cut his own? No. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The egg. Whatever the immediate evolutionary ancestor of the chicken – i.e. the parent of the first creature that would satisfactorily meet our definition of a chicken – it laid a chicken egg, even though it was not itself a chicken. The type of an egg is determined by its contents rather than its parent.

In this case I think yes, you could be disappointed by your results, and have found what you were looking for – disappointment.

Hey, I had a mind-expanding adventure in a virtual world last night – one so fascinating that I had the (missed) oppourtunity to say “Do you want to blog this or shall I?” Although the person I was talking to doesn’t have a blog per se. Details, naturally, later.

Maths Cop!

Holy shit, they finally made a TV series about cops who solve crimes with maths! This is like all my dreams come true at once, except only one of them, and one I haven’t actually had yet, but totally would have if I’d thought to. It’s called Numbers (ignore unreliable sources such as the official site calling it ‘Numb3rs’ – that would mean it was stupid), and I’ve only seen five minutes of the first episode so far, but already there’s been an educational speech on the relevance of mathematics over the credit sequence, and straight off the bat some dude with odd eyebrows is correcting a woman on her use of the word ‘exponential’. Now he’s said “We can create a Bayesian filter!” and I am sold.

In other news, I have this week off, then next week I’m going to Moscow. Having masses of free time seemed like a good chance to try Black And White 2 (as did getting Black And White 2) and so far it is surprising me. I thought it would be pleasant but insubstantial, but in fact it’s got more substance than Colombia. But it’s extremely irritating. I thought it would again be an aimless playground from which no satisfying game could be sculpted, but in fact it’s alarmingly close to a truly brilliant RTS. It’s just definitely not one in its current state.

I have uncensorified my Serenity thoughts now that the film’s out. I may go and see it again in the middle of the day at some point this week – I used to love being able to do that at university; it’s just you and a few old ladies, and you emerge blinking to discover that the day is still in progress. But if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to CSI: Mathematics.

NaNoWriMo

I’m going to write a book in November. That sounds pretty ridiculous, considering I’ve never finished a book in my life (despite repeated attempts), and November – while not a short month – is not a reasonable time-frame. But I’m not the only one planning to do this, and nor am I expecting it to be a good book – more of a fictional blog. I’ve signed up for the pleasantly concatenated National Novel Writing Month, in which chumps and wannabes claim they will pen 50,000 words in thirty days flat. Interesting things about this are that the site itself tracks the cumulative word count of everyone involved so far, and a few of us are planning to launch our works in the extraordinary blacklibrary.

You’ll notice I sound optimistic, and also that this patently isn’t going to work. True enough, but there is one not entirely unrealistic expectation that appeals to me: I might end up writing the story I have in mind into a novella, way short of the word minimum but getting to the ultimate point. The plot is something that rose from the ashes of my old book, which was floored by a fatal flaw in the sci-fi reasoning. This new one is a sci-fi private detective type of yarn, and not as fanciful in some ways as the basics of the last one, but larger in scale and more diverse. The weird thing about it is that I haven’t written a word. Usually I start these things soon after having the idea, then stop for months at a time after every chapter. I think the main thing stopping me from writing a book is the way that I stop writing books or don’t start them at all. Solving that would really help.

Google Oozes Connectivity

Google are always doing interesting things, and one of the reasons I get excited about our current era is that a company distinguishing themselves by not being evil do so well. In fact, they’re the defining architects of the internet itself, and the internet is a big enough deal that history will look upon the computer itself as a footnote to the revolution it enabled. Google are the largest part of a change that isn’t merely technological, cultural, societal or domestic – it’s a milestone in the evolution of the species. There’s ‘can use tools’, ‘brain has well-developed speech centre’ then ‘Googles’.

The new thing is that they’re giving free wireless internet access to the whole of San Francisco. If they move into banking, expect them to drop free money from planes.

It’s hard for me not to imagine a huge translucent blob of connectivity enveloping the city now. There is something wildly futuristic about the idea of free wireless access everywhere – didn’t dialling up, paying per month and plugging things in always feel a little archaic? But more than that, the scary and exciting thing to me is that the internet itself now has an enormous, incredibly rich and powerful agent in the physical world. Google just want the internet everywhere, so much so that they’ll bring it about at their own expense. Until now it’s been a force of nature, growing according to a mess of conflicting interests of parties fighting it out, using the net as a battleground. Now its growth is going to be directed and encouraged by an apparently benevolent corporate super-power. It has become a thing trying to take us over, rather than one waiting for us to realise we want it.

Maybe the story sounds more trivial than that, but to me there is something huge about the idea of giving a free connection to everyone in a city. Not a voucher to have one installed, just free connectivity hanging in the air itself, waiting to be picked up by a wireless network card. Suddenly that city is super-connected – the barrier to being online in a serious way having plummeted from an expensive subscription and installation to a simple $20 component – and the implications of that could be vast. It doesn’t take a visionary to see the city-wide radius increasing, or at least being copied elsewhere, and in the very long term it could actually accentuate the developed/developing country divide – education, information skills and even which parts of the brain and body are more developed are going to get more and more significantly different between super-connected countries and offline ones. It’s the stuff of sci-fi, but in fiction this kind of schism has always been characterised as dystopian. Reality looks more positive, however ugly that divide might get, it’s sharper for one side being raised, not the other lowered.

Lost Season 2

Holy- what the hell was that? Urgent meeting regarding Lost, season 2, in the TV section! Bring cigars and brandy. Spoilers galore there, none here.