I've heard a thing or two about so-called "simultaneous developments" throughout history. Parallel discoveries, concurrent inventions, coincidental musings, what have you. An animated likeness of Ethan Hawke spoke of this in the quasi-film Waking Life. We are told that Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton both discovered calculus at roughly the same time, independently of one another. Much of Charles Darwin's and Alfred Wallace's work on the theory of evolution had been fleshed out before they began collaborating.
There is nothing mystical going on here, so far as I can tell (and it is precisely my inability to wade through mysticism that grants me due authority in my privileged position of "some guy on the Internet"). To me, all of the alleged simultaneous independent intellectual developments throughout history point to just one of many unnerving realities of the human condition: creativity is little more than rearranging bits of knowledge and experience and connecting dots between them. Not just science and mathematics, mind you, but the arts too. Music, novels, humor, they're all just sausages synthesized of the ground of chunks of sausages that came before them.
Try to think of something brand new. Say something random. Do this now. I'd say there's a one-in-five chance whatever you just said had something to do with monkeys, because somewhere along the way, perhaps 180 years ago, a bored patron visiting a zoo watched a monkey scream and do a backflip, decided that monkeys are the zenith of randomness, then handed this bit of knowledge down to posterity to be used and abused for all eternity. Back during my online gaming days, there was a person who played under the name "93% Soiled Loaf". That person, and that person alone, was able to create thoughts out of nothing. Everyone else, me included, are just trying hard enough to fool ourselves.
Not that this realization necessarily detracts from my perception of the world. Progress is still being made. Lacking the capacity to bring anything wholly new into this world does not negate the worth of one's works or thoughts. But it can be frustrating for an individual hellbent on being creative (e.g., UltraMuffin a mere handful of years ago; skim through years 2003-2005 of my website to witness me in the violent throws of disjointed thoughts with no substance). My new aim is to go with the flow, adding my own twist to what happens to trickle by, all the while being cognizant of the streams of thought to which I elect to subscribe. Note: In general, you should sound the bullshit alarm the moment a person plants the word "cognizant" in a conversation. There are far less pompous ways to say the word "aware." This is an FYI effective hereafter. Don't let me catch you falling for it again.
With that in mind, please be aware that, for the past month, I have been reading a book titled Lost Christianities, listening to Laibach's Jesus Christ Superstars album on an endless loop in my car, and even willingly attended two unfamiliar local churches for no reason in particular (are there any ethical considerations for starting a church review website?). I've had Christianity on my mind again. Let it not escape the torrent of scrutiny, here. According to some of the more radical literature I've read, there were a number of ancient religions that paralleled Christianity in numerous respects. Does Christmas really belong to Christ? If so, which Christ?
Some Christian apologists credit these similarities to the downstream influence of Christianity on other religions. I.e., Mithraism thrived by swallowing up elements of other religions, chiefly Christianity. Syncretism, you see, a fancy word for "turbulent theological melting pot." With each new piece of information that comes along, it seems increasingly likely to me that syncretism is how all religions were born, not unlike all other things of this world. Voodoo is a particularly fun example of Christianity gone astray. Everyone's guilty. Even the Greeks commandeered Dionysus from an ancient elsewhere. December 25th is the religious equivalent of that green spinning wireframe skull animated GIF from 1995. It was so cool that, come 1996, every website on the world wide web had it. In light of the fact that Jesus had a lot in common with various religious figures who came centuries before him, I find it rather doubtful that Christianity escaped the turmoil unscathed or otherwise uninfluenced by the rampant syncretism of its formative era.
But where am I going with this? I wanted to learn OpenGL. I accidentally made it through the entire Computer Science bachelor's program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks without taking a graphics programming course. Graphics programming is supposed to be the cherry on top. For many students, it's the sole reason they major in Computer Science in the first place. What is a course anyway but an opportunity for me to zone out and daydream? I'm a book learner, so I bought a book and read enough to get me going, stopping short of textures, lighting effects, and fog. That's right. I can program simple blocks of solid colors, which, incidentally, is as far as ambition took me:
I like brick bash games, especially the 3D variety. I love Arkanoid. Where other brick bash games added power ups to, for example, spawn multiple balls or widen the player's paddle, Arkanoid went the extra mile by arming the player with a gun to shoot away blocks. But what if we were to combine 3D brick bash with Arkanoid? We could call it "3D Arkanoid." If we're lucky, we might even get sued! But why stop at space gun power-ups? Let's have blocks exploding, taking other blocks with them. And what to do with all of the extra CPU power present in any modern gaming device? It would be a damn shame to let that go to waste. Let's add some physics so the blocks react realistically to the explosions. Let's give the blocks different point values to add extra incentive to being precise. Hell, let's ditch the old brick bash paddle style of gameplay and allow the player to "toss" the ball at piles of bricks, attempting to throttle the toss velocity to hit the best targets (high valued blocks, or exploding blocks). The balls will need to be affected by friction and gravity so they don't bounce around forever. Basically, I've just mentally morphed my 3D Arkanoid idea into something more like the crash mode of Burnout 3, except with blocks and balls.
How would I implement this toss throttle, exactly? Click and hold down the mouse button while a colored vector expands, sort of like in the game Worms. Or, how about I experiment with these Wii Remote libraries that keep popping up on the Internet. Maybe I could rig this game up so the player literally tosses balls at the blocks using motion controls. Maybe I could figure out a way to make motion controls work better than 50% of the games on Wii. Just maybe. What simple fun this could be. What an original idea, right?
I hate you, Steven Spielberg. You are to video games what George Foreman is to grills.
I wonder how much of an impact Looney Tunes had on my formative years. No other cartoon I know of is better at capturing the social milieu of the times, but these cartoons are ancient. As such, they are dangerous. Although if given the choice, I would have rather spent the entirely of my childhood watching Duck Tales, Ninja Turtles, and Rocko's Modern Life, there happened to be a surplus of Looney Tunes. Decades upon decades of short animations accumulated to overwhelm the competition. They spanned half a century, as evidenced by the fact that color left the drawings just as quickly as it came, telegrams gave all appearances of being an essential component of modern living, and Bugs Bunny himself morphed, twisted, and mutated in ways that betrayed my trust as he bounced back and forth between the eons. Meanwhile, children like me were indoctrinated with various notions about the world that had long since fallen from favor.
To what extent? Part of me is afraid I'll never know. And if I never figure it out, I can do nothing else but live my life realizing that the Warner Bros. laid much of its permanent foundation. Maybe this is what it is to be an American. Burgers, baseballfootball American Idol, and Looney Tunes. What we all more or less have in common. The lowest common denominators, as they could be called.
What kinds of falsities and half-truths did they shove down my throat before my critical reasoning faculties had developed? That's easy. I need only ask myself the question, "What did I believe before the age of ~eight that ended up making me feel like a fool?" The easy targets.
Criminals, especially burglars, wear striped black-and-white clothes
Do they? Did they ever? Maybe it is in Warner Bros.'s best interests not to depict criminals wearing radical Nickelodeon orange jumpsuits, lest we all grow up in a world where premeditated murder is punishable by slime. The Hamburglar hasn't brought a wealth of reality to the table, either. When I was perhaps four years old, my mother emphasized the importance of using a deadbolt to lock doors to the outside world. She and my father had learned the hard way, unfortunately, when, many years prior, a burglar had broken into their house and stolen my mother's jewelry.
At four years old, I learned a new word: incredulous. I looked deep within myself and decided that, if I were anything at all, I was most definitely incredulous. Here my own mother was trying to convince me that a person wearing striped monochrome clothing, who may or may not have had a fat plastic head and donned a cape, broke into their home to steal gold and diamonds. My eyebrow was officially raised. Pure forces of evil were now escaping from the television set. Oh, wait, criminals look just like you and I? I'm frankly a bit surprised I am still alive.
Creepy men, in general, look like Steve Buscemi
I'm not sure, maybe I'm alone on this, but what struck me most about Steve Buscemi when I first saw him in movies such as Desperado and Billy Madison is that he looked like he jumped straight out of the older black and white episodes of Looney Tunes. Every so often, they'd draw a creepy, greasy, weird-lipped, middle-aged white dude into a cartoon for dramatic effect, all along blissfully unaware that they were drawing a future flesh-and-blood celebrity. I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It took the collective consciousness of America to promote a run-of-the-mill unattractive man to the ranks of "superstar creepy," and Looney Tunes had collected our consciousness decades earlier.
Mars is like Troy, if Troy were built of girders and located on the moon Thanks, Carilyn!
Marvin the Martian is to Martians what Taz is to Tasmanian devils. Is he the only person on Mars? What's with the Trojan getup? And why does Mars have it in for Earth? We've been kind. What does Mars honestly have against us?
If I were a betting man, I would wager instead that we're past due for gimpy ol' Pluto the dwarf planet to come shooting up our solar clubhouse in the turbulent throws of his dilapidated orbit. Me, I've never felt terribly threatened by the red planet of telescopes, illudium Q-36 explosive space modulators, and other such assorted manifestations of the make-believe, Trojan imps be damned.
Bombs look like bowling balls, and crates of TNT are clearly labeled
One time, just one time, I would like to glue a fuse to a black bowling ball and drop it in the key/change bowl on the way through airport security. What would they think? Would they laugh? Would they have a dog sniff it? Would three other different colored versions of me come running out from the corridors, drop their own fused bowling balls within my vicinity, then run away giggling and still manage to blow themselves up?
It would be like the time I bought a 20-pack of AA batteries from Sam's Club, which incidentally were all packaged in a single row, then stuffed it into my carry-on bag before the conveyer belt x-ray. This was not an intentional joke, so imagine my surprise when the TSA found what appeared to be an ammo clip in my backpack. I was a man on a mission, dead set on annihilating an army of koopa troopas by sundown.
It's always reassuring to see how quickly video games infiltrate every last one of my musings.
Hell is underground, firey, and full of Yosemite Sam
I may need to wait another 60 years for confirmation, but I strongly suspect that the Warners lied about this one, too. In any case, it sure made it difficult to make sense of Sunday morning sermons. I guess it could be worse. All Dogs Go To Heaven still gives me goosebumps.
Tasmanian devils look like Taz, and they spin
Lies! I think the animators lost the "T" volume of their Encyclopedia Britannica and just decided to wing it. I see absolutely no correlation between Taz and Tasmanian devils. Tasmanian devils just look like gnarly burnt dogs to me. Taz looks like a walking mouth covered with hair, that turns into a tornado at will. Do Tasmanian devils actually spin in any way, shape, or form? Do they roll around? Do they have violent fits? Are they a force to be feared?
The answer to all of these questions appears to be an unequivocal "no."
Coyotes are unable to make informed purchases
What you do with the Road Runner once you catch him is your business, Wile E. Coyote. But for god's sake, quit wasting your money. ACME has burned you. ACME has burned you bad. Take some of that tension out in an angry letter or a bad review. I would never consider buying a Badonkadonk Land Cruiser without first skimming the reviews a bit. How many times will rockets blow up in your face before you order a different catalog?
I can't tell you how many times Paper Mate pens have ruined my day. And you know what? I'm through with them. I'm through with them and all who support them. Want to be my friend? Use Bic. Want to be my girl? Then there can be absolutely no Paper Mate between us. I'd go to Bangkok if I wanted a whore. ACME has never done any good for anyone. They've been on my shit list since 1989.
Now, just imagine where we'd be if the Censored Eleven were never censored?
May 24th, 2008 - If you have a choice, you should read this
I've always been fascinated by the debate over free will vs. determinism. Do we in fact have any control over our destiny? Okay, free will may only be partially responsible for that. To bring this debate more down to Earth, when you lift your arm, is its movement really the consequence of your consciously willing it to move? If you've never taken a philosophy course or read the neuroscience books I have, the question sounds absurd. Of course your arm moves because you make it move. How could somebody argue against that? There are, in fact, many ways to argue against this.
First of all, if you're a strict believer in science, physics in particular, you should already be wondering how free will is possible. The world is governed by the rule of cause and effect. Y happens because X happens. Y has no choice. There is no decision taking place. How can humans exist outside of these rules? Why should we believe we are not simply extremely complex computers, constantly converting a truly overwhelming amount of sensory input into distinctive outputs like behavior and personality? This is where people will often interject by blurting out "quantum physics!"
Not that I'm qualified to speak on these matters, but, like Mars, a billiard ball, or a bullet, neurons are too large to be significantly affected by the uncertainty of quantum physics. If you believe quantum physics is responsible for the free will of mankind, you should also believe that billiard balls can and routinely do defy intuition. That's a poor example, I suppose, for the game of pool has taught us all to be a little more skeptical about geometry. If you are a strict scientist, you probably already believe that what we call our mind is just the cognitive sensation of various chain reactions of neurons, set off by sensory inputs.
Okay okay, but maybe science is just a bunch of ignorant hocus pocus spouted by unenlightened elitists. What if the mind is not merely a side-effect of brain activity. What if our minds are actually otherworldly souls, resting above and outside of this universe. Something only God can understand? Right about now, you should be asking yourself exactly what God this is. Is this the Western God? The more or less common God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? The omnipotent, omniscient, creator of the world who instilled us with free will?
As the classical argument goes, how can people have free will if God is omniscient? If we take omniscience to mean that God knows the future, then there's no two ways about it: we have no free will. If we have free will, even if God knows all of our possible actions and all of the possible actions that stem from those actions, into a limitless tree of future possibilities, we must acknowledge that there is at least one crucial piece of information God does not yet know. He does not know what path we will decide to choose. Thus, such a God is not omniscient. He's a charlatan.
Those are the two extremes. Two highly abstract, thoroughly unpersuasive examples to prove the same point, disturbing as the point may be. Another interesting stance is that of soft determinism: Yes, we are merely machines that convert inputs into outputs, cause and effect style, just like anything else in the universe. It would be a mistake to believe this happens in a spiritual vacuum, however. The way inputs arrive as our outputs is determined by our personalities, our decisions, our minds. The self is the missing link between sensations and behavior. It's true that we do not have free will, as there is only one possible outcome given the inputs available to us. Nevertheless, this outcome is determined solely on the basis of who we are. Human consciousness, not the mysterious workings of an impersonal brain, turns the gear to complete the universal system of determinism, at least where it concerns humans. So, we do have a choice? But at the same time, we only have one choice to choose: the choice we ultimately do choose. If we could rewind time and play it back again, everything would happen exactly as it had before. In any given situation, our one and only choice is distinctly ours -- so much so that it was effectively predestined. Therefore, we do not have any choices in life, just the appearances of them.
Hmmmm... how did we get back here? It's like being caught in a house of mirrors. No matter where I look, what approach I take, or where I think I'm going, I end up where I started. If I'm given more than twenty minutes to think about it, I invariably arrive at the same conclusion. There is no way free will can possibly exist. Yes, this is all quite fun. Philosophical musings to be pondered during one's downtime, with not a wit of evidence to support them. Or did I speak too soon? What does world-renowned neurologist V.S. Ramachandranhave to say?
... Now let's go back to normals and do a PET scan when you're voluntarily moving your finger using your free will. A second to three-fourths of a second prior to moving your finger, I get the EEG potential and it's called the Readiness Potential. It's as though the brain events are kicking in a second prior to your actual finger movement, even though your conscious intention of moving the finger coincides almost exactly with the wiggle of the finger. Why? Why is the mental sensation of willing the finger delayed by a second, coming a second after the brain events kick in as monitored by the EEG? What might the evolutionary rationale be?
The answer is, I think, that there is an inevitable neural delay before the signal arising in the brain cascades through the brain and the message arrives to wiggle you finger. There's going to be a delay because of neural processing - just like the satellite interviews on TV which you've all been watching. So natural selection has ensured that the subjective sensation of willing is delayed deliberately to coincide not with the onset of the brain commands but with the actual execution of the command by your finger, so that you feel you're moving it.
And this in turn is telling you something important. It's telling you that the subjective sensations that accompany brain events must have an evolutionary purpose, for if it had no purpose and merely accompanied brain events - like so many philosophers believe (this is called epiphenomenalism) - in other words the subjective sensation of willing is like a shadow that moves with you as you walk but is not causal in making you move, if that's correct then why would evolution bother delaying the signal so that it coincides with your finger movement?
So you see the amazing paradox is that on the one hand the experiment shows that free will is illusory, right? It can't be causing the brain events because the events kick in a second earlier. But on the other hand it has to have some function because if it didn't have a function, why would evolution bother delaying it? But if it does have a function, what could it be other than moving the finger? So maybe our very notion of causation requires a radical revision here as happened in quantum physics. OK, enough of free will. It's all philosophy!
If you were to ask me what my favorite year was, I would plainly say that I honestly do not know. However, if you were to ask me what my most nostalgic year was, I would say 1999, and I would do so without skipping a beat. This is very curious. I have always thought of nostalgia as a linear function of time. The older the memory is, the more it is filled to the brim with irrational nostalgic fuzz. If I started retaining memories at age ~four (a rough guess), it seems like that should have been my most nostalgic year. But 1999 is. Why? Oh, I know why. I can explain away the whole damned reminiscent supernova lodged in the back of my head with only three key strokes: V64.
1999 was a four course meal. If The Matrix was its hors d'oeuvre, then dessert was the cable modem secured by Fall, and Starsiege: Tribes was the handful of hedonism I seize from the giant taffy bowl at The Turtle Club in an ill-advised effort to recoup any losses sustained by a $32 dinner. The main course? 64 letter V's stacked on top of a regular-ass Nintendo 64, sitting in the midst of a universally jobless summer.
Or V64 Jr. to be exact. What I hadn't realized until the latter half of 1998 was that, ever since the original Nintendo Entertainment System, perhaps earlier, various outfits in Hong Kong had been producing cartridge emulators. Not software emulators like you download on a computer and drool over, then vow to beat every SNES game you could never afford as a child... for about two weeks. Hardware based cartridge emulators are a much stranger breed, and I wanted one desperately. After finding that the V64 and the Z64 exceeded the modest budget of a lowly teenager, I eventually accumulated enough money by the late Spring of 1999 to order Bung Enterprises' brand new, stripped down, product. The V64 Jr. Otherwise known as The Nexus of Fairbanks.
I was ecstatic when the thing came in the mail, partly due to the fact that I had sent a $170 money order to some back-alley Internet electronics store I had never heard of before. I might as well have planted my money in rich soil and hoped it would grow into a V64 Jr. I immediately played all of the N64 ROMs I had been stockpiling from FTP sites and the bullshit that was Hotline since I ordered the device. Maybe 80 of them, maybe 100 by this point. Each game, whether it was garbage or gold, from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to Pokemon Stadium, received exactly ten minutes of my time. I seemed utterly incapable of committing any more time to a single game, as this was more time that could be spent raiding FTP sites and Hotline servers, or, once things got really out of control, renting N64 games and ripping ROMs for myself.
It was a rapid and vicious cycle of consumption that ultimately brought me no satisfaction, and worse yet, left me disoriented as the hobby that had brought me so much joy since I was six years old seemed to have lost all of its value over the course of a month. The hobby? No, not video games. Accumulating stuff in general. Vaguely aware of the basic tenets of Buddhism, I was beginning to feel like Siddhartha Gautama on a miniature but no less profound scale. No amount of additional crap was going to fill the rest of the crap with meaning. Games were more fun when I only had a few of them. Now, the sense of fun had been replaced with an overwhelming and thoroughly unpleasant burden to enjoy what I had. The $170 V64 Jr. was simultaneously the best and worst purchase of my life, just as Hackers is paradoxically both the best and worst movie ever produced.
I remember casually mentioning this device to my friend Zach, who later became Kapuni, in the locker room after gym class, where the stale scent of adolescence filled the air with an olfactory likeness to spoiled broccoli if not all-out rust. "Yeah, Perfect Dark is pretty cool. I have a piece of plastic I jam into the cartridge slot of my N64 that allows me to play the ROM from my computer." It must have sounded just as dubious as his "All Star Grandpa" gym t-shirt. Two days later, Zach showed up at my front door with a skeptical look on his face.
I think we played Bomberman 64. Or Turok 2. Or BattleTanx. More likely, we played all three games and twenty more. I now found myself in the possession of maybe 200 games by this time, up to and including Superman 64. Money lost to piracy? I don't think so. If there is a single person out there who legitimately owned 200 N64 games back in the day, at $70 a pop, that person was either in exceptional financial circumstances, or would otherwise have been a good candidate for a face full of orbitoclast half a century earlier to cure their obsessive behavior. I had owned my Nintendo 64 for two years prior to coupling it with a V64 Jr., and had owned all of one game: Super Mario 64. Why? We all know why. The N64 was the digital equivalent of my experimental Tang milkshakes. Sluggish, texture-less, and hopelessly orange. A fool's enterprise.
Enter the weekend. The programmable doorbell rang its apathetic anachronism, Jingle Bells indeed. Zach and his cool brother Special K were at the door, ready to be marginalized by a swelling well of hideous games. We confronted the likes of Forsaken 64, Rampage World Tour, Castlevania 64, and Vigilante 8. The next weekend, Zach and KC and ThunderChunk showed up at the same door. Then Drew's brother, his cousin Gerrit, his brother's friend, and Zach's friend Skrumf (RIP). By the time there were seven or eight regulars frequenting my house, it was summer time.
My brother had just graduated from high school, and freshly branded with sharks on his shoulder, he decided to spend the next couple months hanging out with his friends in the basement of our house, playing pool and such, before shipping off to basic training. Three more regulars entered Act II: Jack, Chris, and the tall quiet guy who looked like John Romero. They came for billiards but grew captivated by the bland Bung box. In short order, WCW/nWo Revenge entered the regular rotation of games.
This also happened to be one of those rare summers when my aunt, uncle, and cousins flew in from Maryland for a month visit. What did my cousins like to do? Play video games. Then two guys from school whom I barely knew found out where I lived. Nello and Shawn would randomly show up at the door. Out of what added up to perhaps sixteen people summer suckling the V64 Jr., Nello might have been the only one employed. However, he started clocking in at his job at Westmark Hotel in the morning only to drive to my house and play N64 for nine hours before clocking out at the end of the day. This worked for exactly four days, and then there was uniform unemployment for all.
Soon after, my brother asked of my parents to let one of his school acquaintances live at our formerly tranquil house for a week. They permitted this. Chris II and his clingy girlfriend dove into the throng. Chris, incidentally, happened to be acutely skilled in the arts of Goldeneye 007 and San Francisco Rush 2. "Do you have Goldeneye or Rush 2?" he asked. "Chris, allow me to direct your eyes to the gray piece of plastic protruding from that Nintendo 64 on the floor. Its magic knows no bounds." Chris wasted no time unleashing his unique brand of carefree ass kickery, and the entire congregation of Fairbanks 12-to-20-somethings endured his wrath. It was earth-shattering. In fact, I already wrote about this.
When I blindly downloaded the Japanese version of an as yet unreleased in the states game called Super Smash Bros., the rest of summer was spoken for. I'm pretty sure all parties involved remember this summer with the fondest and strangest of memories. I remember it as sort of a modern Breakfast Club in which the library had been replaced with a V64 Jr. and detention had been replaced with unprecedented summer vegetation. People who would ordinarily never interact with one another spent weeks masquerading as Donkey Kong and Kirby, pummelling each other into the ground, athletes spouting incompatible traditions of trash talk that went sailing over nerds' heads and vice versa. In sum, there were a whole lot of people who really did not understand each other, but made an honest effort to do so.
If after reading this entry you have an irresistible urge to find and buy a V64 Jr., or buy more games of any kind, it may be to your benefit to read it again from the beginning.
February 24th, 2008 - Will $10.20 cost me $1031.52?
I've always wanted to understand the stock market. Last summer, the summer of 2007, the same summer I listened to a lot of Tech N9ne and got hit in the face with a Frisbee, I read The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing by Jason Kelly. Check out my book review, or flip through the little book review slide show I presented to the fantastically nerdy West Ridge Investor's Club. The book was quite basic, but I feel that it armed me with enough knowledge to make educated mistakes. Not random shots in the dark. I just ordered another book with a Christmas gift certificate, One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch, because apparently I am middle aged beyond my years. It's just something to pass the time.
The Neatest Little Guide told me to go to the library, which I did. I looked at some of the fastest growing stocks according to Investor's Business Daily (a newspaper with a retail subscription price of $295/year. Thank you, Noel Wien Library). I wrote down approximately 50 stock symbols, came home, entered them into a mock portfolio on Google Finance and watched and researched them for a few days. I eventually decided that NewMarket Corp (NEU) looked like a good investment. However, The Neatest Little Guide also told me to write down reasons why I like a stock before I even think about investing in it. How do I know if I like a stock? The book taught me how to know. Well, as best it could teach me the unknowable over the course of roughly 230 pages. Let's see if a $10.20 book manages to cost me $1031.52.
Reasons investing in NEU seemed like a good idea:
- The market as a whole is down, so it's a good time to invest in most stocks
- Investor's Business Daily SmartSelect Composite Rating of 99 on 02/15/2008
- Increasing volume over the past few months
- Added to the S&P SmallCap 600 Index on 02/12/2008
- It pays a dividend, which is not to be taken for granted with growth stocks
- Four consecutive years of increasing earnings (in millions of US dollars):
2004
2005
2006
2007
33.06
42.38
57.52
95.32
- Analyst estimates of even higher earnings in 2008 and 2009
- Has exceeded analyst estimates in the past
- High Return on Equity (TTM):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
25.40
17.59
20.55
21.65
- Low Price / Earnings (TTM):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
13.31
36.89
22.52
18.58
- Low Price / Sales (TTM):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
0.70
4.01
2.56
2.55
- High Current Ratio (MRQ):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
2.79
1.70
2.00
1.69
- High Quick Ratio (MRQ):
NEU
Industry
Sector
S&P 500
1.70
0.99
1.16
1.18
- Lots of insider buying by the Director of NewMarket Corp
And, not that I follow the chemical industry or anything, but this blurb on Afton Chemical Corporation, one of NewMarket Corp's two child companies, sounds promising in this day in age:
Afton Chemical develops and manufactures petroleum additives that enhance the performance of lubricating oils and fuels. From custom-formulated chemical blends to market-general additive components, Afton technology helps fuels burn cleaner, engines run smoother, and machines last longer. ... Fuel additives are chemical components and products that improve the refining process and performance of gasoline, diesel, and other fuels, resulting in lower fuel costs, improved fuel performance, and reduced fuel emissions.
Please be cautioned that this is in no way a certain success. I am a novice. I also noticed that NewMarket Corp has a relatively low Profit Margin. Does its historically increasing earnings counter this? Who knows. (Not me.)
I bought 16 shares of NEU on 02/20/2008 at a price of $64.47 per share. Grab some popcorn and join me. Let's see if this turns into a disaster. However, the stock price is free to do whatever it wants for a while. Based on what I've read, I consider the price immaterial until around April 30th, when NewMarket Corp is scheduled to report next quarter's earnings. Before then, I need to determine my criteria for selling the stock. But until then, I persevere!
February 16th, 2008 - Overplaying Super Paper Mario
The other day, as I was trudging my way through the mediocrity that is Super Paper Mario, I stumbled upon the following puzzle as the sole barrier to entrance into Flopside (as opposed to Flipside, you whacky 5D linear game):
There are eight strangely colored Super Mario style blocks. They all start out dark. When I jump up to hit one, it illuminates. But wait! There's more! It also illuminates several of the other eight blocks. So, if I jump up and hit one block, maybe three other random blocks will light up. If I jump up and hit the same block again, all of the blocks it had formally illuminated go dark again. What happens if I hit another block? The same behavior, except it will illuminate itself and another arbitrary handful of blocks along with it. Combine the illumination faculties of several blocks at once and all hell breaks loose, as blocks turn on and off seemingly randomly.
The video I attempted to make to demonstrace this turned out like typical YouTube crap. But I do have these GIFs:
The blocks start like this:
If I hit Block 1, this happens:
If I then hit Block 2, this happens:
Hitting Block 1 again does the following:
Etc. Though the real thing has more color to it.
Hours prior, while flipped into 3D mode back in Flipside (not Flopside), I happened to read a sign that said "eight blocks, one color each." How typical of these sorts of games that my clue would be nowhere near, neither spatially nor temporally, the puzzle to which it applied. This game has been reduced to a feat of memory. Why not just play one of those match-the-cards style memory games? Why indeed. Super Paper Mario actually contains one of those games in its hidden arcade room.
But let's focus. The clue says I need to illuminate all eight blocks? That's one hell of a clue right there. Had I missed that sign, I might have been stuck in this room for an eternity playing Simon with myself. I tested the waters by hitting a few blocks here and there. Toggling the eight blocks on, never off. Not intentionally, that is. There's no satisfaction in solving a puzzle unless you take the bait first. After five minutes of this, I said to myself, "You're better than this, Muffin. Solve it with your mind, not your fingers."
The most annoying part of this puzzle is that I could only see four of the eight blocks on the screen at any given time. Thus, after experimentally hitting a block, I had to run back and forth to examine the results. Over and over again. If I couldn't visualize the action with my eyes, how would I manage to visualize it in my head with even the slightest confidence? This was going to require paper and a pen.
As I fetched the pen and paper, it occurred to me that I had seen this puzzle before. I had solved sizable puzzles of the same nature back in 2002, 2006, and a little bit in between. This wasn't so much a puzzle as it was an old acquaintance from the days of yore. XOR! These blocks were just XOR operations on an 8-bit register, not unlike the 16-bit registers of EE 443 or the 32-bit registers of CS 301. Filled with these wonderfully nostalgic memories, I suddenly lost all interest in Super Paper Mario and once again felt like doing what I always want to do. Program! Forget solving this puzzle with my mind. That has now become immaterial.
When I was a young lad, before the Internet was around, I went through a brief phase of trying to enjoy crossword puzzles. The problem with crossword puzzles is that every puzzle has at least two clues relating to Robert Redford. Once those two clues are discovered, the game is kaput. If you are under the age of 40, you haven't a chance in the world.
If you don't know the crossword answers, you simply don't know the answers. If this happens frequently enough, if a big block of blank squares continues to dominate the center of the page, how are you supposed to solve the puzzle? It's not like sudoku. You can't flex your thought muscles into a solution. Fortunately, bookstores sell crossword puzzle dictionaries. Is this acceptable? If it is, would it not make more sense to simply use Google? Ravens are deemed intelligent if they use every resource available to achieve their goal. Humans should be judged by the same criteria. Having made this bold assertion, I claim that the smartest way a human can solve a crossword puzzle is to wait until the solution is published. Likewise, the smartest way to stay fed is to hang around the dumpster behind Mayflower Buffet. But when your goal is to gain a little more experience programming, maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to play video games in the first place.
I recorded the eight Flopside blocks' behavior thus:
Ostensibly, there is only one correct block arrangement out of a possible 256. Some people model oceans. Others model ballistics or the atmosphere. I'd be doing the same, but, truth be told, I'm not much of an expert on anything but video games. Let's see what a little C++ can do. However, let the record show that I am not tryingtoplayfavorites here. If my Computer Science education serves me right, this should be one hell of a fast program. But if my Computer Science education had served me right, my program probably wouldn't be using a random number generator to kidnap the proverbial typewriter monkeys and coerce them into Flopside. Who am I trying to impress? Certainly not the motherfucking monkeys.
Let's go!
$ g++ -O3 -o flopside flopside.cpp && time ./flopside
What a stupid program. Why did I even do this? Because, like I said in a previous journal entry, clock cycles are going to waste and I ain't got nothing to feed them. Hell, why settle with one retarded solution? Why not generate one retarded solution to rule them all?
Take that, Nintendo! Sitting there, all smug, probably thinking you have the one and only solution, unwilling to share clues of any worth. "Eight blocks, one color each." Twenty years, and nothing's changed. Dodongo still dislikes smoke. So, is the common-knowledge solution Block 2, Block 3, Block 4, Block 5? GameFAQs knows:
Hit each block 1 time. Flip and enter the door.
How in the hell? Was I supposed to know that with such a cryptic clue? ... Oh wait, my words got flip flopped before I managed to flip to Flopside. It wasn't "eight blocks, one color each." It was "eight blocks, each color once." Well, that was several hours well spent. At least I know a little bit more about Fortran. Thanks, Mario!
Just recently, I finished reading a book titled The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio. A synopsis can be found in my book reviews section, north of here. One of the points the author made was that human consciousness has a very narrow scope. You can think of it as a spotlight, illuminating whatever it happens to be pointed at, but surrendering all else to the whims of darkness. Consciousness comes in limited supply. Each waking moment is a fight to determine how best to distribute the consciousness you have.
Fortunately for us, not all of what we do on a day-to-day basis requires consciousness, even things that can optionally employ it. Breathing is a basic example of this. You can consciously control your breathing, but the moment your attention is shifted elsewhere, you don't stop breathing. If you did, you'd be living in some sort of demented Saw II universe. However, it just so happens humans can perform far more complex tasks without necessarily being aware of them. Sleep walking is an obvious example. Some people even cook and murder in their sleep (trust me, I watched Dateline). But more to the point, many things we do in life, in particular any task that's part of our daily "routine," involves a fuzzy tango of shifting in and out of consciousness.
How much time do you spend brainstorming or brooding while you brush your teeth, take a shower, drive to school, or work at a methodical job? And how is it that reading, programming, or solving math problems seemingly suspend troubling thoughts? It's because you've managed to unjam the spotlight and point it elsewhere. If you've ever entertained the idea of taking antidepressants, you owe it to yourself to try and find a hobby that will use and abuse your consciousness instead. Create a thought storm with your LEGO matter, get really good at Chess, or read a For Dummies book on any topic that has ever stolen your interest for the shortest of seconds. Don't just veg out and mull over your agitations. If you're still pissed off after watching a movie or playing a video game, it's time to up the intellectual ante. Dig deeper.
As I was reading The Feeling of What Happens, the more I came to terms with unconscious behavior, and the more I realized that I'm an asshole. As I attempted to recall each moment my body has ever switched to autopilot, a feat of memory that is inherently impossible, the only thoughts that came to mind were of me shifting the autonomous gears of others. Then, it quickly became apparent that I'm still quite amused by, and almost proud of, these memories. After all, it's not that I WAS an asshole, it's that I AM an asshole. And consciousness can be exploited for fun and profit!
Hidden in plain sight
One day, I was talking to my friend, whom I will call Heat Man, in UAF's Wood Center about nothing in particular. Every few minutes, our endless conversation was pleasantly interrupted by various women clothed in short spring skirts walking by, flaunting what had been hidden in hibernation for eight months of winter. Heat Man would say "damnnnnn" or "holy shit," and the conversation would dwindle for several moments before regaining its former momentum.
I asked Heat Man, "have you ever noticed how blind people are to the world when they talk about complex things?" To which he replied, "like what?" I said, "well, any number of things. Neural networks are a good example." Prompted by this, Heat Man dove into a long discussion about his artificial intelligence project. Why it didn't work, how it could have worked, the feed-forward techniques of virtual neurons and dynamically resizing and restructuring the networks. As he described all of this to me, a local celebrity of a woman wearing the shortest skirt spring had to offer began descending the stairs. I made certain to pay strict attention to Heat Man's neural networks, lest I ruin what had just now become an experiment.
He saw the scene. His eyes followed the woman, as did the eyes of every man, woman, and child in the building, but he continued to talk in depth about his project. Approximately 20 steps before the woman walked out the door, I asked Heat Man, "are you seeing what you're looking at right now?" He stopped mid-sentence, paused, his face lit up, and he said "Oh. My. God. What the fuck?"
A quick buck
After conducting the aforementioned experiment in my laboratory (Wood Center, as it were), I experienced a faint feeling of deja vu. Indeed, my discovery was nothing new. I was reminded of a random happening in my 11th grade Spanish class. I did a lot of babysitting in Spanish class. All work was done in pairs, and each week, we were assigned new partners. Except for me and one other person, whom I will call Flash Man. Flash Man was extremely disruptive, uninterested, unmotivated, and unbearable. He was the lowest common denominator in sentient form. And for some reason that defied explanation, he was my assigned partner week after week for the entire year of Spanish class. The only Spanish he learned all year was how to say "gay," as the teacher had the common decency to correct Flash Man every time he said "this class is el-gayo."
It's not that Flash Man was a bad guy, per se, but that he was essentially the very same man from all of those sexual harassment awareness videos you have been forced to watch for every job under the sun. He would constantly speak unspeakable things to any girl within a two desk radius, and they would be visibly repulsed. But, like Screetch chasing after Lark Voorhies, Flash Man was a persistent bastard in the face of all odds.
One typical horrid high school morning, I caught him playing with a rubber band. But I suppose "caught" isn't the right word to describe it. There was a rubber band on his desk when he came into class, and he had been playing with it ever since he sat down. I have no judgement against him. We all do stuff like this. But I had an idea. I had never been so certain of anything in all my life. "Hey Flash Man, I bet you can't leave that rubber band on your desk for one minute without playing with it." Shocked, he said, "How much you wanna bet?" Me, "I don't know. $1?" Him, "and all I have to do is do nothing?" Me, "and you will be $1 richer." Him, "I'm game." Me, "you'd better have $1 on you, because I'm going to win this." He put $1 on the table and so did I.
I waited for the clock to hit an even minute, said "it starts now," looked at him long enough for it to turn awkward, and then asked him if he's ever had any luck harassing all of the helpless females in our class. As if to make chitchat. He swooped up the rubber band within 25 seconds and I busted him. But he took his $1 back anyway, because high school is just as unfair as I remember it.
Littering by proxy
Apparently it's no secret that software development is one of those rare products of academia that require uncompromised concentration. It was then, and it is now, so when I finished the last few drops of my Monster Energy Drink in Software Engineering class one day, and, much to my dismay, discovered that the room's trash can had disappeared since two days prior, I decided to take the road less traveled. Armed with the results of my experiment with Heat Man, I looked around the room for whomever was most absorbed in a programming discussion. As it turns out, the best candidate in this regard was also somebody I happened to know, whom I will call Junk Man.
I walked over to Junk Man and the classmate he was talking to. He looked at me without skipping a beat in his conversation, eyes bouncing back and forth between me and the other fellow as if by reflex. This was the green light I had been hoping for. I confidently handed my empty can to Junk Man. Still talking, still paying me no mind, his hand reached out and grabbed the can without looking at it. He continued to hold it, continued to talk about his project, continued to glance at me occasionally. Finally, I said with a smile, "have a good night, guys!" They returned the blessing, and I casually walked out of the room to trashless freedom.
The MPAA are assholes, too
You're probably not aware of this, and if you're not, I am now about to ruin all theater movies for you for the rest of time, but the MPAA has been doing the same thing I did to Junk Man. They've been doing it for several years. They've been handing you crap while your mind is elsewhere. They've been throwing dots at you. Red dots, all over the screen, like a one-sided game of Connect Four. Fortunately, you've made it up until now without noticing them. But now, and forever more, you will.
Several times throughout each film, an arbitrary configuration of red dots cover a single frame. They speckle the action for a split-second, and then they're gone, but it's not that you didn't see them, it's that you didn't care enough to acknowledge them and promptly forgot about them. Kindly direct your eyes to my red dot mockup. If you truly didn't see them, then how do you explain the fact that you are now going to see them all the time?
They exist as part of an anti-piracy effort. Too often, films appear on the Internet before they hit DVD. Before films hit DVD, their distribution is highly controlled, like the potent drug that they are. Each copy of the film comes with its own fingerprint, it's own configuration of red dots. The fingerprints, in turn, are tied to specific theaters. When a movie leaks from a theater onto the Internet, the movie studios can download it, find the red dots, and know exactly which movie theater is to blame. This is all very theoretical, neglecting the fact that computer criminals are generally very smart people, able and willing to write software that scans video files for arrangements of red dots and masking them.
All of this begs the question, if you can see red dots scattered all over movies and promptly ignore them, why do we need high definition movies? The minute you are absorbed in the movie, you won't even notice the quality. The minute you notice the quality, you are no longer absorbed in the movie. Hence, the best possible scenario is for you to forget you are watching a high definition movie. You don't need high definition movies just to forget about them.
The MPAA is having their cake and eating it, too. And some of you are throwing them a cake eating party. So be it. I'll be over here in the corner eating pie.
The original SimCity was a breath of fresh air for the PC gaming industry in the late 1980s. It was a thinking man's game, tying together so many variables that the complexity and possibilities were as vast as the length of the game - endless. Sort of like a game of chess with a computer opponent that makes up rules as it goes along. Till this day, I doubt anyone truly understands exactly what happens behind the SimCity curtains. It has a mind of its own. But that never bothered a soul since the SimCity objectives were painfully subjective. "Do whatever you need to do to have fun!" the game seemed to say. Well, call me boring if you must, but I just wanted to have a successful city. How does one measure the success of a city? Population? In a crabwise way, I suppose. But what's the purpose of a population? Taxes? Yes. Money.
I was seven the first time I played SimCity. But even a seven year old understands money. Especially a seven year old who was raised in a bowling alley with his brother, where, each time our parents started a new game of bowling, my brother and I were each given $1.00 to entertain us in the arcade for the next ~hour. This weekly lesson, which lasted for the next six years of my life, had two takeaway points. Conserve your money and get really good at pinball. Only pinball machines give away free games, especially when you're good at them.
There is no pinball in SimCity. SimCity is not a place to raise a kid. However, I figured there were only two sure ways to make a game of SimCity end, more or less, and that was to either run out of money or be shat on by God, like New Orleans. With these thoughts in mind, I disabled natural disasters and built a small city that started to generate some revenue. And then I watched it. I watched it make revenue. I had a SimEpiphany. If I just stop messing with my city, it will keep making revenue. The moment I designate one more square on the grid, whether it be for residential, commercial, or industrial enterprises, my city will topple like a house of cards. Like New Orleans. I did it. I solved the mystery. I beat the game in my own little way.
How do we come to feel so powerful in a successful game of Monopoly? The game is yours while the game lasts; all else fades into the periphery. Fake money becomes more real than real money for several short-lived hours, and the second you land your deathblow, the minute the game is won, you ask, as we have all asked, why did it need to end? Where is the real Go and how can I pass it? How can I feel powerful again? This is precisely what I accomplished with my self-sustaining SimCity city. A perpetual winning machine.
So, as you can imagine, I let my city run all night, every night, only at night, like Dark City. It never stopped making money. It was linear growth but it was infinite. Its perfection did not stop there, however. Now that I had a self-sustaining city, I was free to dabble in other ventures: school, soccer, playing Nintendo with my friends. If all went as planned, I would never need to play SimCity again. If all went as planned, I would forget the city even existed.
And so it was. A tiny city, forgotten. That is, until I discovered Panda Garden. Panda Garden is a local Chinese restaurant. It is my 17-year-old virtual city in the flesh. I planted a SimCity in first grade and it blossomed into a Chinese take-out restaurant, though I have only unanswered questions when I try to explain the mechanics of how it happened.
Panda Garden is this tiny little place I discovered four years ago thanks to my friend ThunderChunk. It's the best Asian place in town, and it turns out that's saying lot in the small town of Fairbanks, Alaska. For some reason, which has never been satisfactorily explained to me, the number of Asian restaurants in the town of Fairbanks, the 82,000-populace blip on the Alaska radar, surrounded by cold, dark, and nothingness, is grossly disproportionate to the number of other types of restaurants. We have a lot of Thai restaurants... Lemon Grass, Pad Thai, Siam Square, Thai House, Bahn Thai, Siam Dishes, Sweet Basil, Thai Cuisine. A cursory tour of Fairbanks might lead one to believe our natives are Thai. But that's poppycock. It's just that every Thai person who lives in Fairbanks has a restaurant. We have Korean and Chinese restaurants, too. No need to remember all of these names, though. All you need to remember is Panda Garden. Everyone else does.
The inside of Panda Garden is probably about 500 square feet. There is only one table and two foldable metal chairs. This area doubles as a waiting room for the customers and a break room for the staff. On the table is always the local newspaper and the newest issue of Chinese Restaurant Monthly, free for anyone to read if they read Chinese. Behind the counter are the same five people who are behind the counter 14 hours a day. They remember you. They know who you are, even before you enter the restaurant for the first time, they know your motivations.
Panda Garden is my SimCity. It is a perpetual winning machine. I have never been there once without three more customers standing in the cramped place with me. At any hour of any day, there are people both picking up and ordering food. It is not uncommon to see eight or nine orders lined up on their counter ready to be picked up. When you call their phone number, sometimes you get a busy signal, and sometimes you need to let the phone ring about 25 times before somebody picks up, if they pick up at all... and they don't apologize, because they know they are doing you a favor by existing in the first place. On Sunday nights, their two phone lines never stop ringing, but they simultaneously take orders from phone calls, from people standing in front of them, yell Chinese things to their people in the kitchen, watch movies like Friday and Lethal Weapon 2 on their small TV, and hunt you down to give you your order.
If you order in person, they never ask for a name. They know. They are aware. Even as they watch The Simpsons on their 13" Panasonic television, they are downloading your thought grid. They know where you came from, they know who you are, and they know where you will be. They will run across the parking lot to give you your food, they will deliver your food to your house even if you didn't ask them to do so, and didn't tell them your address (I believe this happened to ThunderChunk once). It wouldn't surprise me if they tracked you down at Blockbuster across the street, or if they found you in the afterlife.
The food itself is amazing, and for $8.50 you get more than you can, or should, eat in two meals. Better than all-you-can-eat, at a fraction of the cost. The meat is so tender that I have, on more occasions than I care to admit, believed myself to be eating real panda. It's Panda Garden. A five-person city that never expands, never changes, never advertises, and has been rolling in cash since 1999. I like their food and I like what they stand for: covert domination. Go get some Sesame Chicken, Beef & Broccoli, or Mongolian Beef right now! 452-3355!
Bit rot, or bit decay, is a colloquial computing term used to facetiously describe the spontaneous degradation of a software program over time. The term implies that software can literally wear out or rust like a physical tool.
One of the things that truly upsets me in this modern age of ours is the concept of bit rot. The idea, as defined in the above quotation, that computers inherently become slower as time progresses. More upsetting is the fact that, as each year replaces the last, perfectly intelligent people become more willing to accept bit rot as a genuine phenomenon, not the joke that it was meant to be. Whole computers are discarded for the simple fact that they are mildy unresponsive or slow. I had no idea the extent to which this was true until, two months ago, I lifted a 2.1 GHz Athlon XP desktop from the upper reaches of a dumpster. Its crime? Forensic anaylsis proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was sluggish, and it had a corrupt DLL file. Bit rot through and through.
Computer consumers are so quick to out-do each other with their purchases, either for fear of living in the past, sinking aboard their doomed vessel, or because computers are the new cars: symbols of status and power, perhaps even knowledge and intelligence. Now with bit rot on the table, society at large has an air-tight alibi to upgrade. Somebody once told me that they wanted to play as much Battlefield 2 on their new machine as they could before the computer became obsolete. This is bottled water reasoning. Where's the logic?
If you like to keep up with the newest Games for Windows®, if you render a lot of 3D models, or if you frequently edit multimedia files, maybe it's worth having a powerful new computer. For the rest of us, probably not. I got a new "box" as a graduation gift last year after living with my previous one for six years. Anticlimactically, now that I've gotten the Counter-Strike: Source out of my blood and have mostly returned to reading books and programming, I've realized that I could have lived with my previous machine for another six years with relatively little trouble. Of course, the kicker is that even my new computer, a 2.2 GHz Athlon X2, is starting to show its wrinkles in the eyes of some. Is it time to activate the ejection seat before I fall from the stratosphere?
I don't think so. Sometimes it's comforting to believe, however unpopular the thought may be, that life thrives between the cardiac pulses of consumption. Is it any secret that you start giving the moment you stop taking? I'm not talking about charity here, I'm thinking more along the lines of creativity. What do you do when you get bored? Buy? Enjoy what you already have? Or perhaps, finding everything you already possess exceedingly and inexcusably inadequate, divorce yourself from materialism and tap into the power of your own creative mind? Creativity is healthy, like vegetables for the intellect, completely renewable, and more fulfilling than ever before.
But, back on topic, in a way it downright bothers me how powerful computers are these days. Wasted potential is irksome. The only good battery is a drained battery. This should ring with the truth: why else would every family I know hang on to eighteen dead AA batteries distributed equally throughout their house in lieu of a single live battery? My point is, besides games, what do we fundamentally do differently on our 21st century personal computers that we couldn't do on our Apple IIs? Okay, fair enough, we do everything differently, except for word processing and spreadsheets. But word processing is the pivotal step on the proverbial slippery slope, sharply angled into the murky abyss of bloatware. Is there any excuse for this:
How does 32 bytes of text come to be 29,696 bytes? How did Microsoft Word files come to be the de facto standard for text attachments? How on Earth is a 28,941 byte screenshot of a 32 byte document smaller than the 32 byte document itself? Why did we ditch Apple IIs again?
For adware, of course. I'm vaguely aware of several schemes concocted out of the 20th century to stimulate employment by artificially creating jobs, namely barring drivers from pumping their own gas in Oregon. But this is the future, the year 2000 2007. The most menial tasks have been overtaken by computers, wresting rote jobs from the uneducated. Computers have gone so far to replace humans, to act like humans, that they are artifically creating menial work by themselves, to be outsourced to themselves, by way of humans. Just what am I talking about here? Adware, spyway, malware, immortalware...
Windows computers are moving targets on a battlefield. They seemingly infect themselves, but at the same time they are the only ones that can cure themselves, once they are suitably empowered with Ad-Aware, Spybot, Ewido, Pocket Killbox, HijackThis, Winpooch, CWShredder, ToCatchAPredator, and The Avenger. They just wait for humans to click the buttons. So, if only we could figure out a way for our computers to push their own buttons, the local computer repair shops wouldn't be making $80/hour, and our obscenely fast desktop supercomputers could burn their surplus CPU cycles masturbating in the matrix while we sit back both proud and perplexed, defenseless, watching 700 watts of power send the machine melting through the floor, all the while asking ourselves what happened to the future we were promised. Where are our hovercars?
By now, I think we can all agree that MySpace has gotten out of hand. I command every qualification to make such a statement, taking into consideration I am a card-carrying MySpace member myself. MySpace is a dirty little secret. Everybody does it but nobody talks about it. Not loudly, rather. It's the first thing we do in the morning, and the last thing we do at night. MySpace is the new Crest, if only our teeth were glowing white pearls of social ineptitude and online surveys. I can talk down on you MySpace folk all I want. For I am one of you, one with you, a pea from Tom's hapless pod, self-loathing and addicted.
Regardless of whether it's a fault of MySpace itself, the problems with MySpace begin and end with spam. Spam comments, spam bulletins, spam messages, spam friend requests, all in the face of an unnerving paradox: MySpace itself is spam. How does one go about spamming a multimillion-user spam vat? That's like mixing Tang in Mountain Dew. It's a travesty. And it's on the rise. I remember when I used to be excited to get a new message or friend request. An opportunity to meet somebody new, or an old high school friend just looking to catch up. These days, I click on "New Friend Requests!" and get a face full of this bullshit:
Which one is real? That's right. But there was never any doubt in my mind that Sloth wanted to be my friend. Truth be told, Sloth, I'd rather be your friend than that of the others, spam bots or not. One way or another, they're sure to be about 8% silicon.
Of course, the first few "hot girl" friend requests fooled us all. We clicked on them out of curiosity, saw that they lived 2,000 miles away, or worse yet, lived in unspecified nowhereness, then grazed their photo albums with complete disregard to the shenanigans at play, and ultimately decided that the eye candy wasn't even worth the effort. But apparently there is a different breed of human being living in our midst. Men capable of absorbing the telltale nonsense of a spam bot without a hint of suspicion. --
The notion of an intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a source of endless controversy and heated debate among psychologists. How can the overarching, abstract concept of intelligence pertaining to something as complex as a human being be summed up by a single number? What are we supposed to do with these numbers? Certainly not this. What about the wholesale neglect toward creativity? The best problem solvers are not necessarily the best authors, artists, or musicians. IQ is flawed. The only reputable metric to determine if a person is dumber than a box of rocks is his or her inherent propensity to post comments on a computer program's MySpace page, asking it to "holla back" in what, at best, would be a series of "beeps" with a high likelihood of counterpart "boops."
Let us know how that goes, shady Jd. We believe in you.
So, on to the 3,500 people on MySpace who are not spam bots. I don't care if you like to party, travel, shop, sky dive, bungee jump, or wrestle grizzly bears to the ground. If this is "living life to its fullest," rest assured, everyone else seems to be doing the same. But it's downright astounding that you're able to post six bulletins a day, stating, in no uncertain terms, that you're bored, between sailing the open seas and flying the friendly skies.
Hey, maybe your hero is Jesus, "JC", God, or plain old Christ. But you're kidding yourself if you think your favorite book is the Holy Bible. If I'm not being persuasive enough, please, by all means, read an excerpt from your delightful book while I argue my case...
15And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. 16And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. 17And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch. 18And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech. 19And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. 20And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. 21And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. 22And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah. 23And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. 24If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold. 25And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew. 26And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.
Pure ASCII inspiration right there. Already, my life has changed for the better.
And the music. For the love of Zillah, Adah, and Jubal, don't make your music play upon page load unless you know, without a doubt, that your visitors want to hear it. That's right. Your music sucks, but, not to be outdone, and thanks to the social complexities demonstrated by MySpace, I'm pretty sure my music sucks too. The universe of music is full of people like you and me, rocking out and pointing their accusatory fingers at one another while traversing their respective parabolic suck trajectories. Ask Einstein. He knows:
I stand at the window of a railway carriage which is travelling uniformly, and drop a [tune] on the embankment, without throwing it. Then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I see the [tune] descend in a [rock] line. A pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the [tune] falls to earth in a parabolic [suck] curve. I now ask: Do the "positions" traversed by the [tune] lie "in reality" on a [rock] line or on a [suck] parabola? Moreover, what is meant here by motion "in space"? ... In the first place we entirely shun the vague word "space," of which, we must honestly acknowledge, we cannot form the slightest conception, and we replace it by "motion relative to a practically rigid body of reference." ... If instead of "body of reference" we insert "system of co-ordinates," which is a useful idea for mathematical description, we are in a position to say: The [tune] traverses a [rock] line relative to a system of co-ordinates rigidly attached to the carriage, but relative to a system of co-ordinates rigidly attached to the ground (embankment) it describes a [suck] parabola. With the aid of this example it is clearly seen that there is no such thing as an independently existing trajectory, but only [that your favorite music sucks to everyone in the universe except for you].
The full text can be found here. Go smart yourself.
January 28th, 2007 - In the Enchanted Land of Ohio
Whenever you leave the state, everybody takes interest, regardless of how uninteresting the destination. This is evidenced by my recent trip to, not Jamaica, not Paris, not Australia, Germany, Las Vegas, or Haiti itself, but to Ohio. I have nothing against Ohio, because, to tell you the truth, I forgot Ohio even existed until I found out a month ago I would be flying there for work. I won't tell you what happened there because nothing happened. Nothing you'd want to read about, anyway. Just a week of RSA SecurID server configuration and management training at another supercomputing center on an air force base. Work as work goes. But I would be an abject failure if I didn't have, at the very least, a few observations to share with you fine folks.
Observation #1: Ohioan winters are indistinguishable from Alaskan springs.
This is the first time I've ever visited another state during the winter season. Prior to this trip to Ohio, I had been to 10+ other states during summer, but never winter. Who would honestly want to leave Alaska during the winter's creamy center? When, after 25 minutes of your car heater on full blast, you can still see your breath by the time you arrive at work, and your knuckles crack and bleed all over themselves because all of the air's would-be moisture is doing its best as tiny ice crystals to block the elusive sun as well as the taillights of the car in front of you. Oh, and to make every street light in town shoot up a questionable vertical beam of light, not so different from the tip of the Luxor casino in Las Vegas. We call them "light pillars", or so I've heard. (#1, #2). We usually don't talk about them, just so we can continue pretending we live on Earth.
Not to say Ohio was particularly warm. Apparently we (my co-workers and I) arrived with Ohio's first snowfall. Given the fact that we had to show off our blatantly Alaskan IDs to air force personnel four times daily, you can sleep well at night knowing that every person with whom we came in contact made the Alaska/snow association and accused the three of us of seasonal tomfoolery. "You guys brought this weather with you, huh?" But between the glaring sun, the feel-good moisture in the air, and the ice and slush all over the place, Ohio most certainly had a case of spring on their hands.
Observation #2: Ohio is distinctly proud of the Wright Brothers.
Not to say they shouldn't be. The Wright Brothers were geniuses and interesting people all at once, so far as history suggests. Maybe it has something to do with the nearby air force base, but this area of Ohio, known by its street name of "Dayton", is all up in the clouds with airplanes on its mind. Elaboration to follow in the next two paragraphs...
Alaska is known for a handful of things. The arctic, gold, the pipeline, the aurora borealis, wildlife, mountains, nature in general. Alaska doesn't brag about being the biggest state, per se, because, following from this very same virtue, Alaska is more proud of emasculating Texas in 1959. As a result, our local shops run the gamut from Aurora Motors to Arctic Bowl to Mt. McKinley Bank, Lynx Pizza, El Mariachi, Gold Rush Fine Jewelry, The Great Alaskan Bush Company, Smallball Texas Sports, and the Polar Roller (rest in peace, my favorite elementary school field-trip spot). Hell, there's even a town south of Fairbanks named "North Pole".
In contrast, Ohio is known for only one thing: The Wright Brothers, specifically what the Wright Brothers did for a flat place with no purpose. For those of you not in the know, let me shed some light on what you would see if you drove down the Wright Brothers Parkway: Wright Rental Cars, Pizza Done Wright, The Wright Inn, Skyhigh Chili, Wright Automotive, Plane Good, B-2 Tattoo, Orville Oral Dentistry, Wrighter's Block, G-force Lingerie, The Propeller Pantry, Wilbur's Fine Wines & Fuselage. You'd think the Wright Brothers would be just as famous, if not more so, for posthumously ruling the town of Dayton with an iron fist, and without any political motives whatsoever. As an aside, even in my most abstract mode of thought, I've never quite envisioned Orville and Wilbur Wright as mere circles of ambition, but there they were on the side of some flashy joint called The Cockpit, glowing, united in brotherly love, pointing skyward towards their dreams with the boldest of arrows.
Observation #3: People in Ohio do not observe the maximum-spacing-at-urinals rule.
And that's just plane [sic] uncomfortable.
Observation #4: If you're going to be stuck on an airport runway in a tinkertoy jet for an hour and a half waiting for takeoff, make certain you surround yourself with angry people.
Or maybe you can be angry, too. I don't care. I never have the opportunity to get angry in these situations because I'm too busy being entertained by the furious people around me. Bitch and moan all you want. You can't fly from Chicago to Dayton on a wave of irrationality. Furthermore, much to the dismay of first-class flyers, hot air stopped being a practical means of transportation in the 19th century. We fly the Wright way today.
Observation #5: Even if you're a pacifist and haven't the slightest interest in the United States Air Force, a room full of thermonuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles can twist your mind and render you mad with power.
I walked into the National U.S. Air Force Museum without any intentions of spending over an hour there. Seven hours later, I was the last of my party to leave. Not that I learned anything. Reading is for learning. I just looked at all the big metal things.
The museum is made of three enormous hangers connected together. It progresses from the early days of gliders, hot air balloons, zeppelins and wooden planes through WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and finally the Cold War, including something on the order of 100 aircraft on display along the way. It got out of hand quickly, with stealth bombers hiding behind huge-ass cargo planes. Then, having counted the hangers from outside, knowing that I had exhausted the exhibits, I walked through some tiny tunnel and realized I forgot about this room:
Top Secret USAF Museum Missile Silo
A room that, from the inside, looked like it was capable of destroying the planet itself. As I looked up at those 90-foot nuclear missiles, a little voice in the back of my head said, "Maybe this isn't what your idols, the Wright Brothers, had in mind..."
Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
Also, there was a shuttle bus that took us on base to see the "Presidential and Research & Development Galleries". Two more large rooms full of jets and airplanes. The Presidential Gallery was interesting enough, but more for those people who think U.S. presidents are inherently more interesting than the rest of us unassuming folk. The R&D gallery? Awesome. A room full of experimental aircraft. Machines that nearly fell from the sky before being scrapped. There was also a 1/4 scale model of a strange, ultra-modern triangular aircraft named the LoFLYTE Mach 5 Waverider, so difficult to control that humans, as yet, are incapable of flying it. It looked like the protagonist from the Colecovision game Omega Race, and was flown by neural networks during its test runs because it finds the smell of human flesh offensive. Coooool.
LoFLYTE Mach 5 Waverider
LoFLYTE Mach 5 Waverider fighting terrorism, circa 2081
Observation #6: Not even a Nintendo DS, an Oliver Sacks book, an MP3 player loaded with aggressive music, and 40 fluid ounces of Starbucks can make an eight-hour layover in Chicago after being awake for 22 hours a pleasant experience.
What more do you want out of me? It sucked. They kept pushing the departure time back by an hour from each hour to the next, so sleeping didn't seem like a valid option. If any one of you happened to see a poofy-haired zombie loafing around Gate G14 like he lost something he might never get back, that was me.
January 1st, 2007 - Why Roulette Tables Have Limits
To set the scene, I was playing one of my new Christmas gifts, Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Nintendo GameCube (backwards compatible on the Nintendo Wii, you see). Mega Man III specifically. Amidst laying the smack down on Snake Man, Shadow Man, Spark Man, Needle Man, Hard Man, Gemini Man, and Top Man, I had the following thought. If you were playing roulette, and you bet $1 on red, and if you lost, you doubled your bet to $2 on red, then $4, $8, $16, etc. until you won, wouldn't it seem like you're guaranteed to come out ahead? Then, the moment you won, you went back to $1 again and started the process all over. Couldn't you do this forever, and make money forever? Call me naive if you must, I already know there should be no surefire ways to win casino games, but I still couldn't figure out how this strategy would fail, assuming you had an insane amount of money to work with.
So, I eased my curiosity the only way I knew how. I turned my computer into a casino. Here is a roulette table:
If you are unfamiliar with roulette, notice the 38 possible numbers to bet on. 1 through 36, 0, and 00. If you bet on the red numbers, your chances of winning to losing for that round are 18:20. Your likelihood of winning is 47.4%, which is why betting the same amount of money on red for every round is a sure way to lose money. But even if the odds aren't 50/50, it seems like 47.4% is good enough to make certain you don't lose too many rounds in a row, which, using the aforementioned technique, seems to be all you'd be gambling against. But how much money would you need to keep going? Once you don't have enough money to continue your pattern, you've shot yourself in the foot.
After I conducted the experiment I am about to describe, I looked roulette up on Wikipedia and found mention of the martingale betting system, which, it turns out, is exactly what Mega Man III instilled into my consciousness. Here's the rundown:
Originally, martingale referred to a class of betting strategies popular in 18th century France. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins his stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double his bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses plus win a profit equal to the original stake. Since a gambler with infinite wealth will with probability 1 eventually flip heads, the martingale betting strategy was seen as a sure thing by those who practiced it. Unfortunately, none of these practitioners in fact possessed infinite wealth, and the exponential growth of the bets would eventually bankrupt those foolish enough to use the martingale.
Very interesting. I feel like an 18th century fool. But now my question is as such: Using the martingale technique, wherein bets are doubled after every loss and reset back to $1 after every win, and given a finite number of roulette rounds, how much money would you need to have in your pocket to make your overall odds of walking away profitable more than 50%? If we can figure this out, then we're already doing better than betting a constant value on red over and over, which, as stated before, would only put you ahead 47.4% of the time. Can we make better the odds of roulette if we play it as a sort of meta-roulette?
Here are the variables for my program:
- Number of roulette rounds to play.
- Amount of starting money, before walking to the table.
The program does exactly what I described above. It bets $1, keeps doubling the bet every time it loses, resets the bet back to $1 after a win, and keeps on going. There are three ways it can stop:
- It reaches the maximum number of rounds as specified.
- It reaches a point where it does not have enough money to double the bet when needed.
- It loses all of its money.
Once the program stops, it checks to see if its ending money is more than its starting money. If the ending money is greater than the starting money, this is a win. If the ending money is less than or equal to the starting money, this is considered a loss.
Here are some example runs:
100 ROUNDS / 100 DOLLARS
WIN - SUMMARY
--------------
Started With: 100
Ended With: 147
Maximum Rounds: 100
Completed Rounds: 100
Wins/Losses: 48/52
Win Ratio: 0.48
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 5
Highest Bet: 32
LOSS - SUMMARY
--------------
Not enough money to continue this pattern.
Started With: 100
Ended With: 37
Maximum Rounds: 100
Completed Rounds: 6
Wins/Losses: 0/6
Win Ratio: 0
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 6
Highest Bet: 32
1,000 ROUNDS / 1,000 DOLLARS
LOSS - SUMMARY
--------------
Not enough money to continue this pattern.
Started With: 1000
Ended With: 82
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 247
Wins/Losses: 105/142
Win Ratio: 0.425101
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 10
Highest Bet: 512
LOSS - SUMMARY
--------------
Not enough money to continue this pattern.
Started With: 1000
Ended With: 496
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 33
Wins/Losses: 7/26
Win Ratio: 0.212121
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 9
Highest Bet: 256
1,000 ROUNDS / 1,000,000 DOLLARS
WIN - SUMMARY
--------------
Started With: 1000000
Ended With: 1000455
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 1000
Wins/Losses: 458/542
Win Ratio: 0.458
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 8
Highest Bet: 256
WIN - SUMMARY
--------------
Started With: 1000000
Ended With: 1000488
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 1000
Wins/Losses: 491/509
Win Ratio: 0.491
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 8
Highest Bet: 256
WIN - SUMMARY
--------------
Started With: 1000000
Ended With: 1000386
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 1000
Wins/Losses: 449/551
Win Ratio: 0.449
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 9
Highest Bet: 512
WIN - SUMMARY
--------------
Started With: 1000000
Ended With: 1000488
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 1000
Wins/Losses: 489/511
Win Ratio: 0.489
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 9
Highest Bet: 512
WIN - SUMMARY
--------------
Started With: 1000000
Ended With: 1000471
Maximum Rounds: 1000
Completed Rounds: 1000
Wins/Losses: 471/529
Win Ratio: 0.471
Maximum Consecutive Losses: 7
Highest Bet: 128
Clearly, given a finite number of rounds, there seems to be a finite number of starting money with which you are more or less "safe" against astronomical odds.
Here is my main question at this point. Can we develop some sort of equation relating the maximum number of rounds to the amount of starting money that can virtually guarantee a 90% chance of walking away from the table profitable? In other words, if we decided to play 10,000 rounds (however unrealistic that might be), how much starting money would we need to have a 90+% chance of walking away profitable? Notice I switched from saying "you" to "we". Because, having read this far, you have decided to join me in my quest! Plus I've always hated using the word "one". One must never sound scholarly at all times.
So here's what I did. I made a program to invoke the other program, because I am more or less lazy. I will call this one the "outer-program" as opposed to the "inner program". The outer program has a fixed number of roulette rounds per martingale scenario: 10,000. The outer program starts with $5,000 and invokes the inner program 1,000 times, playing 10,000 roulette rounds each time, using $5,000 for the starting money each time. It counts the wins (remember, a win is defined as ending with more money than it started with) and divides the won scenarios by the 1,000 total scenarios to get a percentage: the percentage of likelihood of being profitable. The outer program then increments the starting money by $5,000, playing through another 1,000 scenarios of 10,000 roulette rounds each, starting each scenario with $10,000. It continues to increment the starting money by $5,000 up until $250,000. Since I'm almost 100% sure my explanations are getting quite fuzzy at this point, I think you need a graph. There seems to be a long-standing tradition of making any graph supplied through the web ugly as ass, and this website is no exception. Behold!
According to a logarithmic regression, the likelihood of being profitable is 90% for 10,000 rounds of martingale roulette if one starts with $153,725. Let's do it again, still in increments of $5,000, but playing only 5,000 rounds for each martingale scenario. Booyah!
According to a logarithmic regression, the likelihood of being profitable is 90% for 5,000 rounds of martingale roulette if one starts with $101,066. And finally, let's do it again, playing 15,000 rounds for each martingale scenario. It didn't reach 90% by $250,000, so I ran it again up to $500,000.
According to a logarithmic regression, the likelihood of being profitable is 90% for 15,000 rounds of martingale roulette if one starts with $267,625. And just in case you wondered how long it takes a single core of an Athlon X2 4200+ to play 1,000,000,000 rounds of my roulette simulation, it's 61 minutes and 51 seconds.
To summarize, if you wanted a 90% chance of walking out of a casino with more money than you walked in with, using the martingale betting system for roulette, having already decided how many rounds you were going to play, you'd better have:
Rounds
Starting $
5,000
$101,066
10,000
$153,725
15,000
$267,625
Using an exponential regression to model these data:
y = 59423.34627e9.947833349*10-5x
Where,
x = number of roulette rounds
y = how much money you'd better have to cover 90% of your ass
Conclusion: Table limits do not exist merely to protect you from yourself.
I'm gonna go open up a can of whoop-ass on Magnet Man.
As you all know, I've gotten lazy. But somehow, some way, some things seem to write themselves on various Internet message boards using my body as their parasitic vessel to communicate with the immanent world. I can't take credit. The ancient Greeks attributed artistic expression to inspiration by their gods. I pick Poseidon. The following entry is a lazy-as-can-be copy-and-paste job focused on the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console because, as you also know, I like to write about old video games. My previous website on Geocities started as a copy-and-paste hub for my message board activities, so I'm returning to my roots :D
The Legend of Zelda (NES) Impressions (I use the term loosely)
Editor's Note: This was posted on the IGN Nintendo Wii board following the release of The Legend of Zelda for the NES on the Wii Virtual Console.
WHAT IS THIS?!
I don't know. I had the urge to write and I felt that, unless someone took initiative, Virtual Console games wouldn't get the attention they deserve. What follows is 50% nostalgia, 25% rambling, and 25% related to The Legend of Zelda. Like I said, I felt like writing. And I've had coffee. Arbitrary screenshots added because screenshots are cool! This may contain spoilers, if anyone cares!
HISTORY
I have already played The Legend of Zelda quite a bit. I saw this game in the Wii Shop and promised I'd punch myself in the trachea if I bought a game I already owned twice over (NES, GBA). Wanting to get an early taste for the Wii Shop, however, and likewise wanting to see how NES games played with the Wiimote, and most importantly, not seeing any other $5 game I gave a damn about, I went ahead and took the plunge. My cherry cough drops have now been depleted and my neck is the color of bruise. It felt awkward holding the Wiimote like a NES controller at first because it is so much rounder, but after some time with it, I feel that it is comfortable enough to get the job done. It's not like the NES controller was terribly comfortable to begin with.
I grew up on The Legend of Zelda. It was probably the fourth NES game I ever played, and certainly the most memorable (sorry, Super Mario Bros.). In my youngster brain, it was spooky and mysterious, with atmosphere that made me want to stop playing while I kept playing, frightened of what uncertainties might be hiding behind the next door. It also made me want to eat candy, because, at that age, you know, everything made me want to eat candy.
THE THREE LAWS OF THE NES
In my opinion, The Legend of Zelda represents an early prototype of what I have come to call "The Three Laws of the NES", not unlike the laws of Asimov's robots. They are as follows:
1. Nothing in a NES game has to make any sense. At all.
2. Nothing in a NES game needs to be fair. At all.
3. In accordance with NES Law 1 and NES Law 2, and indeed most fundamental to the NES's essence, a NES game will do everything in its power to keep you from beating it.
That's right, readers born later than ~1991 who plopped out of the womb with an SNES controller in hand, NES was an era of toil and torment.
I REPEAT, NOTHING IN A NES GAME HAS TO MAKE ANY SENSE. AT ALL.
Where should I start? Triceratopses named Dodongo? A sombrero named Digdogger stripped of his facade by a dungeon whistle? Seventeen identical old men living in dark rooms without doors or between pyres underneath trees who refer to one another as "the old man", or, similarly, four piles of decomposing washcloths who look vaguely like old women when the Hyrulian sun hits their twisted faces just right, and will only sell you potion when you shade their shame with a scroll the size of shenanigans?
Spinning things, jumpy things, boulders falling at 8fps onto a bunch of rupee-rich crabs above a blue centaur who looks like he's going 80mph while standing in complete stillness beside a pond, saying to himself, "HOLY SHIT, I HAVE HORSE PARTS!", and nebulous wizards who assault you with multicolored echoes. This game has no sense to give, and if it did, it would probably be hidden behind a waterfall on a distant planet beneath a boulder sold by "the old man" for 190 rupees, without explanation, and with all appearances of being something you couldn't sell on eBay for more than $2.49.
Never mind the fact that the only way to save yourself is to run face first into woodland creatures, mountain beasts, and flying projectiles until all 11 of your hearts go into cardiac arrest. In Hyrule, only the losers will live to win another day.
TO REITERATE, NOTHING IN A NES GAME NEEDS TO BE FAIR. AT ALL.
For example, hiding crucial elements of the game (e.g., several of the nine dungeons) in places where only the most evasive of secrets should be, and leaving it up to "the old man" in his infinite wisdom, senility and fragmented identity to guide us behind his various underworld bomb-lodgings. No thank you. In the latter half of the 1980s, my comrades and I had our own little ace up our sleeves...
THE ALASKA WIDE WEB
I live stranded in Alaska. Before the World Wide Web, back when secret codes were still secrets, everybody knew everybody else. We were united by the unruly viciousness of the Nintendo Entertainment System. You couldn't not have a NES back then. Everyone knew, among other things, that if the screen blinked blue, you needed to blow into the cartridge. It was a sort of pseudoscience, but regardless of whether blowing into the cartridge helped a thing, it would render one sufficiently light-headed to finally understand how to escape the Lost Woods.
And although I'm sure only one or two people in my home state of Alaska actually knew how to beat The Legend of Zelda on their own (the same two people, in fact, who knew how to beat every Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man game), having come into contact with these two people either directly or as the fifth link in a chain, everybody knew something. All the pieces fell into place as the NES community floated in, out, and around households, filling in the gaping holes left by "the old man" and his pompous one-liners. We were like the early Christians, spreading the gospel of the 8th bit, which, after much contemplation on my part, probably involved something that looked like this:
1
01010
1
0
Of course, I don't know where any of this information originated from, because I am thoroughly convinced The Legend of Zelda is friggin' impossible to figure out on your own. After all, "a NES game will do everything in its power to keep you from beating it." To prove this, having paid my $5 and wanting to squeeze every last cent from my purchase, I've been considering a thought I've sworn for the past 19 years I would never let my mind entertain: beating The Legend of Zelda's Second Quest with no outside intervention. Wish me luck, my brothers. I'm going to go bake me some mozzarella sticks in preparation for my journey.
Super Star Soldier (TG16) Impressions
Editor's Note: Same dealy here, except I had never played Super Star Soldier before. I played it for 30 minutes, got pissed off, and decided I wanted to write instead. These impressions are largely rooted in ignorance.
BRIDGING THE GENERATIONAL GAP
If Nintendo's aim with the Wii is to reach non-gamers, they have found their answer: well, to be honest, that would be Wii Sports. However, if their alternative aim is to reel the older generation back in, to deflate the ballooning frustration of the hardcore baby boomers lost in a sea of complicated controllery and an inexplicable surplus of story, this is how it's done: with a good old-fashioned two-dimensional screen-scrolling airplane shooter.
Scrolling shooters are among the most approachable genres of games. If you can find an arcade anymore, and I know it's hard, take a look past the Tekkens, the Dance Dance Revolutions, and the virtual boxing games complete with motion sensing cages and corded plastic boxing gloves. Look through the stale prepubescent sweat, around the $1.00-per-play House of the Dead III machine, and above the head of the spiky-haired tween with a mind full of MySpace, to the forgotten corner of beloved times past, where Mr. Pacman is having trouble romanticizing Ms. Pacman with her controls clogged from twenty-year-old Coke mishaps, and Robotron is pealing off the side of his cabinet many decades short of 2084. Here, invariably, you will find one and exactly one person. A 52-year-old man in bifocals playing either a pinball machine or a scrolling shooter.
Old school and new school alike, we've all played scrolling shooters in one form or another... 1942, R-Type, Ikaruga, Gradius, Einhander, Strikers 1945, U.N. Squadron. My dad, amidst his 14-hour days working as a CPA during tax season, used to defile the monotony by spending his lunch hour playing Twin Cobra in the next-door 7-11 wearing a suit and tie. I let my friend Jeff borrow the very first game I bought for my Playstation, The Raiden Project, and a year later, when I asked him if he was done with it, he replied, "Apparently not. My dad's been playing that game in my room for two hours every day after work since you gave it to me. He won't leave." No doubt, I had trouble believing this, considering Jeff's dad was a joyless, humorless man whose sole purpose in life was to stare at me in silent intensity until I made an underwear deposit.
Older folks aren't afraid of a challenge, they just want a straight-forward interface to said challenge. No more than four buttons and a d-pad, or an analog stick, provided they can call it a "joystick". The proof is in the pudding, and what damn good pudding it is! These games are easy to pick up and play, but quarter-thieves and "Continue?" fiends after Level 1. However, there appears to be something slightly off about Super Star Soldier...
DISORIENTATION
The title screen is reminiscent of Zero Wing. All your base are belong to us etc. etc. I began the main game, and shizzle is moving too fast for this to be a beginning. Also, traditionally, games like this reserve the dark backgrounds for the scary later levels, but I'm already erring on the side of caution. Suddenly, various gnats and jets and things start swooping in, and weird weapon power-ups that look like colored alien coins sway to and fro. It doesn't feel right. It's lacking order, the music drowns the cheap sound effects, but I know I'll get used to it. Or will I?
As of now, no. First off, why, when I died at what appeared to be the first boss, did it start me back at the beginning of the level despite my having two more lives? To confuse things further, why did it NOT start me back at the beginning of the level the second time I died? Perhaps most importantly, why, after I've maxed out the levels of the particular weapon I've been collecting, does the screen outright explode? As a bomb mechanism, this is not timely enough to be of much use, and it hasn't given me a free life, and my weapon is still what it was. The game is still hard as bricks. What the dilly, yo? Admittedly, I haven't played the game extensively, but right now the weapons have all appearances of reaching climax at four or five upgrades and, following that, have no choice but to skeet the screen over with a fantastic display of loveless thundersplooge. Super Star is no soldier I'd want watching my ass on the battlefield, to be sure.
And, as much as it pains me to say it, I feel this game has too many weapons. That is to say, too much breadth and not enough depth. I prefer my weapons served up Raiden II style, with only three to choose from but each of which can be upgraded eight levels deep. It's kind of like eating at Denny's. Order what you want, I can guarantee bacon, eggs, and sausage will make an appearance on your plate, but how much of each? And which will you be eating when you reach the end-level boss (the heart attack)? Bacon, probably.
THE "OTHER" PROBLEM
Consider the following scenario. You've worked your way up, scrolled all the way up to the top of the level, avoiding endless obstacles and annoyances along the way, and thanks to your hard work, your cool green electricity weapon is fully charged and ready to engage the boss. And then you pick up another green power-up and your weapon turns into a weak-ass flamethrower. Welcome to the world of color deficiency.
I can't tell the green power-ups apart from the yellow power-ups! But I know when I've picked up yellow by accident, because flame is usually yellow, just like electricity is always... green? This is nothing new. In Raiden II, where every power-up changed every four seconds from red, to blue, to purple, I would always wait until red showed up and then wait five seconds after red changed to blue to ensure that I was grabbing purple. There are workarounds, you see, but it's more difficult when the power-ups are static, not on a rotation (although, Super Star Soldier appears to have those too). I'll get through Super Star Soldier the same way I got through kindergarten, with some good old all-American memorization. I already know which power-ups show up at which times for the first stage. This game is starting to feel a lot like Dragon's Lair. But I felt it altogether unreasonable when I killed a ship and one of these guys popped out of it:
SUMMARY POINTS
- Difficult.
- 30% more chaotic than your average scrolling shooter.
- Weak sound effects, but good music.
- Unbalanced weapons, so far as I can tell.
- Not wheelchair accessible.
September 20th, 2006 - Vending Machines: Murphy's Law Incarnate
Most individuals understand Murphy's Law as something to the tune of "if something can go wrong, it will." Simple, yes, but it's a bit deeper than that. I'm sorry, but a post hoc citation of Murphy's Law when it rains during your fancy dinner date won't buy you any brownie points. Go smoke a pipe on your big leather throne and die of cancer, you pseudo-intellectual cliche. Anyway, growing up, I always wondered who this Murphy fellow was and why we are still hearing about him. Surely he didn't create a Law out of nothingness, with no meaning, just so unoriginal people can repackage it again and again at increasingly discounted prices. I mean, I could have created an UltraMuffin's Law that states "we will eat bird tonight" just so, any time I find myself eating a Cornish game hen with my comrades after another victorious battle, I can assess the roundtable with a peculiar glow about my face as I say, "UltraMuffin's Law," causing everyone to laugh their asses so completely and violently off their legs that I'm forced to wipe a tear from my eye. Is that supposed to be funny? It barely passes for an observation, and that's just because I feel sorry for it.
It wasn't until my Software Engineering course, taught by Knoke the Friendly Ghost, that it all started to snap into place. Murphy's Law actually has an application, as something to keep in mind when you're thinking about cutting corners. Without it, while you're programming, you might not think twice about a problem that has a 1/1,000,000,000 chance of occurring. Regarding modern computers, however, including home PCs capable of berserking through 2,600,000,000 instructions per second, those odds are not as safe as they sound on the surface. If you want to come out of it without looking like another jackass in a sports coat who reads Beowulf every fourth day of the month, try this little Murphy module on for size: "if something can go wrong, and your processor has more cycles per second than seconds left in your life, save fate some time and take a bath with a hair dryer." Your CPU will become comparatively faster
Marvin the Martian is to Martians what Taz is to Tasmanian devils. Is he the only person on Mars? What's with the Trojan getup? And why does Mars have it in for Earth? We've been kind. What does Mars honestly have against us?
What you do with the Road Runner once you catch him is your business, Wile E. Coyote. But for god's sake, quit wasting your money. ACME has burned you. ACME has burned you bad. Take some of that tension out in an angry letter or a bad review. I would never consider buying a 
The original SimCity was a breath of fresh air for the PC gaming industry in the late 1980s. It was a thinking man's game, tying together so many variables that the complexity and possibilities were as vast as the length of the game - endless. Sort of like a game of chess with a computer opponent that makes up rules as it goes along. Till this day, I doubt anyone truly understands exactly what happens behind the SimCity curtains. It has a mind of its own. But that never bothered a soul since the SimCity objectives were painfully subjective. "Do whatever you need to do to have fun!" the game seemed to say. Well, call me boring if you must, but I just wanted to have a successful city. How does one measure the success of a city? Population? In a crabwise way, I suppose. But what's the purpose of a population? Taxes? Yes. Money.
Most individuals understand Murphy's Law as something to the tune of "if something can go wrong, it will." Simple, yes, but it's a bit deeper than that. I'm sorry, but a post hoc citation of Murphy's Law when it rains during your fancy dinner date won't buy you any brownie points. Go smoke a pipe on your big leather throne and die of cancer, you pseudo-intellectual cliche. Anyway, growing up, I always wondered who this Murphy fellow was and why we are still hearing about him. Surely he didn't create a Law out of nothingness, with no meaning, just so unoriginal people can repackage it again and again at increasingly discounted prices. I mean, I could have created an UltraMuffin's Law that states "we will eat bird tonight" just so, any time I find myself eating a Cornish game hen with my comrades after another victorious battle, I can assess the roundtable with a peculiar glow about my face as I say, "UltraMuffin's Law," causing everyone to laugh their asses so completely and violently off their legs that I'm forced to wipe a tear from my eye. Is that supposed to be funny? It barely passes for an observation, and that's just because I feel sorry for it.