Once More, With Stealing - On Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (2015)

From the designer of The Stanley Parable, comes Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terrible Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist! It’s free! It’s short! I’d recommend playing both games first before reading this!

Now, onto our main attraction!

AIMless: On Catherine (2011)

I played Catherine pretty soon after playing Emily is Away (which I wrote about here), and those are pretty interesting experiences back to back.  You could almost imagine Catherine being the continuation of the story of the protagonist from Emily is Away twelve years later, even though their mindsets are different.  But both games try to catalog relationships with the opposite sex from the male perspective, and neither are much interested in simply telling a tale of romance.

On True Detective Season 1

DVD Cover for True Detective Season 1 (Wikipedia)

We don't want to watch stories about good guys anymore. That's what it seems like, if we look at the popular, critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment. It's been happening for a while now, a corrosion of the line between good and evil on our screens. Superman's boring -- you can't write him interesting, you have to write around him -- but even Wolverine's standard fare now. We've gone beyond flawed protagonists, beyond every-man anti-heroes, and our pop culture seems to want to keep pushing further and further afield.  Now?  We're at Suicide Squad and Deadpool -- people that should be locked up, pychopaths, the criminally insane.  And that say nothing good about us, right?  Or that's how I think that slippery slope's supposed to go; someone else wrote something trying to plot a moral trajectory of our superhero films, so go look for that if you want.

But outside of the overloaded slate of superhero films – or, actually, as a cause of it -- movie studios are scared as hell, cluelessly groping around for what can even constitute a safe tentpole blockbuster anymore, and ending up with weird reboots and Apatow-y envelope-pushing comedies and lots of spies having to go off the grid. Television, meanwhile, – well, mainly HBO, and FX, and AMC -- seem suddenly enraptured with getting prestige, brooding, masculine, "adult" dramas greenlit at the moment.

HBO's True Detective is a good example of this.  The second season was apparently bad, and I'm not going to watch it, but the first season was highly acclaimed.  And it's so not-at-all interested in pushing a good guy on the viewer, but it even goes beyond that. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto is aggressively uninterested in making Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's characters relateable, or, really, any of the people on the show. There are moments interspersed to soften the blows, but not many, and they don't balance out with how the show makes sure to remind you how terrible human nature is. You might compare them to Walt from Breaking Bad if we're talking about unlikeable protagonists, but Breaking Bad was different: it wanted to make you root for him in the beginning, and it grounded his actions with a base of logic and conviction before slowly stripping away the rationalizations. True Detective doesn't reveal such an obvious throughline or arching purpose in its protagonists.

In Defense of Free to Wait Games

Jim Sterling (of The Jimquisition, formerly of The Escapist) put out a review and also a video last year about a game called Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  Here's the review, and here's the video:

The Jimquisition - Free to Wait

Dungeon Keeper Mobile kicked up a bit of fuss when it was announced.  It was a mobile revival of a long dormant franchise that had its heyday in the 90s.  (Fun fact for those that don't know, Peter Molyneux worked on it).  And Electronic Arts decided to shamelessly cash in on that IP and they turned what was a strategic, well remembered PC game into a "free to play," "pay to win," "casual" game for mobile devices.  Or so the story goes.

I haven't played Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and I doubt I ever will.  I haven't played a lot of these "free to play" games.  If I have free time with nothing but my phone, I'll generally read something on it instead.  But then these games aren't for me.

Jim Sterling, in the video, complained about how little there was to do in Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  You'd start the game, click a couple times to place down a few blocks or dig or put things down, and that was it; you'd have to wait a couple hours for that task to complete before you could do anything else.  That was the "gameplay."  Sterling focused on the fact that the game would harangue you to pay some real money to speed up the process.  It's a game that seems built primarily to make money off the weak-willed, by making the waits agonizingly long.  It's temporarily holding your gameplay hostage, for money.

And I'm going to try to defend them.

Forgetting You, But Not the Time: On Emily is Away (2015)

Emily is Away (2015)

(some spoilers)

Late last year I saw an article about this game called Emily is Away in Wired. The headline caught my interest: it said the game was AIM-inspired and set in the 2000s. Generally, I don't like reading too much about games I think I might play in the future; I wrote about how pre-set expectations changed my experience with Gone Home before. So I didn’t read the article. But I saw the game get articles in other publications as well. And I saw that Emily Short had written about it, and I made a mental note to definitely give the game a shot at some point. (Her review is here). But even though I’d avoided reading articles about the game, I still couldn’t avoid reading all those headlines, and though I can't find it again, I'd seen one article/blog/forum post/Youtube title which said the game was about getting friend-zoned. Remember expectations? Yeah, there they were, being pre-set.

The Marcio Rubio Glitch and Soundbyte Culture

Slate - Rubio v Christie on Experience

(Warning: US politics!)

Is soundbite culture still a thing that people talk about? It's the sort of term that I associate with Jon Stewart maybe a couple years back. Remember, how one of his big pet topics on the Daily Show was the 24-hour news cycle and its perpetual ravenous need for breathless, urgent, completely shallow news stories? Soundbite culture was all tied to that: how politicians were adapting to the way news media operated, and how they, knowing how what all those organizations wanted was the compact 30-second talking head to splice into their news coverage, how these politicians were tailoring their speeches and interviews to ensure that the half a minute that did make it in was exactly, EXACTLY what they wanted to say. That's what mattered, because the majority of voters (that were even paying attention) aren't ever going to see your full news scrum; they're just gonna see what the news media decides is worth showing.

But it's gone beyond just the news. It's embedded into our generation now, with likes and shares and hashtags. Our always-online culture puts emphasis on “viralness,” on shareability, on the easy-to-digest, and that's pervading into corporations, brands, entertainment, news, and yes, it's still definitely there in politics as well. There are now consulting firms, whole industries built on harnessing the power of word-of-smartphone and keyboard.  Soundbite culture isn't just being driven by 24-hour news; it's now a part of social media.  It's gone digital.

Which brings us to Mario Rubio.

So at the Eighth GOP debate on Saturday, there was an exchange between Rubio and Chris Christie which is going viral:  Slate - Marco Rubio Was a Disaster in the GOP Debate

Here's the Media Matters overview of news coverage on the matter. Media Matters - "Marcobot": Media Rail Against Marco Rubio After His "Disastrous" Debate Gaffe

Let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barrack Obama doesn't know what's he's doing. He know's exactly what he's doing.”

Rubio said basically this line four times; three of those was within consecutive answers, in an exchange between him and Christie on if Rubio was ready to be president. Worst of all, after Christie called him out on “the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what [Rubio's] advisers gave him,” Rubio, obviously rattled and unprepared for both Christie's attack and the boos that are starting to drown out his answers, freezes up, and can't think of anything to do but to repeat that exact line again. “Here's the bottom line, this notion that Barrack Obama -” Christie interjects “There it is. There's the memorized 25-second speech!” Rubio, frustrated, almost goes into the spiel again, beginning with “this notion...” before catching himself this time.

Some people seem to think this could sink his campaign. It's definitely going to change the media narrative for Rubio heading into New Hampshire. Before, in a race of a bunch of un-serious, extreme candidates and floundering, unexciting moderates, he was the establishment candidate that seemed like the best hope for anyone that didn't want Trump or Cruz as the Republican nominee. Now, after the Rubio glitch and a relatively strong showing from Jeb! Bush, there are even articles coming out saying Bush could emerge as the establishment candidate now.

What was Rubio thinking? Certainly I think inexperience and an inability to think on his feet partly led to Rubio's gaffe, and those are probably going to be the big questions raised about him for the foreseeable future. He's not used to political speech-making and debating, and he's crammed a lot for those two areas in the last couple months, trained relentlessly to be ready for the big stages, and it shows. He always did come off as a bit over-rehearsed, a bit robotic -- press him on this topic, this preset answer emerges -- although it never seemed like quite as big of an issue before this. He's not used to give and take with the other candidates or the crowd, and he froze up, rushing to talk over the boos with whatever came to mind first. Trump responds to boos with a carefree shrug; that same debate he called out some boobirds after one of his responses as being Bush donors and special interests, and that might play well with his supporters. But Rubio, faced with the same, short circuited instead. Maybe the mounting pressure got to him. Maybe he was tired, not getting enough sleep. But, well, if any press is good press, then Rubio, who's been fighting along with anyone else running not named Trump for some spotlight, well, he's finally going to be getting a narrative the news media can sink its teeth into.

Improvisation really isn't a good skill to have to demonstrate, for a politician. Wander too far off-script, and you're only going to end up tripping yourself up; that's when you're going to say something stupid, that's when you give the news media the 30-second clip they're looking for and you're not looking to give up. Especially if you're not used to giving answers in front of large crowds, answers that are going to be dissected endlessly afterwards by media panels and columnists and radio hosts and snarky commenters on Twitter, looking for that single moment that you slip up. Trump gets away with it, but that's because he's not a politician (he just plays one on TV), and he appeals to the people that hate all politicians anyway. Rubio can't, nor can Clinton, or Cruz, or Bush, or Sanders.

Speaking about Bernie Sanders, you can see something similar in how he debates. He doesn't riff on foreign policy; he goes back to talking points. He talks about Iraq. He'll give just enough preamble related to the question so his answer doesn't seem completely ridiculous, then he'll circle back to income inequality. Part of that is the fear of going off rails, part of that is sticking with what you know, and part of that is hammering home a talking point. Maybe it makes him seem one note. But that repetition isn't going to get a ton of wider media coverage or social media attention (at least not unless he actually becomes the Democrat nominee, I don't think). It isn't going to put him on the bad side of the soundbite culture either in the news or social media. If there's a snippet of him, it's gonna be one where he's going to come off as polished and certain. Political strategists refer to it as message discipline. All the candidates do it. Politicians can't actually run on sprawling, hundred-page policy platforms. They need to boil things down to simple messages that people are going to remember: glimpses, a strong impression, a couple sticky lines that are repeated over and over, in every debate, every stump speech, every quoted line they ever hear or see from them. Bernie will fight against income inequality and Wall Street. Trump speaks his mind, and he's going to turn America from losers back into winners. Hillary's fighting for you; she's fighting for families, children, women, and she's experienced and strong. Cruz will stand up against Washington and for conservative values, and be strong against immigration and terrorism. Rubio's team knew that the question about his inexperience was going to come up.  And they were ready, with a talking point, or at least they thought they were.  

Rubio's team obviously thought there'd be a comparison between Rubio inexperience and Obama's: that's what'd been in the news, what Christie had been been saying on the campaign trail. Obama had also been an inexperienced senator running for presidency back in 2008, and look where that had left us! That was going to come up, and Rubio's answer would be that the issue with Obama wasn't his inexperience; it wasn't that Obama didn't know what he was doing. It was that what Obama wanted to do was wrong, and so Rubio wasn't like Obama at all. And that's a fine enough type of response to that specific question.

I think it was both over-preparation and under-preparation that did Rubio in. His team must've drilled into him, over and over, spend the first half answering the question, but make sure you hit one of your talking points and hammer it home at the end. It must've been so ingrained into Rubio, all that debate preparation, that he reflexively goes into whatever talking point best matches the topic at hand. Once it went from the structured moderator question, though, and Rubio had to respond after Christie argues that senators don't have the experience necessary to be president, Rubio counters, he attacks Christie's record, then he goes right back into the Obama talking point. And then Christie hits back with the “25-second memorized speech,” and it all falls apart.

I think you might also be able to see another debate strategy that might've been drilled into Rubio the last while: doubling down. You can see Rubio knocked off balance with how Christie shined a light directly on the way he's been structuring his debate answers; it must be like suddenly being told not to think about the way you breathe, or being told that you have a conversational tic you weren't aware of when you're in the middle of saying something. In these debates, you rarely ever see anyone back down, because that shows weakness. After Christie attacks him, Rubio fires back, and then he tries re-iterating the Obama thing, and I think in his head he actually wanted to make sure the difference between him and Obama landed. But the line doesn't work even once, and said again it just disintegrates, even if Christie hadn't pointed it out.

The worst thing about the line is that even teed up correctly, it's pretty bad. Well, no, actually, the worst thing was Rubio repeating it. But I can understand him freezing up. That talking point, though, was rehearsed, and a couple members of Rubio's team must have heard it a lot. Someone should've cleaned it up along the way. “Let's dispel once and for all with the fiction” is clunky and way too formal. It sticks in your mind for the wrong reason, because it sounds weird. “Obama knows exactly what he's doing” is actually the part of the speech that stands out the most in the whole spiel, because it's following “...fiction that Obama doesn't know what he's doing,” and the repetition makes the second line stick, which definitely isn't what Rubio's team actually wanted to emphasize. They want people to know that Obama wanted America to be more like the rest of the world, while Rubio wants to make America great again. Which is fine; it's generic but talking points can be generic, as long as the sentiment comes across. Without the awkward beginning, and with a smoother transition into it from Rubio, the talking point would'be been fine. But when you're dispelling with fictions and telling people that Obama knows exactly what he's doing, boilerplate about making America great again is just background noise. The talking point would've been pretty mediocre said once; that it was rehearsed and meant to be a capper, and that both those aspects came across all too terribly on the first run through and were amplified every time Rubio said it again, that's where it really fails.

I should say this: I didn't watch the debate. I saw clips of it, and read articles on it. I think a lot of other people also rely on articles and highlights as well; otherwise Slate wouldn't be putting up things like The CNN Republican Debate in Under Two Minutes (which is just a video) and NY Times wouldn't have Highlights from the Eighth GOP Debate.  That's what the politicians have to think about: what 30 seconds, what highlights, are going to be clipped from their hours on the stage that night?  What's going to end up being shared, what's going to end up being dissected, become emblematic in a "narrative" about you, end up in an attack ad, end up going viral?  In this social media landscape, you don't want to be memorable for the wrong reasons.  Being boring for most of it is fine, as long as you're looking vaguely presidential and not tripping over your answers.  Hit your couple key lines, maybe land some attacks on some of the others if you're up for it, and that's a pretty solid performance.  If you end up repeating bland things, it's going to be forgotten; concentrate on what you want to stick, what you want highlighted, what you want to reinforce about yourself and the other people on the stage.  Marco Rubio erred the wrong way, though. He was trying to keep on-message, and I have to think that that talking point was him trying to curtail the inexperience question while hoping the rest of the debate would make up for it: a single, not a home run. Instead, he, I dunno, hit himself in the head with the bat?  We'll see if he can recover.

Here's something else that's changed with the shift from soundbites to soundbytes.  News, and political coverage, it used to just be about being informed.  The media would report on this stuff, and you'd watch it or read it, because you felt you should: it was Important.  Now, though, on social media, politics can become more of a horse race, a sport.  You watch, you root, and you get invested.  Just look at how ingrained poll reporting and poll watching have gotten now; it's because politics has gone social.  Poll reporting has to be the best thing in the world for news media. I have to imagine it generates lots of traffic and interest for relatively little work.  This, even though everyone "knows" that polls are constantly having to adjust to the the general shift away from landline phones, that they're untrustworthy, that their methods are always in a state of flux and they're reliant on historical models that could always blow up in a moment.  But still, poll results are blared and shared seemingly everywhere.  It's become "news."  It makes sense: the people most likely to care deeply about politics are the people who should generally probably have an idea who they want to win already; now they have a way to find other people just as invested, and suddenly, people who have nothing to do with any candidate's actual campaign are nevertheless now fandoms.  But still, online communities are just bubbles: Sanders might be able to look on Twitter to take the temperature of what many of his supporters are thinking, but the people that'll be actually voting at the GOP primaries?  I'm not sure if Twitter's necessarily more representative of the voting public than landline phone surveys.  Analog, unaccompanied, soundbites -- as in, conservative talk radio -- that might still what decides it for the Republican party.

One more thing: what about Jeb!? Jeb Bush seemed like he was dead in the water a while back, and now there's articles about how he still has a chance. The media was laughing at him for so long that people were maybe starting to feel sorry for him, because whatever you want to say about him, he's certainly stuck to his very moderate guns, while Rubio was running into trouble even before this, trying to steer hard right – from supporting amnesty -- on the immigration issue. Media – both news and social – narratives can really be so weird sometimes. Originally looking so ineffectual, Jeb as the GOP nominee might be looking like a better and better idea the further into the process we get.  He still has the political infrastructure, which hasn't translated into actual support yet, but well, we'll see what happens from here.

Civilization and Ruin: Fallout 3 Vs. Fallout: New Vegas

I should probably get this done before Fallout 4 releases, right?

So: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It's pretty rare to have such an apples-to-apples comparison between games and their developers. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and developed by Bethesda Game Studios; Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They both take place in the same in-game universe, they were both developed using the same engine, and they both ostensibly share the exact same underlying gameplay mechanics and genre. These are games from two of the biggest western RPG game studios around (Bioware's also there, of course), but although both studios sort of share the same philosophy of providing freedom, choice, "open-worldness," and player-driven gameplay, how that ethos manifests in their actual games is actually pretty different.

There's also this divide between the players, and it isn't just that people slightly prefer one over the other; the emotions run higher than that*. Fallout 3 is, I think, going to come to be one of the defining games of the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and for the generation growing up on those consoles, it's going to define what video games ARE, pretty much. And a lot of those people played New Vegas afterwards and found it boring, and restrictive; they thought it didn't measure up. And then there's the people that consider New Vegas one of the best RPGs of the last couple years, who detest Fallout 3 and that hate everything Bethesda did to the franchise (if they played 1 or 2 first). Sure, there's a middle ground, but there's also a lot of people that feel very strongly about this. So what makes Bethesda's Fallout so different from Obsidian's? One of the biggest, I think? Bethesda's games get better as you move away from their games' cities and people, but those are the areas where Obsidian's games excel the most.

Staged Fighting: Guacamelee's Combat

Guacamelee's combat feel different that of other beat'em up games I've played.

Elsewhere, combat seems like it's about rhythms, about getting in sync with the enemy, about learning the right times to attack and when to counter or dodge.  Or they're about button mashing, or combo memorization, or pattern recognition.

Guacamelee (2013) has some of that, all of that, certainly.  But it asks something different of you, I think, than games like Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Castle Crashers, Dark Souls, the Batman: Arkham games, or older beat'em ups like Double Dragon or that Simpsons arcade game.  It's more active.  More dynamic.  Like I said, different.

Footsteps to Follow: On Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons and Ico

Imagine you are the younger of two brothers. You will not get to forge your own path through childhood, because there will always be an elder sibling that came before you. Your parents and your teachers will always look at the two of you, and they won't be able to help but compare. Your own decisions will be flavored by the choices your older brother made before you, and at every turn, there will come a question: will you emulate, or differentiate? Will you invite the comparison or run in the opposite direction?

Brothers:  the story is about two brothers trying to cure their ailing father

Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons is a story about two brothers, trying to find a cure for their ailing father. And it is a game, one that is consciously trying to follow in the footsteps of an earlier game, Ico. The shadow Ico casts is long: it is considered a classic, a game that pushed the medium in new directions upon its release in 2001 by Sony Computer Entertainment.  Developed by Fumito Ueda and team ICO in Japan, Ico is a name that is likely to come up when you try to discuss Games as Art, for its style, for its storytelling, for its innovation, and for its imagination.  Brothers, released 12 years later, developed on a different continent by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios, and directed by filmmaker Josef Fares, embraces the influences of Ico proudly and eagerly, and because of that you can't help but compare the two as you play through it.  (here's a link to an interview where Fares says Ico influenced his game:  Shack News - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons creator talks inspiration and a grander world)

When No One's Watching: On Dishonored (2012)

A view from high above in Dishonored

After I'd finished Dishonored, I was curious to see how its chaos mechanic worked, exactly, so I looked it up. Dishonored was a game released in 2012, developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. You play as an assassin, and there was a “chaos” system in play that wasn’t fully explained within the game itself, only a screen that told you that killing more people would mean a “darker outcome”. I was wondering if it was simply a case that killing more enemies would = higher chaos and a worse ending, and yeah, it basically was. I also came across a forum post¹ that argued that Dishonored discouraged players from engaging in a high chaos playstyle, and that that was a mistake because killing was a lot more fun in the game than stealth. Dishonored gives you a range of gadgets and supernatural powers, but most of them were either noisy or lethal. Dishonored only allows the player to take out enemies non-lethally in only two ways: choke them out from behind, or shoot them with a sleep dart. The poster found enemy encounters boring because of this limited interaction with them; they found himself reloading often once they got spotted, because enemies are difficult to take out non-lethally head-on, so they found it easier to reload the game instead. Then they watched videos of other people's playthroughs; they watched other players kill enemies with their own bullets by stopping time, possessing them, and moving them into the path of the bullet they'd just fired. They saw players shoot grenades out of the air by stopping time, and they watched other players incinerate enemies by wind-blasting (that’s a magic power you can get in the game) them into Arcs of Light (which were electrical force fields that electrocuted anyone that touched them). But more than that, the game included a morality system, and it explicitly tells you in loading screens that the story would get darker and that there would be consequences if you went the high chaos route and killed too many people. The game was telling you that the “right” choice in this game was to avoid killing whenever possible, but to play the game “right” would limit the variety of enemy interactions and the creativity you could use, and all of this was something that the developers had built into their own game.

(Not) Seeing the World Through a Mini-map - On Mini-maps in Sleeping Dogs, Grand Theft Auto, and Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid's Radar

I remember a couple years back, re-playing Metal Gear Solid and thinking it would make a great flash game.  The stealth sections, specifically, where you're perhaps in a room trying to reach the exit, and there are guards patrolling the area that you have to avoid.  Because what actually ends up happening is you're playing through these sections not watching your character all that much, but instead the little minimap in the corner that represents your radar, making sure your dot never enters the cones of vision of any of the guards or security cameras.  Go onto any flash game portal, and you'll see that's occurred to a lot of people.  Zoom in on the mini-map, Remove all the extraneous controls outside of movement, and you have a straightforward mechanic you can replicate with simple geometric shapes, no art skills required.  The radar is completely unrealistic, of course: how would a radar show you what guards are looking at?  And then there’s the fact that all these guards are so short-sighted that they can only ever see several feet in front of them.  Stealth in Metal Gear Solid is an overtly game-y and unrealistic mechanic, but then again, it's not like the game was particularly slavish to realism anyways.  And because stealth is built around the mini-map as a central component of gameplay, these sections work, which is why even if you take out everything else and focus only on the mini-map, the game still functions pretty well.

Minimaps are a user interface component that have become especially prevalent with the advent of open world games in the past decade and a half or so.  Given large maps which players can easily get lost in, a large number of collectables, enemies that can come from any direction, and multiple missions you can start at a time, there needs to be some way to convey to the player a lot of spatial information.   Mini-maps are a fine tool for this.  But they don’t always completely fix all these problems, and sometimes, they can introduce new ones, especially if you’re just using them because everyone else is, without thinking through how they’re being integrated into the game at large.  Like, for example, in GTA IV.

More Songs! Neutral Milk Hotel, Oceansize, Sunny Day Real Estate

These are some of the songs I would've been listening to maybe five years ago, in the fall while walking outside.

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over The Sea

Medium Expectations: On Gome Home (2013)

Sam's bedroom

Five minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down.  It wasn't a big thing, really.  The game starts you off at the front door of a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning.  I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond the porch.  A steady torrent of rain beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and cold?  I'd just figured out how to unlock the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby.  It was an actual relief entering the house and putting walls between me and the raging storm outside.  I took a look around, the first glimpse at the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam) and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning.  None of them were here apparently for my homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much.  My parents were on holiday, my sister had something to deal with.  So, I contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either side.  Then I turned around, went back outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them inside.  No dice.  Trying to pick them up had been one of the first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys.  Perhaps now that I had the front doors open, Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately, the bags still proved unresponsive.  The game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit.  This was a small thing, of course, that I was being bothered by, and you can forgive small things.  But it’s often these small surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a game.

AJAX, States, and Pushstate()

AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Many popular websites make use of AJAX, for example Google and Twitter. To understand why it's being used, we have to understand how the traditional World Wide Web was meant to be built. The web was intended to work like this: you use a web browser application (eg. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) on your computer to visit a web page, by giving the browser that page's URL address (eg. http://www.google.com). The browser, or client, connects to a web server via the internet and requests that web page, which is merely a text file, specifically an HTML file. That server serves that file back to the client browser, and the browser displays that page, also requesting any additional files such as images needed to completely display that page. You can then click on a hyperlink to visit another web page, and your browser goes and connects to whatever web server is that file is stored on to get that page. But as the web has matured, websites have gotten more complicated, bigger, and more visual, and the basic HTML web model has become obsolete. We moved from mostly text-based pages to websites consisting of many web pages, all with consistent visual elements (eg. logo in the top left, a navigational menu along the top or side, a footer) which are there to make the web more user friendly. We've also developed new technologies, like CSS, Javascript, and PHP, to supplement our basic HTML websites, and one of these technologies is AJAX.

Ha Jin's The Bridegroom (2000) Book Review

In "The Bridegroom," Ha Jin seems more interested in writing stories about circumstances than about people. Almost all of the short stories collected in his 2000 book are concerned with lower and middle class folk living in China, struggling against greater, sometimes conflicting, forces: communism and capitalism, encroaching western values and small town prejudices, societal pressures and familial obligations, and an overarching bureaucracy trying to stabilize and control a vast population in a country in transition. The stories explore life within this paradoxical environment, and are much more preoccupied with introducing and stepping through the injustices and dilemmas facing the characters than the characters themselves; they are powerless to effect the unfolding situations imposed upon them, and develop little more nuance beyond "worried businessman" and "foreign-educated woman". This lends a universality of sorts, and the stories do well in presenting different tableaus, even if the stories tend to beat somewhat repetitious drums. As a pounding critique of life in China it may work, but the futility that permeates all the stories leads to a sameness, and at some point all of the senselessness starts bleeding out, such that it's hard not to redirect some of it onto the stories themselves. 

Videos of live performances from The Weakerthans, Steven Page, and Gorillaz

The Weakerthans - Fallow (acoustic on Backstage Pass)

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) movie review

Olympus Has Fallen is a mind-blowingly stupid and ludicrous movie about Korean terrorists taking over the White House. This premise alone should tell you what type of movie it is. But you know what? I loved it. The general advice for going to these types of big dumb action movies is to shut your brain off, but honestly, I had a lot of fun laughing at all the glaringly obvious plot holes there were. The writers did just enough work to keep the movie moving at a brisk pace and to have everyone in the audience understand everything that's going on, and nothing more.  I mean, if you're someone who gets offended by movies like this where everyone (except maybe the protagonist) acts like complete idiots, then this ain't the movie for you. But hey, this might be a dumb blockbuster, but this also is a dumb blockbuster that's both better and dumber than any other dumb blockbuster in recent memory. Better than Battleship, better than 2012, and better than Transformers.  Also, surprisingly brutal violence, definitely not the typical PG-13 stuff you see these days, but some real, up-close, headshots, torture, and executions, which was, if nothing else, a change of pace.  

#TeamWalt, Fictional Heroes and Villains, and Interpreting Morality in Breaking Bad

I am not on #TeamWalt. Walter White should go to jail, for all the morally reprehensibly things he has done for morally dubious reasons. Many people, though, proudly label themselves members of Team Walt, and actively cheer for the Breaking Bad protagonist, and they'll even have justifications for all of Walt's actions; they say Walt's always been doing everything for his family, to provide for them, to keep them safe, and that includes his surrogate son, Jesse. Others don't deny that Walt's done bad things, but they say it's fun to cheer for Walt, to see him succeed, and he is the protagonist, after all. This is his story, and those viewers want him to keep going, keep outsmarting people, keep doing terrible things in order to survive, because that's what keeps the show moving forward. There are people that are fervent in their defence of Walt's actions, and I want to take a closer look at that viewpoint here.

What is Facebook Marketing?

There are people, I understand, who are confused about the whole concept of Facebook marketing and advertising. Why would you waste money investing in advertising on Facebook instead of using traditional methods? Especially for people who didn't grow up with Facebook, it can seem like a fad, something their small business can simply ignore. In fact, I'd agree with that somewhat; not all small businesses can or should invest in Facebook marketing. But we'll get to that in a moment. First of all, Let's go over exactly what Facebook marketing is.

Live Performances of Past Lives - Paralyzer, Fucked Up - The Other Shoe, The Hold Steady - Stuck Between Stations

Past Lives - Paralyzer (Live on KEXP)