A better view

Here he is poking his head out, this morning:

Again, this is taken from the webcam set up by the O’Higgins research base in Antarctica, and you can find many more pictures of penguins here.

They have hatched!

Say hello to another generation of fuzzy little Gentoo Penguins, which have hatched next to the O’Higgins research base in Antarctica:

Snow Crash - Chapter 2

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This one is 13:45 long. More than enough time to deliver a pizza, but also more than our hero was given.

For You

This is really rough. I can’t seem to find my headphones, either, so there may be a ton of background noise.

The first 19:40 of Snow Crash:
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A Good Start

I feel potent, today. Venomous. It’s not that I’m feeling bad. Things are good, but the urge to pounce is there. I guess, rather than being cranky I’m just feeling too good to be bothered by other people’s problems. Password not working? Huh, did you know that there’s a guy sitting in his office less than half a mile away who has been in space?

I feel like hanging up my phone. Like transferring people’s calls to random embassies in Bulgaria. I want to paint over all the road signs with pictures of dandelions and warnings about polar bears.

It should be a nice day, today, and while I’m drinking plenty of coffee it doesn’t seem to be making me any nicer.

Ad Vitam

Of all things to hate. Of all things which a man may yearn to subvert, to conquer… Of all things to choose as a nemesis (or archenemy), why not Life? After all, the trials and tribulations (or slings and arrows, as the case may be) of living often seem the product of some conspiracy, some master plan to break your spirit. The things we endure simply to bear the right of continued endurance are frightful and many, indeed. And should we not seek to suck the marrow out of life? Should we not rise up to the challenge and meet it head on like they always encourage us to?

Seems reasonable.

There are a couple of problems with hating life, though. First, it’s a very popular thing to do. It’s not likely that you’re going to get any level of personalization in your aggravation. There are so many people hating life right now, that were I to select it as my nemesis (or archenemy) the only thing anyone would notice is that I whined more often. And who likes a whiner? More important than that, though (because after all, your nemesis should be a personal choice, not one picked to make you look ‘cool’), is I just can’t see it working. Hating life is like hating a big machine. Granted, a very complex, inscrutable machine that seems at times to have a definite purpose, and at others to simply chug along because nobody has the sense to pull its plug. But a machine, no matter how vast and complex, cannot truly feel hatred. What, exactly, would be the point of hating something that is incapable of responding in kind? It’s like hating a toaster, or a stapler. After you let loose, after you destroy its tiny little ego with the full force of your frustration at how it always, always burns the toast around the edges without quite warming up the middle of each slice, a bead of sweat forms on your temple and your arteries freeze for a moment. You feel warm in the face, and would probably look like you were blushing if it weren’t for the snarl clawing its way out from between your lips. You begin to feel stupid. You’re yelling at a toaster. The toaster cannot be bothered to care, and will not even improve its dark arts in the slightest.

Life responds in much the same way. If I am to have an enemy, someone to subvert and collide with at every major turning point, then they had better be made of flesh and blood and raw emotion. Otherwise it just can’t be worth the effort.

Ahh, Friendship

It makes sense, really, that my search for a good nemesis would lead me first to those closest to me. After some thorough consideration, I have rejected Alanna’s application. I’d like to say it was a tough decision, but there really wasn’t much of a debate. My thoughts were something along these lines:

• "We do fight from time to time..."
• "She does get cranky every once in a while..."
• A tasty breakfast usually fixes those
• "I really can’t see myself punching her in the face."
• "I really want to go on trusting her Dal."
• Her Dal is fantastic...

At that point I was pretty much convinced not to accept her application. Of further note, I believe that living with your nemesis is too risky, as evidenced by the War of the Roses.

Applications Are Now Being Processed...

It may have been just over three years ago that this was last pointed out, but I’m sure that I’ve seen similar writings in the past. The idea is that a fulfilling life is not achieved through developing connections and “friendships” which can be leveraged to move yourself closer to the elusive state of “Success.” If everyone does this, nobody is going to get anywhere. How can you stand on someone’s shoulders when they’re trying to get up on yours? The solution to this problem is obviously to develop long lasting and powerful Enemies.

Now, according to Klosterman you need not just one enemy, but two: a proper nemesis, and a good archenemy.

Simple enough, right? The nemesis is a close friend who is capable of inspiring such fury in you at times that you have (or will have) punched them in the face. Someone you will celebrate with while secretly hoping that their plans fall apart. The nemesis appears to be something of a benchmark. Something to measure your success against. If they’re doing better than you, it’s time to twist the knife. But twist it secretly so you can still hang out and go get drinks, later. Most people probably won’t have much trouble getting a nemesis. Happens all the time, it seems.

An archenemy appears awfully easy to identify. If you are Peter Gibbons, then Bill Lumbergh is obviously your archenemy. No question. No debate. That’s it. Come to think of it, Klosterman’s entire essay appears to fit Office space almost perfectly.

I had a brief debate with someone about whether or not following Klosterman’s advice was a good idea. He did publish the essay on April 1st. He is advocating something completely different from the standard view. Klosterman also doesn’t give a precise telling of how, exactly, making enemies fosters success. On the other hand, “they” don’t do a good job of justifying the friendly approach, either. Another thing to consider, is the methods are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. It is possible (as evidenced by Batman and Robin’s relationship) to have both friends and enemies. The identification and subsequent vilification of an archenemy does not, as far as I can tell, inhibit in anyone the ability to obtain a close friend or, for that matter, a boy/girl-friend.

The trouble, then, is choosing the right enemies. Choosing the wrong enemies may leave you nowhere. If I want to succeed at web development, it would serve no purpose to generate as much enmity as I can toward Trailer Parks, since they’re never going to do anything worth hating them for. Likewise, a nemesis in China won’t do me much good unless I live in China. How could I ever accept an invitation to a cocktail party when I can’t afford the airfare? Clearly, a very specific nemesis and archenemy are required.

But how to find them? Surely they are out there, somewhere, just waiting to be hated. Waiting to be thwarted. Waiting to laugh in my face at any hint of misfortune. There are, certainly, a great number of people in this area. Any one of them could, potentially, become a bitter rival. The bulk method would definitely find them, but I fear that such a measure, if taken to such a thorough degree that may be required, may in fact undermine the purpose of having two good enemies. If everyone in the world hates you, it seems that an untimely death is likely to strike before “success” can be properly attained.

With such considerations in mind, the search for a hated foe will need to be conducted somewhat carefully. Care will need to be taken. A diligent and thorough approach may, indeed, be called for. I intend to find an enemy I can be angry about. Two enemies, in fact. And I believe that with enough forethought and analysis this particular end can, in fact, be achieved.

Is it EVER Final?

Recently, in a sort of mad rush I made myself finish Final Fantasy 12. Mainly, I didn’t want it kicking around anymore, waiting to be finished. Begging me to find out if it had a really cool ending with some truly amazing cinematics. It took me a while to get to because I had originally intended to fill out the license board for every character. Obtain every Esper, succeed at every hunt and essentially beat the game as thoroughly as possible. I don’t really feel like that’s worth it, anymore.

The game started out well enough. I really liked the first couple of zones, actually, where you play as Vaan’s older brother, Reks. Reks had a surprising amount of depth to him for a character that got killed right off the bat. Basch, too, came on very strong in the beginning. It is unfortunate that the game should begin so well, in the midst of the battlefield as you strive to reach the king before he’s slain by the enemy. Then, suddenly, we cut to Vaan in the sewers of Rabanastre killing rats. It’s kind of cute, and the first few scenes in the streets (mostly involving him and Penelo) are quite enjoyable. Even the first hunt (The Rogue Tomato) was fun. It gave the game the same feeling that the Quest for Glory series gets sometimes, like the game designers aren’t standing on little podiums crying out for everyone to see how serious they are. It was refreshing, actually, to hunt down a toothed, bipedal tomato in the desert while humming the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes theme to myself. The Old Dalan character made everything even better. The man had a way of balancing Vaan’s idiocy that that was fantastic. But Dalan didn’t last long in the story, either. In fact, outside of the characters that join your party, nobody in Rabanastre is mentioned after you leave the city. This, I believe, illustrates one of the biggest mistakes Square-Enix made with this game. They quickly dropped everything about their characters’ pasts, except when it was convenient to advance the plot.

Vaan, as presented by the game is really not very interesting at all. Which is a shame, since they chose the boy to be the protagonist. Vaan complains half the time, and the other half the time he says things other people complain about are ‘neat.’ It’s like dealing with an eight year-old who things it’d be exciting to be kidnapped and have adventures in a Mexican prison but simply will not shut up about how much he dislikes asparagus. Even leaving things as they are, choosing one of the other characters (like, say, Balthier or Basch?) would have improved the game a great deal.

What happened, really, is they picked a snobby, cocky, melodramatic little kid who acted young for his age. He talked and moved his head like there was so much snot crammed up his nose that it was at risk of drowning him. Actually, had that been the case he may have had reason to be a little bit more exciting. It seems like the game really wants to be Lady Ashe’s story, but instead we get the story of Vaan-watching-Ashe-look-uncomfortable. The game really fell apart for me, around there. I was intending to fill in every nook and cranny of my lore books and den, but it just wasn’t worth it. I wanted, at one point, to hunt every hunt and become famous for doing so. After a while it didn’t seem like it’d actually do much. It wouldn’t change anything. The license boards of all my characters were going be complete. But I just couldn’t find it in me to go that extra mile. I finished the game, and to top it off the ending sucked.

I hear they’re already hard at work on Final Fantasy Thirteen. Thirteeen…
I’ve also heard that they want us to play number thirteen for the next ten years. The idea is that they’ll make more, smaller games built around the FF13 world which everyone will just lap up. They’ve already started this with Final Fantasy Seven. Dirge of the Cerberus was apparently a success. In a way, it does sound kind of neat. It rings of the episodic ideal that so many people are obsessed with, these days. I just don’t know if they can pull it off. I’m sure that some of the stuff will be decent, but if it’s no better than FFXII, it just won’t be satisfying.

It’s like nobody knows how to make a good ending, anymore. Maybe they’re afraid of locking themselves out of selling a sequel and a prequel and developing a collectible card game around the market stalls inside one of the various cities your characters visit on their way to the manga…

A Colossal Feat

Shadow of the Colossus is immense. It came at a time when scale was becoming intensely important for video games. Twilight Princess had a world that necessitated travel by a horse. Final Fantasy 12 also yearned for a vast world (which in some cases seems altogether too big). It seems everyone wants to have the biggest, baddest game out there.

Zelda was big. It was really big. I loved the scale, there. Big, open areas, big bosses. Pretty much no wait time for loading anything. Final Fantasy 12 also has some big spaces. They don’t quite have the same scale as Zelda does in each zone, and the load-time is definitely longer, but the sense of scale is there. The desert is big.

I don’t know the specifics of how each game handles the environment, but I can speculate. FF XII doesn’t have much of a problem because they cut the world up into small, digestible chunks. I’m impressed at the depth that their backgrounds have, though, which help to make the zone transitions feel less intrusive. Zelda also cut the world up, though each piece is much bigger than those in Final Fantasy. Understandable, since there’s less detail, and riding a horse would be pointless if you couldn’t really get out there. I’ve thought about the world in Shadow of the Colossus a lot, but I haven’t actually thought of a method that seems like it would work in all cases.

There are no level transitions. The entire world is completely seamless. You ride your horse out of the temple toward the mountains in the distance. Trees slide by as birds fly overhead. The mountains get closer, and eventually you arrive. You can ride up through narrow canyons, work your way through the maze and eventually come out on the other side of the mountain range, cross a river (far below as you cross an isthmus-like bridge) and ride into a nearby cave. No pauses, no transitions. It makes me think that they’re streaming terrain data from the disc to RAM, since 32 megs is a little small for the world, the player/horse animations, all of the textures (which are surprisingly hi-res) etc. It makes me wish I could run r_showtris 2 while playing. The draw distance is intense. You can see mountains miles away. They’ve obviously got some pretty sophisticated LOD algorithms, because even though you get the “popping” effect now and then, the low-poly models are hard to tell apart from the high-poly versions.

I’m sure they save a lot of memory and processing power by not sending hordes of enemies at you in the wilderness. In fact, the wilderness is quite barren. Aside from some wildlife (birds, lizards) the only thing that moves through the world is the wind. I also guess that they saved resources in two ways when you actually encounter a colossus. First, the colossi all have their own arenas. Some are fought deep underground, some are fought much higher off the ground that I expected, and others seem to be in wide open areas, freely accessible from any nearby area. I wager that when a colossus appears, they cut out any geometry external to the arena. I haven’t felt compelled to try leaving an arena once a fight has begun, though I think I might give it a try. With the outside world being ignored, the second method seems fairly straightforward: the arenas are designed in such a way that they cut out the rest of the environment so that all you’re able to see is the colossus and its lair.

The first colossus is fought in the mountains, nestled inside of a small canyon. Later, the player faces off against a very awesome flying creature, which soars above a lake that happens to be sealed from the rest of the world by cliffs on all sides. There is a serpent you fight in a cave, a giant humanoid you fight in an ancient city that has incredibly high walls. I think that by cutting the visibility down they’re able to handle the colossi much easier. I guess their visibility rules might cut out all external geometry if the arena were designed right, too. I have no idea if they use something similar to VIS Portals or not. Man, I’d love to see some screenshots of their editor(s)...

Even considering the technical possibilities (or at least, the ones I can think of a solution to) it still feels like they’re breaking some rules in this game. Like they’re doing things that we have, for years, said were not possible. Running up the back of one of these beasts while it tries to shake you off you will slip, you will stumble, once you’ve grabbed hold of something you may be flipped upside down and shaken like a stubborn ant. I am thoroughly impressed by this game. Some day soon I’m going to find a copy of Ico, the “spiritual sequel” to Shadow of the Colossus, and get the rest of the story.