2007 Archives

Politically Incorrect Human Nature

A recent article from Psychology Today talks about human nature, sex, and the best theories on why we act like we do. From the article:

Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.

Now go read it.

10 Computer Games That Stole My Life

I don’t actually play many computer games: I’m quite selective. Sure, I try out each and every “next big thing,” but in general, I’m left unimpressed. Sometimes, however, a computer game is released that actually steals my life for months or years – something I come back to time and time again. Something that actually makes me into an addict, if just for a while.

Here’s my roundup of the top 10 computer games that stole my life:

10. The (Even More) Incredible Machine

The Incredible Machine 3 I suppose I brought it upon myself. I’ve always been a fan of machines. When I was very young, kids TV programme Playschool used to have what they called the marble machine. It was dropped later, much to my disappointment. The marble machine resembled an upright pinball table, into which – at the end of every show – a bucket of marbles was deposited. The marbles would roll down through a series of see-saws and tunnels and tubes and rails and tracks, striking buzzers and bells and little things that would light up. It was spectacular. I tried to build something comparable with my marble run, but without success.

Two of my cousins used their expansive Lego sets to build a similarly complicated “Rube Goldberg machine,” once, and I was insanely jealous, mostly – I think – because I hadn’t thought of it first. The idea of these millions of moving parts, complex and un-necessary motion, and things that clicked and whirred… really appealed to me for the entirety of my childhood.

When The Incredible Machine was released in 1992, I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. No longer did I have to spend hours finding exactly the right-sized paperclip to slide down a string I’d set up in my room – I could do it all on my computer! In The Incredible Machine, players aim to solve puzzles by building and extending ludicrous machines. I eventually owned every release in the series. I’d use the freeform mode to build perpetual motion machines and to design mind-bending puzzles that I’d generally fail to persuade my friends to attempt. I’d play through the puzzles time and time again, trying to find marginally more efficient ways to solve them.

The Incredible Machine was probably the first computer game to genuinely “steal my life.” I dust off a copy of it or one of it’s sequels now and then and have a go, and I still adore it.

You can probably download a copy from some kind of abandonware site, but if you’re looking for a similar fix right now, I can recommend Armadillo Run.

9. NetHack

Since before I was born, people having been playing Rogue, the original top-down dungeon-crawling hack ‘n’ slash game. Rogue begat Hack, and Hack begat NetHack, which – miraculously – while I’d heard about, I didn’t end up playing for the first time until about 2002.

NetHack is free and open source. You could go download a copy right now and be playing it within a few minutes. But before you do that, read my warning: it will consume you. The first dozen times you play it, or thereabouts, you won’t have a clue what’s going on: you’ll have pressed a few buttons and gotten eaten by a grid bug or something. But then, usually after you’ve taken the time to read at least some of the manual, it’ll begin to click. You’ll have gotten the hang of it.

And it’s only then you’ll realise quite how huge the scope of the game is. Every time you play, the dungeon map is different. Potions, rings, wands and spellbooks – all carefully identified in your last games – will change their purpose. The only thing you’ll find in common is your own corpse, littering the dungeon, from your previous incursion.

And it’s clever, too. There’s a saying in NetHack player circles – the dev. team think of everything. I remember once, my character was trapped in a dangerous situation and surrounded by monsters. I was likely to die if I stayed put, so I scrambled through my inventory to try to find a clever combination of objects that might get me out of the mess I was in. Suddenly it hit me: I had a potion of levitation and a wand of digging: I could drink the potion, float up to the ceiling, and then aim the wand upwards to tunnel my way to the floor above and to safety! The plan worked, but sadly my newly-created hole appeared right underneath an altar on the floor above. The last thing I saw in that game was my gravestone, which read: “Here lies Scatman Dan the Samauri, killed by a falling altar.” Yes, that means that someone on the development team anticipated that one day somebody might dig underneath an alter, and ensured that the text was in there to accommodate. It’s insane.

NetHack stole months and months from my life, and – now and then – I still go back to play it. I’ve never won (“ascended”). Statistically speaking, based on the amount I play it, I never will. But sometimes I get a little bit closer. Perhaps it’s that that makes it so addictive.

8. Super Mario Kart

I wasn’t always such a Nintendo fanboy as I am now. In fact, before I really embraced Nintendo-fandom, I had to get hold of a second-hand SNES with Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island and… Super Mario Kart.

Ah, the original Mario Kart. Zipping round pixelated tracks in stupid little buggies with frustrating computer opponents who cheated – cheated, damn it – by firing power-ups they hadn’t actually picked up. And the multi-player! Two players, head to head, taking on the pack and competing for the cup, or “bursting each other’s bubbles” in a one-on-one.

The rest of the franchise rocked, too – Mario Kart 64 for the N64 and Double Dash for theGameCube, as well as the Nintendo DS version – but it was the original Mario Kart that stole my heart (and countless hours of my teenage years). Perhaps it was the cutseyness, or the not-quite-a-game-of-skill (but close enough that I could, after a while, royally whip everybody I knew at it) quirkyness, or the instant “sit down and play”-ability of it… I don’t know… but Nintendo really hit this one on the head. Sneaky tricks such as saving your “feather” power-ups for the secret routes through the tracks and bunny-hopping to “snake” your way around rough ground really added an extra something to it, too, and the music gave each track an atmosphere all of it’s own, albeit one in bleepy 8-bit sound.

While I don’t play the original these days, I still enjoy an occasional blast on the sequels.

7. Ultima VII

Ultima VII: The Black Gate Nowadays, if you want to play a huge, open, expansive, deep roleplaying game, you install Morrowind or Oblivion. Oblivion comes on a DVD-ROM and it’s huge. But back in the early-mid nineties, when we wanted that kind of experience, we installed Ultima VII. Ultima VII came on only seven floppy disks (assuming that, like me, you bought the 3.5″ copy rather than the 5.25″one) but packed a ludicrous amount of compression onto them – so much so that I vividly recall spending almost an hour watching the installer and swapping disks when I first installed it on my 33MHz 386 with no maths co-processor.

It was all worth it, though. Ultima VII’s game world dwarfed anything that came before it. Sure, you could rush through the game, sticking to the well-trodden paths, and not taking any side quests and (if you were good enough to survive such an ordeal) complete the game within about 50 hours of playtime. Not including the expansion packs, of course. But that’s not what the game was about – it was about taking your party along, being distracted by something moving in the woods, following it, losing it, finding something else interesting, taking side quests, trying things out (there are a million and one easter eggs)… I particularly enjoyed injuring a monster I was previously unable to beat by having the strongest member of my party drop all his weapons so that he could carry a cannon all the way from Lord British‘s castle (with other members of the party carrying balls and powder) to the monster’s lair, firing it at the beast, handing him back his weapons, and getting on with the fight!

It’s deep and it’s clever and it’s spectacularly well-made. It was the first game to introduce the idea of “losing” things in your own backpack (chuck too much stuff in there, heaped on top of itself, and it’s very easy to misplace your lockpicks… and why were you carrying all these spellbooks, anyway?).

It was over a year between me first getting this game and first finishing it. And even now, thanks to a great community and emulators like Exult, it’s possible for me to play it again, and, 13 years on, I still see new things in it. It’s a masterpiece.

6. Dune 2

Dune 2 This list really couldn’t be complete without tipping my hat to Dune 2. Dune 2 is pretty much single-handedly responsible for inventing the modern real-time strategy genre (no, Stonkers doesn’t count).

I got Dune 2 in 1993, and found it infinitely more playable than Doom (which was still good fun, at least in multiplayer: my friends and I had endless games across null modem cables and via direct dial-up), which was released in that year. It was a strategy game with a heavy emphasis on war and scenarios, like Battle Isle, which I’d already fallen in love with, but it was run in real-time. Real-damnit! If you weren’t quick or smart enough, the enemy could quite rightly sneak up on you and trash your base (or, more annoyingly, your harvesters).

All the key elements that became the backbone of modern RTS games were there: a set of missions each with a video (well, animated to save space and processor cycles, of course) introduction, each introducing more and more technology, the capacity to build and upgrade buildings, harvest resources, and buy troops, and fast and furious combat in between short periods of “turtling” behind your walls and turrets. And it rocked: the three sides (Atredies, Ordos, and Harkonnen) were sufficiently different to make the game challenging whichever way you played it, the scenarios were different depending on which side you played (for example, the Sardaukar – the Emporer’s crack troops – always sided with one of the other two houses!), the missions were varied, the sandworms were vicious… and it had speech: speech in a computer game!

I played Dune 2 long before I read the Dune books, saw the film, or played the original Dune computer game (which shares a lot more in common with the stories than Dune 2 – which is just an abstract RTS game set in the “Dune” universe – but which I also adore), and I loved every minute of it. Eventually, my friends and I did battle through every one of the 13 levels as each of the three sides, and then we did it all over again with different strategies.

The only thing we could fault it on was the lack of a multiplayer mode. At that time, modern multiplayer games were just starting to appear (Doom’s multiplayer features, for example, were added as an afterthought; it was thought that only a few people would ever bother to use and enjoy them – but it was this action that eventually made it essential that all first person shooter games had a multiplayer mode), and I’d never seen or heard of a multiplayer real-time strategy game before. We played a lot of Dune 2, but our wishes for multiplayer were only realised in 1995, with the next item on this list.

5. Command & Conquer

C&C. A cut scene featuring the Ion Cannon. Now here was a game that you could get into. Command & Conquer, released by Westwood Studios – who’d already stunned us with Dune 2 – in 1995 made real-time strategy into a real art form. While on it’s surface just a re-write of Dune 2 (Arrakis is replaced by Earth, the Atreides and Harkonnen are replaced by the GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod, Melange is replaced by Tiberium, and so on) it added so much more.

For a start, it added real live action videos with hammy acting, blended right into the game. It also added a real sense of attitude: everybody who played through the GDI campaign remembers the first mission where you have to play “Commando,” the ass-kicking sniper with a stack of C4 (the level itself isn’t terribly challenging, and mostly consists of remembering to do all the actions in the right order, a-la Rick Dangerous, but it’s the attitude that made it stand out). The music has attitude. The FMV actors have attitude. The military hardware has attitude. The whole game reeked of it. You genuinely felt like some kind of general, sending his troops to the front line.

Even the installer had attitude: animations, speech, and a stereotypical movie “military supercomputer” user interface. The installer was simplified for the later Windows 95 Compatible (basically the game with a few patches on it) release of the game, and I resented them for it: that installer was still one of the coolest I’ve ever used.

It added lots of clever new features to the genre, too: transports that could have troops loaded into them, well-balanced superweapons, and the “right-click default action” idea that because so popular for so many games for so long to come.

What really made it stand out to my friends and I, though, was the multiplayer features. By this point, we’d gotten the hang of setting up LAN parties at short notice. We had stacks of null modem cables and even a few old network cards, scavenged from parts bins, and we knew IPX/SPX inside out (skills that would come in very useful when Duke Nukem 3D, one of the best multiplayer shoot-em-ups ever, would come out the following year).

So we played two player battles (by modem and null modem). And we played four-player battles (over networks of various kinds). And we modded the game (we made levels, we made new weapons). And we got better at it. The potential for the game was limitless. Every weekend for several months the attic at my dad’s house became our warzone: battle after battle with different strategies every time. I favoured engineer swamping and fast strikes at ill-defended construction yards. One friend preferred to tank rush. Another friend liked to turtle. A further friend enjoyed the frowned-upon habit of harvester-baiting. We all had our own strategies, our own alliances, and our own favourite maps. And we played it to death.

4. (Open) Transport Tycoon (Deluxe)

Transport Tycoon I’d played Railroad Tycoon, of course, because everybody who was anybody had played that. And I’d played A-Train, which was a lot more obscure and with good reason – it wasn’t really very good. But I’d never really been bitten by the transport simulation game until my dad – a transport consultant – bought me Transport Tycoon as an (unexpected) Christmas present.

I was sceptical. How much fun could it really be? Laying roads and rails, sponsoring schemes in towns, and building a network of trains, buses, lorries, planes and ships sounded – thanks to my understanding of “what daddy did” – a lot like work, rather than fun!

I played it non-stop. Despite it’s faults (stupid computer players, shaky pathfinding, etc.) it was a marvel: a clever, easy-to-learn, fun transport sim that you could play on many different levels. At it’s simplest, you can lay point-to-point track and run trains around, making “choo choo” noises all the way. At it’s most complex, you can set up clever track combinations to make efficient use of stations, provide passing points on single-track, flood valleys to use as canals, chain together stations to move cargo in a “leapfrog” method with greatest efficiency, and choose the best combination of locomotives to prioritise your passengers over your freight.

Then came Transport Tycoon Deluxe, an “enhanced” re-release. At a glance it just provides some silly theming, but looking a little deeper you soon discover how much bigger the game world just became: one-way signals – such a simple concept – enable the construction of far more advanced track configurations. The extra themes aren’t just themes; they provide whole different experiences (such as having to deliver fresh water to towns in deserts in the “tropical” theme to allow them to grow).

I was still playing the occasional game of Transport Tycoon Deluxe in the early 2000s, when OpenTTD started to appear on the scene. OpenTTD is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but, over the last few years, it’s exploded in size and now offers a lot more than official releases ever did: enter/exit signal “blocks” allow for complex station approach/exit designs, a (brilliant) improved pathfinding algorithm makes it possible to design very advanced track/road layouts and still have vehicles reach their destinations, electrified track is improved, stations can be “chained” together into larger stations, vehicles can “share” orders (like a symlink!), there’s a load of new kinds of airport and heliport, and, perhaps most exciting of all – it’s possible to extend the game even further with “NewGRF” add-on packs. In particular, I like the one which provides “realistic” British rail stock, including trucks with speed limits, believable diesel acceleration, and more.

And it’s still being developed: now and then I compile the bleeding-edge version from the repository, and it blows my mind. Trams are on the cards for a near future version, by the look of things, as is the ability to customise the colours on individual subclasses of vehicle. Very new is the ability to build “on-road” bus stations, which is nice, and to have the game automatically pause itself when it first starts (a popular option amongst micromanagers like myself!).

It’s thirteen years since the original Transport Tycoon was released, and I still regularly play the games derived from it. This is truly a “computer game that stole my life.”

3. Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth Of Worlds

Ultima Underworld 2 Most of the games in this list stole my life simply because I kept coming back to them time and time again, even years after I’d finished them or thought I’d seen everything there was to see in them. A couple of the games in this list stole my life because it took me so long to explore them fully – to do everything there was to do in them, to complete them on the hardest difficulty level, etc.

Ultima Underworld II stole my life on both counts, but especially on the latter. It’s a real-time first-person roleplaying game; something that – before Ultima Underworld – hadn’t been fully realised before (okay, okay, there was Dungeon Master…). In any case – what it provides is an immersive 3D dungeon experience with dynamic lighting, bridges, moving floors and walls, secret doors, switches and triggered interactivity, the ability to “look” up and down, and other fantastic graphical and gameplay engine improvements that wouldn’t be seen in the first-person-shooter genre until two years later, with the release of Rise of the Triad (and then, it could be argued, not quite so beautifully).

It’s a non-linear, slightly combat-heavy RPG with lots and lots of character… and lots and lots of characters, too. It’s got a complex magic system, a surprisingly deep combat system, bartering, the need to eat and drink and sleep, swimming… and lots of “the dev team thought of everything” moments when you, for example, weigh up your options in any particular subquest: “There’s a Despoiler Demon guarding that key I need… I could fight him; wonder if I’ve got any potions that could help with that? Maybe I could steal the key and try to run away? How good is a Despoiler’s eyesight? And can he swim?”

Better than that, it’s surprisingly big. About 8 hours into your first attempt at the game… and that’s a very variable amount of time, because there’s a lot to do and try if you want to, being a non-linear game… just when you’ll be starting to think that you’ve gotten the hang of everything, you’ll come across a portal and you’ll find that the game is nine times larger than you’d been lead to believe. The fun will be only just beginning.

The plot is complex and coherent, and you can genuinely feel like you’re “getting somewhere” if you need to. There’ll be monsters you can’t face but that you can come back later and attack, puzzles that you can’t solve until you’ve found clues elsewhere, and a storyline that’ll make you laugh, and cry, and think.

It’s also the first game I ever played that made me physically jump with fright (it was the first time I found a highly-poisonous, dog-sized monster called a Dread Spider… little did I know I’d blundered into a lair full of them…).

Ultima IV and Ultima VII (the later of which is also on this list) will always been my favourite Ultima games, but Ultima Underworld II did a better job of stealing my life. About two years passed between first playing it and first finishing it (although I’d had a few “breaks” from playing it), and I still sometimes go back and play as an unusual character class, or with a more or less heavy-handed approach. And it still pleases me.

2. Quake

Quake I bought Quake on the day of it’s release: June 22nd, 1996. It didn’t matter to me that I was on holiday at the time and wouldn’t be anywhere near my computer for another four days: I had to have it then and there, just so I could enjoy the smell of the manual or something.

I’d been involved with the beta test for almost six months, and it’s chugginess had been instrumental in my insistence that I be allowed to upgrade my PC. I got it home and played it non-stop until I’d finished all four campaigns on hard difficulty, and started on nightmare.

If this were any other game, that’s where the story would end. But Quake was special. After seeing how people had received Doom all those years ago, iD Games had put a lot of careful thought into how Quake should work. Within weeks, I was playing multiplayer deathmatches and co-operative monster hunts with my friends. The following year, still playing it, my college buddies and I would take control of the computer labs in order to have huge blast-fests with mods like Team Fortress installed.

I made maps. I’d done this before in Doom and in Duke Nukem 3D, but Quake – with it’s actual 3D-ness – made the whole process exciting again. I learnt enough C to write mods, and distributed them on the internet (one of my weapons, the Orgeslayer, a rotating-barrelled shotgun, still occasionally appears in mod packs, and it surprises me to see my handle still floating around with it, complete with obsolete e-mail address).

And every week we’d get together and play the maps I’d created. Times changed, and new mods appeared, and we played them too. Quake Soccer was a classic, kicking each other’s disembodied heads around a pitch. Rocket Area was a plain old blast-em-up distraction. Superheroes was a very cleverly-made adaptation. We played them all, and we played them to death.

I played through Quake 2 and Quake 3, and quite a bit of multiplayer of both, when I was at University, but the appeal was never quite the same – by this time, the Unreal Tournament series had stolen my interest. Now and then I still play a quick game of Quake, though.

1. Civilization

Civilization 4 And so we come to the number one life-stealing game for me, perhaps forever: Civilization (and it’s many sequels).

Let’s start by looking how I got into Civ (as it’s known to us veterans), though, because I’m in the unusual position of having a perfect memory of the first ever time I played it.

Back in 1991, my mum was subscribed to some kind of software club – you know, like those book clubs – that would send us a catalogue every month. In this particular month, they were raving about Civilization, a new strategy/wargame (yes, that’s how they chose to describe it). Sounds interesting, so she bought it. This was the original, v1.0.0.0, proper boxes set of Civilization. It came with a many-hundred page manual that just about squeezed into it’s big box, and four 5.25″ floppy (yes, actually “floppy”) disks. It could be run from the disks, and we didn’t have a hard drive at the time (just a CGA [four colour] old 286) with 480K of RAM, so that’s how I’d have to play it – switching disks to watch the introduction or to load up the help (Civilopedia).

The first time I ever played, it took me awhile to “get it.” I played as the Americans, and I had three cities that were doing okay when the Zulu first invaded my territory, bringing with them three or four units phalanx. I managed to fight them off, and continued to develop my technology and economy, eventually building myself an army of three knights! They set out, and immediately ran into the new Zulu army and their shiny new tanks.

And so, they kicked my arse. But I’m not so easily put down, and within a few weeks I’d gotten the hang of kicking arses and getting the occasional space race victory too. Not bad for a 10-year-old.

I played Civilization consistently for several years, and, when Civilization II came out in 1996, pounced on a copy of that too. Civilization II made a huge difference to the game: more technologies, more units, larger maps, more complex diplomacy, more wonders, stronger espionage, and, thanks to the extra storage space offered by compact discs, FMV clips of advisers, wonders, and other special content. This game was spectacular, and I played it at every opportunity for years to come. That it was released between my mock and final GCSE exams might have something to do with my grade drop between the two.

Civilization II didn’t support multiplayer gaming (at least, not in it’s initial release – the later Multiplayer Gold Edition did, which I also bought) so I bought a copy of CivNet. CivNet is a Windows-based remake of the original Civilization with multiplayer options, including an innovative “simultaneous moves” option which drastically changes the way the game is played. Along with Quake, CivNet became a staple of my college gaming group.

Civilization III, which was a bit of a disappointment to many long-term Civ fans, impressed me more than most when it was released in 2001, but it wasn’t until Civilization IV‘s release in 2005 that I found the game series truly stealing my life once again. Civilization IV’s development saw active contribution from Sid Meier, and it shows in just how well-designed the game is, and how well-balanced it is. I continue to play several hours in a typical week, and every time that begins to wane, a new add-on pack is released, giving me more things to explore and to get addicted to all over again.

Civilization games are deep, complex strategy games with a huge focus on resource management and empire building, and a not insignificant amount of war and diplomacy. The AI is typically brutal enough to make single-player games almost as fun as (and quite a lot faster than) multiplayer ones, and the game is designed well enough to cater for casual players (who will happily turn on the Governor options, automate production, etc.) and for micromanagers like me (who can tweak every little aspect of the way their cities operate, view reports on spending, and customise to their heart’s content). Civ 2 and (particularly) Civ 4 are easy to mod, too, and I’ve played a variety of custom scenarios, alternative rulesets, and other modifications to the core game over the years.

So Civilization, and it’s children, sits right at the top of the list of “computer games that stole my life.” For sixteen years I’ve been playing it, and I still haven’t beaten any of them on the highest difficulty levels or achieved every victory type with every race in any of them except the first. Here’s to you, Civilization. You stole my life.

Woken

The dream I remember form last night was particularly strange, even by my standards. I think I remember it so clearly because I woke up several times during the night. The first time I remember waking up it had been after a dream in which I saw somebody creeping up on me, asleep, and so I woke myself in order to repel them. When I woke up I grabbed my phone (it’s bright screen serves as a pretty good torch) and looked around before realising I’d been dreaming. The second time I was woken was by Claire‘s rats, Mario and Luigi, who had pushed over something or otherwise made a loud clattering sound. The third time I woke was by my "system clock," about two minutes before my alarm went off, during the following dream:

My dream was set in a network of concrete buildings on a hillside (somewhat reminiscent of Penglais campus at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, only not). It was Claire’s birthday, and Paul had come up with some kind of surprise celebration and wanted me to help make his plan succeed. Critical to this plan was that I delivered a six-pack of canned lager to "Claire’s bedroom" without her noticing. This room which was on the top floor of one of these concrete buildings, a black-painted hotel of some variety.

Claire wanted to know where her room was, so I hid the lager in a carrier bag and led the way up through the building. The top dozen or so floors before our destination was some kind of nightclub, comprised of a number of small interconnected rooms with steep staircases running through them. Climbing upwards through them all was quite strenuous, and not helped by the masses of people stood or sat in each of the rooms. Claire began to get tired, but persevered.

Finally we reached the correct floor. A wide, upwards-sloping corridor lead towards a cinema, and somewhere along this corridor we know we’d find Claire’s room. Paul reappeared, having followed us up through the building, because – he announced – he’d forgotten to tell us something: it was only possible to get to Claire’s room by walking along the corridor while nobody else was (as if the destination changed based on who was traversing it). He advised us that there were two regular cinemagoers who were liable to walk down the corridor at any time, thereby potentially scuppering our chances of getting where we wanted to go, and he excused himself for awhile to check whether or not these two people were likely to appear any time soon. He returned and said that they were not likely to come here soon, and so we waited for a break in the human traffic in the corridor (remember: we needed it to be empty for it to "work") and the three of us started walking down it.

Unfortunately, we were still unable to get into Claire’s room because the door was locked with a complicated combination lock that seemed to have been modelled on a tile-sliding puzzle. A block of tiles, each with different coloured circles on, eluded us: we tried a few combinations, but not one of the three of us could decipher it.

We backtracked to look for help, but because there were now other people using the corridor, we instead found ourselves in a cave mouth which opened out over a sheer cliff face. A sterotypical cave man sat near the lip of the mouth, alternately looking over the edge and retreating. We noticed that the reason he was unable to look over the edge for long was because an enormous ostrich – about fifty metres high – was reaching up the cliff and attempting to eat him. Fortunately for him, he had a small black umbrella which he was able to hide behind, which was sufficient to distract the ostrich and trick it into thinking he wasn’t there at all.

And that’ll be where I woke up. Which is probably for the best, because that was beginning to get distinctly trippy.

A Few Links To Share

A few links I wanted to share with you to brighten up your day:

A sign seen on Music Zone, Preston’s door, as snapped by Dave.
The Mr. Lee CatCam – a great example of why geeks should not be allowed to own cats. Great photos from the travels of an everyday housecat, though.
My So-Called Second Life, an article about the culture of massively multiplayer social space Second Life, and thoughts on purchasing a penis.

It’s All Fun And Games

Back to work after a great weekend. Troma Night was particularly successful this week – we watched a RiffTrax‘d copy of Eragon (“Get your ragons online at e-ragon!”), which was suitably hilarious; the classic bit of self-deprecating sci-fi that is Barbarella (“Hmm… camp bad guy number 104… how will Barbarella get past this one? Oh; using sex. What a surprise!”); and Human Traffic, which is what Trainspotting could have been if it wanted to appeal to the 24 Hour Party People demographic. Kinda.

That’s three mediocre-to-good films, plus a RiffTrax on one of them. That’s pretty good stamina for Troma Nights these days. After the last film had finished, everybody stood up and meandered towards the door, chatting as they went about the various recent events (floods, terrorism, blah blah) that had been going on. Then stopped walking. Then kept talking. “Well, I’m sitting down again,” I said, after awhile, and so did everybody else. And so, for the first time in years, a 3-film Troma Night ended with everybody sat around chatting for half an hour or more. Which is fab: Troma Night’s always supposed to have been about the people (not the films, the beer, or the pizza, which jointly come about second), and actually stopping to pass time at the end of a night was a fun and unusual reminder of what we’re all really here for.

Then on Sunday we had a low-key but “different” Geek Night. We only had Matt P, Claire and me, so we took the opportunity to learn and try out a handful of the games from the Playing With Pyramids book and Treehouse sets Claire had gotten from Looney Labs (creators of Chrononauts and Fluxx, amongst other things). Aside from Treehouse itself (which is an easy-to-learn and short game – with perhaps a little too much luck – that gets you used to playing with the pyramids), we played Icehouse, Homeworlds, and RAMbots.

Icehouse is the original Icehouse strategy game – a real-time (no, not simultaneous turn: actually real-time – players can all perform legal moves whenever they like) board game, which is somewhat unusual. Icehouse is fun, but I think it would work better with more players, more diplomacy, and more thoughtful strategy than we were executing.

Homeworlds is a stunningly-clever turn-based game of space strategy, diplomacy, exploration, and conquest. There’s a few things in it that make you have to think quite hard (such as the way that the hyperspace system works, the fact that the orientation, not the colour, of a piece implies it’s ownership, and the difference between free and sacrificial actions). Not to mention the secret alignments of the players. This game’s been running through my head ever since we played (I’ve just come up with a strategy that I should have done in the last three turns to lead me to a victory that would have been particularly brutal).

Finally, RAMbots – which I quite liked, but which I think could be ludicrously good fun with four players – is a simultaneous-turn based game of secret orders, which reminds me slightly of the ship-to-ship combat in Yo-Ho-Ho! Puzzle Pirates! or Space Fleet. Players each secretly “program” their robots using instructions from their “limited” code pool and execute them in a way that will seem instantly familiar to any computer scientists who play it (at least, those who are familiar with ideas like priority queues, program counters, and parallel processing), and shouldn’t be so hard for others to learn, too. These robots can drive around the board (actually a chessboard) trying to activate and ram “beacons” in an order chosen by the player to their right, but it’s also possible to ram, push, pull, tip up, and shoot at the other robots too… causing damage lets you “steal” from their instruction set, making it harder for them to write effective programs… and so it goes on.

We’ll be having another Geek Night on Friday, if you want to join in: we’ll be playing more of these four games (and perhaps some other bits of pyramid-related fun), and maybe even a game or Illuminati, if it’s not too late by the time it (and it’s carriers) arrive.

Otters, Again

Saw my family of otters again this lunchtime. The young ones seem to have grown up now: they were all looking big and healthy as they were fishing in the Rheidol. I followed them along the riverbank and I think I’ve seen where they’re nesting, which is cool.

Another interesting discovery: I didn’t realise that otters were vocal until one climbed on a rock to get a better look at what I was up to (I’d clambered down the bank to see them better) and started squeaking to the others.

Tried to get a picture, but, again, conditions were against me. Some day, maybe.

Fictional Twinning

Claire‘s birthday trip to Manchester was a success last weekend; saw some good comedy, drank ’til late at a gay bar which has to be the only pub I’ve ever seen to have a balcony overlooking the middle of a multi-storey car park, and spent most of Sunday recovering. It’s not like being 21: staying up 7am to 3am and getting into the pub by mid-afternoon hurts the following day. Maybe I’m getting old.

We stayed at my mum’s house, as she’d vacated it to go to Somerset. She was apparently staying in a town called Wincanton, which has an unusual characteristic. It’s one of only two towns I’ve seen to be twinned with a fictional place (it’s twinned with Ankh-Morpork). The other is, of course, Westerburg, which is twinned with Daventry.

This week we’ve kept ourselves busy with ongoing QParty organisation. We posted out the first half-or-thereabouts of the invitations this morning, to the people we know the addresses for. Would you believe that in the entirety of Aberystwyth it’s impossible to buy C5-size envelopes with a window?

Back to League Of Gentlemen Night II.

1/0

On Ruth’s recommendation, I’ve been reading 1/0 (One Over Zero), a webcomic that ran from 2000-2003. It’s remarkably clever, drawing ideas about religion and philosophy and determinism and morality into a silly little abstract universe of it’s author’s (Tailsteak) creation. It could be said to be fourth-wall breaking, except for the fact that it never really had a fourth wall to begin with: the author is the omnipresent deity of the comic (although he denies the title himself), and his own character plays a very real part in it’s ongoing stories.

If you’re looking for a few hours distraction here and there, give it a whirl.

Years later, I recommended the author’s latest webcomic, Forward (after I accidentally hacked into a system and stole future episodes).

Carbon Neutrality

Recently, Kit wrote about carbon offsetting, calling it wishful thinking at best – at worst, greenwash. In particular, he was looking at tree planting as a method of offsetting carbon emissions, because it’s the most popular method by far. Just this morning I passed a truck making deliveries to a shop around the corner from me, proudly proclaiming in letters on the back that were almost as big as the company name, "We are a carbon neutral company."

This got me thinking about the mathematics of carbon neutrality. As I understood it, every year your company assesses it’s CO₂ production, estimating how much carbon it’s flinging into the atmosphere, and pays another company to plant trees that will "offset" the carbon emitted by absorbing the gas in that way that plants do – through photosynthesis. I found myself wondering how long this process takes – for instance, if I produced X tonnes of CO₂ last year, so I need to buy Y trees to counteract that… how long will it take those Y trees to absorb X tonnes of CO₂. The missing variable, T, doesn’t seem to be widely publicised – and there’s a huge difference between this year’s emissions being absorbed in one year than being absorbed in 40 years.

It turns out, thanks to some research this morning, that this is actually accounted for. T is one year: therefore, in theory at least, your purchase of a certain number of trees will offset the production of – for example – the carbon emissions of a particular motor vehicle for the rest of it’s lifespan. It’s a very wooly theory, of course – the vehicle will become less efficient with age, for instance; some species of trees do not produce a net reduction in their local CO₂ levels for the first eight years of their lives; maintaining a sustainable forest makes significantly less impact on CO₂ than planting new forests; and as forests reach maturity (30-60 years, depending on the species) they become less efficient at impacting CO₂ again. There are lots of factors that aren’t taken into account, but at least my "missing variable" is.

It turns out that factoring in time isn’t a problem, because tree planting is really quite cheap. A hundred pounds or so shelled out when buying a new petrol-driven car (that’ll see pretty average use) pays for enough trees to be planted that – assuming that they are left alone during the entire working lifespan of the car and are not cut down or (worse yet) burned – the carbon emissions of that car are "neutralised." Good for you. You can feel a happy feeling about yourself.

As an optional aside:
I’m somewhat reminded of the Catholic Church’s practice of indulgences. It is the belief of Catholics that sins must be confessed to be forgiven, but that because humans are such naughty, sinful creatures, it’s pretty likely that they’ll have unabsolved sins at the time of their death. Mortal sins (the really serious kind) and concious rejection of God have you sent straight to Hell, but if you’ve merely got a few venial sins (the not-quite-so-serious kind) under your belt when you die, you’ll have to go to a place called Purgatory where you’ll be punished… er… I mean cleansed… of your remaining sins so that you’re pure when you finally get to enter Heaven. Catholocism also teaches that the time that you (or somebody else – even somebody already dead) need to spend in Purgatory can be reduced (let’s call it "offsetting") through penitential acts: usually prayer, but in the past, deliberately bringing punishment on oneself was perhaps almost as popular (fasting, wearing uncomfortable clothing, etc.). Prior to 1567, if you’d committed a sin – and you had the money – you could even buy your way out of it, purchasing an indulgence from your priest that offset, for example, several hundred days worth of penitential prayer without ever getting down on your knees or picking up a rosary. Some divisions of the Catholic Church still approve of giving money to charity as an act of penance, but "buying your way out of penance" by giving to God is now seen as wrong (I wonder how many "sinners" asked for their money back after being told that their indulgences, purchased before 1567, were no longer valid?).

That diversion aside: my research isn’t all fun and games, though. While initial evidence seems to indicate that carbon offsetting through tree planting genuinely can, done right, theoretically, kind-of reduce atmospheric CO₂ by an equivilent volume to that output by the sinner… er, I mean, offender (wow; it’s easy to accidently take a metaphor too far, isn’t it), the bigger question for many people is: what about global warming?

And that’s where it all falls down. All the studies seem to indicate that while tropical forests (you know, like the ones in Brazil that we just keep felling) cause a global cooling effect, forests in temperate areas have no net effect on global temperatures. It turns out that despite them removing carbon compounds from the air, they also provide a dark and (of course) light-absorbing surface which actually helps to trap heat close to the planet’s surface. Worse yet, evergreen trees (of the kind that are so popular in European tree farms) and plantations in cold areas have an even worse effect, absorbing the sun’s heat that would otherwise be reflected – at least some of the year – by snow.

We’re going to have to see a lot more long-term studies on carbon offsetting before we get a consensus on what it’s actually doing for us as a species, but it should be evident that it certainly doesn’t do everything it claims to do, or at least that it isn’t so clear-cut as it could be. As a way to make yourself feel less guilty for polluting the atmosphere, though, it certainly works a treat, and modern carbon offset companies help to make it a lot less effort than repeated Hail Marys or reducing emissions in the first place.

If that’s all a bit serious for my blog, take a look at CheatNeutral. CheatNeutral apply the carbon offset model to relationships – if you’ve cheated on your partner, pay CheatNeutral £2.50 and they’ll give you a certificate with which to apologise to your partner. They promise to invest your money in helping to ensure that other people don’t cheat on their partner – either by keeping them single or by keeping them faithful, so you can relieve the guilt of cheating by knowing that you’re helping to ensure that other people don’t get cheated on too.

QParty Progress

After weeks of debating and procrastinating, Claire and I have finally managed to order the invitation cards we’ll be sending out for QParty. I’m quite pleased with how they look (well, in proof form), and I hope that those of you who’ll be receiving them within the next fortnight or so will smile when you see them, too. Gratitude due to Paul for helping us to arrange them.

It’s all surprisingly complicated. Today, we spent some time discussing the concept of speeches. As anybody who knows me will agree, I love the sound of my own voice, but it’s always been a traditional part of wedding receptions – on which, in our own way, we’re modelling parts of QParty – to get certain other people… the father of the bride, the best man, etc… to say a few words too. But with no bride and no best man, it’s somewhat difficult to decide on the best way to provide the same kind of experience. We think we’re set, now, but for a moment I was wondering.

I’m looking forward to it, and it’s not even just because I like to drink and dance or because I like to get big groups of people I know together into one place: it’s because, though what others have said, it’s turning out to mean something. That’s kind of hard to explain:

I suppose it’s because other people are taking QParty so seriously. We weren’t sure that they would. We’d always said – once we discovered that neither of us were interested in marriage – that we would one day have a party in leiu of a wedding, because that’s the kind of party we like. Since then, we’ve gone to three weddings and one engagement party, and we’re even more sure that we don’t want to get married, but even more sure that we want to drink and dance and show everybody exactly we care about where our relationship stands.

I don’t know about Claire, but I’m genuinely surprised (it’s a good kind of surprised) at some of the responses we’ve had when we said we wanted to have this party. Especially from our parents, who’d already taken our name change in their stride, and from my dad in particular, who’s been especially proactive in helping us make our plans come to life… but also from our friends, who’ve been very positive about the idea (even those for whom not marrying would be an inconceivable life choice), coo-ed and “aww”-ed in a sweet and only slightly sickening way, and have suggested all kinds of activities and themes for the party itself, some of which we may have adopted. So; thank you all for the surprise.

I’ve had some difficulty working out the addresses of everybody I’d like to send invitations too. In particular, right now, I’m lacking postal addresses for Beth and Pete, and non-termtime addresses for Ele and Andy K. If you’re reading this, could you get an address to me within the next week or so; thanks. An inevitable problem with this time of year is that a lot of our friends – even the ones we had addresses for – have just moved. Such is the risk with having friends who are students or recent graduates.

More to follow, I’m sure.

Claire’s Birthday

It’s Claire‘s birthday on Saturday, and she’s made a plan! Just thought I’d share that news here in case anybody’s given up on reading Claire’s blog (it doesn’t get many updates, to be fair) and wouldn’t otherwise hear about our plan to shop, drink, and watch comedy in Manchester. She’s got the details.

Back At Work

I’m back at work today, after the ‘flu-like illness I had earlier this week. Noticing how much I was still coughing, a co-worker plonked a whisky-heavy hot toddy down on the desk in front of me.

I’m not coughing so much, but my productivity is shot.

Open Fidelity

The other book I got in my recent order from Amazon was Open Fidelity: An A-Z Guide, by Anna Sharman. I bought the book after being made aware of it’s existence by the author on a discussion list on which we’re both members. It’s cheaper to buy direct from her website, and an e-book version is available for just £3, but I had an Amazon voucher that was burning a hole in my pocket, and an order that was only a few pounds from Super Saver delivery!

It’s not in competition with The Ethical Slut (my review), by any stretch of the imagination. At 36 pages long, it’s no good as a paperweight. However, it is good for what I bought it for – providing a five-minute introduction to open relationships to those people who seem to be confused by the concept (“Look, just read this…”).

As you might expect from the name, the book takes each letter of the alphabet and writes a little about it. N… is for Negotiation, J… is for Jealousy, W… is for weddings, and so on. In addition, is if it’s pretending to be some kind of encyclopædia, each page ends with “you might also have meant”-style suggestions, which are sometimes serious but as often tongue-in-cheek: “O is also for… Over – see E for Ending Relationships, and Out – see P for going Public.”

And some bits of it are really good: D (Defending your relationship), L (Love), and M (Monogamy) are all particularly well-written and thought-provoking. Considering that what I thought I was buying was a coffee-table conversation-starter (and it is that!), I ended up taking more from the book than I expected. Other bits are silly, in particular Z (Zzzzz), but never too silly to be useless. There are bits that don’t feel like they have any relevance to me: G (God), R (Rings), and W (Weddings), in particular, and in a 36-page book for £4, I almost feel as if I should get better value for money… those three pages are worth… what… almost 35 pence!

There’s a set of quotes in the middle of the book, and a little before the middle of the alphabet (I’d have thought that Anna would have put it after Q, to save herself a letter, but no, she’d saved that for Queer Relationships, which I’m not entirely sure justified a page of it’s own). They’re okay, but there’s nothing mind-blowingly clever in there.

Anna’s planing to work on three more books. The most obvious one is Open Fidelity: the Complete Guide, which will presumably be a less concise version of this book, with more emphasis on how-tos and stuff, which I’m sure will have value to some, but I doubt there’s anything new to somebody who’s succesfully practiced non-monogamy. The second is Open Fidelity and Bisexuality. This is a book that probably really does need to be written: there are many bisexual people or otherwise bi-inclined people unfulfilled by their monogamous relationships with one or the other gender. There are plenty more who are quite happy with that arrangement, of course, but there’s nonetheless probably a lot less market for a book about how to be a monogamous bisexual.

The third book Anna’s planning is the one that interests me the most, even though it’s the one that applies least to me, and it’s just because it’s a book who’s title you might never expect to see. The title is Open Fidelity: a Quaker Perspective. Yup, you read that right. I’ll be fascinated to see what she comes up with for that.

As usual with the books I review, this’ll be sat around in the living room at The Cottage for some time to come, for anybody who fancies a flick.

Blurgh!

Well, I’m ill. I’ve been awake for eight hours today and I’m exhausted, my nose keeps running, and I’m coughing like I’ve been smoking for fifty years. Hopefully a little bit of vitamin C and a lot of rest will fix me.

Needless to say, I blame Sarah S for this.

Thanks to Claire for insisting that I wasn’t well enough to go to work this morning (turns out she was right) and to Jen for going "aww" every time I coughed this evening as we said goodbye to Jimmy and kicked him out of town. The place won’t be quite the same without him.

Boys On Hills

Helen pointed out that this photo looked like an advertisement for a new boy band.

Now it does even more.