2008 Archives

Violet (Interactive Fiction)

It’s been a long while, but I’ve got some more interactive fiction to recommend: Violet, by Jeremy Freese. It’s got all of the usual things I like in a modern piece of interactive fiction: a believable, detailed world that you can really feel like you’re a part of, and which “carries on” around you; a beginning that doesn’t need to explain itself (you can pick it up as you go along); an enthusiastic thoroughness as far as anticipating what a player might try (many of the “unusual” things you can try to do have been anticipated and have specific flavour text); and a story that’s emotive and clever. So far, so good.

But the way in which it really furthers the genre is in it’s presentation format. The narrator of the story – Violet – is the girlfriend of the protagonist, who – through a series of encouragements and discouragements, as well as ocassional asides and additional commentary – helps lead you through your adventure: it is, if you like, a second-person perspective text-based adventure. But it doesn’t take long to realise that she isn’t actually there at all: all of her dialogue is in your head – it’s what your character thinks she would say in response to everything you’re doing.

I thoroughly explored the game in about an hour, and I highly recommend that you do, too: it’s a fabulous piece of interactive fiction, wrapped around a reasonably good bit of fiction.

On Windows, download and install Windows Frotz (the interpreter), download the game itself, run the former and use it to play the latter.
On MacOS, use Spatterlight instead of WinFrotz, otherwise same as Windows.
On other platforms, from the Nintendo Game Boy to the ZX Spectrum, start reading here.

Fully expect your feedback on this one, JTA.

Update, 19th October 2008, 14:20: Fixed the link to Windows Frotz (previously pointed at WinFrotz, which – while a fabulous Z-Code interpeter, can’t cope with ZBlorb files like the one this game is packaged in). Sorry, Binky.

How to be Mono-Friendly

Freaksexual just wrote a fantastic blog post (as usual) instructing monogamous people “How to be Poly-Friendly“. It’s an excellent little post about the kinds of faux pas it’s easy to make without even thinking about it, and while it’s very obviously targetted at monogamous folk who have polyamourous friends or lovers, I couldn’t help but feel that I’ve made a few mistakes on that list myself at one time or another.

However hard it tries not to be, though, it still comes across as a little militant (I know that’s not the intention!) in it’s defensiveness, and I thought it probably deserved an “opposite number”; a counter-post. So here’s my attempt – and I’m certainly not the most-qualified person to write it – to explain how poly-people can be mono-friendly.

How to be Mono-Friendly

Don’t preach polyamoury. It’s okay – sometimes even helpful – to let the monogamous know that the potential exists for negotiated nonmonogamy (and that for those for whom it works, it can be far better than being in a single relationship could have been). It may well be something that they’d never even considered or that they didn’t think could actually work, and letting them know that it does and how it can is an eye-opener for many. But it’s not appropriate to try to “sell” your lifestyle choice by dropping it in at every opportunity: for many – most – people it doesn’t work, and these people have a right not to be harassed. Especially do not make the sweeping claim that your lifestyle is universally better than theirs. That it is better for you is not in dispute, but shouting about how universal adoption of polyamoury will stop infidelity/prevent world hunger/cure cancer is wrong on every single count, and patronising to boot.

It’s easy to overstate the significance of “mono privilege”: that the world discriminates in favour of couples (and, specifically, one-man-one-woman couples). It’s true, of course, and it’d certainly be nice if monogamous people were aware of quite how complicated things even some simple things can be for some poly families, but there’s no excuse for spending the whole time moaning about how easy the mono people have it… and while it’s worth saying once, nobody wants to hear for the hundredth time how unfair it is that you have to organise your life or your finances in a particular way because that’s the way the system works.

Sometimes, monogamous friends can find it awkward or uncomfortable to know how best to refer to your partners, and the polite thing to do is to help them find a word. If you have a variety of different relationships of different types, folks new to poly ideas in general will sometimes trip over their own tongues while trying to decide whether to use the word “partner,” or “girlfriend,” or “friend,” or “fuck-buddy,” or whatever. When you introduce somebody, pick a word (“friend” is okay, but be ready for questions if you’re later seen to be doing what many mono-people would call “more than friends”). And if a friend is struggling to find words to refer to one of your relationships, help them out by dropping in a suitable word for them to use.

Similarly, be ready for questions about your relationships. There’s no point in denying that your lifestyle is unusual, and it will attract a lot of interest. Don’t be afraid to say, “This is how it is… …but if you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask – I know it’s a little unusual!” From time to time, you’ll get the same initial questions – is it all about the sex? are you kinky? are there orgies? are you bisexual? – but if you can help your friend get past that, you’ll find that, in general, poly relationships aren’t really any different from mono relationships, and you’ll help them to see that, too. By showing that you’re happy to answer questions, you’re also helping poly activism in a tiny way, by demonstrating that it’s nothing to be ashamed or afraid of, just a different way that some people choose to live their lives.

If you consider yourself polyamourous and you’re dating somebody who considers themselves monogamous, it’s as important for you as it is for them to be honest about where things are going. Don’t let them believe that it’s possible for them to “convert” you to monogamy if it’s not true, and it’ll be easier for them to admit any discomfort with you having other partners. In some ways, the kinds of negotiation that poly-people have to do on a day-to-day basis gives you an advantage when it comes to laying your cards on the table, and it’s important that you respect that it might be a lot less easy for your partner to talk about their wants and fears. And if you’re in a long-term relationship with a mono without seeing any other partners, don’t let them trick themselves into thinking they’ve “cured” you of your nonmonogamous tendencies.

Remember that for many monogamous people, just like for many polyamourous people, their lifestyle is not something that they consider to be a “choice”. In a group of mostly polyamourous people, it’s perhaps even more difficult for a monogamous person to feel like they fit in than it can be for a lone poly-person in a group of monogamous people, because the lone poly, by omission at least, can at least come off as “one of them.” Some people will experiment with both monogamy and nonmonogany and will settle on one or the other because it just feels right; others are so sure of their identity that they will achieve the same without even needing to experiment. That’s okay, and it’s belittling to play the “how do you know if you don’t try it” card, just as it is with sexuality – so don’t!

Be polite in your objections to the terms people use, and assume good faith first. You’ll receive party invitations to you “and your partner”, you’ll be asked “how your boyfriend is doing”, and the sheer number of terms that refer to things that superficially appear similar means you’ll invariably hear your relationship structure described in ways with which you might not be comfortable (polyamoury, open relationship, open marriage, swinging, playing the field, friends-with-benefits, nonmonogomy, ethical sluttery, free love…). Try not to take offence – would you want a monogamous person to take offence if you accidentally referred to their wife as their girlfriend? – but politely explain what the term means to you and what you’d prefer they said. “If it’s not too much trouble, is it okay if I bring both my partners?” is an acceptable reply, but “How dare you only invite one of my partners!” is not.

I’ve no doubt that I’ve been guilty of any number of these over the last few years, and I apologise to anybody I’ve offended as a result: but if all the poly-people read this, and all the mono-people read that, I think that we’ll all be a lot better off.

Two Recent Dreams

Summaries of two dreams I’ve had recently:

The Parrot

Faye was moving out of her family home and into a flat of her own, and as it was small, she wasn’t able to provide sufficient space for all of her many critters, so she rehomed a parrot (a Scarlet Macaw, although I’m pretty sure she only has an African Grey in real life). Having heard about this from my mum and on Faye’s blog, I visited Preston and met the parrot, who turned out to be a remarkably intelligent “talker,” – even for a parrot in general – capable even of understanding some particularly complex linguistic constructions like rhyming.

The Moped

I was driving a moped, with Claire riding on the back (she commented that I was doing a better job of it than she would, reminiscent a real-life skidooing incident). We were travelling at speed around the hilly, cobbled streets of a distinctly-Mediterranean city. We were dodging traffic and in an obvious hurry when I was rudely woken by the telephone.

Mi Parolas Esperanton! (Apenaŭ)

Antaŭ pluraj semajnoj, mi havis sonĝo. Mi sonĝis de mi parolas Esperanton. Neniu rajtas diri mi ne postiras mia sonĝoj, ĉar mi komencis lerni la lingvo!

(sed mi bezonis vortaron por skribis jenon)

Translation of my very rough-and-ready multilingual work, above: Several weeks ago, I had a dream. I dreamt that I spoke Esperanto. Nobody may say I don’t follow my dreams, because I’ve begun learning the language. (although I required a dictionary to write this)

That’s the short and long of it, really. Thanks to Lernu!‘s online “audiobook”-like tutorials and Project Gutenberg and a half-dozen other sites, I’ve now got a basic grasp of Esperanto. I can say who I am and how I am and ask the same of you, tell you what I do for a living, conjugate a variety of verbs (actually, any verb – the structure of the language is so thoughtfully put-together that the rules for using it are logical and exception-free).

Why am I learning a language that I know no other speakers of? Well, it gives me something new to think about on my lunch breaks, but I’m afraid the best reason is the one detailed (bilingually) above: I dreamt I could, so I wanted to find out if I was able to. I’ve always been particularly bad at picking up human languages (programming languages, by comparison, I’m tend to learn very fast), and as I’m not quite mad enough yet to learn Lojban, I guess Esperanto‘s the next-best thing.

Toilets With Urinals? Toilets Without Urinals?

Remember this picture I took at BiCon this year?

Looks like as a concept it’s going to become not-so-strange, according to a report in Metro: University students open trans-gender toilets.

Interview Sarah Palin

Remember about four-and-a-bit years ago, I downloaded Dadadodo, which I described at the time as a “word disassociator?” The program itself is a Markov chain generator/randomiser that works on sentence structures: in other words, given some text (speeches, poetry, blog posts, whatever – other kinds have been demonstrated to work on things like music) it will learn the frequencies in which words and punctuation follow other words and punctuation and use that to build resulting sentences.

Imagine the fun you could have if you took the combined speeches of any politician particularly famous for waffling through their answers. Like, say, US presidential election Republican party running mate Sarah Palin…

Well, imagine no more – Interview Sarah Palin has you covered. Kick-starting paragraphs (“winding her up”) with particular topics (e.g. “Iraq and Afghanistan,” “John McCain,” etc.) sets off this fabulous little Markov-chain-speechbot. Even if you don’t understand even the theories of the mathematics, you can enjoy this site so long as you’ve got a suitable sense of humour around political waffling.

Especially For Jimmy

You may have beaten me to the centre of the galaxy, Jimmy, but…

Games I Have Been Playing Recently

There’s a couple of computer games I’ve played recently that I thought I’d share with you so that you, too, can go play them and waste all your free time (hopefully you’ve got more free time than I do to be wasted!).

RUCKINGENUR II

Free (as in beer) to download and play – download it here. Windows only (requires the .NET framework), although there’s talk of a Linux port using Mono.

A self-confessed “game for engineers.” If you ever played Uplink and thought “Hmm, this is good, but I’d rather be hacking hardware, not software,” then you really ought to give it a try. Ruckingenur II is a hardware hacking simulator: in it’s four missions you’ll be determining the code of an electronic door lock, reprogramming a thumbprint scanner to accept your print, breaking the code of a (rather trivial) radio scrambling system, and defusing a tamper-proof bomb. It’s all about interpreting the circuitry and analysing signals, rather than simply bridging circuits, as would be so much easier in so many of the missions. Presumably your boss spent all of the money on the universal combined multi-meter/serial port analyser/debugger and didn’t have any budget left to get you a soldering iron and a half-dozen lengths of wire. Ah well.

It’s only short. I got through all four missions in about 20 minutes, and I could probably have done it quicker if I hadn’t kept detonating the bomb at the end: the very first thing I did was to examine the circuit (while the clock is ticking), correctly analyse which wire carried the signal to the expolosive, and send a quick pulse down that line, confirming my suspicions by blowing my face off.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on, fellow geeks.

SPORE

The other game that’s consumed any of my time of late – by which I mean, of course, all of the free time I can find – is Maxis’s hot new title Spore.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, Spore is the result of a collaboration between Will Wright (co-founder of Maxis, inventor of SimCity, The Sims, etc.) and Soren Johnson (right-hand man to Sid Meier during the development of Civilization III and Civilization IV), it’s has been described as “the ultimate God game,” and as “SimEverything.”

During the game, you’ll help a species progress from being a tiny plankton-like creature living in a drop of water all the way up to being a galactic empire spanning many star systems. The concept of “evolution” touted in the game isn’t really accurate, though, and what you’re actually doing – tweaking your species a little each generation towards your own goals, rather than having the most successful genetic code reflected in the next generation – is closer to intelligent design than anything that any evolutionist would approve of.

Unfortunately, as its Zero Puncuation review gives away, most of the fun of the game is shunted towards the Space Phase, the last of the five phases of the game (the others being Cell, Creature, Tribal, and Civilization), and it makes the rest of the game seem a little short by comparison (note that I disagree with the statement in the Zero Puncuation review about carnivore-superiority: my first space-faring race had no problem with befriending and converting other creatures, tribes and civilizations all the way). The Space stage, however, really shines.

Spore is an amazing achievement, and it’s continues to be fresh and surprising to play (thanks, in part, to the enormous scope of it’s in-game galaxy, but more thanks to the fact that Spore “swaps” your creatures and other content with other players around the world), so I’d recommend you give it a go if you haven’t already. It’s a real shame that the DRM is so fucked-up, because Maxis have just set themselves up for Spore to be the most-pirated game in history (after all, the pirated copy is now better than the legitimate one). Nonetheless, it’s worth getting hold of a copy by one means or another just so you can see what the fuss is all about.

Oh, and here’s one of my species, a Gliblander, stood next to the species’ interstellar spacecraft, the Dirty Beast.

Pictures From PolyDay 2008

For the benefit of people I promised pictures to, here’s some of the photos I took at PolyDay 2008, the post-Dossie Poly Meal, and generally during Claire and I’s trip to London this weekend. There are more photos I’ll share in due course, little doubt, and my write-up of what PolyDay was like, which I may post if and when I get the time, too. But for now, photos – make up your own damn story.

Click for bigger pics.

Thanks to everybody who made it a fabulous weekend.

SSL Client Certificate Authentication In Ruby On Rails

I’ve been playing with using client-side SSL certificates (installed into your web browser) as a means to authenticate against a Ruby on Rails-powered application. This subject is geeky and of limited interest even to the people who read this blog (with the possible exception of Ruth, who may find herself doing exactly this as part of her Masters dissertation), so rather than write about it all here, I’ve written a howto/article: SSL Client Certificate Authentication In Ruby On Rails. If you’re at all interested in the topic, you’re welcome to have a read and give me any feedback.

Ruth’s Blog Post

That one over there.

It fills me with warm fuzziness. After a weekend away doing all the things she mentioned (as well as a number of unmentionable things in The British Museum), I’ve got a pile of e-mail and blog entries to get through this lunchtime, so I shan’t waste time blogging myself. Instead, I’ll just point you at Ruth‘s blog entry and leave it at that. Oh; wait – I already did.

Pictures From The Weekend

I couldn’t (easily) post these pictures while out-and-about, so I thought I’d share them now:

The tailbackon the M6. That’s a serious amount of traffic at a complete standstill, and people million about on the carriageway. In the distance, in the first one, you can just about make out the tops of the emergency services vehicles, despite the low resolution of the picture.

$Gareth\'s birthday cake$ $Penny\'s birthday cake$

Gareth and Penny’s birthday cakes. Gareth’s is decorated with a small place flying across a blue sky, while Penny’s is shaped like a fairytale castle.

This was the moment during their recollection of their boating holiday that Matt suddenly realised that what Liz was telling him about a “steaking incident” was actually true and not something he’d dreamt.

Claire, Jimmy, and Beth. I don’t think Beth approves of this photo being taken.

A fabulous example of BiCon’s non-assuming, gender-doesn’t-really-matter thinking, in the form of the signs on the toilet doors. Behind these, the secondary signs are the same, except the the “Toilets with urinals” sign has had appended to it “Standing up okay,” and the “Toilets without urinals” sign has had appended to it “Standing up okay, put you might end up pissing on the seat.”

Not only a transgender-friendly statement, these signs also function as a reminder that in an environment where your gender is one preferred by not 50% but closer to 95% of the people present, imposing privacy by something as arbitary as gender is even more pointless than it is in the rest of the world.

The organisers of BiCon run a census each year. I think this photograph of a small part of the survey really does reflect “BiCon thinking” when it comes to the definition of gender and sexuality. One question reads “What term(s) do you use to describe your gender?”, with the following options – female only, female mostly, female somewhat more, female/male equally, male somewhat more, male mostly, male only, none/no gender, androgynous, genderqueer, other (please specify). Where almost any other survey would provide in the region of two mutually-exclusive choices, BiCon’s survey provides 10, which can be used in combination, and the space to define an answer yourself if you’re not satisfied with those available.

$BiCon 2008 \'Sticker Code\'$

BiCon attendees are encouraged to decorate their name badge with stickers showing their affiliation to various groups, causes, ideologies, relationship structures, fetishes, etc. These make really good conversation-starters, but the list on the first day – with about six different “codes” – tends to have no bearing on the final-day list, fully-expanded by people adding their own codes and encouraging one another to make use of them. Click on the list to zoom in.

Back From BiCon

Just got back the The Cottage after the drive home from BiCon. Where’d we get to at the end of the previous post…? Ah, yes…

Naked Lunch Saturday was amazingly oversubscribed. One attendee, a regular to Naked Lunches for the last 10 years or so, described his experience of coming into the room and, at the sight of so many people, briefly thought he’d come into the wrong room up until he noticed that everybody was naked. I skipped the next workshop slot for a nookie-and-nap break, because both Claire and I were beginning to suffer from the heat and exhaustion, as well as being in anticipation of having to be more wakeful for the journey up to Manchester and the party that’d be waiting for us there.

The run up to Manchester could have gone better. Sure, the M6 Toll was zippy as always, but two minor fuck-ups slowed us down. Firstly, I made a miserable failure of navigating our way to Beth‘s house (the map didn’t show all the no-right-turns on Leicester’s ring road). Secondly, we got caught only about 35 metres behind a five-car pile-up on the M6. All the lanes were completely closed and people were outside their vehicles, milling about on the motorway. Eventually the emergency services, having rocketed along the hard shoulder past us, were able to clear a lane for us, and we were able to carry on. I’ve got a fab picture of the tailback with people standing around on the carriageway.

We finally reached the airfield where Penny and Gareth‘s party was being held. I’m not sure, but somehow a flying school with a fully-stocked bar seems like a bad idea to me. In any case, we drank a lot and ate barbecued food and did a “pub quiz” and ate fabulous cake.

It was really nice to be able to catch up with folks like Liz, Bryn, Matt R, Matt P, Jimmy (although he’s coming back to Aber soon!), Beth, and – of course – Gareth and Penny. I don’t see enough of these guys these days. It was really great to catch up and share drinks and stories with them.

Being at BiCon had rubbed off on me, of course, and a side-effect of this was that I kept looking for the name badges (and accompanying “sticker code”) of strangers at the party, which of course they didn’t have.

We made great time on the motorway back down to BiCon, rocketing our way back down the M6 and reaching Leicester at almost 2am. We dropped off Beth at her house (far easier to find with her in the car giving directions, although still not as simple as you’d expect given that she’s lived in the town since she was 2 years old), because we couldn’t manage to persuade her to accompany us back to BiCon, pay for a day pass, and see if we couldn’t all find a party to go to – she said she had some kind of family thing to do in the morning.

The BiCon Ball had finished well before we arrived back on campus, but people were still doing their thing: lounging out on the grass singing, sitting around in or outdoors chatting, and wallowing in a paddling pool full of tiny toy lions (the “lion pit”), among other things, with copious quantities of food and alcohol strewen around and being shared freely with just about everybody. Fair play to the staff at the conference centre, who had no problem whatsoever with the fact that their venue was chock-a-block with people at various levels of sobriety hanging around not just around the campus but also in the bar and accompanying buildings, which by rights they probably could have locked up hours earlier.

Eventually, Claire and I found ourselves – at 5am – among a pile of people in a the “lion pit”, drinking mead and beer and an awful bottle of wine that somebody donated to us simply to get it off their hands. I’m a little fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure that we had some kind of “lion pit rule” about pillow-beatings (and occasional whippings) for participants who made particularly bad puns, performed experiments in trying to get a circle or people each using the one to their left (or their right) as a pillow, and exposed breasts. By the time we went to bed, the sky was beginning to get light – apparently some of the folks we left behind were still chatting and throwing toy lions at one another right up until the sunrise.

Sunday morning brought me into workshops in Housing Law (this was actually a really fascinating lecture on the legal aspects of different kinds of tenancy and non-tenancy agreements such as being a lodger, the definition of homelessness and being threatened with homelessness, and an easy-to-understand summary of the rights and responsibilities of tenants and of landlords), and in Conflict Management. This second workshop was a follow-up to the previous one, and actually gave us as a group an opportunity to try out a variety of different techniques for resolving jealousy, domestic disagreements, and more. I took a lot away from the session, both imminently useful (for example, a better understanding of my own feelings about some of the inevitable complications that have come out of Claire and I’s unusual [well, unusual in general – at BiCon we were among a large minority] relationship structure) and a selection of great ways to ensure that I’m expressing those feelings and getting the best compromise possible in general. I remember, shortly afterward, talking to another participant who’d said how much he wished that more monogamous couples had the kinds of negotiation skills that poly-people end up having to learn, and I agreed (and, to be fair, this has been my thinking exactly when I’ve lent my copy of The Ethical Slut to monogamous friends).

There was time for one more Naked Lunch between trips to pack all of our stuff back into the car, and the Twister board came out again, so I got to play a game of Naked Twister in the end (and I’d have won, too, if it weren’t for a particular young lady who tripped me, the dirty cheater!). In hindsight, playing Naked Twister then stopping for a ice cream and a chat about software engineering with a pair of geeks, completely nude, could be remembered as at least a little unusual, but at the time nothing felt less weird. By the time a group of disrobed people have gotten beyond their “hey, we’re naked!” moment, they mostly act just like clothed people. But with marginally more perving.

The closing plenary was it’s usual collection of thank you and goodbye messages, as well as an offer by the organisers to the guests to loot any food, beer, and training materials that remained at the centre. After this came the traditional ritual of dozens or personal goodbyes, hugs, and exchanges of e-mail addresses, social networking usernames and weblog URLs, and phone numbers. Yet again, I’ve met a ludicrous number of fascinating people, and I’m hoping to catch up with some of them at events like PolyDay, if I can make it to it.

So, just like last year, BiCon rocked. Huge thanks to everybody who made it great for me, whether that was by running one of the fabulous workshops, drinking with and chatting to me at the bar or at any other gathering, showing me what a dirty slut you were at the purity party (have I got plans for next year – oh yes!), bringing and playing board games, stripping off, or just being there and being fabulous. See you next year!

Edit: Corrected spelling of “pasty” to “party”. Most of this entry was written using my phone, while in a moving car, and so my use of predictive text was less-than perfect. Let me know if you find any more typos like that!

Edit: Fixed more spellings; thanks Sarah!

BiCon Fun And Games

It’s been hard to find time to post a blog entry here, with everything that’s been going on. Here’s the quick rundown so far:

Thursday. Arrived. Checked in. Accommodation is a lot like Penbryn, for those who know what I mean, although with bigger (but more sterile-feeling) bedrooms. Caught up with loads of folks from last year. Drinks at the bar. Board game (Apples To Apples) with friends. Fab.

Friday. Quick trip to Sainsbury’s (we were looking for Asda but got lost) for food supplies. Bacon sandwiches for breakfast. Opening plenary. Bigging Up The B In LGBT (which turned out to be about how trade unions can better represent their bisexual members). Being Bisexual In The Workplace. Then clothes off for the Naked Lunch. Chilled out for a bit. Solving Conflict In Poly Families (met some people with fascinating poly-backrounds). Dinner of pasta. Self-Harm: How We Cope With Stress (some fascinating perspectives expressed there). Missed out on Naked Twister. Drinks on the grass. Ran a Purity Test Party. Fell into bed at about 2am, but some folks were partying all night (none of this “bed at dawn” nonsense: ACTUALLY partying all night).

Saturday morning. Flapjack for breakfast. Juggling workshop (fun ball-tossing fun and perving at hot poi-people). Non-Traditional Families (lots of interesting child-raising ideas). And now I’m making a packed lunch to take to today’s Naked Lunch, then time for a few more workshops before driving up North to Penny and Gareth’s party, picking up passengers on the way.

All in all, having a fab time. Wish you all were here.

Off To BiCon 2008

Right; I’m off to BiCon again. Just like last year, I’ll probably blog from the event and let you all know what’s going on. See a lot of you at Gareth & Penny‘s party on Saturday!