Earlier this year, I played Emily Short‘s new game, Counterfeit Monkey, and I’m pleased to say that it’s one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve played in years. I’d highly recommend that you give it a go.
Counterfeit Monkey is one of the best interactive fiction games I’ve played in years. And not just because I love puns.
What makes Counterfeit Monkey so great? Well, as you’d expect from an Emily Short game (think Bee, which I reviewed last year, Galatea, and Glass), it
paints an engaging and compelling world which feels “bigger” than the fragments of it that you’re seeing: a real living environment in which you’re just another part of the story. The
island of Anglophone Atlantis and the characters in it feel very real, and it’s easy to empathise with what’s going on (and the flexibility you have in your actions helps
you to engage with what you’re doing). But that’s not what’s most-special about it.
I’m in a bar, presumably in need of a pint of apple. Apple? That’s not what I mean! Where’s my P-Remover when I need one…
What’s most-special about this remarkable game is the primary puzzle mechanic, and how expertly (not to mention seamlessly and completely) it’s been incorporated into the play
experience. Over the course of the game, you’ll find yourself equipped with a number of remarkable tools that change the nature of game objects by adding, removing, changing,
re-arranging or restoring their letters, or combining their names with the names of other objects: sort of a “Scrabble® set for real life”.
Wise words from the Bureau of Orthography.
You start the game in possession of a full-alphabet letter-remover, which lets you remove a particular letter from any word – so you can, for example, change
a pine into a pin by “e-removing” it, or you can change a caper into a cape by “r-removing” it
(you could go on and “c-remove” it into an ape if only your starting toolset hadn’t been factory-limited to prevent the creation of animate objects).
Poster for Dental Consonants Ltd. Get your consonants here!
This mechanic, coupled with a doubtless monumental amount of effort on Emily’s part, makes Counterfeit Monkey have perhaps the largest collection of potential carryable
objects of any interactive fiction game ever written. Towards the end of the game, when your toolset is larger, there feels like an infinite number of possible linguistic permutations
for your copious inventory… and repeatedly, I found that no matter what I thought of, the author had thought of it first and written a full and complete description of the result (and
yes, I did try running almost everything I’d picked up, and several things I’d created, through the almost-useless “Ümlaut Punch”, once I’d found it).
Atlantida, nominal ruler of Anglophone Atlantis.
I can’t say too much more without spoiling one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I’ve ever played. If you’ve never played a text-based adventure before, and want a gentler
introduction, you might like to go try something more conventional (but still great) like Photopia (very short, very
gentle: my review) or Blue Lacuna (massive,
reasonably gentle: my review) first. But if you’re ready for the awesome that is Counterfeit
Monkey, then here’s what you need to do:
How to play Counterfeit Monkey
Install a Glulx interpreter.
I recommend Gargoyle, which provides beautiful font rendering and supports loads of formats.
Note that Gargoyle’s UNDO command will not work in Counterfeit Monkey, for technical reasons (but this shouldn’t matter much so long as you SAVE at regular
intervals).
Download for Windows, for Mac, or for other systems.
Download Counterfeit Monkey
Get Counterfeit Monkey‘s “story file” and open it using your
Glulx interpreter (e.g. Gargoyle).
Download it here.
(alternatively, you can use experimental technology to play the game in your
web browser: it’ll take a long time to load, though, and you’ll be missing some of the fun optional features, so I wouldn’t recommend it over the “proper” approach above)
The explosion of smartphone ownership over the last decade has put powerful multi-function computers into the pockets of almost
half of us. But despite the fact that the average smartphone contains at least as much personally-identifiable information as its owner keeps on their home
computer (or in dead-tree form) at their house – and is significantly more-prone to
opportunistic theft – many users put significantly less effort into protecting their mobile’s data than they do the data they keep at home.
Too late, little Nokia E7: I’ve got physical access to you now.
I have friends who religiously protect their laptops and pendrives with TrueCrypt, axCrypt, or similar, but still carry around an unencrypted mobile phone. What we’re talking about here is a device that contains all of the contact
details for you and everybody you know, as well as potentially copies of all of your emails and text messages, call histories, magic cookies for social networks and other services, saved passwords, your browsing history (some people would say that’s the
most-incriminating thing on their phone!), authentication apps, photos, videos… more than enough information for an attacker to pursue a highly-targeted identity theft or
phishing attack.
Android pattern lock: no encryption, significantly less-random than an equivalent-length PIN, and easily broken by a determined attacker.
“Pattern lock” is popular because it’s fast and convenient. It might be good enough to stop your kids from using your phone without your permission (unless they’re smart enough to do
some reverse smudge engineering: looking for the smear-marks made by your fingers as you unlock the device; and let’s face
it, they probably are), but it doesn’t stand up to much more than that. Furthermore, gesture unlock solutions dramatically reduce the number of permutations, because you can’t repeat a
digit: so much so, that you can easily perform a rainbow table attack on the SHA1 hash to
reverse-engineer somebody’s gesture. Even if Android applied a per-device psuedorandom salt to the gesture pattern (they don’t, so you can download a prefab table), it doesn’t take long
to generate an SHA1 lookup of just 895,824 codes (maybe Android should have listened to Coda Hale’s advice and used BCrypt, or else something better still).
An encrypted iPhone can be configured to resist brute-force attacks by wiping the phone after repeated failures, which replaces one security fault (brute-force weakness) with another
(a denial of service attack that’s so easy that your friends can do it by accident).
These attacks, though (and the iPhone isn’t bulletproof, either), are all rather academic, because they are
trumped by the universal rule that once an
attacker has physical access to your device, it is compromised. This is fundamentally the way in which mobile security should be considered to be equivalent to computer security.
All of the characteristics distinct to mobile devices (portability, ubiquity, processing power, etc.) are weaknesses, and that’s why smartphones deserve at least
as much protection as desktop computers protecting the same data. Mobile-specific features like “remote wipe” are worth having, but can’t be relied upon alone – a wily attacker
could easily keep your phone in a lead box or otherwise disable its connectivity features until it’s cracked.
The bottom line: if the attacker gets hold of your phone, you’re only as safe as your encryption.
The only answer is to encrypt your device (with a good password). Having to tap in a PIN or password may be less-convenient than just “swipe to unlock”, but it gives
you a system that will resist even the most-thorough efforts to break it, given physical access (last year’s
iPhone 4 vulnerability notwithstanding).
It’s still not perfect – especially here in the UK, where the RIPA can be used (and has been used) to force key surrender. What we really need is meaningful, usable
“whole system” mobile encryption with plausible deniability. But so long as you’re only afraid of identity thieves and phishing scammers, and not
being forced to give up your password by law or under duress, then it’s “good enough”.
Of course, it’s only any use if it’s enabled before your phone gets stolen! Like backups, security is one of those things that everybody should make a habit of thinking
about. Go encrypt your smartphone; it’s remarkably easy –
MALAYSIA will not ask Google Earth to blur images of the country’s military facilities to avoid terrorist attacks. Defence Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said doing so would
indirectly pin-point their location anyway.
“The difference in, or lack of, pixelation of images of the military facilities compared to the surrounding areas will make it easy for visual identification.” In his written reply to
Datuk Dr James Dawos Mamit (BN-Mambong), Najib said the images were provided worldwide commercially.
This is the second part of a three-part blog post about my vasectomy. Did you read the first part, yet?
My vasectomy was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, so I left work early in order to cycle up to the hospital: my plan was to cycle up there, and then have Ruth ride my bike back while JTA drove me home. For a moment, though, I panicked
the clinic receptionist when she saw me arrive carrying a cycle helmet and pannier
bag: she assumed that I must be intending to cycle home after the operation!
The Elliot-Smith Clinic lives in an old prefab building buried at the back end of the hospital campus. If you think it looks scary in this picture, imagine what it’s like when it’s
dark and you’re going there to be stabbed in the genitals.
It took me long enough to find the building, cycling around the hospital in the dark, and a little longer still to reassure myself that this underlit old building could actually be a
place where surgery took place.
My tweet upon arriving at the clinic.
Despite my GP‘s suggestion to the contrary, the staff didn’t feel the need to take me though their counselling process, despite
me ticking some (how many depends primarily upon how you perceive our unusual relationship
structure) of the “we would prefer to counsel additionally” boxes on their list of criteria. I’d requested that Ruth arrive at about the beginning of the process specifically so that she could “back me up” if
needed (apparently, surgeons will sometimes like to speak to the partner of a man requesting a vasectomy), but nobody even asked. I just had to sign another couple of consent forms to
confirm that I really did understand what I was doing, and then I was ready to go!
I’d shaved my balls a few days earlier, at the request of the clinic (and also at Matt‘s suggestion, who
pointed out that “if I don’t, they’ll do it for me, and I doubt they’ll be as gentle!” – although it must be pointed out that as they were already planning to take a blade to
my junk, I might not have so much to worry about), which had turned out to be a challenge in itself. I’ve since looked online and found lots of great diagrams showing you
which parts you need to shave, but the picture I’d been given might as well have been a road map of Florence, because no matter which way up I turned it, it didn’t look anything like my
genitals. In the end, I just shaved all over the damn place, just to be sure. Still not an easy feat, though, because the wrinkled skin makes for challenging shaving: the best technique
I found was to “stretch” my scrotum out with one hand while I shaved it with the other – a tricky (and scary) maneuver.
If I’d had a diagram like this, rather than an Italian street map, I might have stood a better chance of just shaving what I needed to shave.
After sitting in the waiting room for a while, I was ushered through some forms and a couple more questions of “are you sure?”, and then herded into a curtained cubicle to change into a
surgical gown (over the top of which I wore my usual dressing gown). The floor was cold, and I’d forgotten to bring my slippers, so I kept my socks on throughout. I sat in a separate
waiting area from the first, and attempted to make small talk with the other gents waiting there. Some had just come out of surgery, and some were still waiting to go in, and the former
would gently tease the latter with jokes about the operation. It’s a man thing, I guess: I can’t imagine that women would be so likely to engage in such behaviour (ignoring, for a
moment, the nature of the operation).
There are several different approaches to vasectomy, and my surgeon
was kind enough to tolerate my persistent questions as I asked about the specifics of each part of the operation. He’d said – after I asked – that one of the things he liked about doing
vasectomies was that (unlike most of the other surgeries he performs) his patients are awake and he can have a conversation while he worked, although I guess he
hadn’t anticipated that there’d ever be anybody quite so interested as I was.
Warning: The remainder of this blog post describes a surgical procedure, which some people might find squicky. For the protection of those who are of a weak stomach, some photos
have been hidden behind hyperlinks: click at your own risk. (though honestly, I don’t think they’re that bad)
With my scrotum pulled up through a hole in a paper sheet, the surgeon began by checking that “everything was where it was supposed to be”: he checked that he could find each vas (if
you’ve not done this: borrow the genitals of the nearest man or use your own, squeeze moderately tightly between two fingers the skin above a testicle, and move around a bit until you
find a hard tube: that’s almost certainly a vas). Apparently surgeons are supposed to take care to ensure that they’ve found two distinct tubes, so they don’t for example sever the same
one twice.
Next, he gave the whole thing a generous soaking in iodine. This turned out to be fucking freezing. The room was cold enough already, so I asked him to close the window while my
genitals quietly shivered above the sheet.
Next up came the injection. The local anaesthetic used for this kind of operation is pretty much identical to the kind you get at the dentist: the only difference is that if your
dentist injected you here, that’d be considered a miss. While pinching the left vas between his fingertips, the surgeon squirted a stack of lidocaine into the cavity
around it. And fuck me, that hurt like being kicked in the balls. Seriously: that stung quite a bit for a few minutes, until the anaesthesia kicked in and instead the
whole area felt “tingly”, in that way that your lips do after dental surgery.
Pinching the vas (still beneath the skin at this point) in a specially-shaped clamp, the surgeon made a puncture wound “around” it with a sharp-nosed pair of forceps, and pulled the vas
clean through the hole. This was a strange sensation – I couldn’t feel any pain, but I was aware of the movement – a “tugging” against my insides.
A quick snip removed a couple of centimetres from the middle of it (I gather that removing a section, rather than just cutting, helps to reduce the – already slim – risk that
the two loose ends will grow back together again) and cauterised the ends. The cauterisation was a curious experience, because while I wasn’t aware of any sensation of heat, I could
hear a sizzling sound and smell my own flesh burning. It turns out that my flaming testicles smell a little like bacon. Or, if you’d like to look at it another way (and I can almost
guarantee that you don’t): bacon smells a little bit like my testicles, being singed.
Next up came Righty’s turn, but he wasn’t playing ball (pun intended). The same steps got as far as clamping and puncturing before I suddenly felt a sharp pain, getting rapidly worse.
“Ow… ow… owowowowowow!” I said, possibly with a little more swearing, as the surgeon blasted another few mils of anaesthetic into my bollocks. And then a little more. And
damnit: it turns out that no matter how much you’ve had injected into you already, injecting anaesthetics into your tackle always feels like a kick in the nuts for a few
minutes. Grr.
The removed sections of my vas, on a tray (actually mine)
You can see the “kink” in each, where it was pulled out by the clamp. Also visible is the clamp itself – a cruel-looking piece of equipment, I’m sure you’ll agree! – and the discarded
caps from some of the syringes that were used.
The benefit of this approach, the “no-scalpel vasectomy”, is that the puncture wounds are sufficiently small as to not need stitches. At the end of the surgery, the surgeon just stuck a
plaster onto the hole and called it done. I felt a bit light-headed and wobbly-legged, so I sat on the operating table for a few minutes to compose myself before returning to the
nurses’ desk for my debrief. I only spent about 20 minutes, in total, with the surgeon: I’ve spent longer (and suffered more!) at the dentist.
Later, I would receive this “Happy Vasectomy” card from Liz and Simon. Thanks, guys!
By the evening, the anaesthetic had worn off and I was in quite a bit of pain, again: perhaps worse than that “kick in the balls” moment when the anaesthetic was first injected, but
without the relief that the anaesthetic brought! I took some paracetamol and – later – some codeine, and slept with a folded-over pillow wedged between my knees, after I discovered how
easy it was to accidentally squish my sore sack whenever I shifted my position.
The day after was somewhat better. I was walking like John Wayne, but this didn’t matter because – as the nurse had suggested – I spent most of the day lying down “with my feet as high
as my bottom”. She’d taken the time to explain that she can’t put a bandage nor a sling on my genitals (and that I probably wouldn’t want her to, if she could), so the correct
alternative is to wear tight-fitting underwear (in place of a bandage) and keep my legs elevated (as a sling). Having seen pictures of people with painful-looking bruises and swelling
as a result of not following this advice, I did so as best as I could.
Today’s the day after that: I’m still in a little pain – mostly in Righty, again, which shall henceforth be called “the troublesome testicle” – but it’s not so bad except when I forget
and do something like bend over or squat or, I discovered, let my balls “hang” under their own weight, at all. But altogether, it’s been not-too-bad at all.
Or, as I put on my feedback form at the clinic: “A+++. Recommended. Would vasectomy again.”
(thanks due to Ruth, JTA, Matt, Liz, Simon,
Michelle, and my mum for support, suggestions, and/or fetching things to my bed for me while I’ve been waddling
around looking like John Wayne, these past two days)
Parts of Oxford have been flooded for the last few
days, and apparently the worst is yet to come. I worked from home yesterday, intimidated by the available
choices of traversing flooded roads or else taking the hilly 3+ mile diversion around the problem areas, but today: I decided that it was time to man up and cycle in to the office.
Here’s where I forded Kennington Road. Yes, I just used the word “forded” to describe crossing the road.
Conveniently, we’ve somewhere along the way acquired a large pair of Wellington boots (we think they might have been Paul‘s, but as he’s now left Oxford without them, they’ve been sitting in our charity-shop-box). So I booted up and set out. I was yawning all the
way:
Police direct traffic away from a waterlogged Abingdon Road.
I had to weave my way back and forth around the cyclepaths nearest my house, and – on a couple of ocassions – get off the bike and wade it through: I’d considered riding through some of
the larger puddles – my mean pedal-ground clearance is about as high as the top of my boots, anyway – until I met a soaked cyclist coming the other way: he’d become disbalanced going
over a submarine kerbstone and fallen into the freezing water. Seeing that quickly made me choose the safer strategy!
Near Hinksey Lake, serious flood defences have been hastily erected and pumping operations are underway to clear gardens and footpaths.
Alongside the lake was one of the most flood-damaged areas, but heavy barriers had been erected and pumping engines were working at returning the water to the “right” side of them. The
lake bridge was completely closed off: it looked like it might be traversable, but if the water gets any higher, it won’t be.
In Hinksey Park, the playing fields and cycle path are completely underwater.
I took the cycle route through Hinksey Park in order to avoid the flooded parts of Abingdon Road, which runs parallel, but I’m not sure that it was much better. In the photo above,
you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re looking at the lake… but in actual fact, the lake is behind me: that’s the playing fields. You can just about make out the line
down the middle of the cycle path, through the murky water.
Between Hinksey Lake and the Thames there are flooded driveways and gardens. The sign on the gate reads “No parking. Keep entrance clear at all times.”, in case anybody was thinking
of parking in this waist-deep water.
Pressing on, I came to the Thames Path, which my route typically follows for a short distance to the footbridge into the city centre. And that’s when I realised quite how high the river
really is.
To the right of the bush – the river. To the left – the footpath. You’d be forgiven if you can’t tell the difference.
By the time I found myself on a footpath with a current, I realised that my route might need a little bit of a rethink. With the bridge I was aiming for just ahead,
though, I was able to double-back and cut through an alleyway (between some seriously at-risk houses), duck under a couple of “footpath closed” barriers, and splash out to the
bridgehead.
From the bridge, it’s clear how much the waters have risen. The path on the left continues to get deeper and deeper underwater: when I’m working in a different office or running
training, that’s the route I take to work!
By the time I was on the higher, better-reinforced East bank for the river, things began to improve, and within a few minutes I was right in the city centre. There, you wouldn’t know
that, only a short distance away, a significant number of streets were underwater. To sit in the dry, on Broad Street, in the middle of Oxford, it seems strange to think that on the
edge of town, people are being evacuated from their
homes.
Further reading:
Flood warning for Kennington, from the
Environment Agency (looks like we’re just on the right side of the road not to be included in the “flood warning area”).
“Live”upstreamanddownstreamwater level measurements at nearby Iffley Lock (there’s a beautiful moment in the graphs for yesterday morning when they clearly started using the lock itself to
“dump” water downstream, occasionally bringing the level to within the typical range.
