Avocadia

I made a tweet about a game idea. I followed up with a Facebook post with some more words, since it can have more words. To wit ¹

Game idea: Adventure Capital. You’re a nobleman in Greyhawk who invests in parties who go dungeon bashing. Mold your party, earn GP %s. I tried to make it more like VC funding, but it turns out I’d rather gouge out my brain that play that. Maybe more like the Football Manager type games, and maybe that seems more obvious if it were to be multiplayer.

The seed of that idea has several roots. The first is a little mobile phone game called Game Dev Story, a management simulation game themed as a video game development company. I played it for a bit after a friend recommended it. It was fun, I obsessed for a few weeks (as I am sure he knew I would and likely that was part of the reason he told me about it because he thought that would be funny), and I doubt I’ve played it since 2011. At the same time, I was noticing the Grognard movement in D&D and tangentially the proliferation of micro rule sets based on OD&D. I started thinking about what kind of rule set I would create, started creating a rule set, and finally started coding it as an engine because that would be the only way I could play test mechanics. At some stage the concepts cross pollinated. Possibly with a healthy mix of memories of the football manager games I recall seeing magazine ads for in the mid to late 1980s.

The idea has been in the back of my head for a few years now, and every now and then I’ll drag it out and dust it off and have a think about what it might look like. There would be Adventurers, obviously, and then a few bags to put them in: free agents, adventurers employed by the player, and not employed by the player. Sufficiently advanced game play would mean the player has hired more adventurers than can be placed in a single party, so a player could have many simultaneous parties with adventurers, in divisions like a sports manager game. The adventurers not hired by the player would be variously hanging around the proverbial tavern and also in rival adveturing parties competing for the same loot. Perhaps that would entail that there are rival capitalists that may be interacted with by the player.

There would be dungeons into which the adventurers to be sent to pillage, since the conceit of the game is that the player is investing in adventurers to reap a profit. There would be no direct control of what they do in the dungeon. The player shouldn’t even get updates on progress, they either come back with a full report on what happened, or just don’t come back at all. Perhaps rumours if the expedition takes long enough, of death or hints of activity. There should be a sense of the tyranny of distance. When the party does come back, they come laden with loot but also reports that provide flavour to how the party performed.

Obviously the adventurers should have statistics have some variety. Not D&D stats. I already think there are too many stats in D&D just looking at the Big Six² and then you have HPs and AC and oh my god! Reduce it to maybe Tanking, Protection, Exploration, and Leadership. There should be something to represent magic use as well. Possibly stealth as well, although that could arguably be lumped in with Exploration. I think there should be more things to rate then character slots in a party, and four feels like the right number for that. Six stats? Seven? Eight feels too many. Game Dev Story had four roles and four stats, but to mix it up and encourage multi-skilled employees it has a Fatigue mechanic, so you can’t just use the same employee over and over to defeat challenges they have been supercharged for. This game would have health and after expeditions to dungeons perhaps some adventurers will need to rest up and heal. Particularly if they have been killed and brought back to life, which is defintely a mechanic which must exist. Football management games would have the player roster turning over due to some players being sacked and some players being poached by rival teams. A dungeon bash management sim should have the adventurer roster turn over due to some players being gnawed by a illithid.

Dungeons should then be a series of challenges that are defeated by the ratings the party brings with it and are rewarded with gold and enchanted items. The usual loot. And some sort of experience point system allowing the characters to be improved. Maybe you just abstract that out as spending the gold you earn from the party. Going back to Game Dev Story as an example, Research is earned during the game dev phase that can later be spent on training and leveling up your employees. The money earned from game sales are used to finance the next game, and unlocking new game dev options. I do think the gold earned from dungeons should be used to finance something unrelated to the adventurer-party-expedition mechanic. I’m just unsure what that would be.

Most importantly, there has to be an end game. I have an aversion to games that do not have a goal to reach. Traditionally those goals were finishing all the levels, or winning the race, defeating your opponent, or getting to Alpha Centauri. I never did complete Game Dev Story, but with the sports manager games there is at minimum the sense of constant renewal of the game through the turning of the seasons. You may have won the FA Cup in one season, but next season you have to start again, and probably not with the same roster of players as some leave for other teams. What I am looking for though is a victory condition, even if only have vague ideas of exactly what that might look like. A Big Bad that your party ultimately discovers as the guiding force behind all the dungeons they have cleared out, the capitalist behind it all in negative to the player?

I think it would be a fun game to play once or twice, if it could be executed well. I don’t make the mistake of believing I could create this myself. Not from a software development perspective, but in terms of game design. Game design is a skill just like any other kind of design and not one I have had any occasion to acquire. So even as I have written this, I know it will never leave the confines of my own system even were it ever actually created. But there you are, an idea for a game I have had bouncing around my skull for a few years.

• games
• adventure_capital

Books

What a failure 2013 was in imagination and groundedness. After a final six weeks of 2012 rushing to read enough books to reach the level I set for my Goodreads challenge, as I mentioned this time last year. I even cheated, really, in reading Matchless because it was short and would get my numbers up. Instead I resolved to set the challenge number much lower and to read “challenging” books, without ever really defining what that would mean, other than that Godel Escher Bach would be one.

It’s important to set goals. If you are going to set them, though, you also need to create a routine. I read a few books right at the beginning of January, A Memory of Light being one, but for the most part I didn’t really put much thought into what these “challenging books” were that I would read. When I did finally pick one up, it was immediately before D and I went to NZ for a week and a half, and I certainly didn’t do any reading while we were touring. In the end, I didn’t read a single book I would have included in the “challenging” books list, and felt guilty for it. Enough so that I read barely any books at all in 2013. Six, according to Goodreads, plus the first three Laundry Files books which I don’t seem to have added.

I haven’t set a reading goal at all this year. Whatever I read this year is what I read. I would like to read House of Leaves, the book I picked up in February 2013, and the some non-fiction. But to do so, I need to re-establish my reading routine, which I had been eroding steadily for the last three years with…

Television

2013 was the year I finally strated cutting loose shows that had outlived their verve. True Blood and Sons of Anarchy should have been dismissed two seasons ago. Arguably True Blood should have had one season and been done with it, and Sons of Anarchy had an excellant second season, but everything afterwards has felt gratuitous tits and violence. The arcs for the characters were distorted for the sake of avoiding cast changes, and the story suffered. I understand Tara was killed in the last episode of the season just ended. She should have left at the end of season 3.

I should have dumped Californication as well, again arguably after the first season. The first season was a fun anti-redemption story. Every other season was just a pripatic tit-fest that I kept watching because Hank Moody seems so cool. It’s the last season in 2014 but I see no reason to watch it.

On the other hand, I picked up some new shows, most of which will probably pick up again in 2014. Orphan Black and Vikings earlier in the year, and then House of Cards and Orange is the New Black in the later half. Vikings is the only one I’m not sure about. It was fun - the mass battle scenes particularly the shield wall on the beach are fantastic - and Travis Fimmel was a manic charisma. If they can maintain the alien feel of the Viking culture without slipping too far into soap opera, it’ll be ok. Orphan Black is a no-brainer for a second season, it was easily the best new show of 2013 and Tatiana Maslaney should be showered in awards if there is any justice.

2013 continued my streak of not being able to bring myself to watch Game of Thrones. It started right after I read the whole extant series as the most recent book was released. I was exhausted at the time and I remain unable to commit to binge the three seasons to date. I did binge Breaking Bad in 2013 and I’m glad I did because Ozymandias was the highlight of the year.

Games

A long time friend from high school suggested I start playing a multiplayer game he was involved in, a game called Arcane Empires. I remain friends with him, despite this game being some really evil shit. It’s one of those games that exists to have players become impatient and spend real world cash for in game currency to improve their position. There’s something horrible about these games. They’re barely even games, really. It’s the grinding experience from World of Warcraft with no other mechanic to redeem it. Repetition of the same actions day in and day out. I eventually quit the game at the same time as my friend. I’ve since noticed he went on to play Clash of Clans, which I grant is at least not so egregiously monotonous.

I instead went back to Civilisation 5 and Minecraft, completely avoiding the trap of playing long-running games with the same basic mechanics repeated over and over. I am finding I gravitate back and forth between those two, with more time on Minecraft in 2012 and more time on Civilisation in 2013. I almost flipped back to Minecraft in November, but then I finally caved and purchased Gods & Kings and it breathed enough new life into the game that I have stuck with it to work out the new mechanics. Not that I’ve ever been much good, hovering around the middle difficulties. In the first game I could play The Mongol Tactic¹ on the highest difficulty, but that’s not a winning strategy since they a) nerfed the Chariot, and b) ramped up the Unhappiness penalties for too many cities.

I noticed on New Years Day while I was bored that I was playing Tiny Wings and trying to get to Island 8. I was trying to get to Island 8 while bored during a practice run of my team’s end-of-sprint demo in January 2011. So yeah.

Music

I’m old.

I really enjoyed Lorde’s album. Other than that, I’m old, and don’t really encounter new music that readily. I spend more time on podcasts these days.

So Accidental Tech Podcast, Mike Duncan’s new podcast Revolutions, The Talk Show, and The Incomparable.

• retrospective
• books
• television
• games
• music

Several months ago I talked about how I use a request to write some simple code in interviews to try and gain some insight into how the interviewee thinks. Specifically I discussed the Swap(int,int) method and what I could discern from it, depending on how far the interviewee could go with it. In the months since then I’ve done a few interviews that have allowed me to develop the concept further, and so I am going to talk about some of my learnings.

The interviews I was conducting earlier in the year were all phone interviews, and I think this makes it difficult to really do coding questions. They were phone interviews by necessity as the subjects were in Manila and I was in Sydney, trying to find a suitable subject to be the core of an offshore development team. I found that two thirds of the dozen or so candidates I interviewed were able to put together the temp variable answer but only one was able to get the arithmetic version, and even then it took prompting with the first line. Most difficult was the inability to watch them working and thinking. The setup just didn’t support it and is to my discredit that I didn’t work to improve the situation by demanding a webcam be setup.

The last four weeks I have been interviewing candidates in person. Despite being a better standard of candidate they have also struggled with the arithmetic solution, and certainly no-one has got it without being given the first line. Watching people struggle with it gave me a light bulb moment though. I actually don’t want the kind of candidate that would come up with that piece of code, so why am I trying to make people write it? But how do I get to the ultimate insight unless I have them critique that piece of code?

The whole point of the question is to determine if they are cowboys or engineers by having them look at a piece of cowboy code and give their opinion of it. So…why not just give them the code? The value I was finding in having people applying for a senior developer position write the temp variable approach was vanishingly slight, and conversely they were all struggling to get to the next, and in my eyes vital, step. So now I have it on the whiteboard when they walk in, see if they look at it and if they do what their reaction is. I do the introductions and ask them to discuss their current role for a few minutes. And then I ask them what the computation is in the function written on the board. Or maybe I ask them what they would call the function.

void X(ref int a, ref int b){
    a = a + b;
    b = a - b;
    a = a - b;
}

After I switched, within a couple of interviews I knew I had made the right move. I discovered I was able to observe other basic qualities of the candidate as they attempted to answer the question.

The first is their approach to learning a new body of code. For example, my approach to learning what this piece of code would do is to run it with a couple of sets of values. You could probably make an educated guess after the first set of values were swapped and I’d probably hazard a guess at that point and then run it again quickly to make sure.

The second is their ability to deal with uncertainty. My ability to cope with uncertainty has historically been pretty poor, and I have to make an effort to let stress and annoyance take over when I’m in that position. I’m looking for at least that, an effort made to push past the stress and at least try to come up with an answer.

Incidentally, one of the candidates who did get the arithmetic solution when asked to write it, gave me an answer I had never considered before when I followed up with what was wrong with it. In my previous post I had pointed out that it was pointless to try and beat the compiler at memory management by skipping the temporary variable. However this candidate pointed out that the temp variable was the better optimisation anyway, because it was all assignment, and thus only memory. As soon as you have to do arithmetic computation you are using the CPU, and that will be slower.

UPDATE I took him at face value because, well cause it sounded like it made sense and because I didn’t really care about the particulars. It’s not like I was hiring him to come in and write code an OS to be embedded in a 1980s wristwatch. But I should point out at least one person believes it is wrong.

• work
• code

@davewiner had a good moan when feedly implemented OPML importing weirdly, but behold Save as Markdown in Fargo…saves as a p element in HTML

— gilmae (@gilmae) July 12, 2013

I should have thought that the bare fact that a function labeled “Save as Markdown” generates an HTML file was self-explanatory as a bug report and yet…

@gilmae -- could you explain the problem in a blog post or email. Thanks.

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) July 12, 2013

Fair enough. Whatever else Twitter is good for, bug reports are not it¹. So here goes.

Dave. HTML is most definitely not Markdown.

Now I understand that the functionality is supposed to be doing exactly as I have described, applying a Markdown parser to Markdown in the document to produce an HTML document. I can indeed read the Fargo docs. Still, that’s not the common understanding of the sentence fragment “Save as Markdown”. It might even be the opposite of said common understanding.

Furthermore, my Fargo doc is, so far, a three deep tree. So even if I did want HTML, I assure you, I did not want HTML that lost the tree structure. It’s particularly galling since the HTML that I might want - if indeed it was HTML I wanted which I didn’t - is already in the page, right there in the DOM. But rather than put that in the HTML file, Fargo applies a lossey conversion and dumps it out as a list. Not a list in the sense of a series of li elements, but a list in the sense of a series of space seperated words.

But yes, I do understand that the tree depths should be thought of as headers, and thus marked up as headers.

What I want is a Markdown version of what I have produced in Fargo. Which is to say, the OPML fragment

<outline text="Getting Started">
        <outline text="Creating Your Character" created="Mon, 08 Jul 2013 11:53:03 GMT">
            <outline text="Generating Attributes" created="Mon, 08 Jul 2013 11:53:08 GMT"/>

would be output as

* Getting Started
    * Creating Your Character
        * Generating Attributes

OPML is not useful to me, it is not readily editable in a text editor when I don’t have access to Fargo. Hence, my desire for a text version. Fargo is a tool for quickly restructuring the document by moving sections around, and a pretty good one. OPML, on the other hand, brings insufficient benefits to the table to offset the lock in.

UPDATE

If any of you were waiting with bated breath for a response from Winer, there has been none. Not on his blog, not via email, or via Twitter.

1. : Not there appears to be a formal way to report bugs.

• writing
• bug

If you are going to look at the problem of 4th edition D&D from the perspective of Purity, what could be more pure an expression of D&D than 4th edition? The greater majority of its critics use purity as their weapon of choice. It’s attacked for having strayed to far from tabletop and morphing into something more like World of Warcraft. Or Diablo. It’s attacked for its long, long…loooooong bouts of combat, reducing whole sessions to a single encounter in extreme cases. It’s attacked for the mini-game like Skill Challenges, which reduces non-combat encounters to a series of dice rolls rather than an acting and/or puzzle-solving exercise. It’s attacked for not being D&D at all, but something else designed to appeal to video gamers.

From a certain point of view though, it is the purest form of the game since Chainmail. Remember, the roots of the game are in the war gaming community, gamers who devoted whole tabletops to platoons of miniatures representing Napoleonic period troops, WW2 divisions, and - eventually - mythic, fantastical creatures. The birth of the game is in the heros and superheroes of those fantasy games stepping off the battlefield and into the dungeon. The earliest rules were hardly more than a shim on a game that was a fantasy skin over simulations of Famous Battles of the Second Millennium of the Common Era. Masterpiece Theatre it was not. Look carefully at descriptions of early play and you’ll find illuminaries such as Gygax reducing non-combat encounters - when he was rushed/bored/out of ideas - to 50/50 dice rolls. It’s even a guideline formalised as early as 2nd ed and informally since the first published rule sets.

That’s all sophistry though. I don’t think 4th ed is the purist form of D&D. I think it is terribly far from being a pure form of D&D, although I think it might actually be closer than 3.5 with its proliferation of classes. Maybe. I can’t actually be sure since I barely played 3rd ed, and never played 3.5 or 4th ed. Closest I have come is ready the rule sets and watching showcase games of 4th ed played the Penny Arcade crew, Wil Wheaton, and Scott Kurtz. I suspect those four could make Snakes & Ladders a riotous explosion of creativity, so not really a yardstick.

From a certain point of view? That’s a phrase that, to my mind, comes freighted with context. Obi-wan Kenobi said that, when he’s just finished owning up to lying his arse off. But in this case, I really do mean it. Because from a certain point of view, D&D 4th edition is a pure expression of its sources.

I do happen to think that it hews closer to video games like World of Warcraft and Diablo. It does so unashamedly. Whereas in previous editions a player and the DM might use their nous to have a fighter character anchor a combat, 4th ed makes a game mechanic by importing concepts like Aggro from games like World of Warcraft. Combat is both amped up with tactical options - even if I get the sense that many combats follow much the same series of tactical moves - while defanging it with so many sources of healing and character builds that have the potential to make a character nigh invulnerable. And for all the variety and options that can go into builds, the classes fill rigidly defined roles: The Tank, The DPS dealer, The Buffer, &c. The roles were there in old style D&D, but not so rigidly and not so all-consumingly.

Combat in 1st ed was nasty, brutish, and short. Dungeons crawls were like climbing Everest, something done in many stages, with advances followed by retreats to recover and consolidate. That’s an experience entirely foreign to a gamer who has come to RPGs via MMOs. The breakout game of the genre - World of Warcraft - actively penalised retreating from a dungeon (that is to say, an Instance) by resetting the whole thing exactly as it was before.¹ And while combat can be lethal in an MMORPG, with party wipes aplenty, ultimately it has little impact, the players just respawn with the only repercussion being time lost and gold to be spent to repair and restock.

I don’t like D&D 4th Edition, and from my reading of the early play test materials I don’t like D&D Next either. But in a way I respect them. I respect them because I recognise that they embraced their inspirations, their source material, their Appendix N if you like. My Appendix N is different to Gygax’s, but it has one thing in common, that they are books and stories. The Appendix N of modern D&D is World of Warcraft, Everquest, Final Fantasy, et. al. The old inspirations lent themselves to a different style of play, a style that I preferred.

As I said, I’ve never actually played the 4th edition. Merely read the rule books. That and three dollars will get me a cup of coffee. And showcase games involving witty and imaginative players prove the game can be fun, even if it is fun in a different mode to the games I played when younger. I drifted away from the game when I finished inversion and moved to Sydney, away from my gamer friends and towards time consuming jobs. But I also drifted away because the game drifted away from me. The signs were there from third edition that the game was skewing towards the market more accustomed to quicker gratification and mechanical manufacture of avatars over organic formation of characters. Feats in particular contributed to this uneasy feeling for me. So I stopped playing, because there was no joy left to it.

There’s this thing called the internet now and I can’t help but wonder, just how hard would it be to find a game of 1st edition to play through the medium of online communications?

1. : Which is not to say a canny DM wouldn’t repopulate a dungeon when the PCs had retreated. The best do, the ones who are thinking people, not automatons reading straight off the page. They’d repopulate, but organically, not a complete mechanical resetting. ↩

• D&D
• perception

My favourite code question in interviews is deceptively easy. I was asked it for my job at C4, and at the time I didn’t really understand it. Nor did the guy who asked the question, for that matter, nut in the years since, I’ve gone over it a few times and have evolved it to be the first question I ask interviewees to code for me. It’s just so useful.

Given two integer variables, x and y, swap their values.

There are six answers to this question. Or at least I am familiar with six answers, there may well be others but I’ve never encountered them in the wild.

These answers are, in ascending order of my happiness when given them:

1. Call a method called Swap(). Don’t laugh, I have been given that answer in total seriousness twice.
2. I don’t know.
3. Start with x = x - y
4. Start with x = x + y
5. Start with x =x XOR y
6. Use a temp variable

Anything after I don’t know is an acceptable answer.

Use a temp variable

var tmp = x;
x = y;
y = tmp;

When I see this, it allows me to ask for it to be done without a temp variable. I am quite happy to feed them the first line, “x = x + y”, and see if they can finish it. If they do, I then ask them why this is not a very good solution. I am quite happy for them to answer that they wouldn’t do it because of the risks, and obviously if they say what the risks are. I’ll then ask if they could do it with bit operators.

Arithmetic gymnastics

x = x + y;
y = x - y;
x = x - y;

OR

x = x - y;
y = x + y;
x = y - x;

I don’t really care if you get the solution arithmetically correct, you’ve at least demonstrated you understand the principle.

Starting within “x = x - y” makes me suspicious that they know the risks in “x = x + y” - integer overflow - but have forgotten the very same risk holds for this answer, but I give them the benefit of the doubt and just ask them about the risks. For either variant, I then ask them if they can think of a different way to do it that doesn’t hold the same risks. They don’t get a first line, but I am happy to give a hint, use bit operators.

Bit operators

x = x XOR y
y = x XOR y
x = x XOR y

I then ask what are the risks in using this method, which are pretty narrow, I admit; that if x and y point to the same memory address, you in fact end up with the value set to 0, which unless you started with 0 is a bad result. Narrow, but if you’re going to play with bit operators you better have an understanding of what the hell they do.

And finally, if anyone makes it to the bit operator solution, the final question is, why is this not a good solution. If they come up blank on this, I know I am dealing with a cowboy. They are a cowboy, because the bit operators - and the arithmetic juggling for that matter - are less readable than using a temp variable, for absolutely no return at all. The coder is not getting any efficiency bonus, not optimising their code. The compiler is going to optimise the temp value out anyway, the compiler is going to optimise the whole thing better than the coder will. For no benefit, the fancy solutions end up making the code more obtuse.

Ultimately, I am looking for a developer who answers with the temp variable, and can defend that answer. I am happy to go through the paths and get back there if they can continuously identify the issues with the other solutions, and I count that as only a little much less acceptable than sticking with it in the first place. The second best end point is any of the rest if the interviewee has managed to discuss the risks in any of the three non-temp variable solutions. The third best is any of the three without knowing the risks.

If you don’t know an answer, in all likelihood you are going to be rejected, but you could still recover. But really, even an under-grad should be able to answer with the temp variable solution after CS101, even if they don’t necessarily understand that it is the only totally good answer for developers not working on micro controllers.

The worst, and the answer that will always get you rejected immediately, is a Swap method. Even if you’re joking. Interviews are a dangerous place for jokes; if that kind of rapport has been established, I suppose it is fine. But I do interviews with the filter questions at the start, and I’m not joking around because I’m looking to see if I should invest my time in the much more difficult and time consuming task of establishing if you will fit into the team. If you can get past the filter of code and theory questions, I’ll try and establish a rapport that would probably involve some laughs. But before hand, I’m looking for an opportunity to get out of the room.

To get out of the room. That sounds brutal and cold, and as if I don’t think interviews are a good use of my time. But they are, they are an excellent use of my time if I am talking to a great candidate. If you’re not a great candidate though, you aren’t getting hired by me, so any time spent talking to you after I have made up my mind is just wasting your time. And if you are joking early on in the piece, I start thinking you’re not taking the interview as seriously as I am.

So, tell me you’d use a temp variable, and then defend the hell out of that answer.

• code
• work

Google Reader is being shut down. You may have heard.

Some might say it died back in Nov 2011. That was when sharing functionality was modified to support Google+ ¹, effectively shutting down countless informal networks. It wasn’t something I was using, not extensively enough to mind at least, but I understood. Understood enough that I only made a little fun of the individuals who popped up promising to rewrite Google Reader.

But now it is really really going. And it’s a shame.

Dave Winer said he doesn’t care because he never used it. He didn’t trust Google, which is fair enough. Cino knows I don’t trust them much. He also didn’t like the “mailbox approach to news”, which strikes me as limited view of what Google Reader was. As much as it was a news aggregator, albeit one with a UI Winer had no time for, it was also a syncing tool for reader. Whether you used the web interface from multiple sites, or you read your news in an applications using the undocumented, unofficial Reader APIs, Google knew what you had read. Great for those of us with multiple modes of accessing our feeds.

He also advised that we should pay for the services we depend on. It’s a common theme, hand in hand with the maxim “If you’re not paying, you’re the product”. It’s powered by the assumption that companies treat you better if you are paying them. I know I pay my bank a lot of money, both directly and indirectly, and they have never felt any compunction not to treat me with a kind of benign contempt. They even as much as accused my wife of lying when she reported her credit card details stolen and a charge illegitimate. My telco treats me badly, my insurance agency will do everything in their power to wriggle out of claims, and Cityrail is the single worst service company I have ever had the pleasure of giving $50 a week.

Consistently the best service I have is at whatever coffee shop I am a regular at. They know my name, they know my order, some of them have known my wife’s name despite her never setting foot in their establishment. The nature of the business almost compels you to make a personal connection with them. But the single best instance of good service I ever had was from a lady running a small online store who bent over backwards to help me out the first time I bought something from her. She cared about her reputation but she also just gave a shit about her business and her customers.

It’s more than money, it’s how valued you are. Maybe you are valued because margins are low, or because they need your custom. Maybe it’s because you are face to face with them. Maybe they are just really nice people. I doubt paying a couple of dollars to Maciej Ceglowski a few years ago was enough to buy good service for as long as Pinboard operates, and if you do you can’t think much of him. No, I think I will get good service because he gives a shit. Companies like Twitter and Google and Facebook and Instagram will do things you don’t like, such as change terms and conditions, or shut down services, because they don’t give a shit about our reaction. Not enough people will stop using their service, or their other services.

People were certainly paying money to Yahoo for Flickr Pro accounts, and while it didn’t shut down, until quite recently it was coasting along treating its paying customers with a species of disinterested contempt.

People are upset because they found out a company that was once a fairly hoopy place now no longer gives a shit. It should be a shock to the system to find out you’re not valued. Those who are standing aside smugly tweeting about “outraged entitlement” - one comment which seems representative of the theme ² - simply haven’t introspective enough to think about what will happen when a service they rely on disappears on them, or just believe it won’t happen because, oh, they pay money. If you think paying some monthly fee will protect you when you’re one amongst a million…well you’re a fool.

Of course, to be fair, maybe they just rolled their own everything. In which case, they simply don’t even know what they are talking about.

What now then? I saw a few people shifting to The Old Reader and I’ve had a look, but somewhat unsurprisingly they’re under attack from Google Reader refugees. I’m also looking at Feedly, because they claim they have built and deployed a clone of the Google Reader API and that sounds interesting, something worth supporting. But I’ll also grab an OPML copy of all my subscriptions.

1. If you’d pressed me to answer without looking it up, I would have said it was mid-2012. ↩

2. Possibly revealing more about the speaker than the subject. ↩

One of the first things I wanted to be was a writer. It’s one of the first things I can recall earning praise for at school. I was 6 or 7 and the class was writing stories. My teachers were impressed that I had used dialogue, but I’d written a condensed version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea a few times by then that not using dialogue seemed weird.

I also remember Mum wasn’t thrilled because I’d had a character yelling “Shut up,” which at that age she thought wasn’t language she wanted me using. I recall she muttered something about if I was going to write it, I could at least spell it correctly. Thanks, Mum.

Over the years I’ve dabbled now and then. The longest I kept at it was a David Eddings fan fic which took two years for ~50,000 words. It was moderately awful. Usually it is when I write longer than a five or six hundred words, I don’t sustain narrative very well. I tend to do better at flash fiction, where I have to get in and out in a few hundred words and it is less about a story and more a sketch of one.

My favourite one is one I thought I had lost. I posted it as a comment to a blog post on another site. They were inviting entries to a competition, 300 words or less on the theme of “The Postmodern Pirate Queen”. I’m never sure I actually get what postmodernism even is though, so except something about intertexuality, so I just wrote a pastiche of Moorcock.

The sky was the colour of a crystal ball attuned to a dead dimension. A column of greasy smoke rose up from the shattered carcass of Peg Leg’s ship. It drifted in the breeze over the Rogue Mistress, temporarily hiding the sickly-coloured sky. Maria de Tres Pistolas hardly noticed.

The long boat pulled alongside and the crew started hauling in the booty retrieved from the water; the surviving crew and passengers of the doomed ship now beginning to slip beneath the waves. For all of the day’s maneuvering and posturing the battle only required a single shot from Goreethmorug, the aft-mounted cannon. Peg Leg’s ship had been no match for them and their hellish rounds.

Goreeth detached and clattered down to the main deck. His -it’s? - last human eye scanned the loot. “A good haul, captain,” he said.

“No Bastable though,” Maria replied.

“No. Escaped through the time streams, most like.”

Maria looked out over the alien sea. There was no life in this sea. No life anywhere they’d been while they hunted. Perhaps she’d sent the last life on this world to the bottom. “These colours bore me. Take us somewhere else. Somewhere with…slavery.” She didn’t stay to watch Goreeth winnow through the captives, discarding the sick and injured over the side and saving one for the engines. She sought her cabin. Later, while drifting in an opium dream, she hardly felt anything when the Rogue Mistress’s diabolic engines powered up and tugged at her soul like a loose thread. A good haul and Bastable would turn up again. As a lover or as an enemy; it hardly mattered which.

Something about it just worked for me. Maybe it was the few lines, that seemed to capture the inage I had in my mind for Maria. And of course, I liked it because I got the nicest praise for it: ‘The editors of “Metal-Hurlant” are applauding, somewhere.’

• fiction
• flashfic

This is the last time I ever give a spoiler warning. Spoilers in the second last paragraph.

My first though upon finishing was, “Damn it, we never found out who killed Asmodean.” That’s a problem. Actually, it’s two problems. It’s a problem for the book because, well, who cares? And it’s a problem for me because we did actually, it was in the notes at the end of the previous book.

It’s still a problem for the book despite me forgetting an offhand remark in the trivia notes of Towers of Midnight because it speaks to the audience and thus speaks to the genre. Because it is scenery. Background detail. Who killed Asmodean? Somebody, sure, but the answer is trivia, its something you can know or not know, and neither alters the plot, nor does it go to what Jordan might have been trying to speak about? Does it really go to how the book affected you, what it made you feel and think about, which is really what art is about? Does “What is Maichin Shin” matter at all? No, it does not. If it did, it wouldn’t require pages and pages of fan speculation built over over some twenty years. Seriously, check that shit out. How does one engage with and critically evaluate a book when all the focus is on the scenery.

Lost had the same problem. Immediately after it finished there were cries of outrage over all the reveals it didn’t have. Like, what did the numbers mean? What was the Hurley Bird? This and that. Who cares? They were all MacGuffins at best; hooks to hang a plot or character on. They are texture for a story. They offer you nothing. You can’t really develop them, they are a binary thing; before, you wonder what the answer is, after you know the answer. They don’t grow, they merely act as a tent pole for something else to grow, be it plot or the characters. All long running series, be it TV or novels, will do this. The creative minds behind it create story, in creating story they create background, and naturally their audience become curious.

When the audience is one prone to attention surplus, to focusing on minutia and attempting to draw it out like a fractal, the economy of these hooks can grow beyond the control of the creators. A audience like nerds. Nerds will seek out all the things the creators seeded into their work. Nerds will find things the creators didn’t seed and turn them into entries in the mythology, like The Tampa Job from Lost. Nerds will learn these things, share them, revel in the sharing and revel in the secret knowledge. Nerds will build social structures around these things. So far so good, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s all a part of creating an immersive background to your story, and no creator should be so egomaniacal as to dictate how their audience reacts and reflects upon their work. As should be obvious from the very first sentence, I also geek out on some of the MacGuffins. I also, however, try to engage with the work as a piece of art.

Now obviously art is many things. To be more accurate, art is somewhere just above 7 billion different things. For me, art is about what does the work make me feel, what reaction does it set off in me. How is it changing me? Because anything that causes an emotion is changing me, however slightly. I am not talking here about “oh I love this book” or hate this book. I am talking about the reactions I have to the content of what I am reading. If I might give an example, while a lot of people were disappointed with Dan Simmons’s Endymion novels, I hold for them a level of respect because the ending affected me. In a small way I feel the ending of that book made me a better person, a better human. The Wheel of Time series, particularly the earlier books, have given me insight into the risks of dismissing and ignoring differences of perceptions of reality that are natural to people of different cultures, creeds, or even genders. Sometimes it did this by driving me nuts with frustration at how stupid these people could be. Sometimes it did it with the Perrin-Faile love story - still my favourite of the category - and Perrin’s journey. And if a work isn’t trying to engage me in that way, what is the point? If all a work is is shuttling me between set pieces, if all it is is kneeling before the Rule of Cool, why should anyone invest time on it?

Robert Jordan allowed himself to get a little lost in the story. By the seventh book, A Crown of Swords, he had most of the pieces on the board, and he’d established what Rand’s arc would be. The arcs for Nynaeve, Egwene, Mat, and Perrin were also in place, and I’m prepared to argue if you like that those five are the lead and supporting players, everyone else is chorus. Everything was all ready to proceed to conflict, resolution, and growth. But then…nothing. We just sat there, at the crest of the arc for book after book. Nothing happened in the midst of story happening, to the absurd levels of Elayne having a pages long bath. I wonder what happened. Did he lose his nerve? Did he just not know how to prosecute it? Was the lure of “one more book” just too much? Hubris? Whatever it was, Sanderson was both the best and worst choice for replacing him. The best because he’s the probably the best of the epic fantasy authors currently operating and he clearly knows how to finish something.. The worst, because he has yet to show any ability to convey his ideas because he’s too impressed with himself and his world building. And he writes for The Scene, those set pieces of action. The cool moments. Jordan knew to use them as climax. Sanderson uses them as beats. Egwene fighting off the Seanchan in The Gathering Storm would have been the climax of a Jordan book, if he’d even written it. In Sanderson’s hands, it’s a loud, pointless clatter that overwhelms the real climax of the book, Egwene exposing the Black Ajah and putting the Tower back together. There had to be other ways of getting rid of Elaida, even something as obvious as having the Black Ajah killing her as they are exposed.

And so, to the point. A Memory of Light misses the point. Almost nothing that happens outside of The Pit of Doom is worth the words spilled. It is all filler to allow Sanderson to pay a visit to familiar names. The only point of the battles is to finalise Mat’s character arc, and it was over worked. Perrin’s character arc was already complete - not well though, and not the right arc - so all he did was run around doing things that were empty because of their meaninglessness. Egwene was probably already complete as well with the healing of the White Tower. So much of Tarmon Gaidon outside of the Pit of Doom was just visiting bit characters and giving Perrin and Egwene something to do that they became cumbersome and smothered Mat. And ultimately none of it mattered: Lan kills Demandred and effectively wins the conventional battle, not Mat. Mat doesn’t even get to be Hornsounder anymore, that gets given to Olver, with no foreshadowing that I picked up on. From a plot point of view, none of it mattered anyway, the only thing that mattered was Rand and The Dark One. It’s a little bit like Return of the Jedi, the Battle of Endor didn’t really matter, and in as much as it did, it was bit players who won it, Chewie and Lando¹, Lan and Olver.

Sanderson ended up getting lost in the woods of Jordan’s world building. On the other hand, Sanderson is a crowd pleaser, he knows how to give fan service. Unlike Lindelof and Cuse, Ronald Moore, and Stephen King he’s finished a long running, sprawling genre piece with an ending I think will go over pretty well. For all the flaws it holds for me, I have to give Sanderson props for achieving an ending that is suitably epic. But the flaws are there, too much time wasted on fan service to the disservice of the characters and the books.

1. If Lucas and Sanderson were trying to provide a counterpoint to the Great Men theory of history, they did it in the face of everything that preceded their final chapter. ↩

• books

So an unexpected pause during which I discovered the show-stopping flaw in my new blogging regime. When your blogging requires running rake from your command line to publish, your workflow will come to a crashing halt when your computer fails.

That’s no excuse for not having words ready to post. To tell the truth, it’s not really even an excuse for not publishing; the software lives in my dropbox folder, so I could have setup a ruby environment on my work computer.

While I was away, I read A Memory of Light. I have a ponderous review sitting in the cloud, slowly creeping towards a point. I also started reading The Wheel of Time from the beginning again. Book 1-3 + 80% of Book 4 in a fortnight. I should pause. I told myself when I started I wouldn’t read them back to back, that I would spread them out, read one a fortnight or month, or the like. I’ve taken in too much too quickly, I can’t get my eyes to do more than skim the pages, particularly in the Elayne and Nynaeve sections, not my favourite characters of all time. Pretty soon my dreams will involve immersive, if bizarre and chaotic imagery from the books.

Last post I mentioned I would set a challenge of reading twelve books that would be out of the usual for me, with forms that I am unaccustomed to. I’m not sure how I am going with that. I have a list of a few possibilities, but at least one of them, the one I bought today and plan to start in the coming week, is only on the list because of anecdotal evidence of being an unusual form; House of Leaves. I’ve also got Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, The Illiad, Camus’s The Rebel, The Republic, and 10 Print CHR$(255.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 on my list. I’m skeptical. To be fair, so are co-workers. One of them asked me what was the last book I read that I put down and was glad I had slogged through it because it was affecting. I took his point.

It was Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and that was two years ago, but I did take his point.

• books