May Contain Nuts

So apparently, James Dobson won’t be voting if Giuliani is the Republican Presidential candidate. While I can at least appreciate his beliefs and his reasons for having them which would ostensibly keep him from voting, this raises an interesting question about the role of religion in politics…

The former NYC mayor is apparently on record (according to CNN) as personally despising the practice of abortion (around which half of Dobson’s issue apparently revolves), but is committed to a woman’s right to have one. While his personal views on homosexuality aren’t spelled out in the CNN article, it seems to indicate that he is also an advocate of equal rights for said individuals. I think that there’s an important point to be made here, and it’s this:

In the realm of politics, your personal religious beliefs do not necessarily reflect the best direction for public policy. There are plenty more people in this country than Christians, and the law needs to encompass all of those people, providing a legal framework for support and behavioral regulations that favor no one group over another. This is obviously a hard thing to do, and when you get into the supposedly moral gray areas of things like homosexuality and abortion, it becomes even harder. Obviously, groups opposed to such practices (and I use that word knowing that it applies better to abortion than to homosexuality, but I’m going with it because I don’t feel like using a thesaurus) wish to see them outlawed in their country of origin (if not everywhere…). Yet other groups find nothing wrong with these practices, and believe that it is morally wrong to legislate against them on the basis of religious belief alone.

I don’t want to get too deep into the whys and wherefores of these issues, because they’re whole papers unto themselves (I know, I wrote one on the subject of gay marriage in school), and there are obviously exceptions to the notion I’m about to put forward, both in these issues and in others, but on the whole, I think it’s a good rule of thumb, and I’m likely to support any candidate on either “side” of the aisle that adopts it as general course. The government should not be required to legislate morality to its citizens (nor do I think it’s appropriate for it to do so). That’s the role of religion, and if religion is doing the job it’s supposed to, then citizens will make “right” choices based upon it. The government’s job is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens, as ordained in the Constitution (oh noes, I’ve invoked the C word!):

[...] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity [...]

To that end, it must encompass all of its citizens in the approach it takes to legislation, regardless of the personal beliefs of a segment of those citizens or the lawmakers themselves.

Now, if Giuliani is just intentionally waffling in an effort to garner support on both sides of an issue, first off, he’s not as smart as I would have liked to give him credit for… in this era of 24-hour news, anything you say gets re-processed about a billion times and played right next to other comments you’ve made… and if the press doesn’t like you very much, those comparisons may not be very favorable. Any discrepancies in your comments will get torn to shreds, so if he’s waffling and not expecting that to happen, he’s lost some serious points in my book. On the other hand, if he’s really serious about his personal beliefs versus his public stance on these issues, I’m willing to grant him more than a few bonus points for being honest about it, plus a few more for putting the country ahead of himself. Realistically, I think he falls somewhere in the middle of these two possibilities; I don’t think even the most starry-eyed politician is idealistic enough to think that the sort of idealistic notion of the role of government I proposed is going to get them elected. Everyone panders and doublespeaks… it’s just a measure of degree these days.

At the risk of sounding like an angry liberal whiner, I’d like to draw people’s attention to something I read in this CNN article on the possible advancement and passage of some liberal rights laws in the new Congress next year.

Another conservative leader, the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, asserted that the gay-rights bills likely to advance next year will infringe on the rights of those who condemn homosexuality.

“All Americans must be prepared to endure serious threats to their freedom of speech, their right to make employment decisions as business owners and their religious freedom in the business world,” Sheldon said.

I simply can’t help but think that this is the same sort of rhetoric that was thrown about in the past during the movement for equal rights for Blacks (sorry, African-Americans… have to keep up the liberal Pee Cee-ness ;P) in the 50’s.

I was going to say something else, but the more I stare at this guy’s comment, the more I think it speaks for itself. So, I’ll just end on this: What the HELL is wrong with people?

So, today I was woken up at 7 by the phone ringing, which someone else answered before I got to it. Then I was woken up again at 8 because I had been instructed last-minute (this was why the phone rang at 7, evidently) to ensure that the basement was clear for the meter man to get through (our meters are indoors for some stupid reason…). And then I was kept up by the construction in front of our house as part of the city’s plan to (for whatever reason) replace every single gods-damned water pipe on the street, which has been going on for about three weeks now. So, I’m awake, I’m cranky, and I’ve had about 4 hours of sleep.

And before someone says “it could be worse”, it’s also raining and I have to be at work in an hour for a 12 and a half hour day.

CNN profiles complaints from safety experts who claim that the recently-installed security measures on the site aren’t enough to keep kids from being preyed upon by sexual predators.

Honestly, since when was it ever really possible to truly identify users with 100% accuracy and confidence? People are going to lie about their age, gender, name, weight, interests, etc… perhaps even more so than usual because of the extremely socially-oriented nature of the website. Hell, people don’t even give you their name or age with 100% honesty in reality… just go to any bar or club and pick five people at random. I’ve got $20 saying one of them fibs, for whatever reason. It’s just a LOT easier to do so online. Unless MySpace wants to restrict itself to US users and require something inane like your social security number to confirm your identity, there’s no realistic way MySpace is going to prevent people from lying about who they are.

Furthermore, since when was it MySpace’s responsibility to keep an eye on kids who may or may not have signed up with an assumed name, gender, or age? Sure, you can have all of the child safeguards and parental control mechanisms for underage users you want, but they all rely on kids a) having their parents’ permission and b) being honest about themselves when signing up for an account. Someone in Texas is suing the company for $30 million in damages because her daughter was sexually assaulted after meeting up with someone she found on MySpace. As horrible as that is, and as heartless as this next question may be, I have to ask, where was the mom and what was she doing to keep an eye on her daughter’s activities? Did she approve this meet-up, or did her daughter just go without telling anyone?

And the 16-year-old who flew to Jordan? Seriously, does it make any sense for some kid’s friend’s mom to organize a trip to Canada (which doesn’t require a passport, I might note, assuming you’re driving anyway) without calling the other parents to discuss it? And wouldn’t it also make just as much sense to want to discuss the trip with that kid’s friend’s parent before going to get your 16-year-old child a passport? (I’ll leave out the question of where the hell this girl got the money to buy a ticket to Jordan on the grounds that maybe the Jordanian guy bought it for her).

I really can’t help but think that, with as much as MySpace has been in the news lately - good and bad alike (though mostly bad) - parents would start taking a bit more of an interest in their children’s online activities and have a nice conversation on the general stupidity of blindly trusting folks you meet on the internet. In that respect, I have to say that it’s nice that I sort of “grew up” in a community online that seems to be pretty much devoid of deviant behavior like the aforementioned cases. It’s good to know that, should someone ever actually go missing for real at a meet-up like Mysterium, folks are willing to get the National Park Service rangers to go looking for you.

Anyway, ultimately, there’s a certain degree of responsibility on parents to make sure they know what’s going on, and as I will admit from first-hand experience that it’s easy enough to hide what you’re doing if you have your own computer, there’s something to be said for not letting underaged kids have unmonitored access to the internet, especially without a nice long chat about how dangerous places like MySpace could be. I think it’ll be interesting as our generation takes the parental reigns, because we pretty much know all of the tricks to pull to hide stuff, and hopefully we’re good at spotting those tricks too and can figure out ways of keeping our kids from getting around us.

Congress gives itself a pay raise while Republicans kill a minimum wage increase.

That seems fair. (not…)

I’ve come to the conclusion that people don’t want to do any work to find out something about a product. Just as an example, Uru Live’s home page has the GameTap press release on it, stating the game’s return through the service. Now, GameTap is only available in the US, while Uru is and has been for some time a very international thing. This has led a distressingly large number of international site-goers to assume that the game will not be available outside the US, and they come to the forum to verify this assumption.

Of course, they do fail, in the process, to completely skip the entire “Game Info” section of the site, which has a wonderfully-crafted FAQ which quite clearly states that the game will, in fact, be available internationally. Having seen this question posted no fewer than five times in the past week (and not just on the Live forums), I have to wonder if people even bother reading FAQs, and if not, why do companies and individuals continue to bother writing them? I mean, granted, it’s easier to ask someone else to do the reading for you, but if you want to know the answer to a question *now*, asking a forum is probably not the speediest way of going about it… and it’s actually more work for the person in the long run, between registering, posting, and waiting for a response.

Of course, at the same time, I’m also baffled as to why nobody ever seems to use the handy-dandy “Search” tool to find the numerous threads undoubtedly already given over to their query, but again, I imagine this is assumed to be less productive and more labor-intensive than is appropriate for the effort this person wishes to shell out.

I would like to note that this doesn’t in any way limit itself to the Live announcement, before someone else thinks I’m just being snarky about it (which I am, to a degree, because I would have hoped that after the twentieth time I’ve seen the question asked, someone would have figured out that the issue had already been raised). I’ve seen just as many occurrences of this in places like the Microsoft User Groups, where the behavior is even more pronounced, though at the same time perhaps slightly more understandable (at least, as far as MS goes), because the MS knowledge base is a joke. But still… Search, folks. It’s there for your benefit! FAQs are there for a reason! Read! Odds are, given the sheer volume of people on the internet, that your question has already been answered. Odds are also that people are getting tired of answering it.

This is the kind of thing that reminds me why I bought my PowerMac…

I pulled my laptop out of its case tonight to do some video conversions from FRAPS to a more QT-friendly format so I could do some editing with it (my “studio”, as it were, consists of my wife’s PC where the videos were shot, my laptop where I usually convert them to free up her PC, and my PowerMac where I do all the editing and whatnot). I plugged it in, hooked up the power cord (the battery is fubar, yay…), plugged in the LAN cable, and turned it on. It failed to connect to any of the shared folders on the network, and couldn’t connect to the internet either. I tried two other cables - even going so far as to disconnect my wife’s computer to test her cable - to no avail. I re-created the local network settings on the laptop, and tried numerous times to renew the DHCP license using ipconfig. The device manager reports that the LAN card is working fine, and the Windows troubleshooting tool is absolutely useless (I’ve yet to encounter a scenario where going to troubleshooting hasn’t resulted in a screen stating “troubleshooter cannot resolve your problem”). I can’t ping anything, and it takes about a minute after hooking up the LAN cable for it to realize there’s something connected. The laptop’s connection light on the router is constant-on, which means it’s not communicating any data, but the active light on the laptop is going like crazy. And before anyone asks, I’ve tried connecting the thing to three different ports on the router with the same result, so it’s not the router, and it’s not the cable, which means it has to be the laptop. I have a sneaking suspicion that the LAN card has somehow managed to up and die on me. I’ve rebooted the thing twice and re-connected the cable I don’t know how many times, and nothing has changed. Meanwhile Windows goes on cheerfully reporting that the device is fine. Ugh.

This is pretty much the last straw for this laptop. It’s a slow-as-hell 1 GHz Celeron with only 248 MB of RAM, a 12″ LCD from the Dark Ages (thing has a viewing angle of about 0.2 degrees…), a keyboard that likes to drop random letters as I type, a dead battery, and now a bad network card. I’d love to get a new one, but unfortunately, I don’t have very much money right now, and what I have I ought to be saving for Mysterium tickets and hotel rooms. In addition to that, I have a few requirements of this new laptop that bump the price up by default. First, it needs to have a bigger screen than the one I have, because 1024×768 sucks coming from 1920×1200. Second, it needs to be able to run all of the Myst games, including Uru/UU, Revelation, and EoA (mostly Uru though). Yes, I know, laptops aren’t supported, but I don’t have a Windows machine otherwise, and it’d be nice not to have to hog Ash’s computer when I want to pop into the Cavern. It also needs to be capable of at least running 3DS MAX, even if render times are less than desirable. It’ll also have to be used for web testing, though that’s hardly system-intensive, ’cause that’s largely what I use my current laptop for. Unfortunately, this means a 14-15″ screen, an actual, honest-to-god video card, and at least 512 MB of RAM. I also refuse to buy another Celeron processor, so that bumps me up to the Pentium M models. The cheapest I’m finding anything is a $709 refurbished model from Dell (which is where I got my current laptop… hrm…) that probably won’t be there tomorrow. I, however, do not have $709 to throw around, and probably won’t for a while yet. This frustrates me, as I use my laptop - pathetic as it is - for a number of things, and the inability for it to connect to the internet or even the local network severely hinders its productivity. Especially since all it has for media drives are a floppy and a DVD-ROM.

Grr… I don’t want to have to buy a new laptop…

Whoa, lots of tags on this one…

So I’m sure everyone involved in the UU scene has heard about this by now, but for those who don’t pay much attention, I’ll briefly recap the situation…

Recently, Grey Dragon posted a note on Uru Obsession and at Cyan’s own forums regarding the modifications fans have made to Uru since its release, especially with regards to the development of fan-created Ages. It was pretty standard faire as far as notices go, basically stating that they need people to file for permission from Cyan’s legal department before developing - and especially releasing - any fan-created content, and that they want to get things straightened out before things get too much farther.

The biggest reason for this, I imagine, is that Chris Brandkamp apparently did not return to Cyan after they shut down in November, and with his departure, Cyan basically has to re-build their legal department, since Chris pretty much WAS the legal department. So, a few things that probably WERE permitted simply need revalidation, and any new projects obviously require their own permission granted.

I am, so far, at a loss to see why any of this comes as a surprise to anyone. It’s how Cyan has operated for the past 12 years: if you want to use their assets in a project of your own, you must ask first. That’s the rule, and always has been. I see no reason to be shocked that they’re actually enforcing it. Perhaps it’s the timing (which some consider exceptionally delayed in coming) that has thrown so many off. AFAIK, the UU hacks like the userKI and adminKI have been approved and now re-approved for use and distribution, so that’s not even really where Cyan’s concern lies. Their concern, it seems, very understandably lies in the seemingly exponential growth of fan-created Ages for the game. When you have a game so intricately tied to a story and history, fan-created content that creates inconsistencies in that story and history can become a real nightmare very quickly. Since there seems to be something afoot with Uru, which I don’t think Cyan was expecting to have happen so soon, they suddenly have to get their ducks in a row, so to speak, and make sure that they have a handle on what’s going on in the community. The implications of fans creating their own Ages which can be distributed online and plug into their engine are severe. Much more severe than any Half-Life mod could ever hope to be. You simply don’t mod an MMO - especially not one with such a strong central story to it… it’s not something that’s been done before (and please don’t cite There or SL, because they are a totally different situation). MMO modding is something that needs much more developer control than a stand-alone game does, because you’re dropping new content into the developer’s world where it will be equally accessible to everyone. Stand-alone games by default include a much greater understanding of the separation of original developer content and fan-created material.

What truly boggles my mind are the people who are fuming up the UO forums complaining about Cyan’s right to protect their own property, basically saying that they should be allowed to do whatever they want because Valve has already laid the groundwork with Half-Life, while completely ignoring the differences between Half-Life and Uru as well as the fact that Cyan is NOT Valve, nor is Uru released under the same license as Half-Life. I’m going to be frank in my opinion about these people, because I believe that they are doing much more harm than good.

Cyan has, through Grey Dragon, openly admitted their desire to work together with us as fans to expand our capabilities, and possibly our influence, in Uru:

We have been continually amazed with the persistence you have shown and hope in the future we can work with you. We truly hope this period of planning will be sorted out soon.

Now, let me be perfectly clear in saying that this offer of friendship will only last as long a we agree to play by the rules and restrictions that Cyan puts into place, even if we don’t agree with them. If we ignore Cyan’s wishes, if we disregard the trust that they have placed in us by not saying anything until now, we risk endangering that future relationship and losing EVERYTHING that all of these wonderfully talented people have worked for over the past two to three years.

I will not let that happen. It has and always will be my dream to work at Cyan someday, and if collaborating with them on a fan-based project that uses Uru as a basis can at all help (and I’m pretty damn sure it would), I refuse to let someone who thinks they know better than the IPs owner how to manage the situation stand in my way. I’m not going to be polite about this, because it’s not just my potential future, but the potential future of everyone in this community who has ever wanted to be a part of Cyan’s storytelling that is at stake here. If we ignore them on this, we could see a very ugly side of Cyan as they’re forced to crack down on those violating their requests and limitations in order to preserve the integrity of their story and whatever relationship they have with their mysterious financial backer (as I imagine that they are doing this as much for their backer as they are for their own protections).

We have been given miles and miles of free range through UU and its relatively unmonitored status over the past year and a half. Now Cyan has started posting speed limits and road signs to prevent things from getting ugly, and there are those who wish to ignore them or even go so far as to try and tear them down. If they persist, I can guarantee that it WILL NOT end well. Cyan has said clearly that their silence on an issue does not constitute approval, hacking the game is in violation of the EULA, and distributing modified files is in violation of the EULA in addition to the DMCA in the United States. Cyan has every legal right in the world to sue people for messing with their engine and their IP, but they haven’t. They’ve asked us nicely to submit any and all Uru-related projects to their legal department for approval just as we’ve done for the past 12 years. They’ve expressed their desire to work together with us in the future, possibly even allowing us access to better tools and the honor of having our Ages officially included in-game, to take the possibilities to their most extreme. But what do these people do? They whine. They accuse Cyan of living in the past (which confuses me, as the vast majority of games on the market do not support modifications to them). They badmouth them and assume without any knowledge of what they’re doing that anything else they create will suck, be unpopular, fail, etc. because of said “living in the past”.

I have only one thing to say to you people (and you know who you are): You are a bunch of spoiled children. Grow up and learn to play by the rules before you ruin the entire experience for everybody.

And for the record, despite the fact that there are apparently a number of folks out there who have developed an increasing dislike for anything and everything that Cyan does, and are excessively vocal about it in a totally non-constructive manner (yet somehow strangely still claim to be fans of their work…), it is still my ultimate goal to get a job there. Hopefully someday soon (note to self, make sure demo reel is ready by Mysterium).

Tomorrow should prove to be a thoroughly exhausting and horrible day at work, and I believe I am completely within my rights to blame it all on Universal Studios and their handling of the release of King Kong. Bear with me a moment while I explain this.

King Kong is, according to the information I’ve seen, a 3 hour and 20 minute long film. Add trailers and it begins to approach 4 hours in length without even blinking. This is a movie which opens everywhere Wednesday, December 14, but which will have midnight screenings the night before in many markets, including Cincinnati. I happen to be working at a theatre which will be running just such a midnight screening.

Now, allow me to briefly wax self-important for a moment. You may think that an audience’s enjoyment of the film rests entirely upon the crew that actually created it. In this, you’re rather mistaken, for there’s a final link in the chain from script to screen: the projectionist. In fact, the film industry is quite possibly unique in how much the final impact of a product relies on the actions of someone not even remotely related to the product’s development. You’d really never know that my job is so important given how appallingly little I get paid to do it, but there you go. Anyway, it is the responsibility of myself and everyone else working in the projection booth to ensure that the people who show up to the midnight premiere of King Kong get their $9.50’s worth (the money they blow in concession is no concern of mine, that’s all up to the concessionists). In order to do this, it is customary and pretty much a required practice that the films we show are tech-screened before being shown to the public. In this way, we can identify problems and replace damaged film as quickly as possible. In the case of the midnight show, this enables us to put the best of all prints on screen for our patrons, as replacement parts don’t come the same day we need them.

Now, here’s the important part. The midnight show is at midnight (obviously) at the close of business Tuesday night. That’s tomorrow. This means that we have to have the film ready to run for the public at that time, tech-screened or not (and obviously, we prefer it to be tech screened). This means that we have to have at least 4 hours of lead time to get the film tech-screened. Typically, when a film has a midnight premiere, we get the films a day before that (in this case, Monday) to allow us enough time to assemble them, screen them, and verify their quality. Unfortunately, Universal Studios doesn’t seem to understand this fact.

In fact, Universal Studios seems to be going out of their way to be as much of a pain in the ass as humanly possible. Because of their paranoia about potential theft of the prints, they decided not to send us our five prints Monday. We get them tomorrow, the day of the midnight screening. As if that’s not asinine enough, they did decide to send us one reel of the film Monday… reel 8 (the movie, being 3:20 in length, is at least 10 reels long). A reel we can’t possibly do anything with. If it were the first reel we could have attached it to the trailers. If it were the last reel we could have added lighting cues to the credits. But no. We get reel 8. Bastards.

Now, I must admit, I can sympathize with Universal’s paranoia about film theft (even though I really don’t understand it… it’s not like your average Joe is going to have the assembly tools, the $10,000 35mm projector, and the digital sound processor needed to actually watch the film anyway), but their approach really is just beyond asinine. If they wanted to protect the film from theft (or even piracy), just ship it with one reel missing, like the last reel, and then send it separately. It’s what they’re doing now anyway, just in an order that actually makes some degree of sense. But instead of being intelligent, they’ve decided to totally screw the projectionists over by holding onto the film until the last possible moment, which could potentially have a negative impact on the viewing experience of thousands if not tens of thousands of movie-goers nation-wide. And for as much as I try not to sometimes, I really do give a damn about the experience people have at the movies, because I watch movies too, and it drives me insane when there are problems with the presentation.

So thank you, Universal Studios, for shitting all over the people who actually make it worth people’s time to come see the products that you release. But then, you don’t care, because you’re getting the film rental money regardless of how many refunds we hand out at the theatre for crappy presentation, so really it’s only the theatres that will feel the ill effects of your crappy-ass anti-piracy maneuver. Though I imagine that, for the end-consumer, this really isn’t much different from the boat-load of technical problems software anti-piracy tools have begun instigating, so in this regard the film industry really isn’t all that unique.

Okay, I’m all for supporting Ubi even though some of its business decisions are a little ineffable, but this one is just a little bit beyond ever being able to be effed (though I could argue that it’s effed-up…).

The standard edition box of End of Ages will be PC-only. The only way to get a Mac-compatible copy is to buy the Limited Edition. To be perfectly frank, this strikes me as an incredibly stupid idea. First off, this means that, being a Limited Edition, there will at some point in the future cease to be any new LE boxes shipped. Thus, after a certain amount of time, the only platform you’ll be able to buy this game on will be the PC. This strikes me as more than a little unfair, to be perfectly honest. Secondly, UbiSoft already has a hybrid-format game. It’s inherently cross-platform. Is it seriously THAT much more expensive to make the standard edition hybrid-format? And why, after already establishing a completely DVD-only release with Revelation, has the decision been made to go back to shipping things on CD? Especially when it’s a 3-CD game?

This frustrates me, because I can’t even wrap my head around the business logic of this decision when it would require no additional development costs to implement a cross-platform standard release. The software already exists, it just needs to be printed onto media. In fact, I can’t see it cutting out more than a few cents per box in profit… and considering the game will be retailing for $49.99, I somehow doubt there’s any real reason to be concerned that they’re somehow not going to make money off of it if it’s hybrid. Instead of taking in 30 bucks in profit, they may only take in 29.50 (or more for direct online sales). Gasp.

I’m sorry, but this is really just stupid. I’ve seen a lot of dumb moves made by Ubi over the past 4 years by factoring profit in over customer satisfaction (and fanbase comprehension), but this one really takes the cake, though the delayed European release of Exile ranks WAY up there… probably at #2.