On a personal note

When I started this particular blog, I quietly swore to myself I wouldn’t be writing about boring, everyday things that happen in my life. That’s exactly what I used to do with Livejournal, write up all the dull shit happening, as if anyone actually gave a damn. The trouble with this was that for the most part, my days are pretty repetitive; I go to work, I come home, I bugger about with the hobby du jour, I go to bed, prior to getting up and rinsing and repeating. This is probably true of most people, but that doesn’t make me Samuel Pepys. This becomes so repetitive to write about that suddenly I’m updating once every six months, and that’s only to say that nothing new or exciting is happening.

So here, I decided I’d at least try to be a little different, and write about things that people not in my immediate family might have a passing interest in. So far, that seems to be working. I can’t claim my posts are interesting to read, that’s the readers call, but at least they’re not boring to write.

For once, though, it’s worth touching on personal events. Last week we had an interview with Homeland Security, and my green card was renewed. For the first since perhaps 2002, one of the major stress factors in my life has just... stopped. Gone away. I don’t have to deal with the interminable paperwork or shockingly high fees for filing said paperwork for at least ten years, and even that would just be a renewal. I have to admit, it’s left me flailing a little to suddenly not have that looming in the background.

I can’t say the approval came as any surprise, given I’m from one of the few countries left in the world that still likes the US. I’m pleased that once you got past the stock forms and demands for financial records of nonexistent things, once you actually get to the face to face level, the immigrations staff have been extremely pleasant. This was true in London, and it’s true in St Louis. Indeed, it’s hard to be concerned about the outcome of the interview when halfway in the interviewer starts pulling up pictures of her cats on her iPhone and showing them to us.

Really though, the whole thing’s had a sense of anticlimax for some time. There’d have been a time when I first moved here when I would actually dream regularly that I’d been deported back to England. I wouldn’t call them nightmares, as they were pretty dull as dreams go, but clearly my subconscious wasn’t thrilled at the prospect. For the last year or so, though, it’s just been another minor stress to add to the pile, a tediously slow exchange of correspondence we wished would just be done.

And now it is. It feels somehow sudden that it’s all over, but unless I want to start the naturalization process in a few months, I don’t actually have to deal with Homeland Security until 2021. Citizenship isn’t anything I’ll be rushing into, incidentally, until I can find out what the long term effects are on both sides of the water. I hear that Neil Gaiman has always, somewhat superstitiously, clung to his British Citizenship like a drowning man clinging to a wooden plank, and I would love to know why.

Nine years of bureaucracy ended in a single day. If nothing else, I thought it would be worth noting here.

In Soviet Russia, Internet reads YOU

Some (most) of the hits this blog gets seem to come from a particular source, an auto finance blog. I'll not give the url, as that might just invoke their fel spirit; at best, it'd be free advertising for them. Note I've never written about cars, or finance, in any way, shape or form. I don't think I've even used either word until this post. I have no interest in auto finance, I have no car, I have no intention of getting a car. Or a loan. Or a car loan. Or...

And yet, still, somehow, traffic comes from them, to me. With no visible sign of an actual link to my website, either. I note when I try to follow the link back, it goes through about 3 layers of Yahoo addresses before landing wherever it lands, which does nothing to raise my respect for that company.

 I'm not sure why they're latching on to me, but I suspect I'm one of thousands. I wish they'd bugger off, though. The hits on wordpress, I'd rather be authentic. It's not like I'm being paid for them, after all.

Perhaps I can entice them to sod off and ping my AC account.

A true story

I recently found out that my PC specs are adequate for running Team Fortress 2. I remembered that that looked like a lot of fun when I’d seen my brother playing it on the 360, so I duly ordered it through Steam. I found a bunch of server affiliated through a particular clan that I enjoyed, and got to playing.

And died. Over and over again.

Now some of that is probably because my PC just about meets the specs; it certainly doesn’t have the sort of Super Fandango Quad-blit video card that I see used on youtube, whose framerates make me insanely jealous. It stutters at times, and I suspect my characters heads would be exploded a lot less were it a little smoother.

But I persevere. I have a crack at it most nights, I get to the point where names of the other players are starting to sound familiar. They don’t say a lot, as they’re too busy firing rockets and flamethrowers at my asshole, but I attribute emotions to them, I start to judge their level of competence, and I slowly begin to get better at the game. I learn where the taunt key is, and use it liberally. I learn how the different roles play out, and basically how to lay down some smack occasionally between deaths.

And then, late one night, someone makes a comment about ‘Jesus, how many bots do you have on here?’ I pay it no mind at first, but obviously my subconscious nags away at it. I check and find you can bring up the scoreboard with the tab key, and sure enough, ‘BOT BOT BOT BOT BOT’. Out of the 20 players on the server at that point, 3 are actual people, the rest are being run by a computer.

Now, it’s a credit to TF2 that the bots are that good; that they can make complex tactical  decisions and contribute to a team’s game so well, that they can mimic human players reasonably, and they don’t get stuck running on the spot against a wall somewhere. They’re possibly some of the smartest AIs I’ve seen playing a game. But I get the feeling I might as well have just been playing offline half the time. I suspect the clan’s servers have more real people during reasonable hours; I tend to play well after midnight, and anything up to 4am.

It’s also slightly creepy to think that even if I weren’t online, there would be anything up to 24 bots, all battling it out, 24 hours a day, with no end in sight and nobody even watching. On multiple servers and maps. War has never looked so futile.

So, back to the drawing board. Time to look for more servers where real, breathing people actually play at OMG o’clock. On the plus side, playing against bots for so long has made me a better player. I suspect the bots have a fair better reaction time than most people; they don’t have to see something and lurch for a key combination or anything, they just do it. On the downside, I also suspect I’ll be back to getting killed to death pretty quickly; however good the bots are, they’re not as good as some of the hardcore players who drink, sleep and shit TF2, and eat punks like me for breakfast.

Written 1/29. Promptness is a virtue

I suspect I need a peer group. At least, some kind of Blog peer group. I still cringe at the word ‘blogosphere’, but this blog really is a wee bit isolated.

Trouble is, every other blog I’ve seen recently is selling something. At the very least, they’re selling themselves, desperate to get pagehits to their sites by any means necessary.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; given my flirtation with AC/Yahoo, I can’t really claim I haven’t done this without being an enormous hypocrite. The sad thing is, you see so many ‘successful’ sites that get thousands of hits a day, and say absolutely nothing. I noticed one site had somehow sent me a few hits my way, and I was curious how. Google Chrome inched its way past the screens of ads, and led me to a blog where there was no sign of the article cited, just 40 or 50 esoteric articles on blog design. I can’t tell if mine was ever mentioned anywhere or just generated randomly with some sort of bot to generate him that tiny bit more traffic. The posts involved appeared to be little more than links to other posts on other blogs, with a thumbnail picture of something vaguely relating to the topic thrown in.

And this site, mind you, had hundred of comments on the posts. On each post. I didn’t even dare read them. How much can you have to say about the importance of graphics in articles?

The point is, this traffic being generated to my blog was never, as far as I can tell, touched by human hand. It was certainly never read by anything sentient due to these clicks, I’m sure.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit depressing? I mean, if we’re going to play silly buggers and write articles and posts that aren’t going to be read, why don’t we just code something up to write articles that no-one will read? Then the two algorithms can just get on with it, and anyone creative involved can go for a drink and relax.

So, this is why I’ve previously been reluctant to join any little blog circles or things of that nature. Discussions on AC’s forums are all about the Search Engine Optimisation of articles, and how to maximise potential hits by parroting key phrases a certain percentage of times throughout your writing. Not only does this seem slightly dishonest, the writing equivalent of trying to lure someone into the back of a van with the promises of puppies, those who do it well turn out articles which are frankly... inelegant. Search engines are supposed to love these (or did; I don’t believe Google relies on SEO any more), but for humans trying to read, it’s a load of tedious, repetitive bollocks.

The short version: I’d love to read your blog, actual real person. I’d love you to read mine. I don’t even care what it’s about, as long as I find it interesting. If you’re such a real person, feel free to subscribe.

If you’ve a blog that’s optimised for maximal hits from Google, I’m probably not interested. If I was interested, I’d have looked you up on Google, wouldn’t I?

If you’re a bot, go play with the other bots. You already outnumber actual people; don’t crowd those of us left who actually write for the hell of it out entirely.

The perennial problem - What the hell to write about

I got a little off-target from my new year’s resolution this month, mostly due to spending the early part of January filled with snot and despair. That’s probably one of the worst colds I’ve had, and the only thing I felt like at the time was a quick, merciful death. Much better now, barring a pulled muscle or something in my side/back that feels like a knife to the ribcage. But only a very small knife.

 

 

Of course, I’m raring to get back into writing something every day, if only for my blog if not actual (*gasp*) fiction. And of course, I can of bugger all to write about. I suspect that piece yesterday about childhood memories and snow is going to get posted whole to AC/yahoo as some kind of prose, partly because I suspect judicious use of keywords like ‘snow’ would be fairly popular right now, but mostly to see if ‘dogshit’ registers on any censorship radars over there.

 

That’s not exactly writing, though. Nor is this, this metawriting bullshit that I’m doing right now, writing about writing without actually writing about much of anything. It’s really just a fallback position for writer’s block. This month, and probably next month, that’s not something I really mind, though. I’m mostly getting into the habit of trying to write something every day. Quality over quantity will hopefully come later. Hell, I wouldn’t mind both at once.

 

It is difficult finding things to write about, mind. It’s a truism that you should write about what you know, but I don’t want to ramble on about my Childhood indefinitely, because that’s really something only I’m interested in, and presumably the idea of a blog is to write about stuff that a hypothetical, invisible (non-existant) audience might find interesting.

 

I have interests I like to write articles about, but to be honest, there’s a pretty limited audience for reviews of Roguelikes. Anyone sufficiently interesting in that type of game invariably knows about the ones knocking around in the first place. Anything more in depth is doomed before it starts. Suppose, for instance, I decided to write a strategy guide for Nethack. They already exist, it’s already been spoiled to death over the last 20 years, there’s strategy guides in abundance already, and it would probably be filled with inaccuracies brought on by having played the damned thing for way too long and building up a collection of bad habits and assumptions. Dog help you too, if there are any errors, or even any questionable suggestions about how to play. I’ve seen dissections of Maniac’s (rather decent) ascension guide that, if printed onto hardcopy, would make respectable phonebook replicas. And they get quite personal, too, in that oddly polite but wounding way you see from veterans of USENET when they decide to wade into a thread with their size 12 boots on.

 

So, nothing roguelikey, then. Except possibly a review of Crawl somewhere with some kind of twist to it. I seem to be well liked by the admins on the forum, and they seem keen on backlinking any mention of the game, which wouldn’t hurt traffic.

 

My interests otherwise are kinda limited. I can be outrageously British and pull a fair bit of attention that way, but there’s another 60 million or so of them out there, and quite a few already have the corner marketed. The Internet does not need another website about cats being amusing. ‘Eating pizza’ is, while popular, something that doesn’t really need much written about it.

 

I read the BBC news daily, not with a view to looking for ideas, but just to keep up on things and get a news source that isn’t too horribly corrupted by US politics and commercial interests. Whatever else you might say about the BBC, they’re reasonably unbiased, or as unbiased as a news center can get. I do tend to keep an eye out for things I could write about though. Again, there’s remarkably little jumping out at me. Nothing I wouldn’t just be repeating parrot-fashion from the original source. I can, in all honesty, see why AC like (and will pay more for) first-person accounts of events. There’s way too many sites around nowadays that do exactly that. I don’t even mean aggregators like Boingboing or Fark or so on, there are hundreds of cookie-cutter news site that just cut and paste stuff in its entirety. I suppose that’s true of most places online nowadays; for every Facebook or Twitter there’s scores of imitators trying to jump on the bandwagon. Total members of these sites: 3. And at least one of those is the developer’s mother. It seems particularly pronounced with any news or article feeds, however.

 

Anyhow, I think this is yet again enough rambling for one day. No real conclusions, no specific, clear-cut ending, no moral to the story.

 

Why, I could be writing about life itself.

 

This is something that’s been batting around in my head for the past few days, probably because of the snow we’ve been getting here. It’s not what I’d consider a life changing event, or something that I always remember, but it does pop back into memory now and then, and I have no trouble remembering it clearly when it does.

I’m not sure how long ago I’m remembering this from, I was about seven or eight, I’d guess. Old enough to walk home from school on my own, or at least old enough back then when no-one was concerned about vans full of paedophiles cruising the streets.

Between the street I grew up on and the street behind us, there was a narrow alley; this seems to be a standard thing between terraced streets that back onto each other; at least I’ve never seen any in England that don’t. Even houses around here in the US seem to have something similar, though UK alleys (or ‘backs’, as they were known round our way) seem to involve more brick walls and privet hedges, and less chain link fences. And more dogshit, as I recall, though dogshit in general seems to be in decline in the wild.

 

Anyhow, I digress. This back ‘lane’ was pretty much the standard walk home. At this point in time, people in Yorkshire were still pretty lairy of using their front doors. These portals were reserved for any members of royalty that might visit, and everyone else came in through the back door. I’ve no idea why this was, or why people only opened them for births, weddings and funerals, but I know our own front door, until it was replaced with one of those uPVC monstrosities so popular in the 1980s, would have been a challenge to open, the dust in the locks and frame probably welded it shut.

 

So, I was walking up the back lane, heading home. It was dark, and it was snowing quite heavily, heavier flakes than I’ve seen since, even the godawful weather they get here in Missouri. It was that calm kind of snow, though, the kind where there’s absolutely no wind behind it whatsoever. The kind of snow where it’s actually pleasant to be out in, where it’s only just started to fall so you’re not wading through it up to your shins, and it’s not actually cold enough to be a pain in the arse.

 

I say there was no wind, but that was the odd thing; the snow wasn’t falling straight down. I don’t know if it was some weird eddy or current in the air down that alley, but the snow was coming along it in a gentle swirling corkscrew movement. It was like walking down a tunnel of swirling flakes, each one clearly visible from the ambient streetlight behind the houses. Even more oddly, hardly any of it was hitting me, as if I was in the eye of some extraordinarily docile hurricane. This whole scene lasted the two or three hundred yards I walked to our back gate, and I remember being as awestruck as it’s possible to get when you’re that age. In fact, I suspect it’s the first time any sort of natural phenomenon had impressed me to that degree.

 

And then I more or less forgot about for thirty years, until it was time to find something to put in a blog entry.

 

I’ve lived in a variety of places since then, and I’ve been out walking in the snow many times since (usually not by choice), but even in the same alley, in the same conditions, I’ve never seen snow behave like that again. As memories go, I know it’s not terribly spectacular, and the BBC could probably recreate the scene on a budget of ten quid, but it clearly made something of an impression on single-digit-years me. And I still think of it fondly now and then today. It was probably one of the few moment of actual, literal stillness in my life I can recall, a time and place where everything else was still bustling about gently, but where I was, absolutely nothing was happening.

 

Or this could just be the point where I’m crossing the line into pretentiousness, so I think we’ll call it a day.

 

I think I give up. For now.

I'm a savvy enough geek to be able to compile stuff on Ubuntu, if I've got a cheatsheet/webpage open with careful instructions. Did this with Dungeon Crawl as soon as I got the laptop up and running, and Unnethack seems to be working also.

I can't fathom Sporkhack, however. I've no idea when it comes to SVN, or what to do with a .diff file. I'm not really prepared to delve into it given some of my misgivings about the changes in the fork, either. It really is way too much complexity to just setup a bloody roguelike.

Given the layout of the homepage, I almost have to think the author is deliberately not just putting the sourcefiles up on a nice, simple html link to download. Possibly just to spite me, and me personally. Given I've seen him memorably described as an 'ass with a top hat on it', it's entirely possible.

Oh well. Shower, and then we'll see if Dwarf Fortress wants to be more friendly.