A personal log for me as I bounce back and forth between the biological world and the digital world.
29.9.11
It's Time for a Common Human Language
17.9.11
Help Save Your Android's Battery
- Make sure you're connected to your wifi network.
- Bring up your menu screen and go to Settings.
- Go to Wireless & Networks
- Go to Wi-Fi Settings.
- Push your menu button and select Advanced
- Select Wi-Fi sleep policy and choose the never option.
16.9.11
1.8 Arrives and the people rejoiced...well, some of em.
Video game communities are well known for having rowdy members. All our bases are belong to them. Usually this manifests in aggression towards bad games, bad companies, outsiders, the web itself, and even the players themselves. Often the only thing that escapes this scrutiny is the the team behind the game. They get attacked of course, but not on the same level as the others. This tends to be especially true in the indie gaming scene. I hate the term indie btw, I prefer underground gaming but whatever.
Indie game companies tend to be much closer to their player base. They actively communicate with them and even frequently request feedback on how to make the game better. Because of this intimacy, the gamers themselves tend to be more polite and respectful of the game and everyone involved. They tend to thank and encourage the coders. The coders in turn tend to work harder and with more passion. Everyone wins.
The best community I've seen so far that exhibits this kind of relationship is dwarf fortress. The game is an underground classic and to those in the scene, it's the measuring stick all other games are measured with. It's complexity and depth is matched only by the wretched ugliness of it graphics and interface. The game is dense, difficult, incredibly fun and the community loves it. They embrace the fact that with such depth you sometimes get nasty bugs. They accept the fact that with games that live in beta things can get hairy. Not only do they embrace these things they actually use the bugs to their advantage and end up having even more fun. Yes both kinds!
No matter how bad it gets, the community in general, loves ToadyOne and continue to embrace dwarf fortress. This community may be the best in my opinion but they certainly aren't alone. Another game called Cataclysm(not the WOW add on) has the same kind of community. It's much smaller but the respect for the coder is there and so is the understanding that games are not easy to make and take time.
Which brings me back to Minecraft. Minecraft started out like all the rest, small indie game, tight player base and a coder who has no problem talking to his community. But something about minecraft was special and it suddenly exploded onto the mainstream gaming scene. Everyone seems to love this game and with good reason. It's a lot of fun, it's easy, and it can be played many different ways. Because of this, it's captured a very large player base even though it's still in beta, and as a result has made a lot of money.
And yet for all that minecraft has going for it, it still has the worst community base I've ever seen. They're rude to each other, they have an unreal amount of trolls, and they're ungrateful. Before we continue, I should point out there are good members, you know who you are so don't get pissed. Now back to the douchebags.
A large chunk of minecraft's base seems to think that since they paid 20 dollars for a game, they now own Notch(the coder) and have the right to basically act like a bunch of brats. They've decided minecraft should be a 24/7 job and that it should run flawlessly. No matter what notch does, it's not good enough. The players will scream for an update and get one, and then scream that the update sucks, notch should have waited. If he had waited they would have called him lazy. This time in particular it was Jeb's fault the update was late. Turns out jeb is married and his father in law was visiting. The selfish prick actually went an spent time with his wife's dad. The nerve of him. I guess no one told him that he was a slave to minecraft and as such is not entitled to family visits.
I'm not suggesting the game is perfect or that the developers themselves are perfect. They've made mistakes and there are bugs but there's a difference between acting like an ungrateful prick and helping find bugs and working to help build a game. Everyone that has bought Minecraft knew they were buying an unfinished game. This was never kept a secret. In addition to that, Mojang has given the players free updates, little drm, and access to the finished game when it is done. They have been beyond generous in how they offer up their game.
In spite of the communities attitude, Notch and Jeb continue to work hard at improving minecraft and they never seem to complain about it. Maybe they realize that the ones screaming the loudest and acting the rudest are just a small percentage of the true minecraft community. A large but silent group of people who love minecraft and appreciate the effort that goes into creating it.
4.9.11
My Sacred Place
The only thing I love more in the natural world than forests is water. Oceans, streams, creeks, ponds, hell, give me a big puddle and I'll just stare at for hours. Bodies of water have some kind of strange hold over me. I'm not sure what it is or why but it's there none the less. My favorite of all however is lakes, which brings us to my main point, Lake Wallenpaupack.
Lake Wallenpaupack is located deep within the Poconos mountains of Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is a place of phenomenal beauty. People from all over come here to fish, camp, hike, boat, water ski, and much more. The lake itself is 13 miles long, has 52 miles of beautiful shoreline, and at it's deepest point is about 60ft. The lake is surrounded by large swaths of forests and smaller lakes, streams and tributaries. When you see it first hand it's hard to believe that a place of such immense natural beauty could ever be created by man, but that's exactly how it happened.
In 1926 PPL(pennsylavnia power & light) Corporation decided to build a hydro electric dam, over what was at time, the Wallenpaupack creek. They bought up a ton of land from local residents, and cleared the valley that held the creek. Houses, stores and everything else had to be demo'd and/or relocated. To this day there are still, some remnants under the lake of the small town that once stood. Not full houses mind you, but foundations and even some roads can still be seen by brave divers who venture below the lakes waters. At the time of it's completion, Lake Wallenpaupack was considered a marvel of engineering and was the largest man made lake in the state.
This is one of the places I grew up. Normal life was spent in the suburbs, but summers, and occasionally winters were always spent 'up at the lake'. We gathered at the lake house each weekend. Usually there were about 10 to 15 of us there at a time. Everyone would go out hiking or swimming all day, and then in the evening we'd have a huge communal meal. It's hard to describe the effect this had on me, but some of my fondest memories occurred here.
This happens at regular intervals, roughly every two years or so. I try to ignore it because I live an hour an a half away and I don't drive. But the only way to stop the obsession is to go there. To be at the lake. Once I get there all I have to do sit down next to it and the feelings start to disappear. Replaced with a sense of peace and calm that I rarely ever experience in my normal daily life, I'm ADD to the core and I don't handle anxiety very well.
I'm not a religious person, and I'm not a hippy by any sense of the word. But I can't deny that somehow this place is a sacred spot for me. It holds power over me that I can not control and must obey. It is absolutely relentless. No other location has this kind of hold on me and no other place can replace it.
Someday if I ever get my life in order, one of my dreams is to own a home on the lake. I would love to buy the exact property I grew up on, but even if that's not possible, a new home on Lake Wallenpaupack would be the perfect place to create new memories and bring peace to my twisted head.
3.7.11
Google Plus - It's about damn time!
I was thoroughly let down by wave and buzz just became a boring feed of useless and mostly automated data. So let down that when I first heard about plus, I said fuck it, and decided not to even bother trying to get an invite. After that first night I started to hear some of the preliminary reviews and it got my attention. Now I wanted an invite and it didn't seem like I had a good shot at getting one.
Then something weird happened, I got an email from someone in china. It was all in chinese so I couldn't read it, but there was a hyperlink and the url was in english. plus.google.com/allkindsofcodeystuff. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was either an oops email or I just got an invite from a stranger. My gut screamed scam, but I know how to read a url and this link was clearly to a google site.
I clicked it and it took me to my new profile page. The only problem is it was all in han, I couldn't read anything but my name. Fortunately google translate came to my rescue. It took me a while to figure out how to change my language settings inside plus. I also had to ditch all my default circles because even after the language switch, they were in han.
So far I am loving g+. The interface is slick and the concept works. I like how easily the circles work when adding people, and I like that adding people works more like twitter than facebook. It's cool to be able to basically follow people. Pictures are a breeze but the android apps need a little work. It's still early though and google says this is just the beginning. So I have hopes.
I really can't believe it took google this long to seriously enter the social scene. This is what wave and buzz should have been. I'm glad they got it together but I really hope it's not to late. Facebook is a beast now. It's huge and it's grown outside it's main perimeter and entrenched itself on the web. They have login and their commenting system everywhere. It's going to be very difficult to dominate them.
As a show of support I've disabled all my fbconnect logins and I've started removing my older fb content. Nothing major yet, but hopefully soon I won't have to straddle two networks at once. I can't wait to see where things go from here.
5.3.11
On the Go
I just installed the blogger app on my kyocera zio. I'm hoping this will get me back into the swing of using my account. I don't have much pc access these days except for at work. Plus ever since I got a decent phone I really haven't been using pc's as much anyway.
As strange as it sounds, getting an android phone completely reshaped my digital existence. The deciding factor in things has shifted to a "can I do it on my phone" mentality. If I can't, it gets pushed to the wayside. Blogger was one of those things.
I guess this isn't always the best way to go about dividing my time, but I've always jumped from thing to thing anyway, so for now I'll just ride the wave and adjust as necessary.