Mass Effect Cover

Ok, so my KotOR 2 review sounded like I hated the game. But I really didn’t. I was criticizing it out of love. It’s funny how we always reserve our harshest criticism for the things we love. Yeah, we may mercilessly bash the stuff we hate but when you criticize something you love – oh you will meticulously and systematically take it apart. That’s just how it is.

It seems that when BioWare shook down the KotOR formula to clean it up for a new game more than just the Star Wars branding fell out. Id say the game lost it’s heart and soul but that would be a bit harsh and for it’s flaws (multitude of them) Mass Effect is still fairly decent.

So I wanted to complain a bit at first before talking about the stuff I liked because complaining is usually funnier.

Companions

As many other games of this type, Mass Effect allows you to pick up companions that will assist you in your quest. Just like in KotOR you can only have two of them following you at a time, while the rest must wait in the ship somewhere. I have never really understood this restriction. It doesn’t really make much sense story wise. You have assembled a crack team of heroes, all of whom have a score to settle with the big bad final boss of the game. And yet, when the final battle is to be fought only two chosen ones get to accompany you, even if it would make much more sense to take everyone. But it’s an old game mechanic which I’m already used to, so I won’t complain about it.

Ooops, I guess I already did. Oh well. The fact that it’s silly doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. It does. That’s not why I bring it up. I’m talking about it here because Mass Effect manages to ruin it by allowing you to assemble the whole team in the first hour of game play.

It’s like this: on your company switch screen there are 6 silhouettes that depict the available and non-available characters. These 6 slots are all you ever get. You start with two of them pre-filled. You pick up your next three companions before you actually leave the Citadel (which is really an extended tutorial area) and the game proper begins. Your final companion joins you on your first or second story driven mission out of the citadel (depending on which path you choose first). After that you are done. No more new companions ever.

For comparison, KotOR games you would be picking up new team members unexpectedly at different points in the game. Some of them would show up early, while others wouldn’t join you until the third act or so. It was fun, and exciting to seek these folks out, and you could always look forward to fining new cool companions ever past the middle point of the game.

Mass Effect gives you all the companions up front, making it painfully obvious you will never meet any other allies out there. So it sort of takes the excitement and wonder out of that part of the game. At least for me.

Inventory

One word: train wreck. Ok, that was two words, but you get the idea. Whoever designed this system needs to be sent to a mandatory US design camp for a week. I seriously don’t know what happened here because KotOR games had decent inventory screens that just worked. Mass Effect tries to be stylish and modern like, but fails at usability.

The Inventory Screen

For example, why can’t a character not carry an assault rifle? In my team I have several individuals who are not trained in rifles. They are great with pistols and/or shotguns but not rifles. And yet, the game insists that each of these characters have each of their weapon slots filled with an appropriate item. None of these slots can EVER be left blank. It’s just not possible. What is worse, there is just no reason for it.

This flaw means that to swap two weapons between characters you have to have a third weapon of the same type at hand. If you want character A to give his pistol to character B and you just sold/scrapped all the pistols in your inventory you are out of luck. You’ll have to wait till you find a pistol, or go to a store and buy one.

Which is an interesting experience in itself. You see, Mass Effect trading screen sucks even more than the inventory screen. Why? Because there is no way to identify items at a glance. Instead of showing you a picture of the actual item, armor or upgrade you are buying, the game will display a large, detailed image of the suitcase in which the item is sold. It’s not just one suitcase of course – the designers took great care do design different cases for each item – the all have intricate color patterns and look very pretty. There is only one problem: there is no way to distinguish which suitcase contains a weapon, armor or an upgrade item. Item descriptions usually look like this:

In huge font: Stiletto IV (ie. the brand name)
In smaller font: Foobar Technologies (the manufacturer)
In tiny, barely readable font: Pistol (ie. what this is)

Each time you shop, you have to literally squint at the screen to find out what you are looking at.

That’s not all though. You actually don’t get to see the stats of the weapon you are buying unless you press a “compare” button on the UI. It then shows you the stats of the item, compared with the items you have currently equipped. There is of course no easy way to compare the sold items with each other.

Then again, you hardly ever have to make such comparisons anyway as Mass Effect items come in distinct tiers. Regardless of brand, manufacturer and designation each item is marked with a roman numeral which is a bit like a level. All items in the same trier have comparable stats. So you know that if you are carrying bunch of VI items, you can safely scrap or sell most of your V. IV, III, II and I crap.

Besides, you don’t really have to trade in this game at all. I mostly use stores to unload my gear when I’m nearing the carrying capacity. I can count items I actually bought on the fingers of one hadn. Looted item are usually better than anything you can buy in the stores and they are dispensed quite generously throughout the game.

Looting

Did I mention that you can’t loot the bodies in this game? Yeah, it is not allowed. Dropped items just auto-magically appear in your inventory. What’s worse, you never know that you picked up loot until you open the inventory screen.

To me, this is deeply, deeply unsatisfying. I think most of crpg players enjoy looting corpses. Yes, it is not a very heroic thing to do, but damn it, its a fucking tradition. I just expect enemies to behave like gold and weapon filled pinatas that will dispense awesome rewards upon death.

I think in the past I ranted about how silly this system is. I think I even used a rat dropping a plate armor as an example. Still, even ridiculous loot system like that is better than what Mass Effect is doing. Enemies just drop dead, and nothing happens. WTF?

Oh, wait no – I’m sorry. There is a little message popping up in the corner of the screen that says “+INVENTORY”. Gee, thanks! It totally only took me half the game to notice that it was there.

Oh, and guess what happens if you accidentally auto-loot or open a container when you already have the maximum 150 items in the inventory? Will the game let you scrap some old items to make room? No, of course not. Will it allow you to cancel out of the pick-up screen so that you can come back and loot the container later? Hell no! It will force you to manually destroy every single item you just picked up by hand. Yup – if you forget to clean out your inventory, you will be punished. This is the worst looting mechanic I have seen as of yet. And the best part is that there is absolutely no reason why it has to be this way, other than poor UI design.

Dialog Trees

Guess what else got irreversibly broken in Mass Effect? Dialog trees! You know, the age old mechanic that dates all the way back to the point and click adventure games. You know what I’m talking about, right? Someone says something and you see bunch of responses you can make on the bottom of the screen.

Yeah, Mass Effect removed that and replaced it with a little wheel that lists “topics” for the conversation. Why? I have no fucking clue. Maybe because they were releasing it on Xbox and they assumed that most of users of that console are illiterate? I don’t know!

The end effect is that you don’t actually know what your character is going to say until you pick one of the options. And what the wheel says does not always sync up with what comes out of your mouth. Let me give you an example. At one point in the game some guards wanted to disarm me. I clicked on the option that I assumed was polite refusal, at which point my character whipped out his gun and started spewing insults and taunting the guards. Ugh!

Eventually I learned that upper right option is always the “nice guy” response, whiled the lower right is the “total jerk” one. The responses on the right are merely for asking questions, unless they are colored in which case they are either “charm” or “intimidate” options. I mean, they might have just labeled them as such. You know “click here to be nice” and “click here to be a dick”. It would work exactly the same, and it would avoid the initial confusion.

Summary

To summarize: Mass Effect is like KotOR that was repeatedly punched in the face until it suffered enough brain damage to forget most of the things that made it such a success. Inventory is absolutely atrocious, trading is a harrowing experience that I seek to avoid as much as possible, and the fun of looting is mostly removed from the game via lack of corpse drops. The dialog mechanic is needlessly altered from the old working standard, making it shallower and less fun than it should be. In other words BioWare took all the parts that us RPG types usually enjoy, and replaced them with some weird, experimental, dumbed down crap. The only thing that is left is the level ding which somehow is still somehow enjoyable.

So what’s left? Well, there is the setting and the story. Former is actually quite interesting, while the latter seems passable at this point. I can’t really comment on it as I haven’t finished the game yet but it keeps me interested. I say this: despite all the flaws I listed above I’m still playing the game. So you can expect few more Mass Effect related posts in the next few weeks.

Oh, I haven’t forgotten about the mini games. Have no fear, that’s a topic for a whole separate rant.

We have this group of people out there – let’s call them A list celebrities. They are so famous that they are almost universally recognized by everyone worldwide or at least nationally. It doesn’t matter whether you care about what they do – you know who these people are.

Then there is a whole industry that concerns itself primarily with gathering information about these people, and delivering it to the general public. There are whole TV networks, radio stations, magazines and commercial web portals devoted to celebrity gossip.

The intense interest in the minutiae details about the daily lives of few hundred, rich public figures is actually able to sustain hundreds of thousands of people working in this industry – from a lowly paparazzi to a high powered TV network CEO.

Then we have millions of people who consume the products generated by that industry. The funny thing is that the people at the top of this pyramid (the celebrities) hardly ever realize they have a captive audience of immense size that watches their every move. Or rather they know, but they have no clue how to exploit it. I mean, there are millions of people intently watching you poop then your bowel movements have the power to change the world. Very few celebs actually capitalize on this.

Some do realize the potential they have, but fail miserably when they try to get a message across. Usually they get on a soapbox of some sort to talk about the issues they care about, and then make an idiot of themselves on national TV. Their captive audience rolls their eyes and switches to the gossip channel to find out who this celebrity is fucking this week. They fail, because they don’t use their network – they are doing this ass backwards.

How do you affect millions of gossip obsessed individuals who spend several hours per day informing themselves about daily lives and controversies of their favorite celebrities? You smuggle the message in. You wrap it around in controversy, top it of with a little bit of sex and just leave it in the open. The gossip network will lap it up, and distribute it to their customers in no time, thereby infecting millions of people with your hidden message. You can change popular perceptions, challenge the establishment, bend norms and etc by simply making dumb people think and talk about things they wouldn’t even consider otherwise.

These super-celebs are the most powerful people in the world. They can change perceptions, start memes and new trends without worrying about political, religious, social, ethnic or national differences. And they have a captive audience of millions and they can usually affect the people who are forever beyond the reach of any politician or religious leader. The problem is that they can’t be direct – they must work via memes and be subversive to achieve anything. That’s how their distribution network works.

Unfortunately most of the A list celebrities are idiots. Comparatively speaking that is. They are not movers and shakers – they are usually merely performers. They don’t have it in their make up to lead men, and break paradigms (if they can spell the word paradigm at all). People capable of doing these things usually go into politics, become writers, editors teachers and/or philosophers. And so, the celebrity gossip network remains under utilized for it’s potential.

Still, I sometimes do see a subversive memmetic torpedo being delivered through it. And when it hits, it is fun to see people reeling from the impact. Let me give you a recent example: have you heard about Lady Gaga’s penis? I did too – and I don’t even pay attention to that kind of shit. I don’t follow the lives of celebrities, I do not read gossip blogs and magazines and I don’t watch mainstream TV (unless you count History Channel and Adult Swim as mainstream, in which case I do) and I usually skip the entertainment section in the news. And yet, I heard this rumor somehow. The network sought me out, and delivered it to me via word of mouth even though I didn’t care and I wasn’t interested. Everyone heard it and everyone has an opinion about it. And so we go:

“If she had one, would it change anything? Would you treat her differently? What does it make you, if you fantasized about her before you found out? Is it right for her to speak on behalf of other women whilst having a vestigial male member? Can she still be considered a female role model? Or female for that matter? What defines gender? What defines sexuality? What would you do if you were born like that? What would you do if you were born like that and the doctors made the wrong choice and adjusted your gender incorrectly early on?”

I heard all of these things come up in conversations about her – and it goes on, and on. It’s funny how this little rumor changes the tone of conversation when it is mentioned. One minute people are objectifying her, and/or judging her for wearing skimpy clothes. Next minute they are quite seriously talking about gender identity, sexual orientation and associated issues. Half the time these conversations are embarrassingly judgmental, sexist and/or closed minded – but people are talking about it. They are considering these things, and at least making an attempt to understand. Oh, wait – wasn’t Lady Gaga also outspoken gay rights supporter. Wasn’t one of hear goals to spread just that kind of awareness? Initiate that kind of conversations?

Could this intentional? I really hope so, because this would be a perfect example how to use this network to literally rewire people and make them talk about and research things they wouldn’t normally care about. But it’s almost to clever to be true – and I’m disinclined to give anyone this much credit. Still, even if this is a random event, it is this is an example of a subversive memetic message that hits people right in the brain and throws them off balance. Viral messages like that could be spread through the gossip network like wind, allowing a clever celebrity to infect general public with new radical ideas.

For the record, I do not believe that any vast, wold wide secret conspiracy is currently utilizing this network – that would be silly. And no, don’t go looking in the archives for my conspiracy theory posts. I’m kind of past that stage now. Besides, if some all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful Illuminati secret society existed, it would already have full control over all the media so this is a moot point. Yes, corporations can and do use this network but they use it to sell you shit. It’s just basic viral advertising, and it’s no different to other viral advertising you see everywhere else. And it has similar success rate – the network can put ideas in people’s heads but it cannot make them act upon them.

I see this network mostly as a platform that select individuals could use to have their message heard. Not necessarily understood mind you – but heard nevertheless. It can implant ideas or notions which can slowly germinate and resonate within people. Whether they accept or eventually reject them however depends on the person in question. It is a subtle tool of influence, not some magical mind control device.

This is just something to think about. If you can think of any other messages delivered via the gossip network, list them in the comments.

Is this the right cover? Or is it the boycott one? Ah, fuck it. I'm using it anyway.

On the other hand though, I was skeptical. While I like multilayer games I am really an antisocial freak at heart. I prefer to do my gaming alone. L4D however is a multiplier FPS game with not much story or character development to it. This means I would be racing through the levels with other people, never taking time to enjoy the scenery or take in the game at my own pace.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I like games such as Team Fortress 2 for example. They are great deal of fun. But I don’t play them nearly as much as the single player games I own. I bought TF2 as part of the Orange Box paying around $30 for all the awesome games it contains. Despite the fact that the game has the most replay value out of all the titles in the box, for me it was the game I cared the least about. It was the icing on the cake so to speak – what I really wanted were the HL2 games and Portal and I would still buy the box even if TF2 was not in it. And I definitely wouldn’t buy TF2 for $30 on its own.

For comparison, the original L4D is $30 by itself. The sequel will be even more expensive than that on the launch date. Do I really want that game so badly? Will I really have $30+ of fun with it? I was torn. On one hand all the zombie killing looked fun. On the other hand I was worried that it wouldn’t be, considering my love-hate relationship with multiplayer games.

Then someone told me: “Why don’t you download a demo of L4D2 and find out if it is right for you?”

A demo! Holly shit! I forgot that people still make those. I haven’t played a demo in… Oh god, in so many years now. Last PC demo I installed on my PC was back when I still had dial up, and was running Windows 98. Ever since we got broadband internet and I figured out how to use a torrent client, PC game demos became irrelevant.

But what the hell, why not! I decided I’m gonna party like it’s 1999 and download myself a demo! Especially since it was on steam. All I needed to do was to click a button, then wait few hours while it downloads and play it. And so I did.

First impression: the opening intro for the demo needs to be made into a movie like NOW! I don’t know if they used actual footage from in-game cut scenes or just animated this especially for the demo (kinda like they make the TF2 shorts) but holly shit! If that was a movie, I would totally pay to see it. If the actual game has this sort of cut scenes in between levels, and if Valve is actually squeezing in a storyline elements in between the frantic multiplayer combat I am getting this game on the launch day.

I watched a cut scene, and I was already excited! This was a good sign. If the game play was anywhere near as awesome as that cut scene… Oh man!

With shaking hands I picked a single player game mode (cause no fucking n00bz are gonna ruin my first impression of this game), picked my character and launched it.

And then my head exploded.

HOLLY… FUCKIN…. SHIT!

I’ve been missing out! This game is a blast. I didn’t even know slaughtering hordes of zombies could be so much fun! It’s exhilarating, adrenaline pumping joy. And you know why? Because I didn’t die every 3 minutes. Watching L4D videos doesn’t really tell you how the game actually plays. It looks difficult and daunting – especially when you cross reference it with your experience with other zombie games where being rushed by few dozen angry undead almost always means a swift death.

L4D2 however seems to have hit a good balance – the zombies are just enough of a threat to be scary and make you jump, but not enough to be a deterrent. Valve was able to challenge me without actually ruthlessly punishing me for my mistakes. It startled me without actually even threatening to kill my team and sending me to the beginning of the level.

The fact that the single player mode is both playable and enjoyable in itself is a major selling point. This means that I can run through the game a few times to get the general feeling for how each stage works before I actually jump in and attempt to play with other human beings. I really like when games allow you to do some training like that. This means that I may not actually feel like a total n00b for once! This feature is not a big deal when you are buying a new game on a launch date. At that point everyone is more or less a n00b. However when you jump into the game late, being able to train with bots to get the feel of the weapons and stage layouts really helps.

Best part of the game so far? There is a spot in the game where you can activate a jukebox standing in an abandoned restaurant. One of the songs that plays is “Re: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton:

That is a massive, massive amount of FUCKING WIN right there.

I know that there is a vocal group of people out there who likes to bash the new game for not being a free DLC for the original game. I don’t really buy their arguments though. They have already been deconstructed here so I will not repeat this stuff here. I just wanted to say that the game is fun and that I like it. In fact, I like that parts of the game are played in daytime when I can actually see what is going on. Some videos of original game looked way to dark for my tastes.

Needless to say, I think I’m hooked. Valve managed to pack an incredible amount of fun into this short demo and if the rest of the game is equally awesome (which is very likely given Valve’s track record) it should be well worth the money.

How about you? Are you getting the game? Have you played the original? How do both games compare? Is it better? Worse? About the same? Let me know in the comments.

The upgrade went smoothly up until I rebooted the machine and noticed that I’m running 800×600 and my dual head setup was broken. This was very noticeable on a 23 inch monitor, and running the new KDE version which super-large windows decorations. So I decided to fix it.

So I did the exact same thing that worked for me last time. I pulled up the KDE Hardware app and told it to activate proprietary nVidia driver. It didn’t work. I tried couple more times, and then restarted the machine thinking that maybe the damn thing is just not registering the change. That’s how I hosed my X. Kubuntu came back in text only mode and I had to hack the xorg.conf and switch it back to the generic driver.

After this I tried following some online troubleshooting steps trying to install, re-install the drivers, hack the xorg.conf and each thing I did made my system more broken than it was. Eventually I managed to delete my .kde folder with several moths of emails (ie. my last backup was few months ago, and I have no one to blame for this but my own stupidity).

To make a long story short, half the solutions posted in the Ubuntu forums are total crap. It became painfully obvious that my problem ran much deeper. Reinstalling the drivers and re-creating the x config just wouldn’t cut it.

For reference my machine is a Latitude D820 with nVidia Quadro NVS 140m board. I was starting to think that there is just no working driver for this card that is compatible with the 2.6.31-14-generic kernel. Finally, after several hours I found the solution.

Alexander V. Røyne-Helgesen deserves one free internet for figuring this out. His fix is the only thing that worked for me. In case you are to lazy to click on the link, here is the solution:

First, open up your /etc/modprobe.d/lrm-video file and comment out every single entry that references nvidia. Your file should look something like this:

 # Make nvidia/nvidia_legacy and fglrx use /sbin/lrm-video to load  
install fglrx /sbin/lrm-video fglrx $CMDLINE_OPTS  
#install nvidia /sbin/lrm-video nvidia $CMDLINE_OPTS  
#install nvidia_legacy /sbin/lrm-video nvidia_legacy $CMDLINE_OPTS  
#install nvidia_new /sbin/lrm-video nvidia_new $CMDLINE_OPTS'

Once this is done, go to your /etc/modules file and add this at the end:

nvidia

Finally, go to your xorg.conf, find the entry that describes your video card and change the driver to nvidia. It should look something like this:

Section "Device"
   Identifier      "NVIDIA Corporation NV40m [Quadro NVS 140m]"
   Driver          "nvidia"
   # more lines here...

Now restart thy X server and… Boom! Back in business.

I should probably mention that I uninstalled and reinstalled the nVidia drivers about 10 times during the whole ordeal. I used various sources. The last thing I tried was the EnvyNG script (the package name is envyng – it’s in the repos). So I can confirm that this method above works with Quadro NVS 140m with a driver installed by EnvyNG. May not work after a straight upgrade.

Did I mention that the upgrade also broke my VirtualBox installation? Yeah, it did, but that’s a topic for a whole other post. Needless to say, I am never doing this sort of thing again on a weekday.

VALIS - contents are crazier than the cover

Valis is part deliberate mind fuck, part a treatise on spirituality and religion, part science fiction novel and part autobiographical record of Dick’s religious experience/psychotic episode. Dick seamlessly blends all these parts in a delicious literary stew. If you eat this stew it will make your brain think weird thoughts for a while. Perhaps even forever A strange, strange but very fun stew it is.

What is this book about? That is a difficult question. The truth is I still don’t know. It is a story about religion, insanity and everything in between. If there is anything in between that is. After all, what is the difference between religious experience and a psychotic event? How do we distinguish a true touch of the divine, and a brush with insanity?

Of course the problem is that the main character of this story – Horslover Fat is insane. Certifiably so. And so is the narrator of the story (the author himself… Well, maybe…). So we have an unreliable narrator, and an insane protagonist who are both the same person. Or not. Dick is never really clear as to what is real, and what is hallucinated in his twisted world. Confused yet? We have barely started!

Horselover Fat experiences a religious revelation. But it is not your usual run of the mill conversion. He doesn’t just “find God” like people sometimes do. God finds him, and pumps his brain full of alien knowledge. The transmission medium for this knowledge upload is a pink laser beam shot from a possibly alien, self aware satellite from the future (or past… Or the future of the past that never was). This knowledge allows Fat to see colors he does not know names for, talk in ancient languages he never studied, peek through the curtain of time and space, and discover a terrible truth about our reality and about God. Or maybe he was just really, really high that night. Oh wait, he was! Still, insanity and drug abuse can only explain some parts of his vision – the rest is assumed to be a true revelation. What he sees is seeped in gnostic mysticism, techno-babble, and conspiracy theories. What does Fat do about this? He tries to codify and understand his vision by writing about it and explaining it to his friends. That is basically the bulk of this book – Horslover Fat trying to put into words what Philip K Dick has experienced in real life. Yes, that whole thing about pink laser and being high out of his mind – that was all more or less autobiographical. Of course it does not help that the narrator is playing the devil’s advocate and trying his best to torpedo Fat’s theories by applying a healthy doe of skepticism to everything his says. Dick is way more cruel and skeptical of his own crap than you and I would be. So instead of looking for inconsistencies in Fat’s tirades, readers can simply wait for the narrator to point them out. And he does. All the time.

Fat’s friends know he is insane, but humor him by listening to his ravings, ignoring his split persona or his habit of having long drawn out discussions with himself. In fact, they tend to fuel his insanity by picking apart his theories and fixing inconsistent parts by injecting them with their own crackpot musings. Everyone treats this as a fun past time until they see a strange indy movie that seems to be using imagery and symbolism and vocabulary straight from Fat’s prophetic visions. And then, as they say, the shit gets real. As soon as you are convinced Fat’s theories are merely hallucinations, Dick pulls the rug from under your feet and proves that there is more to them. Then he does it again, and again. Eventually you doubt everything, and believe everything he says at the same time.

When I reviewed Life of Pi I mentioned that at the end of the book the narrator asks the reader to pick which version of the story they like – the colorful one with tigers, monkeys and fantastic islands or the mundane one with hardship, potential rape, murder and insanity. If you thought that was a mind screw, Dick will totally pwn you with his twists. There are no two stories here – there is one, but it can be interpreted in several different ways. And every time you think you understand, it flips on you and proves you wrong. So you are forced to pick and chose which parts you think were real, which were fake, and which are irrelevant. Dick gives you blueprints, and you build your own novel which says whatever you decide it says.

Is it a lunatic rant? Is it a true revelation? Is it a work of science fiction? Is it a study of pathological insanity? Who knows. It is Dicks personal religious exegesis in a form of a quirky SF novel. The writing style alternates between light and easy digestible and knowledge sledgehammer to the cranium. Dick’s world is populated by flawed, irreverent characters who may or may not be real. As all religious rants go, Dick can be fuzzy and confusing in places. But unlike most self appointed prophets he delivers his ideas with astonishing eloquence and sense of pacing and purpose. It shows that he did his research, and really thought these things out.

The book is smart, compelling, well written and absolutely fucking nuts. It swept me away and made me fall in love with Philip K. Dick all over again. And yes, I felt that I need to use his full name in this sentence because saying that I fell in love with Dick would just sound wrong. I must confess that I sort of avoided his books for a while. When I was a kid I tried reading A Scanner Darkly – mostly because I loved the Blade Runner movie and someone stole “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” from my local library. So I picked the first Dick book on the shelf instead. Sadly it was just to heavy and to dull for my young impressionable mind back then. So I sort of avoided him for years. I respected him as a prominent SF author, and a literary figure but from afar. That period is over now.

I loved VALIS with all of it’s brilliant, contagious craziness. I inhaled it being absolutely enthralled by Dick’s musings on gnostic spirituality, Christianity religion and reality. I do realize that it’s not a book for everyone, but I highly recommend it. It blown me away, an added Dick to the list of my favorite writers. Go read it!

Our regular UPS and FedEx delivery people usually need a signature. Still, I can hear them coming in and usually greet them as they are walking in, as my cube is actually near the door. Sometimes they smile, sometimes they wave or return the geeing. Sometimes they even stop by and chat with us. But not the US Postal Service guy.

In fact, I don’t even know if he is a guy. He could be a woman. Or both. Or neither. He could be some grossly mutated monster for all I know. I have never actually caught a glimpse of him. I have never heard him open or close the office door. Sometimes, if I’m really attentive I can actually hear the characteristic *plop* sound a bundle of letters makes as it hits the desk behind my back. But every time I turn around, the mailman is long gone. Once I even jumped out of my cubicle to see him walking out the door but he just wasn’t there. He vanished before the mail even hit the desk, alerting me to his presence.

This is what happens when a retired Ninja takes a job at the post office

I consulted this experience with my coworkers, and none of them has seen this evasive mailman either. It’s a bit of an office mystery at this point. Is he a man? Is he a woman? How old is he? Is he a Ninja? Is he an ex spy? Former mercenary? A retired hit man? Shadow person from a parallel dimension? We just don’t know!

Every time we set a trap for him, he actually manages to outsmart us. When someone sits in the empty cubicle he leaves the mail on top of the filing cabinets just outside of it. If someone happens to be filing, he just drops it on the floor by the door. If someone is standing an staring at the door he will wait till they turn around, crack the door open just a tiny bit, slide the mail in and then bolt for it.

I even asked the FedEx lady if she has ever seen our mailman, but she never actually met him despite sometimes delivering packages minutes before or after him. Bizarre!

I actually considered setting up a web cam pointing at the door, trying to capture him in action. But then maybe that would be a mistake. Perhaps there is a reason why he does not reveal himself to us. Perhaps the truth is just too frightening. Also, seeing him sneak in would probably ruin this mystery thing we have going on right now.

I did some mental math and decided that it couldn’t be that much. Knowing our server d00dz they probably bought the Dell PowerEdge server second hand somewhere so the whole thing was probably the discounted price of the hardware + the TB drive. No clue really, because these guys descend here every once in a while, attach themselves to the server rack for few hours and then vanish as suddenly as they appeared.

It turned out that my visitor was asking about the software.

Software of course is free. This did not register well. How could a powerful tool like that be free?

Well, it’s open source – I explained. And you can see that very well, by how the cloning process requires me to go through about 15 steps and configure it using a slightly cryptic ncurses interface. If this was a proprietary solution it would probably look much different. It would probably have two buttons (one to clone, one to restore) detailed graphical dialogs and animated progress bars – sort of like Norton Ghost has.

That sunk in. Free because it is not easy to use – it made all the sense in the world to him. Now, I didn’t say this because I’m a hater. I love open source software. In fact, I am a long time Ubuntu user. I love Firefox, I wrote my Masters thesis using LaTex (fun fact: no one in my thesis comity actually knew how to use Tex) and most of the software I wrote in my spare time was released under GPL. So I’m the last person who would want to badmouth open source projects.

Still… The above is often true. A lot of open source projects do require certain skill or know-how to use. There are plenty of exceptions of course. But for each Ubuntu, Firefox, and Open Office there is a Clonezilla, sendmail and Apache. Some open source apps are just not user friendly. At least not very much.

Is that wrong though? Nope, its not. A proprietary application can’t really afford to have an arcane user interface. The more difficult it is to configure and/or use, the less likely it is to find customers. When people pay for software they do require some level of convenience. Open Source software is often written by hackers for hackers and offered as is – no warranty, no support, no guarantees it will work on your machine. And you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It usually works like this: Cheap, Powerful or Easy to Use – for each project you can pick any two. Open source software can afford to concentrate on power and flexibility forgoing ease of use. A lot of apps are a major pain in the ass to use, but once you figure them out, they offer vastly superior performance, and configurability than their user friendly counterparts. Prime example could be using LaTex vs. a WYSIWYG editor.

Back when I was writing my thesis I made a conscious choice to go with LaTex rather than word like all of my peers. This meant that I had to do extra work in order to embed figures and charts (such as converting jpg images into EPS files) but it was worth it. My thesis looked much better than most of those generated with word. The custom context aware kearning and word spacing meant I never had to worry about my paragraphs not being justified properly. I could change just about every aspect of my document (font, character and line spacing, margins, paragraph spacing, headings etc..) just by tweaking the settings in the preamble. And don’t even get me started on maintaining proper numbering of figures or bibliography.

Most of my friends thought that they were getting the better end of the deal. After all they just had to fight with the quirky WYSIWYG UI – while I had to actually comprehend the arcane LaTex syntax. I thought the exact opposite. I take a LaTex problem over an idiosyncratic UI bullshit any day. LaTex issues are usually logical – syntax errors, or faulty markup that can be isolated, debugged and corrected. Whenever my thesis got messed up, I knew it was my fault, and I could apply standard debugging strategies to resolve it.

Word on the other hand… Well, sometimes it just fucks up the document because of a stray keystroke, but there is no easy, logical way to debug it because you can’t see the markup. You have to guess, try different things, hit the undo button a lot and if everything else fails, revert to a previous save. Ugh…

The Clonezilla server we have at work is similarly pretty sweet. We attached a little switch to it, and all I need to do is to plug the machine to be cloned into that switch and perform a network boot. It loads up the OS, let’s me quickly configure it and then it just does its’ business. A proprietary solution would probably have much less flexibility for a much higher price.

So, easy to use does not always mean good and free does not always mean easy to use. Or something like that.

Click to see the slide show

For one, it’s amazing to see how macro scale modular design really looks like. Modularity is a good thing – this sort of became an engineering mantra. In our daily lives we see it in much smaller scales – computer parts, automobile parts, etc… We don’t often see human habitats built this way.

Most importantly though this suggests how space stations will be built in the future. They will start small, and then slowly grow over time as new modules are added and old ones are replaced. Kevin Kelly suggests that they will grow like modern cities – always expanding, changing and re-shaping their structures. Old, mature stations will be almost labyrinthine networks of new and old modules.

Compare that to the almost canonical monolithic rotating wheel station you can see in most science fiction works. These stations are vastly expensive mega-structures which have to be built in one piece. The wheel can’t really be modularized – once it’s complete you can’t really add to it. You could potentially add more wheels to the spoke, but each one of them would be ass expensive as the first.

The current model of modular, slowly evolving floating city is much more practical, and affordable. Of course without the wheel we can’t have artificial gravity. Still, we are talking about science fiction here. I would think that inhabitants of gigantic modular space hives will likely be geengeneered to survive in zero-g without the usual side effects that plague astronauts today.

• Crysis
• Bioshock
• Mass Effect
• Overlord
• Assasins Creed
• Prince of Persia
• Farcry 2
• The Witcher
• Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
• Mount & Blade
• Mirror’s Edge
• GTA3
• Left 4 Dead
• Gothic 3
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Borderlands
• Torchlight

Again, there is no particular rhyme or reason to the order of the games here. Er… That would make it a non-queue, would it. It would be more like an un-ordered set of games. Hey Chris, this actually might be a real life example of an un-orderable set. Ie. I pick the games from this list on a whim, and I do not know ahead of time which one is going to be next. As it can be seen from the list above, the order of appearance does not impact the order in which it will be played. For example I played Cirisi, then Bioshock, then Farcry, then Assassin’s Creed and etc…

Oh, btw – I should probably comment on Assassin’s Creed here. I shelved the game. I didn’t un-install it from my system yet but I stopped playing it due to the fact it was repetitive and the save system was beyond fucked up. I’d play it more if it wasn’t for the checkpoint system. Each time I wanted to launch the game I had to ask myself: “Do I have enough time to actually do all the investigations and reach the office today?” Usually the answer was no.

You see, I’m a hit and run gamer – I like to launch the game, play for an hour or two and then go do something else. AC sort of insisted that I put in at least 2 hours each time I play and that just killed the game for me. Yeah, I know – it supposedly saves after each successful investigation, or each time you climb one of those big towers. I found that iffy – sometimes it saved, and other times it would boot me back to an earlier state.

I haven’t abandoned the game yet, but I had to put it away for a while. I will likely revisit it later.

In the meantime, I wanted to ask you for suggestions for games to be added to my que… I mean set. Note that I have a beast of a PC but no current gen consoles in the house. As you can probably see from the list above I’m mainly into RPG and FPS games but I’ll play anything that has an interesting story and/or is fun. I generally don’t digest strategy games that well – especially the RTS kind, though I do sometimes make exceptions for the SF based ones. Especially if they have a cool story.

Oops… That CD drive was sort of there for a reason. He realized that after it was too late to do anything. So now he basically wanted to know if it’s possible to install XP from a USB thumb drive. Can it be done? Apparently, yes it can. All you need to do, is google for it.

But at the time we were having this conversation I gave him a benefit of the doubt and assumed he already did search it online, and came up empty. And since I didn’t know the solution of the top of my head, I got a crazy idea.

“Why don’t you just keep Ubuntu?” I asked him.

I mean, it’s a Dell Mini with a 16GB solid state drive and a tiny ass screen – he is definitely not going to use that machine for gaming, photoshop or other Windows centric stuff like that. The machine will likely be used as a hardware extension of a web browser. The OS is mostly an overhead on a machine like that.

Now, I’m not a linux evangelist. I don’t go around telling people to switch to Linux. I honestly can’t do that anymore because I know that my experience with the OS is irrelevant. I am a computer geek a software developer and linux enthusiast. This makes so far removed from the general population, that I can hardly relate to your average Windows user.

Nevertheless I did my best to give him a quick pitch on how the OS will be mostly irrelevant on that machine. And it will run most of his favorite apps – like firefox for example.

“Will it run Chrome?” he demanded.

Of course it will run chrome. Then again last time I used Linux version of Chrome Flash didn’t work yet, but they fucking update it daily. I quickly launched my copy of the browser to check, and lo – it was running flash quite flawlessly now.

My friend was not fully convinced yet. He started asking me about opening Word documents so I pulled up Open Office and illustrated how it works. Then I quickly downloaded and burned him a copy of the Gnome based Jaunty to show him what the OS that ships with his Mini will look like (I’m running Kubuntu on my laptop, and it looks quite different).

I booted it on his laptop, and he was blown away when he realized you can actually run a fully functional OS from the CD like that.

“But how can it do that?”

Well, because it’s really not that impressive. I mean, it doesn’t really matter whether your OS binaries are on the HD or on some other media. You have to load them into memory before they get executed anyway – so where they are originally is irrelevant. There is really no reason why Windows couldn’t have a Live CD version. In fact, you can easily make one with BartPE.

He was also enamored with virtual desktops. “It’s like tabs for your desktop” he said. I never thought about them like that, but yes – that’s a valid analogy. That’s technically how these things work.

He was also amazed on how many “features” were included in the OS itself. I had to explain that most of the applications he saw there were really stand alone open source projects – but by virtue of being free software they could be included in the free OS.

To make this long story short, my friend decided to keep Ubuntu on that machine – at least for now. In fact, he said he might replace it with the Notebook Remix version he found online so he can be running Jaunty (the Dell ships with Intrepid if I’m not mistaken). I told him that if he tries Ubuntu can’t deal with it, I’ll be happy to help him with the XP installation hack. He nodded, but I’ve seen that gleam in his eye that told me it won’t be needed. I think our little community might have a brand new member.

Now, I’m fairly sure my friend will continue using Windows. I didn’t “convert” him and made him into an exclusive Linux user. But he will give Ubuntu a try, and hopefully will like it becoming an OS agnostic nut bag like me. And that’s more than I could ever ask for.

We really don’t need to convert people, or try to ween them off of Windows. All we need to do is to show them the alternatives and find places in which they work well – like mini notebooks for example. This will have far reaching effects. For one, they will no longer automatically assume that OS == Windows. They will see that there are different operating systems that can be used for different purposes. Secondly, they will be now able to call MS on their bullshit as they will see that things can be done differently in the open source world. Thirdly… Well, they will be using linux. The more of us are there, the better. I don’t care if he still uses Windows on the other machine – he still counts as one of us.