Category: Journal

I did get the iPhone 5

I did get the iPhone 5. None of the tricks/tips I found for trying to fix the home button on the iPhone 4 worked (WD-40, rubbing alcohol, blowing air, and various software things), nor did they kill the button/phone. Mandy and I discussed it, our upcoming expenses & plans, and decided that, for example, the iPhone’s home button was more frustrating to her than the couch’s failing springs -and replacing the couch will cost a lot more than the iPhone- so we pushed the couch replacement back another several months (unless we find an amazing deal on a couch we love, at just the right time) and I bought the iPhone with my Apple credit card (okay, it’s technically Barclay, but I got it when buying an iMac interest-free, it generates iTunes cards when I earn points, et cetera) which gives me 6 months interest-free for buying it at an Apple Store.

It’s pretty great. Love the extra screen space without the device being appreciably larger – it seems the increase in device height is about half as much as the increase in screen height. Plus the screen is brighter, with better color, a better camera, and everything is faster – not just because of the LTE (which I’ll rarely use), but because of the processor and RAM. We did stay on the old/unlimited plan, for now. Ooh, and the sales rep at the Apple store was even able to get me the extra sims & setup needed to to the phone-swapping/contract-swapping musical-phones routine, so I didn’t have to go into an AT&T store at all! A very smooth procedure. A very happy outcome.

iPhone 5 and related thoughts

To begin: I’m a big proponent of Apple devices. I believe they’re the best option for people who would rather have their computing devices “just work” than to have to work to get their computing devices to do what they need. I don’t want to “root” or “jailbreak” or “hack” or choose between kernels or otherwise have to manually manage or deeply customize my computer/tablet/phone – I just want to open the box and start using it, and I want to be able to continue using it the way I did when I opened the box until the device dies. (Said device failure preferably coming 5+ years after purchase… and though I don’t expect to still be the primary user of a particular phone after that many years, I do expect it to still be working as, say, an iPod Touch for someone without a smartphone.) Nearly every computing device in my household is from Apple, from the wireless routers to the iMac, Macbook Pro, iBook, iPad, and several iPhones and iPods. (We don’t, yet, have an AppleTV. Maybe soon.)

We don’t compulsively upgrade our devices, certainly not with unsubsidized phones. We can’t really afford to. Instead, we typically wait as long as possible before updating. So, for example, I bought the original iPhone (the day after they dropped the price) and didn’t upgrade until the 3GS was available. Then I got married and, when we wanted to move Mandy over from Verizon to AT&T onto a shared plan, we never even had to put her on a contract – she just used my original iPhone, at first. With two phones, two lines, and one not under contract, it would be easy enough to buy one of the latest iPhone every year, putting every other phone line on a fresh 2-year contract – and since I’m the tech geek and last-year’s-iPhone is still a really good smartphone, just shuffle the devices so I have the newest and Mandy has the next-newest, and my sister gets the no-plan-use-it-as-an-iPod-Touch two-versions-old device. Due to other influences (including planning for possibly heading to Japan, a plan currently moved once more to the back-burner) we never did get a second contract on our account, and had nearly let mine run out entirely – though this spring when Mandy’s 3GS started going mad (I think I determined in the end it was Gmail’s fault) using 10x-100x more data than it had any reason to, we did renew my contract for 2 years to got me a new 4s and give her my 4 (my sister is now much happier with the 3GS-as-iPod-Touch than she was with the original iPhone).

So now we’re to the release of the iPhone 5. It looks great, and I’d love to have one, but it’s not necessary. The closest thing to failure on our devices is that the home button on the 4 isn’t entirely reliable – which has been a problem for years; I dealt with it, but it frustrates Mandy quite a bit. (In case you hadn’t heard, some iPhone 4 home buttons are less-than-perfect. Sometimes you press it and nothing happens. Other times you press it and it registers as a double-press. Since the introduction of multitasking to iOS, this is somewhat inconvenient.) What we’ve decided is that tonight we’ll try the anecdotally-recommended solution to the button problem, WD-40, and if it kills the iPhone 4, we’ll buy an iPhone 5 tomorrow morning (I’m excellent at waiting in lines) and do the old iPhone-shuffle. And if it fixes (or doesn’t change) the button problem, no problem, we’ll just stick with the hardware we have until something goes wrong (or there’s an irresistible upgrade, like the retina display was). Continue reading iPhone 5 and related thoughts

Alternative roles in video games

Last night I watched the midnight showing of Resident Evil: Retribution 3D. Lots of fun/over-the-top-to-the-point-of-silliness action, though perhaps significantly too much shooting zombies in the chest for the fifth movie in a series. They keep adding nods to the games, to the new games, many of which I at least recognize despite never having played any of them. I tried, a bit, but quit within minutes. The first three were too difficult because of the (intentional) limitations of the interface, and while 4’s interface was some improvement, I’m still not quite good enough at that sort of action game to succeed. But watching Milla et al kick ass on the big screen is pretty fun, now and again.

Anyway, what I wanted to post about was this: One of the two groups of protagonists we follow through the film (until the two groups eventually manage to meet up) is a group of five guys, all well-armed, experienced, et cetera… but one of them stood out to me, especially in the first scene they’re facing an oncoming army of undead soldiers. You see, throughout most of the battle, while four of the men were shooting, shooting, shooting, his gun was slung, his computer was out, and he was hacking, mapping, and planning. How are they going to get out of this unwinnable situation? Where can they turn? What about the [evil character who directs the attacks], and interfering with them? What about how this is making them run late; where is the other group, now?

I watched this sequence and thought, “Now there’s a role I’d be glad to play in a Resident Evil game.” I’m not much good at shooting zombies, but maybe I could hack into the computers to look at the situation (accessing cameras, heat maps, systems, et cetera) and plan escapes and systems-based counterattacks, while my team of NPCs shot the zombies for me. Then we all move around together, according to the plans/routes I helped find. I don’t mind a little action being mixed into the experience, but more on the scale of QTEs and/or triggering things I set up or discover with my technical prowess. If I hack well enough, plan well enough, and out-think the [evil enemy] at every step, my team stays alive. The more mistakes I make the smaller my team gets, until eventually I lose when I’m the last man standing and can’t stand against the zombie hordes (or whatever) on my own.

Now, I’m not looking for a “traditional” support role, as seen in MMOs, where the challenge is not much different from the DPS in its button-mashing, just making your side’s health go up rather than the other side’s health go down. I’m looking for something more engaging and cerebral. Something where, as I would in a single-player shooter/RPG, my character is effectively leading the action and the guys shooting the zombies/whatever were really the “support” characters. I generally don’t want to micromanage things like where they stand during a firefight, what weapons and special abilities they use, or who they target; they should be smart enough to figure that out on their own. I should have to pay attention to things like “how much ammo do we have left”, and then if I can find the armory/gun-shop on the map when needed and get my team there safely, they should know to reload and pick up as much as they can carry. Or if one of my guys gets injured, then it’s up to me to find a way to a hospital/clinic/whatever, hack the doors to get us in, et cetera.

It’s not a fully fleshed-out idea, just a brainstorm. Saw the guy doing it in the movie and wanted the option in a game. Even if it does boil down to half a dozen mini-games to resolve different sorts of hacking, plus map-reading and planning, with QTEs thrown in for action, it would probably be more fun for me than having to be the big guy with the gun standing in front. Make me the geeky guy standing in the back. Let me use my brain.

Thinking about interactive storytelling

Like a gear finally catching, and the machine lurching forward, a couple nights ago when I stumbled across inklewriter, my mind and momentum were altered. I’m still depressed, don’t get me wrong, I’m still overeating, feeling like crap, and being generally nihilistic – but instead of being distracted by video games, now I’m spending much of my time engaged in actual creative pursuits. The upside of which is much better than the upside for video games. My sleep schedule is off-the-charts weird, things have been extra stressful and difficult with my wife lately (she’s a teacher, it’s the first week of school, which I think is an obvious factor, plus her first attempt to get a reading endorsement didn’t work out as well as she’d hoped, so she’s having to sign up for additional classes… it’s a whole thing and I’m not posting about that right now, but I am dealing with it in my life), but at least I’m thinking about getting back to some creative work. Actually, I’ve been digging in a bit and getting my hands “dirty” with the tools.

Well, err, tool, anyway. inklewriter. It’s an authorship and hosting/sharing tool for choice-based interactive storytelling. (This is, apparently, as opposed to the sort of interactive fiction you got in the old text adventures, where your inputs were freeform and parsed; in the most recent popular, web-based wave of interactive storytelling, the reader is presented with explicit options to choose from, rather than a command line.) My brother has also been looking into creating interactive storytelling of his own, but where I want to create things closer to books or short stories (ie: longform narrative, closer to literature than to games), he wants to create things closer to the video games end of the spectrum (he’s a big fan of failbetter‘s Fallen London). failbetter themselves are working on adapting the tools they used to build Fallen London into StoryNexus, a platform for creating very game-like interactive fiction. Another developer associated with that team has been working on Varytale, which is geared toward more book-like interactive fiction, broken into small chunks they call storylets. (I recommend you read one of their sample interactive books, How to Read, about how to read interactive fiction but more importantly about the uses, implementations, and value of interactivity in storytelling.) I am also obliged to mention additional tools/platforms like Playfic and Choice of Games, both of which are very deliberately wading in the games end of the interactive fiction pool.

Some of these tools are publicly available now, some require you to request access or submit a book/game/project proposal, and others are still in closed beta. Some of them have very user-friendly, GUI interfaces that require little or no coding, others were clearly designed by programmers who think everyone thinks like a programmer, and a few explicitly require you to code all the interactivity in your stories by hand. The three I’m most interested in are inklewriter, Varytale, and StoryNexus – in that order. inklewriter is the only one of those which is open to the public right now. It and StoryNexus don’t require any real coding. It and Varytale are designed with more-booklike projects in mind. None of them, unfortunately, offer any tools/capabilities (yet) for exporting/saving/backing-up your stories, or hosting them on your own site. They’ve all got plans to integrate monetization, but none is actually up and running with those features, yet.

Of course, my books (especially my digital books) don’t actually make much money, anyway. So I’m seriously considering making my next project an interactive fiction project. As I said at the beginning of the post, I’ve been tinkering in inklewriter for the last few days. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to be able to have meaningful and responsive conversations with their Twitter account about the current features and future plans for the service. I’ve made several pages of sketches of plot structures made possible by the technology (most of which would be unimplementable on paper, ever, and unlikely to work within existing eBook formats), I’ve actually used the tool to implement one of them fully (though it’s just a skeleton, without much of the flesh of the story itself, so far), and others partially (to see how my initial ideas had holes in them, mostly, though also to wrap my mind around meaningful logic implementations for coherent narratives), and I’ve begun brainstorming about what sort of very-large (for interactive fiction) project I’d like to build.

I could flesh out (and design logic for) my initial insane idea. I’ve determined that for a target average-story-length of 3k-5k words, I’ll probably have to write 40k-60k words to fill out every possible path/branch/intersection/insanity I initially mapped. It’s only about 200 discrete story chunks with about 100 total decision points, but getting them all to play nicely with one another, the way I’ve designed it, would be … challenging. Probably what I’ll do is play with another few short projects, and share them freely with everyone (maybe enter them in one of the ongoing interactive storytelling contests – I’ve never really submitted anything to contests before…), and then do something … big.

What I’ve been thinking about most recently is building my possibly-pending adaptation of Dragons’ Truth as interactive fiction, in one way or another. Actually, it would be the whole trilogy (yes, I’ve been planning on turning it into a trilogy when/if I re-write D’T), and then the problems become things like producing print and audio editions. If I had a larger, engaged fan base and appropriate analytics tools, I could do something like tracking which choices readers make most often or polling people about their preferences, and let the readers decide what the “definitive” version of the books will be for the audio version and the limited-edition print runs… though if I do it this way, to me the interactive version will be the truly definitive version. And then later I can release a “director’s cut” eBook with the version I get from my own responses…

Of course, I’ve still got a huge backlog of research and planning to do before I can tackle that project, and then I’ve actually got to sit down and write it. (And write several times as much as “normal”, if it’s interactive.) So … it’ll be a while. But that’s what I’m thinking about now. My decisions in the coming days and weeks will certainly shape the nature of my research and planning in coming months.

As always, your responses are welcome, though not expected. Feel free to comment, email, text message, call me, or send a letter with your thoughts. Bonus points if your letter arrives by post and was typed on a manual typewriter.

Video games as distraction from depression

I’ve been playing a lot of The Secret World, lately. It’s quite fun, a good diversion. So far, I’d say I’m getting my money’s worth (and I bought an LTS, so that’s about $265) so far, with high hopes for the future. I’m about halfway through Egypt, as of last night, so I’m going faster than I did my first play through Star Trek Online, but in no way rushing through (like some people did, finishing everything available in a matter of days). I really want to be playing it right now, actually.

STO hasn’t been drawing me in much, especially Season 6, which is all about fleets and team-based play – I’m not in a fleet and I’ve never much played STO with other people. I’ve been thinking of starting a fleet for myself and my alts, though, and beginning work on the Fleet Starbase… it’s a long-term project designed to take a 50-player fleet about a year to reach max-level, and a 5-man fleet much longer. How long do you suppose it’ll take a fleet with one casual player?

Playing video games, MMOs especially, seems to be a good way to keep myself (my mind, my hands) occupied when things get bad. When my depression gets bad. Like it is, now. Spending all day thinking about a video game may not seem like a good use of my time, it may not seem to accomplish anything, but when the alternative is spending all day contemplating suicide, eating junk food, and/or laying in bed crying, the result changes. Eight hours playing a video game, right now, accomplishes a great deal – especially if I have some fun along the way, but certainly if it keeps me from doing anything to hurt myself.

Even when my mind is too far gone to generate new ideas, to do the real creative work, and even when I’m having enough difficulty focusing that I can’t even carry out already-laid plans for the ideas I had when I was feeling better (which is how I get 60%+ of my life done – make plans and routines, generate ideas, and set things in motion when I feel well, then simply follow those plans by rote when everything goes dark and I can’t see past the pain), I can usually focus enough to do some casual video gaming. Luckily, they’ve been building MMOs for “casual players”, in recent years. There’s a lot to do, there. Almost nothing that requires more than half an hour on any one thing. (Though last night I got to a point where I couldn’t effectively play TSW’s ‘sabotage’ missions; I was too worked-up/unfocused/crazy, I couldn’t keep track of where the guards were, and I kept getting caught/killed/starting-over. I got to a point, for a while, where I wasn’t capable of much more than sitting around, self-loathing. (Not because I wasn’t doing well at the game; just because that’s how I feel, lately. I’m generally pretty good at TSW. I can even (usually) do sabotage missions without any trouble.))

I’m not obsessed with the games, though I do enjoy them (more often than not, and right now, more than most of life/reality), but right now video games are one of the few things standing between myself and deeper depression, self-harm, or worse. While I’m playing, I’m usually pretty-well-distracted from the depression. I’ve used movies (and TV) for this, in the past, but video games is really doing it for me, right now. Though I’ll probably spend a while watching strange foreign films on Netflix Instant, as soon as I reach the end of Transylvania in TSW; they’re almost all I have left in that queue.