More Borderlands

Still addictive enough that the awesome TF2 Halloween update takes second place.  As the screenshot shows, I learned a) how to make screenshots, and b) how to play in third person mode.

Scooter, one of the few characters you don't kill.

Playing a mixture of single-player and co-op games is weird… you end up playing the same area several times, the first time in a fog of confusion as you help someone else with quests you haven’t got yet.  You can have a fair mixture of levels, but once it gets too wide it’s less fun– I was in a game with someone 10 levels higher and it wasn’t that fun– he just swept up all the enemies.  I created a second character when a friend was just starting out.

There’s an appealing punk feel to the game… no appeals to your better nature, no saving the galaxy– it’s a rough and ugly planet and you’re in it for the money.  And if you have several players and are fighting a horde of enemies, it can be really intense, chaotic fun. 

The loot system is compelling, as it was designed to be, but I’m not sure it marries well to co-op.  I don’t know why you’re limited so much in inventory (you start with just 12 slots)– it forces you to make decisions constantlyon what weapons to keep, and in co-op you don’t want to hold everybody up while you ponder.  Doubling the slots or more would only improve the game.  You want to try out all these weapons, or be able to save one or two for a friend.  It’s annoying to pass over drops because you have no slots or can’t easily evaluate if they’re better than what you have.

 

Dealing with the unhinged right

An excellent article which not only details the frightening insanity the Republicans have fallen into, but starts to address what to do about it:

http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/08/post-66.html

A lot of the ruckus is political theater, but the Republicans have been stirring up the crazies for years, and some of them are going to get violent– just as they did in the ’90s.

While we’re at it, here’s what the craziness looks like to a British observer.  Both links via Agto.

 

Mirror’s Edge

I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge lately.  It always looked intriguing, and there’s something hypnotic about the picture of Faith on the cover— perhaps that fact that her mouth is too small— but I was scared away by Yahtzee’s review. 

Fortunately, Yahtzee was wrong; it’s really a lot of fun, though of that peculiar sort of fun that involves enormous amounts of swearing and pointing at the screen with a gun hand making shooting noises.  A lot of the moves require very precise timing, and there aren’t enough savepoints, so if there’s a particular spot you’ve missed you have to keep trying not only that bit but the half-minute leading up to it, giving you a chance to re-blow previous moves you already accomplished.  You can’t save the game at all on your own.  On the plus side, this means you tend to actually learn the moves rather than bungle through, and it’s a real thrill to get a sequence right and fly across the rooftops.

For me, whose last experience with what the kids are calling “platformers” was Lode Runner, it’s a neat, novel form of gameplay.  A million games let you be a swordsman or shooter; it’s more interesting to be a parkour specialist.

The visual design is spectacular; rather than the usual dystopian muddle, the designers have gone for a bright white palette with accents in bright colors.  It’s really a beautiful game.  Key objects are highlighted in bright red (e.g. the bar below), though if you’re an insane person you can turn this off and figure your own way around. 

A relatively dark and forbidding image, by Mirror's Edge standards

I’m only partway through so I can’t say if the plot elements turn out to be interesting or not.  I’d venture to say it’s going to require a certain suspension of belief: every element so far turns out to require a long trek over the rooftops.  Doesn’t Faith ever just take a taxi?

I’m guessing that some of the criticisms derive from the original price and short gameplay.  It’s just $20 on Steam now, though, which seems like a bargain.

One complaint: there’s no manual, so when I’d forgotten how to do a particular maneuver I had to replay the tutorial.  It was left-shift, by the way.  It’d also be nice to have integrated third person… I see that there’s a way to hack this in, but the results look clunky– unlike (say) Fallout 3, the designers obviously spent most of their time on first-person mode.

 

Note to advertisers

Re: Ads that take over the window or otherwise hide the page I’m reading.

Doesn’t work.  Dudes, it’s 2009.  I already have an attention span measured in seconds.  The moment I see one of those things, I click on another window, or hit the close box if any.  Did you follow that?  I don’t watch the ad.

 

What we’re good at

Alert reader Alon Levy responded to my question about industries where the US is still on top:

Right now, I’d say the number one answer is semiconductors. The semiconductor/hi-tech industry is powering the Bay Area and Dallas. In addition, several Midwestern cities – Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, St. Louis – are trying to develop strong health care and biotech industries.

Usually, the objection to these industries is that they’re highly specialized, and require much more education than most Americans have— at least, that’s the main objection I’ve encountered. The answer is that as late as the 1940s, the same could be said about the auto industry: it produced a very specialized item, and required its workers to have completed high schools, which at the time most Americans hadn’t. In fact, today’s auto populism has a lot of parallels with the farm populism of William Jennings Bryan.

I think it makes sense in general that our continuing advantage will be in high-tech and other things that require good education; and the nice thing about this analysis is that it comes with a policy prescription: focus on education.  We already have a formidable university system… the problem is in primary and secondary education, where we lag most industrial countries and many non-industrial ones. 

That Malcolm Gladwell has a New Yorker article pointing out the huge difference between good and bad teachers: one finding is that a good teacher can advance students 1.5 years in a class year; bad teachers, just 0.5 years.  So, we should hire good teachers instead of bad ones.  But, as he points out, almost nothing predicts teaching excellence— especially not the teacher’s own education level.

My worry about tossing the American auto industry is that transportation technology seems like it’s an industry that Americans should be leading in. It’s hard to imagine Detroit doing the leading, to be sure.  But transplanted Japanese and German factories aren’t going to do it either.

 

2008 cartograms

From Andrew Sullivan: county and state level cartograms for the presidential election.

It’s a good example of the effect of the Electoral College, which amplifies a comfortable-but-close popular vote total into a 365-173 Electoral College landslide.

Interesting how completely the third parties were a sideshow this year.  CNN didn’t even bother to include them in its charts.  Nader, Barr, and two others all together got 1.1% of the vote.  It’d be interesting to know if this was mostly in states where it didn’t matter– if people avoided the fringe parties in battleground states.

 

Ask Zompist: Lieberman

What’s your take on the point that’s come up in blogs and on TV about the Democrats potentially “kicking Sen. Joe Liberman (I-CT) out”of their congressional caucus?

 My initial reaction is posted here (http://vroomsplat.livejournal.com/91167.html), so if you’d like to respond to that I’d be grateful— but this is about asking you, not asking me, so most of all I’d like to know what you think the Democrats should do.

—lemur

I’d better reply before events take over…  There’s some justifiable anger at Lieberman’s consorting with McCain and running as an independent; but I think it’d be foolish to kick him out.  It’s not merely prudent to have one extra vote; it’s a certainty that it’ll be needed one day and probably many days.

There’s a profile in this week’s New Yorker of Chuck Hagel, a Republican who’s been increasingly critical of his party, especially on Iraq.  (He accompanied Obama to Iraq this summer.)  Frustrating as they are to ideologues, we need this sort of people—the rather small group of politicians who inhabit the middle ground between the two parties.

 

On the addiction front

Interesting article on substance abuse in the NYT by one Charles Blow.  (Pause for snickers.)  Also a fascinating graphic, with an almost Tuftean quantity of information and ease of reading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/opinion/14blow.html

Blow focusses on a rise in treatment for substance abuse by older women.  But he seems to have forgotten how to read a cohort-oriented graph.  The two times compared are about 10 years apart.  Look at the graph for alcohol treatment for whites: in 1996, the peak was 35-year-olds.  Ten years later, it was 45-year-olds.  In other words, the same generation  is having trouble; they’re just older.

Throughout the charts, this cohort– 40 to 50 year olds, late Boomers– is trouble.  They now account for most of the treatment for alcohol, heroin, and cocaine. 

Interestingly, the cohort after them (current 30 to 40 year olds) seems to have seriously cooled down their alcohol abuse.  If they abuse anything, it’s stimulants. 

And the next cohort, 20 to 30 year olds, is busy abusing alchohol, heroin (whites only), and marijuana. 

(As a caveat, the charts only consider admissions to treatment centers, so they may or may not reflect addictions in general.  Who goes to treatment centers probably correlates with income, for instance.)

 

 

40% of Prince Caspian

We saw Prince Caspian tonight.  Where the first film was passable, this one is seriously annoying.  Let C.S. Lewis himself explain the problem:

I was once taken to see a film version of King Solomon’s Mines. …  At the end of Haggard’s book, as everyone remembers, the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not ‘cinematic’ and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined.

That’s pretty much my reaction to Prince Caspian.  Throughout the middle of the movie I was thinking over and over, “What the hell?”  Why are they introducing a foolish failed raid on Miraz’s castle?  Why did they introduce this theme of complaint and abandonment?  Why did they set Caspian and Peter at each other’s throats?  Why did they put everything out of order?  Why did they make Peter, frankly, an asshole?

My wife thought it was horribly violent.  And it is, much much more so than the book.  The book has battles and a very good swordfight, of course.  But the main battle lasts about two pages.  To echo Lewis, if the original isn’t thrilling enough to be a movie, why are you even trying to make it into one?

I just re-read the book, and the difference in tone is remarkable.  The filmmakers have entirely lost Lewis’s charm, his sensibleness, even his earthiness.  The first section of the book is enchanting, not least because of all the little details– how the children virtually live on apples for a few days, how sick they get of apples, why it’s inconvenient to cut ropes with swords, how you find fresh water when lost in the woods.  And you’d hardly get the idea from the movie that a good section of the book deals with Aslan holding a huge party in the woods, catered by Bacchus the wine god.

 I’d worried that Evangelical writers would make Aslan too gooey, too pious.  In fact the problem is that he’s barely present.  There’s a brief version of the long strange scene where Lucy and no one else sees Aslan; but in the book this is resolved fairly quickly, and Aslan meets all the children (and Trumpkin)– the main battle isn’t engaged in defiance of him.  In the movie he just shows up in the last fifteen minutes or so, as pure deus ex machina.  You’ll have to read the books to get any sense of why this lion might be an appealing figure.

Someone at a story session must have been undergoing a crisis of faith or something… the movie characters are constantly worrying that Aslan has abandoned them.  There are skeptical characters in the book, such as Trumpkin, but they’re not exactly anguished– they go along with the more religious types, because there’s always something to do.  In general this is a deep theological question… but in terms of the story, it’s a problem invented by the writers: in the book there’s no great question why Aslan isn’t acting, because he is.  And there idea that Lucy has to keep going back to the point in the woods where she saw Aslan seems like a half-wit parody of faith.  There was nothing special about that point, except that Aslan was in it.  He wanted the children to follow him, not simply as a test of faith, but because he knew the way better than they did. 

The writers even messed up small points… e.g. the kids’ use of “DLF” for Trumpkin… a little callous, but in the book it’s Trumpkin, not the children, who uses the term first.

It’s not a total loss.  Reepicheep is too great a character to harm.  The centaurs are suitably dignified; Lucy is still a winning character, and I liked Susan too… mmm, female archers.  I did wonder how King Leonidas ended up ruling Narnia…

 

 

Stupid reactions to Burma

Via Agto, Laura Bush opens her big mouth about Burma:

“Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path.” 

“It’s troubling that many of the Burmese people learned of this impending disaster only when foreign outlets, such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, sounded the alarm,” she said.

Asked by a reporter whether she was accusing the junta of having “blood on their hands,” she said it was clear they are “very inept.”

As opposed to her own husband’s administration, which issued an order to evacuate New Orleans after all the mass transportation had been closed, and her own husband, who only learned of the ongoing disaster when aides forced him to watch TV clips.  

And now Time has its own breathtakingly stupid suggestion: invade Burma.  Because nothing improves a natural disaster more than adding a war on top of it.