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I was considering using PayPal, but, uh, I guess that doesn’t seem like a particularly smart choice.

New Orleans

Apparently I’m only going to update this blog while I’m on vacation.

So anyway, I’ve been in New Orleans since Tuesday. Great place. I’m so fat now (not really (but really))

We’ve been using the streetcar system a lot. Mostly the St. Charles line, since our hotel is on St. Charles Avenue.

When it runs along St. Charles, it runs along a median. Two tracks, one for each direction, divide the road into two halves. Coming into mid-town, when the streetcar crosses under the highway and into the Arts District, it moves into a lane of traffic. So cars can be in front of or behind it, it follows streetlights, and so on.

The streetcar goes one block up Howard Avenue before hanging a right onto Carondelet Street. Howard is a several-lane road, and the streetcar again uses the median to travel. It therefore crosses all of the other lanes as it turns, so there’s a sign on the righthand side of Howard saying to wait behind a certain point when the streetcar is turning.

We were riding the streetcar this morning. A car was one lane over to our right, trying to get past us.

It didn’t make it before we started turning. So it slowed down and stopped.

Then it tried to pull around us. That didn’t really work that well either.

It stopped. We turned a bit more. It moved a bit forward too. The world’s worst game of chicken was unfolding.

Finally, the car backed up a little bit.

Only so it could swing around more to get around the streetcar, which at that point was halfway into its lane.

So, my point is this: do not, under any circumstances, drive in New Orleans.

(You’re probably not any better off walking. When there is actually a crosswalk and a crossing light, half of the time the light is broken: I’ve seen multiple dead lights, one that never changed from Don’t Walk, and one where the Walk and Don’t Walk lights were on simultaneously.

The other half of the time, the light has an erratic Walk/Don’t Walk cycle that is completely different from any other light’s pattern. No two lights switch in relation to the traffic signals in exactly the same way. This evening I encountered one which indicated Walk while the traffic light in its direction was red. It stayed on Walk as the light changed to green.)

999

I just finished Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors (999), a Nintendo DS game by CHUNSOFT. It’s an intriguing little gem, one which probably isn’t quite like anything you’ve played before. I don’t really feel like writing a tome about it, but it deserves a few words at least.

999 uses restarting after a game over and replaying with the experiences of previous failures as part of its plot.

Lots of games, especially older action and text/graphical adventure ones, use this as an essential part of gameplay. When you lose all your lives in Castlevania, you restart with the knowledge of what not to do in the places you died. Modern games tend to be a bit more forgiving in this regard by making it harder to reach a full game over, so instead of restarting the whole game, you just replay shorter segments instead.

But that’s not quite what I meant. While 999 does do that too, it incorporates restarting with past experience into the plot itself. It’s pseudoscientific, and I can’t really say any more without spoiling too much, but trust me when I say it’s fascinating when everything finally (sort of) clicks. The way it fits together with the big reveal, dual-screen conceit, and final puzzle is really something.

The game’s major flaw is a direct consequence of that same mechanic: you have to play the game more than once. The game requires at least two playthroughs to reach the true ending, three to reach all of the puzzle content and major backstories for each character, and six to view all of the endings. The game helps you out a bit by letting you fast forward through text you’ve read before, but there’s so much text that it still takes a while. Plus, there’s no way to skip through puzzles, so you have to replay them every single time. You will get sick of the intro puzzle room exceedingly quickly.

Did I mention the game has a lot of text? Because 999 has a whoooooole lotta text. CHUNSOFT mainly makes two types of games: Mystery Dungeon games, which are roguelike games best known overseas for the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon installments, and “sound novels” like 999, which is what they call their visual novels. In 999, there’s a lot of conversation between characters, as well as a bunch of “cutscenes” with dialog and narration (accompanied with pictures and music). And, honestly, the text is pretty good. There are a few rare typos and some scientific and historical silliness, but there are some interesting ideas in the story and the characters work well together and by themselves.

CHUNSOFT’s sound novels are critically acclaimed in Japan, but 999 is the first one to make the hop to Americaland. The initial print run was pretty small, but after it sold out, Aksys published a new batch. You should pick up a copy if you can find one.

Nullary Sources

I recently started doing yet another thing which will cause me never to update this blog. Nullary Sources is a Tumblr blog I write with cool dude Colin Barrett. We’ve talked about starting something like it for a while, but much to our surprise, it finally happened. It’s been active for a little more than a week now and somehow we haven’t lost interest yet, which is always a good sign.

We don’t have a theme for content. Whatever we feel like posting gets posted: news, video games, radtacular music, baseball, etc. If you’d like some examples of what we do, here are my favorite post by me, my favorite post by Colin, and my favorite post by the both of us.

While I’m on the topic of site news, TileStack has unfortunately gone under, so that game I published last year, Unique Moves, is no longer available. Megafrownyface and all that. I do have a saved copy of all the puzzle data, so I may or may not reimplement it somewhere else in the future. Stay tuned!

Christopher Nolan & JRPGs

Here’s a trailer for the film Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan and set to be released on July 16, 2010. It’s short, so feel free to watch it all if you want to, but the specific scene I’d like to bring your attention to starts at 0:42.

Continue reading ›

LOVE SQUIDS

I recently got on a kick of old educational games: The Learning Company‘s Super Solvers series, MECC‘s DinoPark Tycoon, etc. One game I started playing is Sierra‘s The Island of Dr. Brain, the only of the four Sierra-developed Dr. Brain titles that I never played while growing up.

The first two games in the series, Castle of Dr. Brain and Island, were in the style of a Sierra point-and-click adventure game (although simplistically so). Each screen has one or more puzzles which you have to solve in order to move onto the next screen. There’s a hand tool to interact with puzzles and other objects on each screen and an eye tool to inspect things, and there’s an inventory which is used on occasion to collect items (that you get by solving a puzzle) and use items (to unlock another puzzle or the next screen).

In grand Sierra fashion, every screen has quite a few scenery objects which you can poke or inspect to activate short little animations or display joke messages. There are many things in the game which are seemingly there just to make puns when you look at them. One screen has a large hand hanging from the ceiling, and sitting in the hand is a bird. This serves absolutely no purpose except to make the obvious joke when you look at it.

Looks like Dr. Brain prefers his bird in the hand.

There’s a scene in a laboratory late in the game that contains a large computer with a flashing red light.

the underground laboratory from The Island of Dr. Brain

When you inspect the computer, you get the message “Dr. Brain’s mainframe sure seems to be working overtime on something.” There’s a small scrap of paper coming out of the right side of the computer, behind the teacup. If you inspect this, you’ll see that it actually contains x86 assembly code:

the assembly code listing easter egg

This is written for an assembler I’m not familiar with, MASM I believe, so there are a few lines I can’t explain, and I can’t tell you whether the whole code is valid and can be assembled into something executable. But the code is pretty simple, so I can explain what it does.

.MODEL SMALL
.CODE
        ORG     100H
Start:  JMP     Begin
        text    DB  4CH,4FH,56H,45H,20H,53H,
                    51H,55H,49H,44H,53H,20H,
                    20H,24H

Ignoring the first three lines, this code does two things: it moves execution to the label “Begin” (line 4) and defines a string with the name text (lines 5-7). The string is a comma-separated listed of characters, and each character is encoded with its hexadecimal ASCII representation. We could use a table of all the characters to translate the string by hand, but let’s just write some quick Python instead:

>>> chars = ["4C", "4F", "56", "45", "20", "53", "51", "55", "49",
...  "44", "53", "20", "20", "24"]
>>> [chr(int(c, 16)) for c in chars]
['L', 'O', 'V', 'E', ' ', 'S', 'Q', 'U', 'I', 'D', 'S', ' ', ' ', '$']

So, uh… “LOVE SQUIDS $”. Yeah. Moving on to the real stuff.

Begin:  MOV     AH, 9
        MOV     BX, 093H
        MOV     DX, OFFSET text
Looper: INT     21H
        DEC     BX
        JNZ     Looper

Lines 1 and 3 here set up the registers for a call to DOS interrupt 0x21, which encompasses a whole lot of I/O functions. Specfically, subprogram 0x09, which prints a $-terminated string, is going to be used. This is why the string definition ends in a dollar sign. Only “LOVE SQUIDS ” (with two trailing spaces and no newline) will be printed.

The second line puts the number 147 (0x93) into register BX. This is used as a counter by the last three lines, which run the interrupt, printing the string, 147 times.

Exit:   INT     20H

        END     Start

And this just calls another DOS interrupt that terminates the program.

So, The Island of Dr. Brain contains an easter egg of hidden code that prints the following:

“LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS LOVE SQUIDS “

I wonder how many people playing this game understood what this code did, or even entered it into an assembler to run it.

“Unique Moves”

I’ve been knocking a game idea around in my head for a little while: a maze game where you can move any number of squares in a straight line, but once you move by a specific number of squares, you can’t move by that exact number again. I thought it was a pretty interesting idea, and I’ve never encountered it in a game before, but I was never really super fired up about it because I didn’t think the concept had a whole lot of depth for exploration, unlike Guide.

I’ve also been meaning to do something with TileStack for a while, since HyperCard remains my one, true love.

So, I killed two birds with one stone and knocked out a quick game.

Unique Moves

I wrote 20 puzzles for it, and none of them are really terribly difficult (nowhere near Guide‘s final puzzles), so it should be a quick play: half an hour to an hour, I’d estimate. I think I managed to come up with a few neat challenges here and there. There’s even a puzzle editor, if you want to make your own.

Safari or OmniWeb is strongly recommended, although it’ll work in Firefox or Opera with some noticeable initialization lag. Chrome is kind of busted, and I haven’t tried IE.

Tynt Insight: The worst thing in the entire world

<@Crash> China's Wang wins third gold medal at short track
<@Crash> Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/olympics/2010/?eref=sinav#ixzz0ghvk2qyP
<@Crash> WTF?
<@Crash> I didn't even copypasta that part!
<@Crash> I was all hooray for China's Wang, but that came out too
<@Crash> That shit's just fucking rude now.

More and more companies are integrating software called Tynt Insight (formerly Tynt Tracer, a name I’m sure was changed because of the creepy connotations) with their websites. It’s free, and it’s pretty easy to install: all you have to do is include one extra JavaScript file on each of your web pages and it’ll automatically do its thing.

So what is its thing, exactly?

The ostensible purpose is copy/paste tracking. In short, it tracks what text and images users are copying from your web site. Tynt’s website talks again and again and again and again and again about how what is copied and how often it’s copied can provide valuable information to the webmaster. It’s a magic technology that produces WOW ACTUAL NUMBERS, so I can see the attraction, but I don’t really see the value in knowing what headlines people are copying to make penis jokes about.

Really, what use is there in being able to say, “2,500 people have copied text from my blog“? It’s a completely meaningless number. It means even less than visitor numbers or Alexa rankings, which, while easy to obsess over, do actually have marginal utility.

The reports of what’s being copied from your web pages could potentially be useful, I suppose. If you need JavaScript to tell you that people are copying the summaries from your articles to show others, more power to you. The rest of us will just have to figure that out on our own.

I’m pretty much outside of the target adopter group for Tynt Insight, though, and this clearly appeals to others a lot more than it does me.

<@CHz> The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering action against a producer of "The Hurt Locker" who sent multiple e-mails urging academy members to vote for his movie in the Oscar best-picture race and "not a $500 million film"
<@CHz> Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/entertainment/academy-ponders-action-against-locker-producer-who-sent-e-mails-soliciting-oscar-votes-85688222.html#ixzz0gulgCN6w
<@CHz> f'in copyjacked

I don’t really mind the idea of a website knowing what I’m copying from it. It’s definitely creepy, and as I explained above I don’t know why someone would care, but this doesn’t keep me awake at night. Google Analytics is I think much more invasive, and I let that do whatever it wants to, so yeah, I’m pretty much okay with this in theory.

But I was curious about what information they track, so I checked out their privacy policy. Here’s the relevant part, in its entirety:

When you use TYNT Products, we will collect the following information:

  1. The Internet domain and IP address from which you access the TYNT Products;
  2. The type of browser and operating system used to access the TYNT Products;
  3. Screen resolution of your monitor;
  4. The date and time you access the TYNT Products;
  5. The page you are visiting with the TYNT Products;
  6. If you linked to a TYNT web site from another referring web site, the address of that web site.

By using the TYNT Products, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed both within and without the United States of America

By using the TYNT website, you agree to the preceding uses of your information in this way by TYNT.

Browser, OS, and screen resolution are pretty much par for the course as far as these things are concerned. I don’t see at all why Tynt needs to know these things, but that just ties back into my opinion that the whole thing is useless. If you’re the kind of person whom Tynt Insight excites, then you’ll probably find the demographic info useful too.

Do note that the policy doesn’t say they won’t use your IP address to track what you specifically are doing, doesn’t say they’ll delete your identifying information at any point in time, and doesn’t say they won’t give away or sell your information. And I’m sure there’s quite a bit more that it doesn’t say. They know which sites you copy text from, and therefore which sites you visit, and they can do whatever they want with it, whenever they want.

If this bothers you in any way, well that’s your toughie, because Tynt offers no way to opt out. According to their technical FAQ, they’re currently “investing considerable effort into developing a feature that will allow users to block Tynt software across all the sites that are using it.” I’m glad they felt this was an important enough issue to spend time on, but I’m dismayed that this was apparently not important enough to address before they let their tracer loose. Nothing builds a rapport with your users like saying, “we’re going to track you, and we’re working on a way for you to opt out, but until then we’re just going to track you.”

Thankfully, since Tynt Insight is just one JavaScript file, it’s blockable with any sort of ad blocking browser add-on, like NoScript and Adblock Plus for Firefox. The request URL is something like http://tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/Tracer.js?user=userid&s=somenumber, with userid and somenumber filled in with different values depending on the site. I’d recommend casting tynt.com and all of its subdomains into a black hole and forgetting about it.

<@CHz> http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702911/Security-Appears-Unannounced-At-Infinity-Ward-Studio-Heads-Missing-Staff-Freaked-Out-.html what the eff
<+Tails> "Infinity Ward studio heads Vince Zampella and Jason West reportedly met with Activision this morning and have not been seen by Infinity Ward staff members since.
<+Tails> Read more: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702911/Security-Appears-Unannounced-At-Infinity-Ward-Studio-Heads-Missing-Staff-Freaked-Out-.html#ixzz0h1AkEOSa
<+Tails> lol the copied link

I’ve intentionally avoided talking about Tynt Insight’s second, and far more visible feature, but the IRC logs I’ve been using as section separators illustrate it. Whenever you copy text from a page running Tynt Insight, it automatically adds an attribution link back to the webpage at the end of what you’re copying. It does this silently, so you only know it’s happened after you paste the text somewhere else.

Let me rephrase this. Tynt Insight modifies a system behavior without telling you or asking for your permission.

I’m not even going to explain their reasoning behind doing this, because this is indefensible. There is no planet in the universe on which this is acceptable behavior.

And, just like the data tracking, they don’t yet offer a way to disable this. From the technical FAQ again:

Q. I don’t want Tynt Insight to add a link when I copy and paste. What can I do?

A. We’re currently working on providing users an option to opt out of Tynt Insight. If you’d like to disable Tynt Insight immediately, you can use an ad or script blocking tool to disable Tynt Insight.

No.

No no no no no.

Here, FAQ guy, sit down. I want to talk to you for a second.

First, you are fundamentally changing the behavior of my web browser without my permission. This is not something you do and then make users opt out of. This is something you make opt-in. The onus is not on me to tell you not to pollute my clipboard; it is on you to not do it without asking me.

Second, why is this not a feature already? Why was this not a feature before you launched? Either no one in the company thought about this beforehand, which is embarrassing, or no one cared, which is reprehensible.

Tynt Insight is the worst thing in the entire world. Leave my browser alone.

“The Farmer”

The Farmer (1887?)

(hover over underlined words for annotations)

Once on a time he used to plough
And rise at dawn to milk the cough,
And drive with merry song and laugh
To pasture Brindle and her caugh.

Then for the pigs he’d fill the trough,
And for the market he’d be ough;
Sometimes, his mare would bruise her hough
Against a fence-post or a rough.

And there he’d switch her with a bough
To teach her better anyhough.
He planted wheat to make the dough,
Which, in drought, was hard to grough.

In winter, when his work was through,
A little sporting he would dough.
He’d wander with his gun and shough
And aim at crows he couldn’t knough.

Sometimes he’d hunt along the slough
For birds that do not live there nough,
And shoot a seagull or a crough,
Which he with joy would proudly shough.

From swamp land, watered by a lough,
He made good pasture for his stough,
By laying here and there a sough,
While perspiration wet his brough.

Sometimes a snake that shed it slough
Would scare him so he’d run and pough
Till stuck knee-deep within a slough,
He’d yell until he raised a rough.

But rough work makes the farmer cough,
And, careless hough much people scough,
He lives on boarders rough and tough,
Whough vough theigh dough not eat enough.

– Oil City Derrick.

About “The Farmer”

The Reno Gazette-Journal runs a small feature called “Today in History,” where it reprints something that was published on this day in a previous year. It’s usually a blurb from an article or an advertisement, no more than a paragraph, but it’s usually pretty fun to read, especially when they go with some old-timey stuff.

In Wednesday, February 24th’s edition, they reprinted an ad that originally ran in 1890. I wanted to show my friend Colin the ad, but I didn’t feel like typing it all out, so I hit the Googles with a phrase from it to see if it was present somewhere on the internet. And, luckily for me, the NEGenWeb Project exists. They have a pretty rad library of transcribed and scanned books, journals, atlases, etc. published in Nebraska. One of them, the special “immigrant issue” of the Nebraska State Journal (now the Lincoln Journal Star), published on June 5, 1887, contained the same ad. You can see the ad on this page, under the header “TO WEAK MEN.”

Because it was available, and also because old newspapers are awesome, I read more of what they’ve put up on the site from it. On the same page as the ad was a poem called “The Farmer,” credited to the Oil City Derrick, a paper which is now simply called the Derrick. There’s no information on the poem beyond that, such as who wrote it, or where it was originally published (if it wasn’t the OCD). I could only find one other record of the poem: it was also published in the November 19, 1887 edition of the Tuapeka Times of New Zealand. That site has a scan of the poem, which I used to supplement the NEGenWeb transcription, because the latter seems to have numerous typos.

I thought the poem was hella awesome, so I decided to print it here. Colin rightfully pointed out that the wordplay is pretty similar to Ogden Nash’s, although Nash was born at least fifteen years after “The Farmer” was written. All of the annotations are mine.

“Guide”

There’s this one guy on the internet named Peter Hosey who recently started a blog feature called “Ship-It Saturday,” where he’s posting projects that are basically done save for maybe one or two niggling things, in the interest of just getting them done I mean seriously come on. I’ve been thinking about it since he started, because I have one project in particular that’s been basically done for an embarrassingly long time, but which somehow has remained unpublished for a staggering dearth of good reasons. I mean seriously, come on.

No longer.

Presenting Guide.

Guide is a small game I wrote to teach myself JavaScript. Puzzle, web-based, check the hell out of it. I guarantee you’ll be challenged. Feel free to leave comments, bug reports, and death threats as comments on this post. Especially death threats.