Starcraft Review Thing
So, I kinda want to put up more reviews of games I play or movies I watch or anything else I feel like talking about, and well I’m going to start with this. If you’re extremely worried about plot spoilers maybe you shouldn’t read this, but I shouldn’t be putting in really hard ones, but I may say a couple things that make some surprises in the game a little less surprising.
In Starcraft 2 you take the role of Jim Raynor, a returning character from the first Starcraft game (in fact, I think all of the really important characters at least show up for a little bit). He used to be allied with the current emperor (Arcturus Mengsk), but when Mengsk turned out to be evil and leaving a third person in their group behind to die (Sarah Kerrigan) Raynor, who seems to have had the hots for Kerrigan, said it was too much, and decided to fight against Mengsk but Mengsk took over and became emperor. Meanwhile Kerrigan instead of dieing ended up basically becoming an alien, and took over their forces and generally became evil and very powerful leading the zerg. Now, if you cry spoilers at this I say too bad, this is all from the first game (and actually makes up about 1/2 the manual for SC2, which has no info at all about playing the game) you’ve had 12 years, if you didn’t know yet you don’t actually care.
In the four years since the end of the “Brood War” things haven’t actually changed much. Raynor, still a rebel wants to fight against Mengsk, but being a sort of criminal is having a hard time coming up with resources and so is sort of a mercenary. No one’s been quite sure what the zerg and Kerrigan have been up to, they’ve been off on their own, and anyone who goes to try and find out ends up not coming back.
The zerg suddenly show up again attacking various human worlds without giving much reason, and then the real story starts. However not much really happens. Characters show up, you do some work for them, then just as you’re starting to like them they leave. There are people who betray you but it’s pretty obvious right from the beginning that you can’t really trust them so it’s not that surprising, and pretty much just like any other video game storyline. Speaking of many of the characters being kind of bland, if you’re familiar with both the warcraft and starcraft stories you may like this (and by like I mean be upset at the lack of creativity). The villain in the game, (The Queen of Blades/The Lich King) was once (Sarah Kerrigan/Arthas Menethil) a member of the elite (ghost commandos/paladins of the silver hand) but was corrupted by the evil (Overmind/Ner’Zuhl). They soon become so powerful that they end up in charge of the (zerg/scourge) which uses a (virus/plague) to turn normal people, including the armies fighting them, into minions in their own armies.
I’m trying not to spoil the ending of starcraft 2 here, but I just want to say that I found the ending to be unsatisfying. We’ve pretty much all heard by now that starcraft 2 isn’t going to be one game but three, and they want to tell the story over the course of the three games. Instead of using cliffhangers though, they want the whole story to be made up of three smaller stories, and in this part I think it fails. I don’t know for sure what’s coming, but I feel like pretty much nothing you do really matters for the larger story except for one thing. And the independant story that doesn’t need the larger one? Well turns out you don’t really accomplish anything, by the end you’re pretty much where you were when you started, it feels like the story is only getting started, but since the next games are going to be the other races, which don’t really care about human politics I can’t imagine the questions I have at the end of this campaign regarding what happens next will be answered.
So that’s kinda where I sit regarding the single player campaign in Starcraft 2. I feel like it could have been better, whether you like the games or not I think it’s hard to argue that Blizzard doesn’t put out great games, and I think I was expecting more. It’s good enough to keep you interested and playing, but in the end the story is just pretty standard video game writing, nothing particularly special.
Several times throughout the game you’re given choices whether to side with one character or another but it really has no outcome on the over-arching story, just the next mission (or for the last one, the next 2 missions) and a decoration you can look at between missions.
As for gameplay they seem to have not really wanted to change things too much from the first game, people would get upset at them if it was anything more than minor tweaks from what made Starcraft Starcraft. I’ve you’ve played a blizzard RTS before, you’ll know how this game plays. You tend to need to micro-manage your armies better in this game than in most other RTS games, but that’s standard for blizzard. At least with this game they removed the things they put in Warcraft 3 with the upkeeps and the focus on heroes. It’s nice not being punished for trying to have more than 10 guys.
Multi-player has a sort of weird feel in it coming from the single player. It feels like there’s so much content that they just completely removed from the single player. I’m probably going to forget some, but units in the single player but not multi player include: medic, firebat, vulture, goliath, diamondback, wraith, science vessel, predator, and some transport whos name I forget right now, as well as the nifty models on the mercanaries (if someone from blizzard reads this, which I know they wont, you should make the models unlockable in multi-player so that you can use them instead if you want even if they don’t have the stat bonuses) This is also just the terran race here, there’s also a few zerg units that don’t make it to multiplayer. I suppose it makes sense though, since the campaign was only Terran (although there are 4 or so Protoss missions) you would sort of expect them to flesh out the Terrans more and by not including all the units it made their lives easier for multiplayer, since they don’t need to make a similar amount of units for the other races (but probably will for the next 2 games) so I expect to see some of these units with the next game as they add to multiplayer, but as for now it just sort of makes the multiplayer feel incomplete, and if you’re a player who prefers the Terran then when the zerg game comes out in a year or two and there’s completely new units for the zerg and protoss that you’ve not been able to use before, you’re going to probably end up with something you’ve known about and been able to play with for a couple years, and that will feel boring.
All this said it’s still a fun game, I’ll be playing it a bunch, and if you haven’t yet add me as a friend so we can play together.
Alright, so here’s a spoiler, if I get it working right, highlight the text from here…
The Zerg campaign is coming next, if she’s really redeemed who’s going to be the main character in it? I suppose they could have it take place before this one in the timeline, or alongside it, but then that means we don’t get to know what happens next. My guess is that the one thing you do achieve in the terran campaign turns out to not actually have worked.
… to here to see it. From here on I’m just adding a few words to the end of this because when I previewed that “here to here” thing it was hard to notice the second part in the end of post graphics and text, so this way you will definitely see it, I’ve been done for a while though so why are you still reading. In fact why am I still typing, I’ve got lots of stuff that needs to be done before tonight and since I’ve been playing Starcraft all week it hasn’t got done yet. So if you are in the group of family who I’m seeing this weekend and things seem rushed and not planned, it’s Blizzard’s fault for releasing Starcraft at about the same time I was going to really start getting things ready.
Words are very important. We’re able to convey ideas to other people by using a series of either sounds or symbols that we’ve agreed upon to have some meaning. The common meaning however can cause many problems because, especially when dealing with science, one word might mean different things to two different people, making communication between them very difficult. Here’s some of my favourite examples.
- Well, you can’t do a list like this without using the word theory, not while it’s still one of the popular arguments against the idea of evolution. One person will use the word to mean “a hypothesis which no matter how hard I (or anybody else) try, I cannot prove wrong” while another person will conceive of it as “an idea I had that I haven’t tested at all yet to see if it’s true.” I can’t imagine these two definitions being any more opposite of each other. It can be kind of funny how some really huge arguments still go on because one side doesn’t know the meaning of this word.
- When I was thinking about doing this post a webcomic I read went and posted this comic. At least I think I had thought of this post before that comic went up, maybe it was the inspiration for this. Either way, the next word is chemical. Tell someone that you’re adding chemicals to their food, and watch out for outrage and they worry you’re trying to poison them, or make them fat or some other thing. Explain to them that water, sugar and salt are chemicals, and in fact, everything is either technically a chemical or made up of them, and check the reaction you get.
- For more negative connotation for something that isn’t (always) inherently bad for you, my next word is radiation. Watch out for that stuff because it’s going to give you cancer right? That’s also why cell phones and wifi must be bad for you because they work by using radiation. Well if you think that’s true then you mustn’t have been paying attention in high school science when they taught you that light, you know that stuff that lets you see things, is radiation too. In fact, when it comes to EM-radiation (of which light is) the shorter the wavelength generally the more dangerous, cell phones and wifi and stuff use longer wavelengths than visible light, which would mean that before you worry about a cell phone’s radiation killing you, you should put yourself in total darkness and never come out again.
- I have another science term but I’m going to take a break and go to a couple math words next. This part gets 2 words though because it’s the same reason. Real and imaginary are probably some of the worst possible names that could have been given to number sets. Numbers are abstract concepts. There is no such thing as a five, it’s just an idea that you have. That being said, what makes some abstract concepts real, while other abstract concepts are imaginary? Also, because one is a subset of the other that means that even 3 is an imaginary number. If you’re one of those people who automatically discounts the imaginary numbers just because of their name your wrong, and if you discount them because you can’t find a use for them, then you should do the same for the real numbers too, because any practical use of numbers pretty much demands use of rational numbers, as it’s extremely hard to express an irrational number (a real number that is not rational) in a meaningful way in your calculations, you will basically always round to a rational.
- My next word is graph. It might take me too long to describe what the word graph means to a mathematician as compared to a normal person, so I’m not going to. I’m just putting it here as a note for anyone who ever ends up in a conversation with me where I use the word, or if I make a post here and use the word, that I’m talking about something that looks more like a flow chart than 2 axes (plural of axis, not something you use to chop wood) showing some relationship.
- My last word for today (maybe I’ll make more posts like these in the future if I feel like it) is really more of a phrase. It’s genetic engineering. Like chemicals and radiation, genetic engineering is something that must always be bad, it’s unnatural, and is us playing God to come up with something, and because it’s genetically engineered that something must be bad for you. The thing is, we as humans have been practicing genetic engineering, probably from around the dawn of civilization. In fact without it we probably couldn’t have survived the way we have. Husbandry, or selective breeding, is a form of genetic engineering, it’s what’s allowed us to have some dogs that are good at running, others good at herding, and some good at smelling. We genetically engineered those different dog breeds into existence. We’ve done the same to horses, as well as pretty much everything, plant or animal, that we eat. So please, just because your food has been “genetically engineered” and has “chemicals” added to it, that doesn’t mean it’s bad for you.
The Way Rogers Screws Online Gaming
So I’ve gone back and been playing a bunch of Modern Warfare 2 recently, and been reminded of one of the biggest reasons I stopped playing in the first place. No it’s not the fact that after long enough all the games seem the same, and it’s not all the cheaters out there, and not entirely the fact that if you play something too much you’ll get bored of it. The lack of dedicated servers, which was a huge criticism of the PC version has actually made the game slightly unplayable for me, and whoever I’m playing with at the time when the game decides to choose me as the host.
You see, Rogers, our ISP, has this policy of not actually giving you the service that you thought you were buying. Sure I could blame Infinity Ward, the developers of Modern Warfare 2, but they’re not the only ones who do this sort of thing. If you play games on consoles you’ll see most, if not all the online multiplayer for things like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 (maybe Wii too, but I don’t know as much about that, but who plays with the Wii’s horrible online functionality anyway?) works in a similar way to how MW2 is trying to run on my PC. One computer (or console) is chosen as a “host” for the game to be played, then all the other computers connect to that one, and the game is sort of played on the host machine.
This is where Rogers comes in. They detect that you have outgoing connections to multiple people. Once this happens, they have some special routing software kick in, and start losing the information you’re trying to send to the other players. Looking around the internet the claim they make in their defense seems simple enough. You basically share your connection with your neighbors, and if one person is using all of it, then that means the others get problems and don’t get the speeds they expect. The problem I see here is this. With the play I have with Rogers right now, they say I can get 1Mbps upload. The thing is, games don’t come anywhere close to using that, otherwise you’d be over your bandwidth cap extremely quickly by playing a game. Rogers claims that sending 10 people a small amount of information clogs up their network more than sending 1 person a very large amount of information (even when the total amount of information per second going to the 1 person is higher). I won’t claim to be an expert in this field, but I do know a thing or two about it, and I think it would be fair to say, any network where the previous statement is actually true is very poorly designed (at least if it’s a big general purpose network, like say you would expect an ISP to have).
When they start preventing your game from working properly, it can make other players unable to join, and for those lucky enough to be able to join, their information will be so out of date the game becomes completely unplayable. See when I said above, games don’t send much information, I didn’t mention that they want the information delivered quickly. Let’s Ted Stevens this post up and imagine the internet like some tubes. Let’s say you need to get some liquid from one place to another, and there’s 2 pipes that can get it there. One of these pipes can let ten litres per second go through it, but it will take one minute from when something gets put in until it comes out the other side. The other pipe can only handle 1 litre per second, but only takes one second for something to pass through entirely. Now, let’s say you have a 10000 litres of water you want to send to the other place. Which pipe do you pick? obviously it should be the larger one, sure it might take longer for the first drop to reach the other side, but on the whole it’ll be faster. Now imagine you have 2 litres of something live-saving. You should send it through the smaller one so it can get to the other end faster and save a life.
Rogers can kind of treat your internet connection like this. Not only that, but they try to make it so you don’t even know which pipe you’re sending something down, they’ll send it down the one that’s best for everyone, or at least that’s what they say. While doing some research for this post, I found the following quote:
I agree that video conferencing and voice services are a high priority. But sending email and requesting web pages? Games need a higher priority than those things, and yet with the games I’m talking about like Modern Warfare, and numerous things on xbox live they get treated like low priority file transfers. Most email clients only check with the server every 5-10 minutes to see if you have new email, it doesn’t matter if it took .1 seconds or .3 seconds to get it to the server. Same thing with webpages, how much are you going to notice the difference if a page takes .1s longer to load, sure it would be nice if it were faster but it doesn’t make your web browsing unbearably long to wait for. The thing is, in my games, that .1 second can make a huge difference in the outcome, yet instead they’re making the difference to be in full seconds, if the data ever gets there at all.
On their website, Rogers makes much mention of games being able to be played on their internet service, even saying “virtually all online games and gaming services are compatible with the Rogers Hi-Speed Internet service” without mentioning that they actively sabotage your gaming experience should you ever try and host a game yourself. I’m not 100% sure if my site is being indexed by google, and I’m too lazy to figure it out, but for all you like 4 people who actually read these posts, and anyone who might see this if I am indexed I just feel a need to say: Rogers is a horrible choice for your ISP if you’re interested in most forms of modern online gaming. They do not provide you with the service you are paying for, and despite the fact they most definitely know of the problem due to many complaints from gamers trying to use their service, seem to have no intention of fixing the problem.
Geek TV Shows
So I don’t think I should post things so close together, give people time to read one, and then wait the week or two or four before they have to put up with my wordiness again but I got to thinking about this and wanted to write it while I was in the mood for it, and while I still remembered.
While looking at something on Fark yesterday they had a headline, and comments to go with it comparing The IT Crowd with The Big Bang Theory. There was some heated debate as people defended their favourite as being better, some asked “why can’t you like both” and others who’d never heard of one and after hearing the praise decided they should give it a try. I am here to set things right, and by the end of this post I will have crowned a “best geek humour” TV show.
As someone who’s only seen bits and parts of one of those shows, and who gave up on the other about halfway through its second season/series (I’m trying to be ambiguous as to whether I’m talking about the British or the American show here for those of you who don’t already know which is which) I think I’m obviously the right person to make the calls I’m about to make.
So let’s get on to comparing these shows. The first is a show about some “nerdy” guys and a leading “normal” woman who is totally out of place when around these guys. There’s two kind of jokes that get told in this show, the “nerdy” ones which are often explained to the audience why they’re funny since the show is directed at “normal” people. To someone with even a bit of background in the area though you’ll find the jokes to only require knowledge that maybe you picked up around the time you were in highschool or at the latest early years of university, otherwise the joke would take too long to explain. It’s too bad too because you can tell that the writers want to tell more of these jokes, but can’t. The details in the background also reveal this, there truly is some geekery at work in the background, but they won’t let it take over from the other parts of the show.
The other kind of joke told in the show is akin to one of the main characters looking straight into the camera and saying “Look at me, I’m being a nerd” followed by the laugh track playing so the viewers know that it’s supposed to be funny. The show also teaches you the lesson that sure, being smart means you can know things, and tell jokes that people won’t understand without you explaining it, but also that you have to be socially maladjusted who would easily be diagnosed with many mental health disorders if only they’d go see a doctor.
Interlude: I suppose up at the top I said I was going to be comparing shows and said I would start by describing one of them. I think with my general term use here it’s pretty obvious that I am in fact describing both of them I could have a better way of saying that, but I’m sure you’ve already figured it out, and want to focus more on things, so just pretend I did a funny or clever way of tying it together while I keep going.
This humour, which is why I can’t bring myself to watch the show isn’t furthering the cause of geekdom, or making it more mainstream, it’s still just making fun of it but unlike in the past, it’s doing it in a way that geeks don’t realize (partly because of some problems with social intricacies) and so they latch on and think it’s for them, not about them. It shows the way the media treats people like me and my friends. Sure, I bet if you found any group and asked “is the portrayal of <people in your group> in the media accurate?” the answer is no. How often though do they make shows about a group that call themselves comedies where most of the jokes are based off of reinforcing negative stereotypes about that group?
So I said I was going to crown a “best geek humour” show up above, and now it’s time to do that. Will it be physics grad students? Will it be the tech department of some giant corporation. Well the winner is…
Good news everyone, neither of those shows won. Also, if you’re at all familiar with the show that wins then the three words at the start of this already gave it away. Whereas those other two shows could be most kindly put as shows written by nerds for everyone, Futurama is a show by nerds, for themselves, and people like them. No matter how smart you are there will always be jokes in Futurama that you have no hope in catching because they put them everywhere, even the plot. After telling a joke, they don’t pause the entire show in order to play a sound of people laughing so that you know it was a joke, they treat you as smart enough to know whether something is funny or not. They also don’t tell you why the joke is funny, if you don’t get it too bad, someone else did, plus they use that time to instead set up another joke, hopefully one that you will get, especially since as soon as you try to explain a joke it stops being funny. Futurama treats its viewers like they’re intelligent, and that’s what makes it the best. It also doesn’t try to say geeks are weird and different, and although they’re smarter than you, you’re still a better person than them. Instead Futurama says “here’s some jokes that us geeky writers find funny, and think you might like too.”
I promised a post, and it’s been less than a week since it ended so I guess I better get on it soon, otherwise we’ll have all forgotten about the whole thing.
I suppose one of the most talked about things this year seems to have been the absence of video replay, especially since we’re at a point where the technology could have a conclusive decision faster than the way it is now with the players mobbing and arguing with a ref, as any player trying to argue a replay call would most definitely find themselves with a card pretty much immediately.
The argument FIFA has against this is that it would slow the game down, and the counter argument is “no it wouldn’t.” I think the truth is that they’re both right. If the feed going out to the world can show that England did indeed score on Germany while the players are still arguing that means the refs could have looked at it and seen the result and had complete certainty. The problem becomes what do you put replay on because I also don’t think you can argue that holding up a game to check whether there really was contact or if the guy was diving wouldn’t slow things down, and what if the ref’s original call was “no contact, keep playing” but he looks back and finds out it’s wrong? Do you turn the clock back and discount stuff that’s happened? You just can’t go to the video replay for every offside and foul in a game, as that really would slow the game down.
The best answer to this problem seems to be to be to look at the NHL. I may say that partially because I’m Canadian, and a much bigger fan of hockey than pretty much any other professional sport. There could also be other leagues with rules like this, but I don’t know them so this is what I have. It’s simply that video replay is only used to determine whether a goal is good or not. Penalties are not watched on replay, but the league can punish you after the game with things like suspensions so even if you get away with it in game, that doesn’t mean you get away with it completely, and that is also a system I would support in Soccer, if replay after the game finds him diving, then do something like start him off with a yellow card in his next game (or give him a 1 game suspension or something, but then again practically these two things would probably be the same, why would the coach start you in a game with a card when he can put someone else in without a substitution). So if we only allow replay to be used (real time) on goals, problem solved right? I’d say not quite.
What if the player got the ball, and shot immediately, but was offside? Well replay is used for determining if the ball went in via legal means (ie. no handball) and while play was still going (by the way, even in the NHL where they do use video replay, that goal the US got screwed out of still wouldn’t have counted, the whistle went before the ball was in, and whether it goes in or not after the whistle it doesn’t matter, play’s over, video replay wouldn’t have fixed that problem) not whether a player is offside or not. However, it seems really obvious that you shouldn’t count a goal if the player was offside. What if he was offside in the middle of the field and ran in on a break away, I’d say that’s different than if it happened very quickly inside the 18 yard box. What if the shooter was onside, but it got passed to him by someone offside? You’d have to draw a line somewhere, but then every time something happened that was near that line we’d have pretty much the same controversy we have now without that line.
The other thing about cameras, especially high-speed cameras is that they’re not cheap. The 2010 world cup was also a lot more than a month long tournament in South Africa, it’s been going on since 2008, and been played all over the world, the tournament we just saw was merely the last stage (that’s why you can use the term “world cup finals” to describe all that happened in South Africa, not just Spain vs. Holland), and when we put it into that perspective cost of cameras could be an issue. I think it would be hard to deny that one of the main reasons soccer has become so popular is that all you need to play are the people, a ball and a place to play, and no matter where in the world you are, and no matter how poor that’s something you can manage.
Sure at the higher level, the place you play needs to be measured out better and more exact, and there’s also travel costs, but imagine you are one of FIFA’s smaller members, only barely able to put a team together and afford to send them to play, I’m sure it happens. Well now we’re asking them to potentially add thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of equipment (plus ways to prevent it from being damaged or stolen) to a field that an island with 100 000 people on it want to play their games. I agree that for most nations these cameras won’t be prohibitively expensive, but for some they could be, and I’d say that that is bad for the game. I guess you could say then that the cameras only need to be used during the finals themselves and save others some money, however, then I would know you’re not from Ireland (by the way look up France vs. Ireland if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
The fact is that no matter what happens there will always be bad calls somehow and when your team is on the wrong side of things it’s going to be upsetting to you. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to improve the system, but, the overall benefit compared to the cost (and I don’t just mean money here) however seems to not really be in favour of cameras right now. Personally I think if something is done to the game, some level of rework to some rules to make the game more interesting should be considered.
This could again be a hockey fan saying what he really wants to watch is hockey so other sports should become more like it, but I’d still say this is worth thinking about. Back before the lockout the NHL was running into a little bit of a problem with games not being very interesting. Some teams would play super-defensively and only go for things like a 1-0 win, and that worked well, so if you were to put the best teams together to play each other instead of getting a high paced game full of exciting moments you would see a lot of control, a lot of passing, and almost no offensive pushing at all. That’s not to say they weren’t highly skilled, and it could be interesting to watch, but gets boring after a while because all the games have the same slow pace.
The NHL said “hey this is no good” and have changed rules in order to up the pace of the game and make it more exciting. I’m not trying to say more goals is necessarily better, there’s few sports I can think of that would be more boring than basket ball, however when scoring is easier it means one goal isn’t enough, you need to know that they could score so you better go for another. The other way to see it is that the team that plays worse, but gets a fluke goal is less likely to win. Sure if you’re the better team you can still lose, and even if it’s still a one goal difference it’s hard to say that a team that wins a game 3-2 doesn’t at least somehow deserve the win more than a team that wins 1-0, as although one fluke goal is possible when you’re being out-played, something like 3 is just not going to happen. As for where they could start with soccer rules changes, I’d say do something about making it easier to get past the defenders without being offside, and also maybe something more (possibly even unlimited substitutions) to keep the player energy levels on the field high. They could even have an official who part of his job is to make sure no one goes on the field without someone coming off, but allow it anytime not during a play stoppage. You could even solve both of these problems by making defenders switch off back near their own goal, so if you get caught on a bad change then the offense has plenty of space without being offside.
Riots in Toronto
I’ve been meaning to make a world cup post, and will soon, but other things that seem more time appropriate keep coming up, so I guess the world cup will have to wait.
I’m also going to try something new with this post and Google Buzz to see if it might get more people to read this who I otherwise wouldn’t know these posts are here. If this works feel free to let me know, and if you’ve never seen the site before consider reading older posts too, there’s not that many of them yet. (Edit: so it appears it just posted the entire thing in buzz instead of directing you to my website I’m not sure I like that because of how long this post is but don’t know a simpler way)
So this past weekend in Toronto there were some protests and such, and they seem to have got out of hand. Over 900 arrests were made, the police are being criticized for both reacting not harshly enough, and being too harsh. Downtown store owners who’ve had their storefronts destroyed are demanding someone pay for their repairs. So where to start?
Let’s start with the people who really need to be called out most here, the rioters. Here’s the question I pose to the internet because I really just cannot fathom an answer to it. What message do they think they’re trying to get across by doing the things like burning police cars, and destroying store fronts for no reason other than the fact that they’re there? The most positive thing I can possibly think they’re trying to say is “I’m a moron who should be put in jail.”
Even all these so called “anarchists” strike me as completely failing to get a message across. If these people were anything more than stupid, immature posers (I couldn’t actually think of a good enough noun for this spot. If you have a better one to use let me know I’ll edit the post) then we should hear more about their attempts to undermine our society than just at these types of events, instead they only come out at times like these so they can destroy things, and use a crowd to try and get away. That’s not making a point, that’s just cowardly sociopathic behaviour.
What about people who will claim that what these world leaders are doing to the poor people of the world, either in other nations or in their own is as bad or worse that what happened in the streets of Toronto. To that I’d say, yeah the poor of the world are quite regularly getting screwed over much much harder than anything that happened to anybody in Toronto this past weekend, and that is a message that really should be spread. However if you think that this was the way to get that message across, then you are probably among the worst kind of people there are: hypocrites. Basically when it comes down to actions that are wrong there’s really only two ways you can describe the perpetrator. Either they’re being ignorant or they’re being hypocritical. Between the two, ignorance is easy to solve, all you need to do is team them why it’s wrong. Sometimes they’re resist you and refuse to learn, and it can be a difficult process that may never work, but still easier than solving the problem of someone knowing something is wrong and yet doing it anyway.
Enough about those people though, many of them probably just want attention, and if that’s the case then they probably should only get enough to be taken out of society and forgotten. There were over 900 people arrested, and I guarantee that they weren’t all those people I was just talking about. I’m sure not all of them are really guilty of things deserving of criminal records, and those people will be let out, but let’s take another look at all the people claiming they were unjustly detained. First and most important of all let’s remember that of course everyone detained is going to say that, in a case like this one of the best things you can possibly have going for you is public sympathy, and whether you believe it or not you’re going to say this because it’s going to get reactions in your favour. But let’s look at things another way too.
When rioting breaks out and you’re in a crowd what actions do you have? You could join in, you could stay put and stay neutral, you could leave, or you could oppose it. I don’t think I need to tell you why joining in is wrong, but by staying around but thinking you’re not taking part in it you are getting in the way preventing the police from doing their job (try blocking a fire fighters from a fire, or paramedics from helping and taking someone to the hospital, you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble, just like if you block police from the criminals they’re trying to get). In this case your inaction is only making things worse, allowing the others to get away and hide, and in that case, I’d say you probably deserve at least a night in jail and you should be lucky to be let out later without being charged. As for the other options of either leaving as soon as it starts or helping prevent it, let’s listen to all the stories of the “unjustly arrested” and see how many are along the lines of “as soon as the rioting started I decided to peacefully get out of their so I could get out of the way and because I didn’t want to be involved in this, but the police arrested me as I tried to leave” or “I was trying to point out to the police one of the guys who started a fire, but instead of arresting him they arrested me.” I bet you’ll find it wasn’t very many.
Now, who pays for the damage. This is the simple one that I can’t believe other people aren’t suggesting it. The store owners are saying they shouldn’t have to pay for it, as it’s not their responsibility. I’m sure insurance companies are saying it’s not covered on policies. Every level of government seems to be saying something like “we think someone should pay for it, but it’s not our job it should be the next higher level.” Basically everyone is saying “we didn’t do it, so why should we pay?” and they’re all right. Right now there’s lots of calls for the federal government to pay for damage, but since they get their money from the taxes of everyone that means that some fisherman from Nova Scotia, some logger from B.C. and me may all end up paying for it. If this happens that that means each and every citizen is going to be held as liable for the damages as the people who actually did the damage (assuming they pay their taxes, which I actually bet pretty much all those anarchists do). So here’s what I suggest, let’s make the people convicted of crimes related to the rioting split the cost. A year from now or two or even five let’s take everyone who was convicted and divide the damages up among them and make them pay. It doesn’t need to be an even distribution, someone convicted of actual acts of vandalism can pay as several people, whereas someone whose only crime was obstructing the police doesn’t. We could even convict people after the money goes out, and when those people have to pay it can go as a refund to the people who’ve now paid larger than their share. If the time line is too long for the store owners which I fully agree it can be, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for someone like the federal government giving them the money, then keeping the payments made at a later date.
The genius of this plan is twofold in that it’s the ones responsible for the damage that pay for it and also it encourages people to name names. If you got caught and need to pay it could save yourself hundreds or thousands of dollars to tell the police about that acquaintance of yours who was there doing the same things as you but didn’t get caught (as long as these people also get reminded that I do believe it’s illegal to file false police reports so they risk additional punishment for trying to get people in trouble who weren’t there).
E3 Motion Controls and 3D
So it’s been too long since I wrote anything here, and since E3 just happened, and video games are something that’s important to me I thought I would post some observations regarding these two topics that seemed to dominate the major news coming out of LA last week.
Let’s start with Microsoft, since they were the ones to go first there too. Their new Kinect thing seems sort of nifty, and among the motion controls of all three of the major consoles seems to be the most advanced and best among them. Not relying on any sort of controller the camera watches you and so the movement of your arms and legs and body do all the input. This concept brings two things to mind very quickly to me. First is just a matter of the processing power involved. First the system has to take that picture it has of you and figure out which part of the picture is you. How does it know what part of the picture is you, and which part is the observer in the background? I’m not saying it can’t do this, but it takes system resources to do so. Next now that it knows which part is you it sort of needs to construct a 3D model of you using that picture, and it has to make sure the model moves the same way you do. Again this is going to take a lot of resources. Last it has to take the movements of you/your model and interpret them and turn them into a usable input for the game. No two people are going to move their arm the same way, but some games will need to treat similar movements almost the same, this too is going to take up a lot of resources. Now that you’ve done all this, you can make your game. Your graphics engine, your physics and also your gameplay rules all need to split the remaining processing power, whereas before the motion controls these things are used to getting all the resources of the system. Is Kinect adding more processors and RAM to the 360? If not I think you can only expect low complexity games to use it, kind of like the only things they really showed at the show, and that the games for gamers just can’t run on a 360 with Kinect. Also consider the perspective of developers, even an amazingly designed API from Microsoft making things easy to deal with (example: creating the models for you) is going to make the input portion of coding very complicated compared to “has this button been pushed?” or for your analogue sticks/triggers “how far have these buttons been pushed?”
Nintendo went next, so now for Nintendo. Nothing especially new in terms of motion controls, I think most people are familiar with the Wii, and what it can and can’t do. There is something that came to my mind while watching some video coming from their press conference. They were demoing the upcoming Zelda game, and it was plain to see that basically it wasn’t working. Now things not working like this happen all the time at shows like this, but it reminded me that this happens often whenever I try to use a Wii. There was lots of lag, when you swing, you can expect the swing to happen afterwards, so your movements need to be preemptive, and that’s if it even registers the swing at all. During this demo you would see them swing their arm two or three times sometimes before Link would swing his sword and it reminded me that this happens to me too, and they were using the motion plus device which I’ve never had the chance to use, but is supposed to make things more accurate, and yet this can still happen. Also for those of you who have used a Wii, how many times have you tried to point to something on the screen and not have it work or have it shake all over the place (moreso than should be caused by the fact that your arms won’t stay 100% steady). But perhaps their problems were because they were using unfinished software, and my problems are not design flaws with the system. How about that 3DS thing though? Well if you’re reading this site you may be able to tell some of my feelings towards the current 3D crazy the entertainment industry is going through right now (it’s a scam and not only doesn’t work, but can’t work). So maybe it might be surprising to hear me say that I think this is exactly the way this stuff can be used correctly. It’s completely personal which means you get to be in the one spot that works. It’s also a huge bonus that it doesn’t need glasses. My only concerns are things like the focus problem that I think I may write about in the future, as well as problems with the original DS (if you need to use the stylus for something your wrist that’s holding the device gets very poor support because it’s holding it off to the side to be able to hit buttons). This could be even worse since you can’t really make out the image unless the device is held in a very specific position relative to your eyes. Lastly they’ve gone and made this thing even more unfriendly to lefties than the original DS was. All that said the 3DS doesn’t seem to have the same glaring problems as other 3D things.
Lastly Sony. When talking about the Kinect for the 360 I mentioned resources, well the PS3 has the advantage that when being designed Sony went overboard and added too much processing power to it. Not only that but they’re not trying to do the same complicated thing with the input that Microsoft is, it’s more like the Wii’s much less intensive system. What this says to me is that for complicated physics or graphics systems mixed with motion controls the PS3 is going to be the vastly superior platform. It sounds to me that the Playstation Move system is going to be largely what we all thought and were hoping the Wii was going to be before we actually saw what its limitations were. Plus, the move setup is going to cost roughly the same as a Wii too, and that’s just the camera/controller not the initial investment of the PS3 itself. Two more quick thoughts about move before talking about 3D, first the Playstation Eye, a peripheral for the PS3, was also the name for a PS2 peripheral both cameras. The basic idea behind them I think was basically the same as Microsoft’s Kinect thing, but they weren’t as hyped, nor as complicated and nobody bought them because there were no games that used them worth playing. Next, I kinda like the glowing balls that everyone is saying looks so silly. Now what about 3D games on the PS3? Well even if 3D TVs weren’t so expensive that it was not worth buying one, they are a scam and don’t work (they do work better than movie theatres though). This is a way for Sony to try and boost sales of their own 3D TVs though and in that case a decent marketing ploy.
All in all a fairly dissapointing E3 because instead of announcing interesting sounding games there was just lots of games that were “dance” in front of your TV, as well as “Wii shovelware, now for 360 and PS3″
Mathematical Proof 3D movies don’t work
So, doing movies in “3D” seems to be a big thing right now, everyone seems to think they need to do it to their new movie. The problem is, we just can’t do it to make it work, at least not for everyone at the theater. In fact I will claim (and shortly show for the most part) that it can only work correctly for one person in the theatre and the pictures get more wrong the further away you are from where that person is.
How does 3D work in the first place? Close one eye, and look at the scene around your right now, like your desk and computer. Then open it, and close the other eye. Notice that things don’t look the same to each of your eyes. Your brain takes these images and puts them together to create a 3D scene for you. When you watch a normal movie though you don’t get that effect on the objects on the screen, both eyes see the exact same parts of that car that’s being chased down the highway by the aliens. In 3D movies, there’s 2 pictures on the screen, but you wear glasses so each lens blocks one of the images making each eye only see one, then your brain puts them together and you get the 3D effect.
So the idea of what is put up on the screen at the movie theatre is this, what would each eye see if the objects on the screen were real and behind (or in front of) the movie screen. This idea I have no problem with at all, however, here’s something to think about, what about the person sitting beside you? The movie is showing what you would see, but that person is somewhere else, they would see something different, but they’re still seeing the same two images you are, and what about the person who came late and got stuck in the front row at the very edge, or the couple sitting in the back row so they can make out?
Everyone in the theatre is seeing the same images, but only one person can be sitting in the spot where the images would combine into the proper scene from where the person is sitting. So what do the people in the non-optimal positions see? That’s what I wanted to find out, do they see the same objects in the same proportions, maybe just in slightly different positions than they should be (best case)? Does the object get warped in all sorts of ways including straight lines no longer being straight? I decided I would sit down and do some math to partially answer these questions. I got lazy and uncreative with my naming conventions so my example only uses a specific general case, but I think it shows enough evidence that 3D movies don’t work I’m not going to do the general case (which is really easy to do from here, it would just get very messy really fast)
A quick note before I start with the math: The math here isn’t very complicated, it’s actually at the grade 9 or 10 level, and thus would be a great test (there’s too many steps for it to really be a single questions, but for an entire test or exam or assignment this would be perfect). In the spirit of a high school math test I’m going to word it all like a problem you would see there too. My example is also missing a dimension, however, that doesn’t really change the way things work, and if you’re upset at me handwaving that dimension away, then let’s just say that they’re only looking at one horizontal line of the screen. The units are also kind of unrealistic, but I’ll discuss the implecations of that later.
Xavier and Yvette went to see a 3D movie, however when they got there they couldn’t find 2 seats beside each other so they had to sit in different parts of the theatre. Xavier managed to get the perfect seat right in the middle of the theatre (0,0), whereas Yvette ended up in front of him and to his left at point (-5,4), imagine their eyes are 1 unit to the left or right of their centres (so Xavier’s left eye at (-1,0) and right at (1,0) and Yvette’s at (-6,4) and (-4,4)). The screen is 10 units in front of Xavier (at y=10). At one scene in the movie Xavier sees the characters Alice at position (4,12), Bob at (4,18) and Carol at (-4,12). At what position does Yvette see the characters?
I have the answer, but I said “proof” in the title of this post, so I think I should explain how I got the answer. Feel free to double check my numbers if you want, but I’m not going to transcribe them all for you right now.
First, find equations for the 6 lines that go between a character and one of Xavier’s eyes. Then find the intersection point of those lines with the screen. Now, take the points on the screen that correspond to Xavier’s left eye, and find the 3 lines that go through them and Yvette’s left eye, and the same for the right eye. You should now have 6 lines which each correspond to a character’s screen position and one of Yvette’s eyes. The last thing you need to do is find the intersection points between the lines that correspond between each character, and one of the eyes, the point of intersection should be where Yvette sees the character. This past paragraph probably sounded very confusing, and so to hopefully make it make more sense here’s a diagram (not to Scale) that sort of shows the process for one character.
So what are the answers to my question? Well, Yvette sees Alice at (5,11.2), Bob at (8, 14.8) and Carol at (-3,11.2). What’s the most obvious thing to note between this set of numbers and the original set ( (4,12), (4,18) and (-4,12) )? Well the original set formed a right angled triangle, whereas the Yvette data does not. Distances (and proportional distances) are also not the same (that said, it’s not possible for one of angles or distances to not work and the other one to work). Where Xavier sees a square, Yvette does not, and if in the movie Carol threw 2 balls, one to Alice, and one to Bob, if Xavier saw them going at the same speed, Yvette would see the ball going to Bob as being faster than the one to Alice.
Alright, I’m almost done now. To sort of conclude, this data shows that in terms of viewing a 3D movie, angles and distances in the image are relative to the observers based on their positions, unless you are sitting in the absolutely ideal position (and there is only going to be one) then the objects will be warped.
Disclaimers: The scale used in the example has the screen only 5 times the distance between eyes from the furthest person’s face, only 3 eye lengths from the closer person, although warping is still bound to happen it’s not going to be as severe as my data showed, that said, I would not be surprised to hear of an uncanny valley like effect where the things that are almost right but not quite are more unsettling than those that are more obviously wrong. Final disclaimer, the thought process I used here I came up with independently of any other similar ideas if they exist, I’m sure they must because it seemed so obvious to me, but I’ve yet to encounter them, if you know of it let me know, I bet they were able to phrase things more eloquently than I did.
Think About This.
Why hasn’t an major oil company tried selling “organic” gasoline?
Now for Something Immature
I just found out that not only does this place exist, but it’s in Canada too:
Honestly I think adding the “East” on the front makes it even funnier. If you don’t know what’s funny, look up Pen Island, I know there is (or maybe just was) a website, that’s Pen Island with no spaces, but I can’t remember if it’s .com or .net or .org or some other TLD so why not try looking it up on something like Google?