Audacious or Ridiculous?
I'm not sure what to make of the Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative project on KickStarter. It's Interactive Fiction, also known as a text adventure. (Insert fond memories of Infocom here.) It's set in Colonial Williamsburg, during colonial times, of course.
So, who the hell wants a text adventure set in Colonial Williamsburg? Well, me, for one. I live near Williamsburg and I loved text adventures. Apparently there are also 53 other people for whom the thought scratches a particular itch.
The goal is a modest one, only $1,500. And he's 90% of the way there. And he still has 18 days to get that last chuck pledged. But I'd hate to see this not happen. So, head over there and pledge five goddamn dollars, if only to see such an oddball idea come to fruition.
(Truth be told, if it gets to the deadline and he's still a bit short, I'll increase my pledge to get him over the hump. I mean, c'mon, it's a Colonial Williamsburg text adventure!)
Personally, I love KickStarter and have backed several projects.
8 Reason Facebook is Better than Google+
In the end, all social media sites are just big fat BBSs. Yet, you still see snarking from one about the other. Actually, I haven't seen much of that on either Facebook or Twitter recently. Where do I see it? On Google+, which is still suffering from an obvious inferiority complex. Yes, you can easily find insufferable lists of reasons why Google+ is better than Facebook.
So here's my own insufferable list as to why Facebook is still better than Google+:
- Facebook users don't try to justify that their chosen social media site is better with lists of reasons. Except for this one.
- Facebook users don't try to justify their chosen computer platform, either. I truly shake my head that folks on Google+ still argue about this, saying things like
Apple computers are for trendy hipsters.
- Facebook users don't make pompous claims like
I think the general IQ level is higher here.
- Facebook has less Libertarian trolling going on. It's not that Facebook doesn't have Libertarians. But they don't seem as intent on shouting in every thread even tangentially related to politics.
- Facebook has an API. (No, having read-only access to public posts does not count as an API. I have no idea why geeks seem to have no problem with this.)
- The Facebook Android app supports share functionality.
- The Facebook Android app lets you zoom into pictures. (When it manages to load them. Which isn't often. Look, I didn't say the app was great.)
- Facebook doesn't claim perpetual rights to things you upload. (Note that they've removed the term
perpetual
recently, although if you read the paragraph, you'll see that things haven't really changed. Facebook tried for the perpetual license, but its users complained and they changed the policy. Although now I can't find the exact wording.)
There! That was fun!
Note that missing from this list is the misconception that Google+ is a wasteland with no users. It requires a different sort of effort to get involved in Google+. But it's far from empty.
In truth, I don't think either is actually superior. Again, they're just BBSs.
Waiting...
Sometimes atheists joke that we can't wait for the Rapture to actually happen and take all the most annoying Christians away.
Personally, I'm waiting for Libertarians to go Galt
already and leave the rest of us to continue maintaining civilization. Seriously, go off somewhere, set up your Libertarian paradise, and stop suckling off the teat of the very social contract you claim to reject.
But no, it's whine whine whine about being subjected to a social contract to which they didn't consent, even though they're providing implied consent by staying within the society.
Just fucking leave already.
Vingeful Book Reviews
The Children of the Sky
Back in the 90s, Vernor Vinge was a sci-fi god. 1992 brought A Fire Upon the Deep and 1999 offered A Deepness in the Sky. Both are wonderful novels and if you haven't read them, you should. Right now. I'll wait.
But he hasn't produced a whole lot in the new millenium. Rainbows End, in 2006, was good. At least I remember liking it at the time.
Then, just last year, he produced a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, called The Children of the Sky. Reasonably excited, I tossed it in the reading queue and just finished it over the weekend.
My verdict? Meh.
It's not that it's bad. It's just that it's not very good. The good is that it's set on Tines World and the Tines are fascinating. The bad? Well, where should I start?
I'll start with the long real-world time gap between A Fire Upon the Deep and the sequel. It's nearly two decades. Vinge seems to have assumed that everyone not only read A Fire Upon the Deep, but read it recently. There's very little in the way of recap. Even the Harry Potter books gave you more recap.
Problem two is that this isn't really a sequel. Based on the storyline, it's apparently book two of a trilogy. I have no problem with book twos of trilogies, but to toss this out nearly two decades later? Without any indication that it's part of a trilogy? And when can we expect book three?
Without a book three in the near future, the story is just, again, meh. Major plot points just sit there, unresolved. You can feel Vinge bringing up new questions and you read on, waiting for answers, but you never get them. Finishing the book is deeply unsatisfying. I suppose it's meant to whet your appetite for the next book. It didn't.
Forewarned of all this, the book improves. The story itself is okay. There's lots of meandering that really has no point other than filling pages with narrative. But, hey, you're on Tines World and that in itself is an interesting time.
One other thing really bugged me about the book. Actually physical descriptions of the human characters are sparse. Near the end, there's a description that's clearly supposed to throw you. You can almost hear Vinge chortling Ah ha! You were assuming that X was Y but X is really Z!
Yes, I was assuming X was Y because you've been using Y-ish language descriptions and Y-ish surname structures. Dropping that in at the end of the book didn't make me question my internal racial views. It just convinced me you're a smug dick.
Marooned in Realtime
Oh, I promised plural reviews. Okay, I also recently read his Marooned in Realtime, from the mid-80s. It's awful. I didn't finish it. Do you like Ayn Rand-ish rants about the evils of all governments, complete with liberal application of Godwin's Law, mixed up with a couple of mysteries? Then you'll like it.
(Am I the only person who sees a Libertarian archetype in the straight white male, successful in a niche market, who somehow thinks that scales?)
Oh My Darlin'...
I've long become disenchanted with iTunes.
No, that's not right. I've never been enchanted with iTunes at all. It's a big piece of bloatware when all I really want to do is play music.
Alternatives on OSX? Well, there are some, but they've always lacked one important thing, smart playlist support. I rely pretty heavily on smart playlists. So most alternatives have been non-starters.
But now there's Clementine. It's a cross-platform player with smart playlist support. Sweet! So I fired it up!
And it works pretty good. It's free, but in order to stream to my AirPort Express, I had to buy AirFoil for $25. (If you play directly from your computer, then you won't need this.)
Alas, there was a problem when setting up playlists. Many of my playlists use the star ratings I've given tracks. But, that info doesn't reside in the ID3 tags. It's local to iTunes. Clementine supports ratings, but it has no way of grabbing iTunes' rating info.
So, I whipped up some AppleScript to grab the info. It queries every track, grabbing the artist, song title, and album title, plus the rating. Then it dumps it all to the clipboard, pipe delimited. I then pasted that into a text file called Dump.txt. Here's the code:
tell application "iTunes"
set dumpTruck to ""
set theseTracks to (every track of library playlist 1)
repeat with thisTrack in theseTracks
set thisArtist to artist of thisTrack as string
set thisName to name of thisTrack as string
set thisAlbum to album of thisTrack as string
set thisRating to rating of thisTrack as string
set dumpTruck to dumpTruck & thisArtist & "|" & thisName & "|" & thisAlbum & "|" & thisRating & return
end repeat
end tell
set the clipboard to dumpTruck as text
display dialog "Done!"
If you're wondering why I didn't extract directly from the iTunes database, it's because the SQLite database is encrypted. I think. I'm not checking because then I'll feel stupid.
And if you're wondering why I didn't extract the data from iTunes' XML file, it's because Apple doesn't understand XML and parsing that file is a royal pain.
Anyway, once I had the data extracted, then I whipped up some Perl to insert that data into Clementine's database, which is also SQLite, but is unencrypted.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use DBI;
use strict;
my $db = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:clementine-test.db", "", "",
{RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit => 1});
open(FILEIN, "<Dump.txt") or die;
my @lines = <FILEIN>;
close(FILEIN);
chomp(@lines);
foreach my $line (@lines) {
my $artist = '';
my $title = '';
my $album = '';
my $rating = '';
$line =~ s/'/''/g;
($artist, $title, $album, $rating) = split(/\|/, $line);
if ($rating ne '0') {
my $newRating = $rating/100;
my $sql = "UPDATE songs SET rating=$newRating WHERE ((title = '$title') AND (artist = '$artist') AND (album = '$album'))";
print $sql . "\n";
$db->do($sql);
}
}
All the code does is go through each song. If the song has a rating of more than zero stars, it converts that to Clementine's rating scheme and updates that song's rating in the database. No, it's not optimized at all. I don't care. It's a one-time thing.
Can't Take Much More
I posted this on Facebook, as a series of comments. I think it's good enough to be a blog post:
I don't know if I can take much more stupidity surrounding the Martin shooting. But here are some tips to avoid looking stupid:
(If I get any of these wrong, please tell me.)
1) Things like Stand Your Ground
are a defense, not a Not-Get-Arrested card. Think about it. How do we know Zimmerman reasonably felt threatened? Via sworn witnesses and other evidence. What's the forum for presenting that evidence? That would be a trial.
As long as there's enough evidence to get past a Grand Jury, he ought to be arrested. Zimmerman's disregard of the 911 operator and his own admitted chasing of Martin would bring enough doubt to his Stand Your Ground
defense to get past a Grand Jury.
2) That photo of Martin with his drawers hangin' low and giving the finger isn't him.
3) Even if that photo was of him, even if he's a bad, bad kid, it still doesn't matter. Unless Zimmerman has prior knowledge of that, it doesn't support his claims of reasonably fearing harm.
4) Innocent Until Proven Guilty
isn't a general rule, it's a legal concept. You can't point to it if Zimmerman hasn't even been arrested yet. You can certainly say that you think people should reserve judgement, but me thinking and even saying that Zimmerman is probably racist scum looking for trouble isn't violating some Innocent Until Proven Guilty
right.
5) Arrest isn't the same as conviction. People are upset that Zimmerman hasn't been arrested. I don't think anyone is suggesting that he should be thrown in prison without trial.
(Now, afterwords, when people go fucking nuts that the case wasn't decided the way they think it should be and start talking about street justice, then you can complain about them.)
6) In the US, jails are typically where you hold folks before trial, if they weren't granted or couldn't make bail. Prisons are typically where they go if they're convicted. Saying you think Zimmerman should be in jail means you think he should have been arrested and not allowed bail. Saying you think he should be in prison means you think he should have been found guilty.
So, it's perfectly fine for me to say I think he should be in jail. But I wasn't there, so I can't say whether he should be in prison. (Pedantic, but important.)
Reason Rally!
Did you get here by scanning my fez at the Reason Rally?
Sweet! I'm Tom. Come on up and say Hi!
The gal with me is my wife, Kari. (Don't worry about the pronunciation. You'll get it wrong no matter what.) She's shy, so if she doesn't talk much, don't take it personally.
We're atheists, duh. We're also your standard classic American liberals.
My personal interests include old computers, recumbent tadpole trikes, the Venture Bros., Minneapolis music from the late 80s, messily hacking code, and tea!
We brought decent cameras to the Rally, but I'll also snap the occasional photo with my phone and toss it up to Flickr. You should see a slideshow below of whatever is up there:
Okay, that's about it. Seriously, stop and chat.
A Reason Rally? Why?
Okay, there's this contest to gain access to the valued VIP seating at the Reason Rally. You have to say why you want VIP seating. Why? Well, okay:
Why I would like VIP seating:
- Because it's closer and we'll have a better view.
- Because my wife is only 5'5" and claustrophobic. I'd guess that VIP seating will be less crowded, affording her a better and more confortable view.
- Because we're bringing lots of cameras, including a matched pair for 3D shots. A 3D shot of 30,000 atheists from one end would be awesome. Hey, maybe you should let me get on stage to take one.
- Because I'll be wearing a fez, a sure sign of a VIP.
- Because it's a fez with a QR barcode on it, linking to this blog, so people who scan it can instantly learn more about me. Sweet, eh?
I think a better list is why we're going to the Rally at all.
Why we're going to the Rally at all:
- To celebrate being an atheist! It's not a protest, it's a celebration!
- To see what 30,000 atheists look like. (If you really crammed people together, you might be able to squeeze 30,000 onto a football field. Maybe. That's a lot of atheists!)
- To help the world know that we're here and that they had better just get used to the idea.
- To hear the great speakers. (Greta! PZ! Holy crap, Andy Shernoff!!!)
- To meet, in person, awesome atheists I only knew online before. (Ben! Terry!)
- To see what awesome shirts other people have. (Mine has a big-ass US flag on it, with the words
God-Less America.
) - To get my photo taken in front of the Westboro Baptist Church folks. (C'mon, you know you want to, too.)
See you there! I'll be the one who doesn't believe in God!
QR Code Fez
So, I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I won a fez from Fez-o-rama. I had my choice of a handful of options. One option was to receive a custom QR barcode fez! Who the hell passes up something like that?
So, here it is:
The QR code contains the URL for this blog, so trying to scan the photo with your phone would be a little pointless, as you're already here. (Plus, it might not work. It scans more reliably in real life than in the photo.)
Of course, after it had shipped, I realized I should have put something in the URL so I would know if a visitor to the blog came from the scanning the fez. But I hadn't. Oh well.
I'll be in DC next week at the big Reason Rally for dirty rotten atheists. Weather permitting, I'll be wearing this fez. As far as I know, it's the only QR barcode fez in existence. So, if you're at the Reason Rally and you see someone wearing it, that's me. Come up and say "Hi!"
I should be easy to spot. There's only going to be 30,000 or so folks there.
Wait, what? Thirty thousand? Fuck me! That's a lot!
Tick Season
So, my last music review post wasn't very glowing. So here's one that is...
Deer Tick - Divine Providence
I was introduced to Deer Tick's brand of music by the guy who did the Replacements documentary. He said that Deer Tick has the same ramshackle go-for-broke feel as the Mats did. And I'll be damned if he wasn't right.
I don't know much about the band's music other than listening to their latest, Divine Providence. They're not from the Minneapolis area; they're from Rhode Island. But they sure sound like they could be. And I mean that in the best possible way.
It's almost like the Replacements had sloppy drunken sex with the Jayhawks and birthed something weird and wonderful.
I keep saying they,
but it's really just one guy, John McCauley, with an ever-evolving band backing him. And McCauley himself swaggers with drunken abandon, possessing a voice like some unholy hybrid of Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson.
The album itself has thoughtful slower songs, sparse songs, loud songs, and a glorious drinking song.
Oh, and a wonderfully screwy video:
More Deer Tick CDs are on their way. Should arrive today!
