Facebook Socialite

It’s funny that Facebook is considered a social site.  For sure, it gives you a chance to interact with your friends and family, leaving messages or playing games with them.

It’s not so bad at first.  People write on your “wall” and you answer back.  Then you start getting “requests.” 

Your auntie, for instance, may be  collecting Rainbow Brite pictures from a Facebook application.  The way it works is that your auntie sends a request to people on her friends list and then those people may or may not, send one back to Auntie.  If they do, she gets more Rainbow Brite characters and, the more people that send them, the quicker she builds up her collection.

You may not give a hoot about Rainbow Brite but since your Aunt does, you go ahead with it.  Then, more and more of your friends get into it and you end up with more and requests. 

Eventually you start getting requests for different games.  People want you to join their mafia, army, dragons weir, or whatever.  Simple games where you basically just need to click on one button over and over until you run out of energy, fatigue, magic, or whatever.  These games give you an option of sending a free “gift” that will help your friends.  You’re getting a lot of them so you feel obligated to send some back.

Then there are the Flash based games.  You suddenly find yourself drawn into games where you take care of your pets, fish tanks, restaurants, gardens, and farms.  And these games are set up so that if you don’t keep a constant eye on them you’ll lose something, usually in-game credits.

For example, in Farmville, you need to plant crops.  If they grow and you don’t harvest them in time they wither away and die.  Different crops take different amounts of time to grow.  There’s about two dozen different farming games on Facebook right now so if you find yourself playing more than one then you have a lot to start keeping straight. 

You may find yourself figuring out schedules.  You can’t cook a pot roast in Cafe World now, because you’ll be asleep by the time it’s cooked.  Or you can’t go out after work with your co-workers because your eggplant will wither.  And do you go to that meeting or do you feed your fish, who are about to go belly up?

You find yourself being more of a slave to a hundred Facebook applications rather than interacting with people on Facebook.  Maybe even putting of real world events for the sake of your digital produce.

It begins to get not too social at that point; neither online nor off. 

The Author’s Note

I just finished reading “The Art of Discworld” by Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby.  I liked it quite a lot, mostly because I like reading about how authors think of their own work, or tell about how their ideas grew or mutated or just plain changed.

Back in the day when I used to read Piers Anthony’s books it got to the point where I didn’t enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed Mr Anthony’s author’s notes in the back. 

Rarely, it seems, do authors write about the genesis of their works and tag it onto the beginning or end for their readers to enjoy, and I think that’s a shame.  It’s understandable, though.

A State of Failure

As I’ve mentioned before, my first memory of seeing a video game is when I saw Space Invaders in a Texas pizzeria.  This may not actually be the case, but it’s the first memory I can recall.  And that was a very long time ago.  Since then, video games have been an integrated part of my life – just like baseball and football is to my dad.

The first computer I remember using was a Commodore PET in my middle school.  Somehow I managed to wrangle time on it after school, playing with BASIC.  Since then, computers have been an integrated part of my life. 

As a child I had dreams of writing my own games.  Games that I would want to play.  I had dreams of being a kind of superstar. 

The first computer I owned was a Commodore VIC-20.  My mother, or grandmother, or both, bought it for me just before we started a long car trip from New Jersey to Louisiana.  It sat in the trunk while I spent the trip reading the manual that came with it.  I dreamed about being able to program the little fellow.  And, I think, the first thing I did when I got it hooked up to the TV was to toss in Radar Rat Race and play away.

Not that I didn’t do some programming on the 3.5K, 20 column device; I did.  I would enter programs from magazines (like Compute! and Creative Computing) and figure out how they worked.  But I never really created anything of my own that was worth very much.

There was an awful lot of justifying going on: the display was too small, there wasn’t enough memory, the BASIC wasn’t good enough.  Of course, those were all true and may have something to do with it, but the truth is that I would just lose interest after awhile.  Or I would get stuck on a problem and not feel like figuring it out.

Eventually I received an Atari 400 for my birthday.  It had better resolution, better sound, more memory (8K!), and a crappy keyboard (membrane!).  My dreams of writing games came back and then, sadly, fell by the wayside again.  I would rather play games than write them, once I started writing them.

By the time I got my Atari ST I figured the computers were too complicated for me to work with.  A windowing operating system, no built-in BASIC.  It just seemed too complicated to work with.  With the advent of the PC and Windows I figured that was the end of that dream.

Last night, though, I went to Frys with my step-son.  I was idly glancing at things when I noticed the HYDRA Game Development Kit by Parallax.  I saw the 80’s era graphics on the box and instantly started thinking about how awesomely incredible it would be to have it and try writing games again on a system that, maybe, wasn’t as complicated as writing for a regular PC.  I went to different sites reading about the Propeller processor and what people were doing with it and I was lost in dreams again.

This morning, however, those dreams are being dashed because of another realization.

I’m an intelligent guy.  I’ve always been an intelligent guy.  But, if I were to make an analogy I’d say I was a car with a lot of horsepower but very little torque.  I’ve had a lot of teachers, friends, and co-workers tell me I’m smart but I always questioned it because I’ve never achieved what it was I wanted to achieve. 

I’ve been told I’m a good writer.  I think I’m a good writer.  One thing I’ve noticed, though, since my school days is that while I’m fairly good at starting something I’m not very good at finishing it.  I write a few sentences, maybe a paragraph, perhaps an entire chapter and then never get back to it.  Even in this blog it can be seen by the amount of “Part 1’s” that never continue.

Could I have done better in school?  Yes, I think so now.  I just didn’t want to.  Could I have gone to college and become somebody much more than I am?  Yes, I think so. 

Could I have written at least one stupid game?  Yep.

Could I have finished one story, from start to finish?  I’m sure.

But I never applied myself.  I would hit a wall and instead of tearing it down, or climbing over it, I turned aside and let it beat me.  I’ve done for just about everything I’ve ever done.

There are times when I wish that my adult mind would enter a time hole and settle into my younger self, so I could have a chance to change, to live life again without the same mistakes and sense of futility.

A few people who have known me thought that I had a fear of success.  I laughed at them.  I would think that I would like being rich, or famous, or at least be able to live day to day without an obscene amount of worry about what was going to happen the next day. 

But maybe they were right.  A fear of success that keeps me from achieving what I’m really capable of achieving.  There’s no mental wormhole that will save me, only I can do that. 

Maybe one day I will be able to write a game or finish a story.  Or achieve a better position at work.  Maybe.

SETI

I don’t think the S.E.T.I. (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program will actually get anywhere.

That isn’t to say that I don’t like the idea; I do.  If I were in charge of anything they would continue to get funding to do whatever it is they’re doing.  Some people will probably roll their eyes at the idea of wasting money but there’s a long list of programs I consider to be a bigger waste of money.

It isn’t that I don’t think there isn’t intelligent life somewhere out in the cosmos.  I don’t know if there is, but I have no reason to believe there isn’t.

Let’s digress for a moment.

Fifty years ago, the year was 1959.  In 1959 requested a patent for the integrated circut.  Rawhide, Bonanza, and The Twilight Zone appeared on television.  Radio was still in swing.  There were no cell phones, or home computers.  Commercial airplane travel had only been around for 30 some-odd years. 

One hundred years ago it was 1909.  The movie industry was just getting into gear, with no sound.  Okay, well, let’s be blunt: there wasn’t much in the way of technology.

Five hundred years ago it was 1509.  One thousand years ago the year was 909. 

Can we go over all the changes in the human life between 909 and now?  Can anyone really  say what the 3009 will be like (aside from Futurama)?  Probably not.  I’m pretty sure that if you told someone from 1959 about today’s iPhones or Blackberries they’d think you were writing a Dick Tracy comic.

Let’s get back to SETI for a moment.  Let’s assume that there is a planet out there with intelligent life.  We’ll figure they’re kind of like us.  The only real question is that of time.

Where are these E.T.’s in relation to us in terms of development?

In the unlikely event that we evolved at the same time, at the same pace, and they had the same stuff that we did, then SETI might have a chance of picking up something.  That’s assuming they’re close by.  If they were circling Epsilon Eridani, it would only take ten years for radio transmissions to get there.  That would be plenty of time for someone there to find the transmission and get excited about it.

That’s assuming they’re like us.  If there’s any deviance from there then things would get very sticky, indeed.

Let’s be frank, here.  It hasn’t taken very long for radio and TV to become obsolete.  It’s not entirely there yet, but it will happen.  Signals are being sent over cable more than they are over the air.  If someone isn’t ready to listen over the span of, say, 100 years then they may not get anything from us at all.  In terms of geology and evolution, 100 years is less than a blink.

If this other civilization started after us, maybe 100 years, then they may not even progress to the technological level of being able to listen for us until after we’ve stopped broadcasting and started watching TV full time on computers, or DVR’s, or web-enabled TV’s.

Or maybe they started 100 years before us.  Then what?  Maybe they’re already using nothing but cable to watch “Glork & Mandy.”  Maybe they never thought of broadcasting and they started off with a tin can strung to every household.

The time difference alone is enough of a hurdle to make finding a signal from another civilization to be a major stroke of luck.

Another thought that occurred to me is if a civilization isn’t actively trying to signal their existence to the rest of the cosmos how would the information be broadcast?  Would it be encrypted or compressed?

Some people might wonder why an alien civilization would encrypt or compress all their transmissions.  I brought it up before, but we have no idea how a group of aliens would do anything.  We have absolutely no idea of how their mental processes work or their motives or anything else. 

That’s another hurdle.  We might be looking for something that’s important to us only to be missing something that’s important to them. 

Wacky Drugged Out Hippie Story

Barker had given me something in the parking lot.  A pill.  He wouldn’t tell me what it was, just that I would find it ‘rad’ and ‘groovy.’  So I took it.

We weaved through the crowd in the bar, winding our way like serpents to an empty booth.  We sat down on the leather-like covered benches, elbows on the scarred wooden table, leaning our heads close together so we could hear each other over the noise.

Barker signaled a waitress who brought over our customary pitcher of Margarita’s.  When we poured our glasses Barker leaned towards me again and said, “Man, I had a crazy thought today.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Listen,” he said.  “What if we’re all, like, characters in a story?  Like, we don’t really exist except in some dude’s head?  Like, maybe there is a God and he’s this author dude sitting at a typewriter and making us up?”

I looked at my fingers wrapped around the Margarita glass.  They had started to pulsate, getting bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller. 

“What do you mean?” I asked.  “Like, we’re not real, just in someone’s imagination?”

“That’s it, Clarke!” Barker cried.  “That’s exactly what I mean!”

I thought this was weird coming from a devout atheist.  Barker had never gone in for the idea of a god before, capitalized or not.  One time he had explained to me how Chaos Theory dictated that nothing was random, that everything was a series of events that happened one after another.  If you traced all the events in the universe backwards, he said, all the way to the Big Bang, it would show that when the very first particle created in the universe took off, it went off in a direction that would, billions of years later, culminate in Barker being pissed off that day.  My thoughts were becoming less coherent.  I thought about that pill again.  And my pulsating fingers.

“Everything would make sense that way,” continued Barker.  “Like, how we were able to get this prime booth in a crowded bar on a Friday night.  Like, how, when you’re in a hurry, there’s always someone paying by check in the express line.”

I watched his brain light up his forehead with a sequence of lights.  It looked like a special effect from Star Trek.  But he was right, it would explain a lot of things.

Why were there never cars coming until I wanted to make a left hand turn?  Did those people exist around the corner of the road before I got there?

Barker interrupted my thoughts.  “Listen, we don’t even know if we knew each other before today, man.”

“What do you mean?  We’ve known each other since we were kids.  I know you exist,” I protested.

“Dude, what if those memories were just made up now?  What if we just sort of came into being right out there in the parking lot.  You can’t remember everything that’s ever happened to you right at this moment, can you?”

That was true, but I was blaming it on the pill he gave me in the car.  I couldn’t, really, be definite that my memories of us, or even just me, were real or not.

I said, “Wait, there must be a scientific way to prove that we’re real and not made up?”  I was grasping, but you could always rely on science to shoot down fantasy and fun.

Barker slapped the palm of his hand on the table and yelled, “Ha!  How could it?  The author would write all that in, right?  He could, like, wrap his own science around his own universe.  If a scientist tried to figure that out, the science would work out to be whatever the author wanted it to reveal.”

He was right.  The entire world would be created in any way he wanted.  Nuaga’s, instead of being raised on farms, could be caught in traps in the dark forests of Illinois before being turned into furniture covers.  Beer could taste good.  Women could make sense.  The possibilities were endless. 

The world swooned around me.  Yellow lights floated over the crowds head.  The crowd.  I didn’t know anyone in the crowd.  Were they real, did they have a back story?  Or were they just cardboard cutouts made Barker and mine’s benefit? 

My fingers pulsated madly.  I looked at Barker, staring back at me with pinwheel eyes, his red lips glaring from the center of the forest of his grizzly beard.

I didn’t remember Barker having a beard.  “Hey man,” I said, “have you always had a beard?”

“Of course, man.  You can’t be a prophet without a beard.”

“Do I have a beard?”  I honestly oouldn’t remember.

“No way, man.  You can’t grow a beard,” he said, “it just looks like you have a dirty face.”

I slid out of the booth and tried to stand up.  The world swirled around me in multicolor phases.  I cursed the damn pill that Barker had given me.  I was that if I was straight I could laugh off everything that he had told me.  As it was, it all made sense to me.  It was a little way out there to think that there was a story just for me, I mean it would have to be just for me if I were the first person narrator, right?  Did Barker have his own story?  Did the fake milling crowd have a story?  I didn’t know.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I pushed my way through the fake people, fighting for a way to the door.  Music pounded in my ears, words floated through my brain.  I pushed through the large oak doors out into the calm, cold, night.

My breath poured out of my mouth in a fog.

I was a character in a fucked up story.  My God was some guy sitting around thinking up all this crap.  Why? For what? 

And what would happen to me, I wondered, if he got bored of it all.  Would my entire universe end up in a crumpled ball next to a wire wastebasket?

What would happen to my life, my thoughts, my self, if the story were to suddenly end

Facebook Games VS Linux

Since I did a really good job of screwing up my Windows XP installation (that is, I killed it by accident) I’ve been spending a lot of time using Linux (Gentoo) and KDE 4.3. I love it, but there are a few problems that one can run into now and again.

Facebook games, for instance, are a crap shoot. Some will work fine and others are not so fine. Since I can’t do anything about this directly I thought I would do the next best thing: bitch about it on a blog and hope someone that can fix it will.

So here is my list of Facebook games that I use with Linux.

I’ll mention that I use Firefox 3.5.2 and Flash 10.0.32.18, which is the latest I can get with Gentoo.

• Restaurant City (Playfish) – I’ve never been able to get into this one. I always get a message saying that it’s unable to make a connection to Restaurant City. I get this often on Windows, too, but it’s a constant on Linux.
• Crazy Planets (Playfish) – This one always gets stuck at 10% on the loading screen.
• YoVille (Zynga) – It looks like Zynga fixed the problem where you couldn’t click on the game thing. Or I just managed to skip it. In any case, it looks like YoVille is now working. Wait, I take that back. The inventory screen only shows the first item in your inventory. Still, not too bad.
• Farm Town (Slashkey) – Farm Town has some display issues but that’s common with Windows, too. The only problem that I can see with Farm Town is that there are no scroll bars in the store so you can only see the stuff that’s on top. This is a minor issue until you really want something that you can’t get to.
• Farmville (Zynga) – Seems to work just fine. I haven’t seen any problem yet.
• Pet Society (Playfish) – Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Again, this is also something that happens in Windows. When PS is working in Linux it works fine.
• BeJeweled Blitz (PopCap) – As addictive as crack, Bejeweled Blitz works great with Linux. Which is unfortunate because it’s such a time sink.
• Farkle (Viral Games) – Farkle works fine. I think it cheats, but it works.
• My City (????) – This one works in Classic View. Silverlight might work with Moonlight, but I can’t be bothered to install it. The only problem I see with this one is that there doesn’t seem to be a point to it.
• Pathwords (Zynga) – Works fine. I just suck.
• Geo Challenge (Playfish) – Hmmm. Maybe Playfish has a problem with their network code that doesn’t work too well with Linux. Same problem as Restaurant City in that it can’t establish a connection.
• Word Challenge (Playfish) – Unable to establish a connection. I’m seeing a pattern here.
• Bowling Buddies (Playfish) – Same.
• Word Whomp Derby (Pogo) – Works great. No problems.
• Minigolf Party (Playfish) – Yep, won’t establish a connection. I see a common thread here.
• Uno (Gamehouse) – First, I think it’s great that this card game is on Facebook. Also, I think GH did a great job with it. It also works great.
• Kidnap! (Travel Channel) – Works fine.
• Pirates, Mob Wars, Mafia, etc – All the ones that you just click on stuff work fine, but that shouldn’t be too surprising.

It would be nice if the rest of the world would start realizing that more and more people are using an operating system other Windows. While I’m not a huge fan of Apple, I do like diversity so Playfish, Adobe, and others should do a better job of checking their stuff against other OS’s.

Testing Bilbo

I usually use Microsoft’s Live Writer to write this, but I’ve been using KDE4.3 a lot lately so I thought I’d give Bilbo a try.

It seems pretty good so far.

A New Way Of Thinking

Something that’s always bugged me about television series is how they can start to get tedious.

This mostly revolves around dramas of one kind or another.  Sitcoms are usually self-contained episodes that don’t really rely on a back story.  Although, sometimes they do.

When I was a kid watching cartoons, for instance, it was always annoying that when watching “Battle of the Planets” the villain was going to get away.  Not the minor bad guy, the dude piloting the weird ship that looked like one kind of animal but was called something else, but the top bad guy.  G-Force would never, ever, knock down the Spectra organization.

Shows that have a back story where the main character or characters are looking for something, running from something, or have some kind of goal as its background story are going to become tedious.

Following a character for year after year just to see them fail, in the long run, is a bummer.

If I were given a chance to create a television show I would do it differently.  It would be designed to be contained in one, maybe two, seasons.  All the scripts would be written ahead of time to create a uniform and believable story.  Nothing is worse than when writers start pulling ideas out of the air to make things that happened in the past fit with what they want to do in the future.  Anyone remember the eighth season’s cliffhanger of “Dallas?”

The season would have a definite beginning, of course, but also have a definite ending that has a definite resolution.

If there’s enough enough clamoring for another season, then it can be done.  A new story line can be written up, again with the idea of going through an entire season.  Kind of like a long mini-series.

This would also let the actors involved decide if they want to keep going for another season.  Everyone knows how fickle actors get when it comes to being stereotyped.  If they have another project they want to do they don’t have to worry about renegotiating their contracts in mid-season.

So, if you’re in Hollywood and reading this go ahead and drop me a note.

 

 

After These Messages

I’m not a commercial person.  I don’t mean that I don’t like my material items, I most certainly do.  But I really hate commercials.

I don’t listen to radio because I hate listening to the commercials.  They just seem to go on and on and when the music finally hits, it’s over before you know it.  By the time I stopped listening to Howard Stern in New York I would swear that there were twenty minutes of commercials and ten minutes of show.

Some people might feel bad for me because I don’t have cable or satellite.  Don’t.  I’m perfectly happy watching my shows on Hulu.  At least there I only have to sit through one 30 second commercial; on regular TV it’s several minutes of dumb commercials.

I don’t mind so much if the commercials are kind of clever or funny.  But when they’re really stupid it totally makes me not want to buy whatever product they’re hawking.

Have you ever seen those cheapo commercials for “time saving” devices, or helpers for household chores?  They show some dimwit trying to do something really easy but they’re having a really hard time.  Like opening a cereal box, or putting a shirt in a drawer.  Then they get all frustrated and throw whatever it is they’re working with down on the ground.  I hate those.  They aren’t even believable.

Right now, though, Geico has my brain melting.  They’re the only company that has three concurrently running commercial ads that are mind numbingly  dull and stupid.  And also very overplayed.

Isn’t the gecko getting a little old by now?  Sure, it was sort of clever when it started out, but that was a long time ago.  How much more can you do with a CGI lizard?

The less said about the cavemen the better.  A commercial idea so horrendous, they got their own TV show.  Which failed miserably.  Did they give up on the whole caveman idea?  No, not at all.  They keep coming back.  If the original cavemen were that industrious we’d still be dragging our knuckles on the ground.

Finally, there’s the commercials with the stack of money with a pair of eyeballs that plays Rockwell’s, “Somebody’s Watching Me.”  I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean, but the commercials freak me out.  If I were in the market for insurance, Geico would not be getting my money.

Hulu-Hoop

I like Hulu.com because it lets me watch TV shows that I never get to watch because I have a big problem spending a lot of money for not watching a lot of TV. 

In terms of TV-Land I’m pretty much out in the desert.  I really don’t know what shows are out or what’s coming up or when anything is on.  Unless it’s a show that’s been on since forever in the time slot then I’m lost. 

This is a lot different than when I was a kid.  Back then I could tell you every show that was on, what channel it was on, what time it was on, and what new shows the Fall will bring.  All this without the Internet.  Of course for most of that time there were only three major networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS.  Then Fox jumped in.  Then everyone else and their brother set up shop.

So, anyway, I’ve lost touch.  There’s been a bunch of shows that have come and gone that I’ve never heard of. 

But, thanks to Hulu, I get to catch up on quite a few of them.  For instance, I could watch what is possibly the best science-fiction show every made: Firefly.  I’d known about it, knew it was chucked off the air, but never saw it until it showed up on Hulu.  Other gems I got hooked on were: Dead Like Me, Journeyman, New Amsterdam, John Doe, Surface and others. 

If you look through that list you may notice that none of them are on the air anymore.  Killed, cancelled. 

And that’s why I hate Hulu.  I could have gone my entire life without watching some of these shows, and never wanting to see them, or even knowing about them.  It really sucks to get interested in a show and find out it was knocked off the air years ago and will never come back.

It won’t stop me from continuing, though.  I’m just a glutton for punishment.