My old phone died, and I needed a new one anyway for travelling to Europe.

Despite the fact this post was private, the number was being used to register for spam services. So I am defriending all you fuckers.

these are by and large the people who were drawn to zzt - people with the desire to make games or tell stories but without the experience or knowledge or technical skill to take the conventional route to game creation. kids, amateurs, dabblers, and hobbyists. videogame zinesters: much of what they produced is unpolished and unplayable, and much of what they produced is incredible outsider art. which is why i thought a list of recommended games might be a useful place for the interested to start exploring.

(11:30:20 PM) Joe: What happened to my motivation?
(11:30:38 PM) Matt: It boarded a plane to Germany roughly 15 days ago.
(11:30:46 PM) Joe: No, I mean from like 5 years ago.
(11:30:55 PM) Matt: I don't remember five years ago.

Current Music: A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations 1955 & 1981 - 8/32 - Goldberg Variations, BWV 98

I've now run five Maid RPG sessions, one with a group at work and four with a group over IRC. I really enjoy the game, both thematically and mechanically. I think my enjoyment of the thematic part speaks for itself, but the mechnically part surprised me. I was expecting a fairly standard TriStat-ish rules-lite system based on the initial description, but there's a surprising amount of depth to the system from an unexpected source - the master/mistress interaction.

The GM in a game of Maid ends up taking on two roles, that of the standard GM in an RPG - managing NPCs, encounters, required to make rule judgements, and so on; and that of the master/mistress (hereafter "mistress" since it's what my main campaign has) of the mansion. Far from being the standard all-powerful GM insert found in a lot of campaigns, the mistress is bound by roughly the same rules as the players in terms of stats (which are on average lower) and abilities. The mistress does have the power to hand out favor - the game's money/XP - but at the same time one of the main purposes of spending favor is to try to mess with the mistress, and while the mistress has that ability by default, there are ways maids can gain it for other maids (e.g. seduction), effectively halting the GM's ability to govern that character's advancement.

Speaking of seduction, the role of the mistress is extra-important since the game leans heavily on social interactions, even if you choose to play those reactions as a series of die rolls. When the mistress is not present, frankly the GM gets very bored - while in a D&D session there's usually enough combat, rules lawyering, or world building to keep the GM involved, Maid's restriction of the world to the mansion and the combat rules to straightforward opposed rolls results in a GM without much to do unless they can interact directly.

The result is that the mistress can collaborate with the players a lot more to make ad-hoc or random-event-based sessions much more interesting than other systems. I went into the game this morning with a rough scenario outline, which I was happy to throw out (or rather, postpone) in minutes when my players decided they'd rather wrap up the rest of the previous day instead of going to bed. One of them spent some favor to cause a random event ("a TV station wants to do a report on the mansion") and within minutes the maids, with some direction from the mistress, were planning a pretty detailed plot to stop the TV reporters.

The rules are comprehensive and general enough that you can use it to run almost any kind of campaign. It's definitely tuned for Victorian-to-modern settings, just because those are "real" maids, but jessicatz and I discussed some vague plans (inspired by ARis) to move one of the campaigns at least partially into a cyber setting for a few scenarios.

The game absolutely requires a certain kind of player. The combat is fun, even when it drags on longer than expected, but it can't be the core of the game. Players need to be willing to roleplay someone drastically different from themselves (unless you are playing the game with an actual maid, a pleasure I've not had yet). Since the game can evolve into sexual situations quickly the GM needs to keep careful watch over everyone's comfort levels, something I found much harder to do over IRC than in real life. Thankfully the comfort zone of my IRC players extends pretty far. Conversely, players may need to be willing to put up with something a little outside their comfort zone at least temporarily for the sake of story coherence. There's a poster on the official mailing list that is so paranoid about his players that he wants a new character sheet that doesn't look female - this is the kind of player that you just don't want in the first place.

Alternity used to be my favorite system despite its many flaws, because it let me switch between a story-heavy/rules-light/players-talking mode and a rules-heavy/combat-focused/players-rolling mode very easily depending on what kind of pacing I felt the scenario needed. Maid has definitely displaced it for this, for the same reason, and because something about the nature of it makes players less likely to want the rules-heavy mode in the first place.

If you're interested in anime roleplaying (I miss GoO too), rules-light systems, or even story games, I think Maid is one you shouldn't miss. It's not exactly any of those (no specific anime and my Victorian campaign wasn't even really anime-style, rules-light systems don't have 50 pages of event/item tables, and there's too much GM rules-mediation to be a story game) but for me it's a near-perfect balance of what I like about each of them.

Tags: maid, maid rpg

I found this last night.

The verb love is grammatically backwards relative to all other verbs in the English language. The standard word order is SVO, but when you say I love X, the active noun is really X, I the direct object, and the verb denotes how X makes you feel. The problem with the investigation of love is that our grammar tricks us into looking for the meaning of the word in what I does to X. After all, to see what eat means in I eat pie, one looks at what I is doing to pie, and say eat denotes that action. Instead, to learn what love means in I love you, one needs to look at what you does to I.

There's an old saw about apathy or ignorance, not hate, being the opposite of love. Given the above one can see this fallacy in this statement. The opposite of love is loneliness, the absolute absence of the you in I love you - I love, an ungrammatical subsentence without a subject, is perhaps the loneliest utterance in the English language.

Tags: equally obscure but more accessible, limerence, why so logical positivist?

It featured:

• Alien archaeologists who gave earth culture
• Who also happened to be currently residing in a non-physical plane
• Pyramids as landing platforms
• Plus a whole host of other technology made out of stone for no apparent reason
• Numerous unlikely jury-rigged inventions
• An ancient repository of knowledge getting downloaded into someone's brain making them go totally cruvus
• Fights against:
  • Other government organizations
    • Causing the hero's boss to resign..
    • Only to have the hero promoted to the boss's old job at the end
  • Communists
  • Ants (no seriously, ants)
• A crystal skull mysteriously cut against the grain
• A kiss at the end that everyone has been waiting years for

Was it:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2. MacGyer + Stargate back to back

Honestly, there are probably more similarities. But the fight with the ants is what convinced me. They just ripped off anything with RDA in it.

SPOILER ALERT

How many four-year-olds do you think you could beat up?

Another fun game I'm playing recently is the "get to and from work on time and without dying" game. Thus far I've successfully fought daylight savings time (it's now pitch black by 6PM on the trail near the office), a washed out dirt path, potholes, stupid runners wearing black, a detour that points in a circle, several small children, a raccoon, a skunk, and an army of geese.

However, I lost the minigame where you have to not run into trees while swerving to avoid cats.

Elite Beat Agents has displaced Katamari Damacy as my favorite video game.

It's a tough choice. Both games provide tons of replay value. Katamari has hours of collection and exploration while EBA offers the kind of pure synesthaetic stimulation only good rhythm games can provide. EBA (and Ouendan) also manages the tap into the same surreal, indulgent style that Katamari did, and the only beat game to do that before was Space Channel 5. So, both are near-infinitely replayable, and both fit my sense of humor exactly. What puts EBA over the top?

First, EBA uses its plots to great effect. Very few games get the writing maxim "show, don't tell" right. Some of that's historical, since graphics weren't good enough to show. EBA gets it perfect; there's not much to tell at all, and emotions are very easily tweaked with music. There's a real sense of success when you win (and corresponding sense of crushing failure when you lose; EBA is the second game ever to make me tear up while playing, after Beyond Good and Evil).

Secondly, EBA is hard. Both games let you keep trying to best your previous high score, but getting to the end of Katamari is mostly a matter of playing all the levels. Aside from MAS7, I beat them all on my first try, and by the second or third time, I had reasonably good scores. EBA S ranks demand a level of perfection that I can't even always achieve on Breezin', the easiest difficulty, yet. There are still three more difficulty levels, and I'm only halfway through the third (and pulling consistent Bs and Cs).

EBA gets multiplayer right, which Katamari never did (though MDKD was a huge improvement). Competitive and co-op modes are reminiscent of Beatmania, and the fact there are specific multiplayer plots for each song is amazing. I've yet to try four player mode, but I can't imagine it gets worse. What cinches it, however, is the versus ghost mode. You can play competitively against any saved replay data (your own or a friend's sent to you). There's an "attack" system when you do particularly well, and your ghost does attack you if the replay was good enough. This almost creates a fifth difficulty level above the normal single player mode.

Katamari might last me longer, but looking at the concentrated fun within the first ~50 hours of single-player gameplay of both (of which I've already sunk in about 10), EBA is definitely the winner.

As for the localization, I'm just going to quote ToastyFrog: [L]icensing Chicago and Cher for EBA sends a very clear message to the J-tards: you are not our core audience. And good thing, too.

What did EBA do wrong? Not enough songs. Still, it's already huge for a DS cartridge, and 19 is not a horrible number. But really, that's it. The gameplay is internally "complete", and any serious modifications would make it not feel like EBA, in the same way any serious rule modifications to chess make it stop being chess.

(Other excellent games I'm playing are Phoenix Wright 2 and Magical Starsign. But the nature of adventure games and RPGs make them basically unable to compete for "best game of all time" since they only last a few dozen hours.)

Watch as the ID3 authors totally fail to learn from their previous mistakes.

Digging through the GNOME Bugzilla to find out why soundconverter is still writing Ogg files without eos markers⁰, I found this gem:

Reporter: How should RG values should be written in the rythmdb.xml? With a period or with a locale specific decimal separator? For now (0.9.5) it is locale specific, which IMHO is not good.

RB Developer: You're right that using locale-specific formatting for rhythmdb.xml is bad, but I'm not sure what other options we have for floating point data.

Yeah, I remember the days before pervasive locale support, and how it was absolutely impossible to print floating point data. I mean, it's not like your standard utility library has a function to do exactly this. (Incidentally a similar bug, in Python, has bitten Quod Libet in the past - though GStreamer was the most common trigger for the Python bug in the first place. But the Python developers apparently had no problem fixing this impossible issue.)

⁰ This is remarkably difficult when Bugzilla cannot search for words less than four characters and I need to search for "ogg eos".

Tags: why am i surrounded by morons?

I agree completely.

Furthermore, I think we should also have "rc" removed from version strings because we don't want our users knowing that we shipped them prerelease software. In fact, let's just bump every version up to at least 9.0.

As for the changelog entries, any mention of fixing previous bugs should be removed as well. New adopters should also go back and change any previous changelog entries to refer to themselves. We don't want users to be able to track down useful change history (since the current version is of course perfect), or know that the software came from someone else originally.

Even within a single library!

>>> import gtk
>>> filter(lambda s: "volume" in s, gtk.icon_theme_get_default().list_icons())
('stock_volume-mute', 'volume-medium', 'stock_volume-0', 'volume-knob', 'stock_volume',
 'volume-mute', 'volume-min', 'stock_volume-min', 'volume-zero', 'volume-max'
 'stock_volume-med', 'stock_volume-max')

Of course, most themes actually theme totally different names (prefixed with rhythmbox-), unless they were made by someone using Muine (in which cases the names are prefixed by muine-). And Tango specifies that they should all have an audio- prefix.

1. Spam the hell out of my ticket tracker until I finally give up and try to upgrade it.
2. Make upgrading a ticket tracker require a new SVN which requires a new Apache which for some reason conflicts with PHP 4, which breaks the existing web mail configuration. Which paying customers are using.
3. Downgrade Trac again only to find mysterious errors since apparently Trac upgrades are one way.
4. Find out the wiki dump functionality is broken in the old version.
5. Make me write the new Quod Libet page.

I hope you die in a big chemical fire.