theme parks and sandboxes

I have a few friends. Very few, really, but I tend to stick with the ones I have even when they do things like stab me in the back. Maybe I'm a masochist, or maybe I'm just not that socially smart, whatever it is, I am a pretty terrible judge of character.

Anyway, a preponderance of my friends play games. All kinds of games, and I think this isn't unusual, since games are entertaining and smart people tend to be good at them and I hang out with a lot of smart people. However, a little more disturbing is that the preponderance of the games that my friends tend to play have become MMOs.

MMOs are interesting. They seem to come in two basic flavors: the theme park flavor and the sandbox flavor. To be fair, I didn't coin this terminology. I've seen it used in many places, and I can't find attribution back to an original source, but it's not me.

The idea here is that most MMOs -- in the DikuMUD style -- are like a theme park, you show up, and they have a number of different entertainment options available for you, you pick one, and then you go on your ride until it's done. Some, like Project Entropia or EVE Online or even the old school Ultima Online are more like sandboxes. You hop in and then figure out on your own what you are going to do.

The theme park games are fun, and grab a lot of folks, even those that aren't hard-core gamers and only want to play for a few hours a week. You might not have the best gear, but you can always find something fun to do.

The sandbox games tend to require copious amounts of time, even if you aren't playing competitively. They tend to be much harsher. Losses are not replaced, and can be catastrophic. Hours, measured over several months, of efforts can be wiped out in an instant. And yet, these games have rabid followings. Why?

I think they more closely mirror society. They have more realistic economies, more realistic governmental (player run and initiated) structures.

I first started MMOs with a Star Wars based MUD that I can't even remember the name of sometime around 1992. I'd been playing BBS 'door' games for quite a bit longer than that, but they were all solo things. Only the biggest BBSes at the time had multiple phone lines, and I only phreaked my way into those to download porn. That was a much more valuable way to spend my stolen bits than playing multiplayer games.. at the time..

My first real MMO experience was Ultima Online though. That game stole 4 years of my life. Many of the staples of the MMO experience didn't exist yet. Eventually UO go in-game guilds, but it didn't start out that way. Eventually it got an in-game reputation system, but that too, was a novelty. In the beginning, there was no way to tell who was a good guy, who was a bad guy, and whether to stay and fight or run (running was often futile anyway) until the other player yelled 'Corp Por' and you died. The whole world (except the cities.. sort of) was a PvP zone. It was a very harsh place. And I loved it. I played both sides of the 'PK' fence. But out of nothing spontaneously came organizations of 'good' and 'evil' players working together because they needed the protection.

Economies are even more interesting, especially in games like Project Entropia (which doesn't like to call itself a game) where the in-game currency is tied to real world currency for value.

But that's a post for another day.

google gets smarter!

Finally!

I looked back today and the AdSense ads that I have on this site are finally about something that I give a care about: Homebrewing! That makes sense.

The Audi thing was a little creepy, but this actually seems to be purposeful. I should really blog more about the brews I'm making anyway, this is just another kick in the pants in that direction.

I've got ingredients sitting in my kitchen for a Belgian Double Dubbel that I've been wanting to make (high gravity dubbel - not a trippel) for some time now, I should get started on it.

It'll give me incentive to bake some more bread too. My poolish accidentally soured on me, and while I think it made for a tasty pizza crust, I think it might contain something that my wife had a mild allergic reaction to, so I tossed it.

Since I think that beer dregs make for the best poolish starters, I'll have plenty to work with after this next batch.

I just bought two more cornelius kegs, and I'm going to begin work on a kegerator at some point in the next months as things start to warm up, so I will actually have things to take pictures of, maybe.

the universe is getting bigger

A few years back, I registered a domain name - greenlock.com - for a business idea that I had. It turned out that the business never got off the ground because I was relying on angel investors that were crooks and I was so disheartened by the experience that I've never tried to start it up again with new sources of money.

I used to use a free DNS service - zoneedit.com - to direct the name to my own machine on the internet. It worked out just fine until someone figured out that I didn't have an MX record published and began to spoof my domain and spam people like crazy. When I did decide to start receiving email there, I got hundreds of angry letters from people telling me to stop spamming them. I didn't want to deal with the problem then, so I just shut it down.

I recently had an idea to start using the domain name again. I still own it, but it's been dormant for a few years. So, I've reactivated it and it's just got a holding page attached right now, but I started looking around to see who else might be using the name Greenlock or GreenLock to see if I'd run into more problems with the name.

No fewer than 25 distinct entities that I find are now using this name for everything from public storage companies, to software DRM (which could be a problem for you.. I trademarked the name for this purpose when I incorporated), to plastic containers, Christian rockers, bloggers, file-sharers (I might also someday object to you..), to other off-the-wall stuff.

Three years ago, I couldn't find one, hence the ease at which I registered greenlock.com, greenlock.net, greenlock.biz, but I left greenlock.org alone.. So, someone else has that one now.

I wish I'd moved on technosavant.com earlier. Technosavant.net is more appropriate for what I started this for, but people confuse it all the time..

superscalar brains, redux

So, I finished that article the other day. I said I'd come back and write what I thought about it, with no real intent of doing so, but that's a cop out and I've resolved to stop doing that, so here I am.

I think that the article makes some truly salient points about the brain's ability to process multiple data streams at the same time through a crude form of parallelism being the root cause for focus and memory issues that seem to be much more commonplace in today's developed societies. To borrow a word from Mr. Colbert, this has a good 'truthiness' to it.

I do not mean to disparage Mr. Kirn in any way, but it is his job to be entertaining, and his piece is an opinion piece and very entertaining as well. He makes loose references to some presumably more rigorous studies, including a UCLA experiment that he gives little detail about, so presumably there is factual basis behind much of what he's writing, but it's not intended to be a representative article.

Do I believe him? Sure. But I also once believed in a man who is proven to be a con artist now, so I'm perhaps not best equipped to make snap judgments like this.

It's an interesting piece nonetheless, and very entertaining, and likely could form the basis of a good conversation.. maybe I'll have to give it a shot the next time I find myself in a social situation.

google is a little creepy sometimes

I just enabled AdSense on this page. As far as I know, I have zero readers, but I figure, "What the hell?"

I don't know how they pick what ads to serve if they can't get a good sense of what your site is all about, but I just looked to see what's there and there are two ads for Audi. How in the hell would Google know that I've been looking at Audi cars a lot recently? I haven't written anything about Audi on my page, I haven't linked anything, I haven't received any emails about their cars in my gmail account...

I think I've determined that I can't afford an Audi, but it's creepy nontheless.

the superscalar brain

Back in the days of my education, when I was learning how to create microprocessors that were superscalar (roughly: able to dispatch two or more instructions within the same clock to disparate parts of the same CPU - achieving better than one-instruction-per-clock throughput) I can remember thinking about how the brain functions in a superscalar manner as well.

See - I'm kinda old. Not old in the sense of what modern medicine considers old -- I have quite some time before I reach that threshhold -- but measured with Moore's Law, I'm hella old indeed.

This was in the days before multiple core processors. Hell, this was before the days of the much-vaunted Intel Hyperthreaded CPUs. You had one CPU and you had one pipeline into it. However, if you were very clever, you could cheat a little bit. The pipeline into the CPU was wider than many of your instructions needed. You could therefore create a new instruction, a SUPER instruction that was two instructions concatenated together. This super instruction would then also pass data to two separate and functionally isolated parts of the same SINGLE CPU. The FPU and ALU could both be active in the same clock, so it seemed more efficient to try and use them in parallel.

This is the heart of the superscalar architecture and how we were able to design in more throughput than you could get from a single clock normally. This is why AMD Athlons had numbers like 1800+ even though they ran at clock speeds far below 1.8Ghz, which was what the competing Intel clock ran at.

But I digress...

I bring this up because today I'm reading an article (literally.. as I write this, I'm reading it in a different pane, I haven't finished it yet) and listening to some music and monitoring the stock ticker to see when I'm going to be rich enough to buy a house, and checking my email inbox and waiting for an IM to tell me when lunch will be happening and I realize that I have only one brain.

And I'm abusing the hell out of it, using some of those same kind of tricks.

Superscalar thinking is addictive, but not very effective. You can do it, but at the expense of not doing other things very well.

But I remember a time, not all that long ago, when I was not old, when I lived in the countryside and hadn't yet been spoiled by the good food and constant entertainment that the city provides, and when I could _concentrate_ on things.

My ability to concentrate has been damaged. I'm still good at all of the things that I've spent time becoming good at, but I'm not quite as good, and new things are hard. Some new things, like trying to change the way I react to situations, or how I think about certain things, or how I perceive things, are very, VERY hard.

This is the article I'm reading: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

Normally I'd wait until I finished it to blog about it, but this seems particularly apropos.

I'll let you know later what I think of it when I'm done.

blogging..

I'm pretty sure that I don't much like this Blogger software.. I could write something or adapt something and make something better, but it doesn't seem like a great way to spend my time.

This is 'good enough'.

But it does have some faults. I just deleted a bunch of older posts, and there's no way to get them back.

I shouldn't have done it, I regret it now, but I had this idea that I was going to re-purpose this, again, and that all of these miscellaneous posts were cruft that should be removed.

At least I didn't get rid of them all.. I'll just tag and move the rest away and then use this for blogging my thoughts on technology like I started to, instead of unrelated musings.