Mass Effect 2

08 Feb 2010 | No Comments »

Here’s something neither intensely depressing nor work-related for a change – a quick review of Mass Effect 2 for the PC.

Mass Effect is a borderline guilty pleasure for me. I consider things like being a Doctor Who fan to be more of a badge of honor (though not a mathematics badge – I’m looking at YOU, Adric), but epic space opera is kind of like eating Miracle Whip straight from the jar with a knife, which I certainly have never, ever done. The idea that a ragtag (they are never orderly, even in Star Trek) band of heroes (really anti-heroes) can zoom around (ignoring relativistic problems) the galaxy (always flat 2d)  in a ship (with middle-class accouterments) with no supply chain (unless there is a plot shortage) and ultimately save the known galaxy (albeit temporarily) through incredibly violent means (including sound in space) whilst clinging firmly to a nonviolent ethic (Commander Shepard isn’t exactly what MLK had in mind)  is terribly, terribly appealing and lends absolutely no support to the idea that I may have some depth of character,  intellect, or chance at reproducing.

ME2 is built around an ensemble cast, which means while it has a main character (you, with what horrible face you choose to give to poor Shepard), its story is almost entirely dependent on how Shepard acquires and interacts with his crew. Where the first ME focused more on the main plot, the second game treats it almost as a side concern; the real game is collecting your ragtag band from whatever hellhole they are currently living in (only a handful can be acquired without a prolonged firefight with some party), figuring out what their biggest problem in life is (usually, again, something that can be solved with the judicious use of high explosive), and solving that minor issue so they can concentrate on the real  problem in their lives, which is backing you up on the  suicide mission (it is literally called ‘SUICIDE MISSION’ on the map at a certain plot point) that ends the game (though it isn’t, really, because I managed to keep everyone alive). That’s not a spoiler, really. Trust me in all things.

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the formula. It is a pleasant milkshake that I’ve had several times before, and I look forward to the next one with no remorse or shame. I just wish it was a tad less predictable. Mass Effect and KOTOR (Knights of the Old Republic) have mastered this particular storytelling structure – whether it is ‘explore two planets, cutscene, explore two planets, cutscene, then endgame’  as KOTOR works, or ‘collect X companions, advance through X plot sections, collect X companions as needed, endgame’ as ME2 rolls.

I think the latter of those two structures is better, as there is some sandbox play allowed, but there is still a lack of the kind of freedom allowed in, say, Fallout 3. In that game, if I decide I do NOT want to descend further into the ruins of Washington D.C. today, I can turn around and go in any direction in the wasteland at any time. In ME2, once I land on a planet and start shooting up the locals as Shepard tends to do, I can’t do a tactical retreat, even though I have a shuttlecraft no enemy is smart enough to blow up, let alone shoot at, or a spaceship that literally cannot be detected by anybody save millennia-old godlike entities and people looking out of windows. In short, I can sense I’m on rails for most of the game, and I would like for Bioware to shore up the flimsy walls in this particular corner of the Matrix – perhaps they could make the steak to Cypher’s standard of juicy and delicious,  so I don’t occasionally that notice the only direction I can go is forward. Then again, once those walls are broken, they are very, very hard to put it back up again.

Reverting back to praise, I really liked the way that the past game was constantly invoked and referenced. Part of this was due to the very clever ability to import your old ME1 saved game, complete with all the major plot decisions that you made in the first game. People who died are dead; people who did big things still did big things. Furthermore, Shepard’s old crew makes decisions consistent with their established arcs – some return, some do not, and some find third options.

In short, highly recommended.

Category(s): Gaming, Mike's Posts

Michael Leff

05 Feb 2010 | No Comments »

I just learned that Michael Leff, the president of RSA  and chair of the communication department at the University of Memphis, died this morning. I knew he had been recently hospitalized, but it’s still a shock.

I first met Dr. Leff when I took his graduate seminar in classical Greek rhetoric. I think it was 2006. I didn’t really know at first what I was getting into; I knew the Communication Department had an unusual relationship with the English Department in that all the rhetoric courses were cross-listed, but it took me awhile to realize what a fantastic opportunity I had stumbled upon, where I could get a firm grip on both the rhetcomp side of rhetoric and the communication studies side.

He refused to give grades to graduate students, and didn’t even assign a seminar paper – and I learned so much in that first class that I felt like my brain has been stuffed with theoretical gunpowder. I took rhetorical criticism from him next, which opened another door, and I managed to audit one more from him on argumentation theory, which kicked open another. He was, quite probably, the best teacher I’ve ever seen. I found it almost impossible to stump him – he had read everything worth reading on rhetoric and written a fair amount of the same.

In 2007 he invited me to teach the composition course  in a four-class learning community focused on the civil rights movement in Memphis, with him teaching the freshman seminar, and that was an absolutely fantastic experience.  He also ultimately agreed to be on my dissertation committee in 2008, proceeded to ask all the tough questions that I figured he would, and adroitly pointed out a key problem in my second chapter. His positive judgment of the resulting manuscript went a long, long way toward my self-image as a scholar.

The last time I saw him was late last spring before I moved to Houston; I dropped by his office to ask his advice on a new article I was writing, and as usual, he knew precisely where I needed to go. I figured I would talk with him again by May’s RSA in Minneapolis, but that won’t happen now. I imagine there will be a fitting tribute to him at the conference. He was a great teacher, scholar, and human being.

Category(s): Mike's Posts, Personal Stuff, Professional Stuff

On a slightly brighter note

01 Feb 2010 | 1 Comment »

The last post was a bit of a downer. I think H and I are getting along better now about this.

I had a dream about Gracie a few nights ago. I was hunting (which I don’t in real life) in the woods, trying to kill something that needed flushing from trees, and Gracie was there, doing just that (even though she was never a gun dog in the slightest), in a carefree manner whilst sniffing around randomly as dogs like to do. After awhile I realized she shouldn’t be there because she was dead, and I decided to pick her up and take her to H’s parents’ house to prove that I had seen her. I picked her up and she turned into Sam, H’s parents’ 14-year-old boykin spaniel, a friendly, brown, barrel-shaped dog going white. Sam felt like picking up a cardboard box of uncomfortably arranged sharp rocks, so I put him back down and we looked at each other for awhile, him with his sleepy sure-a-nap-sounds-mighty-fine eyes. I said, “Sam, you aren’t going to prove a damn thing.” Then I woke up.

Anyway. We have a lot of visitors coming this spring. My father and stepmother in a week or so, sister-in-law Dr. J and her wonderful menagerie immediately afterward, then my mother and stepfather. Throw in the 4C’s conference in March and the RSA conference in May and we’ve got a full spring. We still need to buy one more piece of furniture to make the house palatable to guests – a task that should be completed, with luck, by this weekend.

On a side note, as a personal project just before the semester began, I built a workbench for the garage, following these plans. It came out level, square, and very sturdy despite the fact that I don’t have a circular saw or miter saw as the author of the article did (although I really want a miter saw now – it would have saved a lot of time). I have next to no practical woodworking skills, so I learned quite a bit, or, rather, expanded my ignorance. I intended for it to be just a general fix-things bench, something I could sit computers on at a reasonable level while tinkering, but I had some fun figuring it out; I may try a small bookcase with some actual joinery for a second project, and if that goes well, a desk to replace the horrible device in my study.

Category(s): Mike's Posts, Personal Stuff

Damn

26 Jan 2010 | 1 Comment »

My dog is dead.

She was never really my dog, but I always thought of her that way. Her name was Gracie  – sometimes just Grace – and she was 9 years old when she died on the operating table this morning in Memphis.

She was a sweet little 45-pound pit bull, a rescue that my wife, H, had in college and who later came to live with her parents for the past five years or so at their idyllic country home outside Memphis. She was covered in scars from being used as bait in dogfights, and she was scared of lightning, guns, and loud noises. But Gracie could play hard, as she did over the last year with our boykin spaniel puppy, Kara, despite her creaky back legs and her natural inclination to take day-long naps.  She was injury-prone due to her love of jumping fences to run around in cow pastures, and had the scars (and the name, Grace) to prove it. She also enjoyed burgers, tacos, burritos, and pretty much anything that would fit into her mouth, including student papers. She is in the right of this picture, which was taken last April. Kara is the puppy. She is now Gracie’s size.

Grace and Kara by purplepaste.

Anyone that ever met her knows what a pure and good soul Gracie had. I mean pure as the driven snow, the Platonic form of good. I don’t even believe in souls and I think that. If you think all pit bulls are mean, vicious creatures, then you’re an ignorant idiot, plain and simple; choose what you think is a good dog and I’ll put Gracie up against them any day. That dog was so soft-hearted that she never even barked.

I loved that dog so hard that it is really hard for me to think her not being here anymore, and I am having to stop and think of something else for a few minutes so I can stop crying.

When I went back to Memphis over the holidays, I spent most of my time sitting next to her on the old loveseat that she used as a napping post. I would look down at Gracie peacefully snoring away and think that there ARE really good and true things in the world, that it’s not all crap and artifice and hardship and disappointment.

H once told me that she knew I was ok because Gracie liked me. In a funny way I knew I was ok, too, because Gracie liked me, like I’d gotten the blessing of someone higher up on the ethical chain. If this dog trusts me and likes me, I thought, then I could, indeed, possibly be a good person if I tried hard enough.

I’m an agnostic. I have searched and waited patiently for evidence of a God, or a heaven, or a hell, or an afterlife, or anything like that, to no result. I expect to die one day without ever finding any. The only thing that has ever given me pause and made me think that I have been too stubborn-headed about the nature of existence is that dog. Because if there is a Gracie, then maybe there is a God, and he/she/it is good. I don’t know. There are many horrible, evil things in this world. I do know Gracie was not one of those things, and if there is an afterlife that rewards virtue, then she is lounging on a sunny porch, taking a long nap, with an unlimited supply of Sonic burgers without cheese. I do know that the last thing she saw was my sister-in-law, Jessie, and that she was surrounded last night by people and animals that loved her just as hard or even harder than I do.

She hadn’t eaten for a few days, and my mother-in-law took her to the clinic yesterday, where they suspected cancer. Jessie, who just passed her boards as a vet (go Jessie!), immediately drove up from Mississippi, and she and Dr. Tower operated to save her, but her heart stopped before the operation was over and wouldn’t restart. And so she’s gone. There is nothing to be done about it – I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to try and save her, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to linger in pain.

So in a way this is good. But it doesn’t feel that great, not yet at least. H and I are just reeling – just stunned, almost struck numb – we haven’t figured out how to mourn properly, if there is such a thing as a proper way. It doesn’t feel real, I think, because we weren’t there. To me, in a way, she’s still alive, because the last time I saw her, she was, and she seemed ok, her usual sleepy, gentle self.

If you’ve never had a dog, or think of them as just animals, then all this probably seems pretty silly. It’s not silly to me at all. It’s life and death, and nothing is more important. H and I do not think that dogs are just dogs and pets are just pets. They are more like kindred spirits that accompany us and remind us of who we are, and as a result, I feel like a part of myself is gone.

I will probably dream about her, and I think those dreams will be pleasant echoes. Despite a rough start, she had a pretty good life. I wish it had been a little longer, but we have little control over such things.

I hate death right now.

Category(s): Mike's Posts, Personal Stuff

The return of students, Spring 2010

20 Jan 2010 | No Comments »

Today (yesterday, really, it’s past midnight) was my first day of teaching this spring.

There seems to be a never-ending supply of new students each semester. I could very likely continue to show up for classes for 30-odd more years (actually, that’s the plan) and never see an end to them. I’d never thought of my job as a battle against entropy, but education is never going to end as long as humans continue to reproduce. I’ve picked a field that isn’t going to get stale, that’s for sure.

I’m only teaching three sections this semester due to my taking on, at the last second, of some administrative functions – namely, the reading of numerous capstones and theses. There are no new preps, though I have done some moderate reshuffling of the assignments in all of the courses in response to student comments. I have ambitious plans this semester for writing an article or two, but those won’t get started until next week, alas.

Category(s): Mike's Posts

The kairotic moment for health care

20 Jan 2010 | No Comments »

Well, now that the Democrats are about to lose their supermajority in the Senate due to throwing away Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat over the past month, we are about to find out if the party has learned, finally, that the last chance in the foreseeable future for something resembling universal health care is rapidly disappearing. The House could simply sign the current  Senate bill (doubtful), or the Senate could start using the nuclear option and reconciliation (also doubtful). They were supposed to finish it before Xmas and failed. Now the do-nothing opposition has a rallying point. Obama was clever to leave the  health care bill to Congress so he could concentrate on other matters, but the problem is that our honorable legislative bodies really aren’t well suited for  epic  idea execution. Watching the Democrats debate their competing health care plans is like watching someone on fire try to drive a hard bargain on the price of a bucket of water. I suppose it’s better than the GOP strategy of sitting still in the hopes of the fire  going out at some undisclosed future point,  perhaps  dowsed by Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

Category(s): Mike's Posts, Politics

Revenge

03 Jan 2010 | No Comments »

I stumbled across an account of the development of The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge, one of my favorite all-time PC games, from 1991, by the game’s producer. Really interesting stuff, especially about how the two-part structure of the story came about.

I actually didn’t finish this game, which I bought nearly twenty years ago, until about four years back. I’d gotten stuck on one of the very last missions and given up, only to discover over a decade later that the reason all my airstrikes hadn’t been working was that my old 8088 had rendered the attacking fighters far slower than the troops they were trying to hit. DOSbox fixed that – I completed the mission on the first try.

Revenge is not only the first RTS-like game that I can remember playing (aside from The Ancient Art of War, to which Revenge clearly owes a debt), but it also did a really nice job of making each mission feel like it meant something (decisions made in previous missions affect future ones) and that it took place in the rich and detailed BattleTech universe. The decisions that the player makes during the incredibly long and tense sequence to rescue a certain character’s relative, for example, are not simple ones, and the best choice of action is not immediately apparent, even after the fact; and they are important decisions, too, not trivial ones.  Yes, I am being vague. It’s too great a game to ruin by discussing the plot, although I am sorely tempted.

Category(s): Gaming, Mike's Posts

These aren’t the shades of blue you’re looking for

02 Jan 2010 | No Comments »

Rereading Hume’s Enquiry has brought the so-called “missing shade of blue” problem to my attention again. I have never accepted that it is a problem, and while I was driving yesterday, I thought of a few ways to demonstrate this.

The problem is as follows. Hume’s theory of perception classifies all perceptions as either ideas or impressions. Impressions come from sense experience; ideas come from impressions. This theory holds as long as no ideas can be generated without the use of an impression. However, Hume lists an apparent exception: imagine a man who has lived his entire life having seen all the different shades of blue save one. If shown a palette of all the shades of blue that he is familiar with, placed in order, will he be able to detect the absence of a shade? The common-sense answer is yes – and yet Hume dismisses it as a minor if singular expection. Several camps exist on this issue – one holds it really is a exception, and another does not, but it’s not easy to reconcile either position with Hume’s line of argument.

I can think of several reasons that Hume was right to dismiss this objection, though he probably should not have been as mysteriously cavalier about the matter, especially given the rhetorical aims of the Enquiry.

Some of the following suppositions  match preexisting arguments.  I have placed them in order from weakest to strongest.

1.) The situation as given is impossible to replicate. Color is not made of separate shades, but rather a continuum. How can the man be sure he has not seen that shade before? Did a team of scientists keep him in a bubble for his entire life that was drained out that particular shade? They would have to make sure he had never seen a prism or a rainbow. It’s like saying the man has used numbers all his life without ever encountering 42. Could Hume’s man perceive a missing shade without the presentation of all the shades of blue? Probably not. The example is loaded – it assumes, in fact, that there is a missing shade, a problem I’ll address a bit later.

2.) If I accept the situation, the idea of the missing shade is still not independent of impression – it requires extensive knowledge of color, which is dependent on simple sense perception. One individual color on the entire spectrum does not constitute an idea independent of sense perception, especially if defined as a blend of two colors.  Furthermore, the mere notice of a gap in the sequence is built on a foundation of years of experience with color, and the concept of a gap itself is not necessary to mathematics that I know of. This argument is a little too ordinary-language philosophy for me, but it’s important nonetheless.

3.) The perception of a gap in a series, or in any pattern, does not require that gap to actually exist. This, I feel, was Hume’s plan all along – his coming evisceration of causality would render the blue-shade example moot.

Much of the argumentative strength of the blue-shade example comes from our knowledge that there IS a missing shade, but the man in the example does not have that certainty. He only suspects there is one – he cannot prove it, for he has no sensory experience of it. Rather, he can only suggest there is a very high probability there is a missing shade, much like I can only posit there is a very high probability that the Indian Ocean exists (I’ve never seen it) until I have seen it, and even then I may be misled, for our senses are rather untrustworthy.

In the 1985 film Goonies, the Mikey character finds the skeleton of a long-dead pirate called One-Eyed Willy, who is still wearing an eyepatch. Curious, Mikey pulls back the eyepatch… and there is no eye socket, only bone. The expectation was that the patch covered something absent, but Willy never had an eye to begin with. The anticipated missing eye is revealed as non-existent. This line of thinking leads rather quickly to  Schrodinger’s cat; it is not until the moment of sense perception that questions of existence or non-existence can be partially enlightened.

Imagine this scenario – Hume’s blue-deprived man perceives there is a missing shade, and goes looking for it… and never finds it. He experiments with dyes, travels the world, gives talks to breathless audiences, writes furious  monographs. He dies without ever seeing it or without any human being ever finding it. Some scholars, in fact, suggest his perceived “gap” in the color spectrum is actually a fundamental principle of the color spectrum, evidence of a limitation of the human eye, or a mere symptom of the man’s madness-tinged brilliance.

Hume’s notion of causality allows such a scenario, as it allows ALL scenarios. The mere notice of a possible missing shade demands nothing. Take John Couch Adams’s predictions of the existence of Neptune. What if they had come to nothing? Newton’s laws would have to be reexamined.  What if, rather, the measurements made by Bouvard had been incorrect, and there were no discrepancies in the data upon remeasurement? The perception of a gap or discrepancy in a pattern is a sense perception that requires absolutely nothing to follow it. This of course does not require that nothing does – only that deductive logic is useless for such questions.

But, you might, ask, can’t Hume’s colorist have an IDEA of a missing shade that is independent of sense perception without it having to exist? Well, no. I once worked in a eyeglass lab with a color-blind fellow, who oddly enough was very good at color dying lenses; he went solely by darkness of tint and the labels on the dye vats. He knew there was an entire world of color that he did not have access to, and I’m positive he thought about what it might be like on many occasions, but he had nothing save dark/light patterns – anyone who has experienced color knows it is far more than that – and word labels to go on. They could give him an ‘idea’ of what he could not experience, but he has no independent way of confirming if his ‘idea’ matches up, save the unreliable testimony of six billion people or so. His ‘idea’ cannot approach a color-sighted person’s ‘idea’ of that shade (which is itself imperfect in proportion to experience with that shade); it is at best an approximation made up of similar sensory perceptions that he does have access to.

Category(s): Mike's Posts, Philosophy

Fifteen years later

31 Dec 2009 | No Comments »

Today (Wednesday) was yet another pleasant vacation day, and I spent it doing something that I’d put off for no less than fifteen years – finishing Final Fantasy 6 for the SNES. I played the game first when it came out in 1994, but stopped close to the very end. I took it up twice again over the years on emulators, bringing it again to the same point, but losing interest both times. The last time I did this was in the airport, waiting for a flight after the 2008 RSA convention; I kept that playthrough on my laptop and dusted it off today.

As I believe ‘ending fear’ kept me from finishing (I’ve discussed this phenomenon  before), as well as remembering that my first attempt at Kefka’s Tower in 1994 was ill-prepared, I decided to be extra careful in my old age and did some leveling, bringing all the characters over level 45, acquiring the Paladin Shield, and making sure I had at least a half-dozen characters that could cast Ultima.

So how was the ending? Gorgeous. Twenty minutes long at least.  Worth the wait. If I can get a certain friend of mine (cough, cough  COUGH) to do some podcasts discussing classic games, I think this one would be a good conversation starter, as it is prima facie evidence for games as art. Beautiful music, excellent gameplay, compelling story and characters, a great villain, top-notch visual design that cuts through the severe technical limitations of the SNES – what’s not to like?

I remember an incredible amount of detail from the story, far more than I remember from even a good novel or film. I have always been intrigued by how it doesn’t really have a main character. Nominally it would be Terra, but Celes is just as compelling, and then there’s Locke… it’s really, rather, about how each character’s individual narrative intersects and complements other character  narratives, the same trick that all the good FF games pull, with wildly differing levels of success.

I find it difficult to put a finger on why this particular mixture worked so well.  The overall structure and timing of the plot as the assembly, separation and reunion of a extended family would seem to have something to do with it, but I would not want to discount the genuinely pleasing  friendships that spring up between otherwise very different characters, and their life-affirming effect when contrasted against the assorted baddies. And it never hurts, of course, when there’s a play within a play.

Category(s): Gaming, Mike's Posts

Agreeable

24 Dec 2009 | No Comments »

It’s Xmas eve, and so far I am finding the holidays agreeable. H and I have returned to the Memphis area for a spell, and it has been enjoyable to sit around and do nothing more important than play through 20 years or so of Europa Universalis 3 in a sitting, eat too much, and take long naps. Kara, our 9-month old boykin spaniel,  has no less than 5 dogs and 6 cats to play with here, so I perceive her mostly as a red-shifted blur, now that she is approaching the speed of light.

I have even gotten some reading done. I’m almost finished with Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and I’ve reread Hume’s Inquiry yet again. Hume always resets my keel; I feel far more balanced and reasonable in my core assumptions after reading Hume than any other philosopher or associated work. Come to think of it, back in undergrad when I failed Philosophy 101 twice due to falling asleep in the morning after working the late shift at Target and not getting home until after midnight, I never missed the lectures on Hume – I definitely listened to them three times. I finally got a B.

Category(s): Mike's Posts, Personal Stuff

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