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Dirge of Cerberus: so dark and shiny!

15-Oct-06

I think I’m almost at the very end of Dirge of Cerberus, and I’ve only logged about 5 hours of game time. I could be totally wrong though. I’m not cheating and looking up guides or anything. hm… btw… god. Vincent is so hot. (*snickers*)

so… time for some Dirge of Cerberus reviews and reviewing by penny!

I like:

  1. The style/tone of the game.
    With the exception of one small side-scene where the point of view shifts to that stupid cat Cait Sith… the entire game is pretty dark and serious. I like the odd combination of mysterious-vampire/demon-like-magic that vincent seems to radiate, combined with the political/technological/environmental stuff that final fantasy VII is all about.
  2. Vincent (duh).
    I like his character, his story, his twisted and broken body. I have to admit that I HATE his stupid cell phone and it’s stupid gothic silver cross style. it makes his character more like a costume complete with matching accessories! omg ponies! … but whatever. He was my favorite character from the original game… his story never got explained fully. Now it has, and my jaw has sorta… dropped. (nope, no spoiling.)
  3. Gameplay style:
    I love the 1st/3rd person shooter thing. woo for mixing it up in the FF genre. And as far as the 3rd person action style game goes, it seems like the time the creators spent on Kingdom Hearts influenced this one… it’s sort of like KH, only you’ve got a gun in your hand (well, 3), and you actually have to fricken aim. Not that aiming is all that hard or anything. It’s like halo without the funky controls, and with a lot more auto-aiming. So… Halo minus about 200 in difficulty. plus mele combat. and materia. woo shiny materia.

What I don’t like:

  1. The leveling system.
    I HATE that the whole “leveling up” system is now pretty much non-existant. Unless you’re really really good and get a really high score at each chapter, you’re not going to get all that much experience. The drop-rate of items is also really controlled, so you can’t gain enough gold to upgrade your weapons very well… which I suspect is one reason the second thing I dislike about the game is a problem for me:
  2. The Tsviets
    Granted, I haven’t beaten any of them yet (not for lack of trying), but the fight with Rosso the Crimson (and I assume all the other Tsviets, although I haven’t gotten past her yet) is DISPROPORTIONATELY hard compared to all other battles before her. It’s really fricken annoying. I’ve only died once in all the other boss fights, and I can’t get her down past about 1/2 health before she wipes the floor with me.

What I’ve got mixed feelings on:

  1. Inventory limit
    The limit to how many items you can carry makes the game a major challenge. At first I thought this was really really lame, but now I realize that the challenge is there for a reason. It keeps people “playing fair” and keeps people from just stocking up and maxing out on all the potions you can hold. it makes sense, considering ALL of your items are a usable at any time. The creators put a lot of care into the small logistics of the game to make sure that even the most experienced FF player isn’t going to be using any of their old tricks to get through unscathed. On that note… next item:
  2. The lack of any save-points.
    Probably for the same reasons that they’ve limited your items inventory, they’ve also limited how games are saved. For one thing, you can never actually “save” your game in the conventional sense. You can’t save a copy just before a boss you like and then re-play it later (or even just as a precaution before a boss in case you die). There are NO save points. Your game is auto-saved, and I still haven’t quite figured out how all that works because when I return to a game, I sometimes expect it to pick up in a place a little farther along from where it ends up starting… I don’t know. I’ll leave that to someone else.
  3. Related: the Temp Save system
    Both this and the lack of save points is frustrating PROBABLY because I’m used to being able to be a little more reckless. Back when I knew I could just make a temp-save, go nuts and learn the level, and then just restart, I’d do it. But this temp save system is meant to prevent that. Once you re-open a temp save file, the file is destroyed, preventing you from just resetting the console. It’s pretty obvious that the creators know the kinds of tricks players like to use to “cheat.” On the other hand, this system solves one of the biggest problems of any other RPG with fixed save-points you have to manually access: you can save and quit your game at any time. So, if your mother tells you to get your ass down stairs and do the dishes, you have no excuse (or in my case, if my ride is about to leave or something). I love AND hate both these details. They show the kind of thought that was put into it, and it steers players more into playing the game how the creators want it to be played.

Overall, I love the game so far. I love the FF saga, and you really can’t have that saga without vincent (Soooo odd that vincent is an optional character in the original game.)

I also find it kind of strange and cool that I bought the game only a few days away from Oct. 13… Vincent’s birthday (according to the original FFVII booklet).

I wonder why they didn’t try to release the game on that day and see how many fans would notice.

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Literacy, technology, Google, and India

05-Oct-06

(or titled “part 2 of the “hole in the wall” India literacy experiment post!”)

Google announced yesterday that it’s launching the Google Literacy project to help spread literacy and provide resources and lots of other stuff for teachers, parents, mentors, students, and just regular people (with internet access) to help do so.

While promoting literacy worldwide via the internet is not a new thing (just do a google search. basically every self-respecting university, and a number of big organizations also are working to create a more literate world), I think google’s visibility, their philosophies, and their resources can add a lot to this.

Google’s literacy project basically acts as a portal to some of its services, like book search, google scholar, and other things, all acting as a kind funnel and pointing to things related to literacy. It draws attention to literacy, education, and pro-actively does something about it in the google-way of doing things… by organizing information and making it more accessible.

That’s way more powerful than you’d initially think, really. Honestly. Because most people in “literacy initiatives” or projects try to open schools, try to gather volunteer support, write and publish, or they manually collect links to resources and re-post them. But google uses it’s own technologies to sort and find these resources for you, so there’s no manual lists of resources to sort and maintain, and all the results are current, relevant, etc.

Plus, making this kind of portal (rather than yet another technology/news/omg-cool-stuff! portal) shows what kinds of values Google celebrates and wants to promote.

So… India. The googleblog announcement talks about India, and how it has 1/3 of the worlds “literacy problem”. And just yesterday, I blogged about the hole-in-the-wall experiment from India, which showed that there was some exciting and active research going on involving literacy, technology, and accessibility to this education.

Coincidence? maybe. Awesome? yes.

Gotta read more.

But first, must go back to work.

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ban a book during banned books week. yes!

03-Oct-06

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451″ came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence

Hahahahahaha. coincidence, my ass.

so… I’ve been hanging out on reddit.com this morning. can you tell?

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“Hole in the wall” computer literacy experiment

03-Oct-06

“ New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra has a radical proposal for bringing his country’s next generation into the Info Age”

I don’t wish to claim that this shows anything more or less than what it has shown, which is that curious kids in groups can train themselves to operate a computer at a basic level. In doing so, they also can get a generally good idea about the nature of browsing and the nature of the Internet … And, therefore, if they view these things as worth learning, no formal infrastructure is needed [to teach them]. (emph mine)

What he did was this: he mounted a camera in a tree, embedded an internet-connected computer in a wall in a “slum” area, and watched what happened.

He calls it “minimally invasive education” and believes that the key to promoting authentic computer literacy is “for teachers and other adults to give [kids] free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves.”

Wow. Yes yes yes.

Another cool point was that the kids taught themselves in groups. it seemed that being in a group was a major component to self-learning.

How’s that for authentic education based on collaboration, social-ness, etc. de-centralized learning, and all those other literacy and educational buzzwords floating around! woo hoo!

But it makes sense. People don’t learn by rote memorization or being forced to learn something. They don’t really truly learn material by sitting at a desk and forcing it into their brains. we learn by practicing, doing, asking questions, figuring stuff out. NOT by lecture. we learn because we have a question, a problem, or out of curiosity.

lectures can help us prepare for tests, but this kind of “figure stuff out” method is what gets you to really learn something.

The thing that’s way cool is that this shows that this type of ‘decentralized’ learning model isn’t all that expensive.

So what’s the real difference between adults and kids? Just that adults “can’t” learn new things? No. it’s more like the sense of curiosity and self-confidence just fades or grows out of them or something. So the key to always being able to learn is to retain your sense of curiosity and spontenaety.

All these things are sort of “common sense”, but now there’s some sorta scientific “proof” that this is true.

I just wish that we had an educational system that matched research like this. individual teachers who model their classrooms around these ideas are awesome, but when they’re forced to “teach to the test” or their kids will fail and they’ll lose their funding… it just hurts everyone.

Anyway, gotta get back to work… just didn’t want to forget to write about this.

Filed in literacy | | Comments (2) »

AOL sued for releasing member search data

26-Sep-06

Wow.

I didn’t even hear about this before now, but today while reading some of my work-related rss feeds, I came face-to-face with the story of AOL’s big screw up last July… and the fact that now they’re being sued for $5k a person-whose-data-was-released…

wow.

Here’s a link to the complaint and here’s a story and another story.

The “Factual Allegations” in the complaint outline the basic facts of what happened and the consequences of AOL’s mistake. (I read all of it. yeah. really I did.) It explains the basic mechanics of the search marketing business, how companies and regular people can (and have) profited improperly from the release of the data, and the types of potential damage that could still occur from it (including the steps necessary to connect the data with the real names, addresses, SSNs, etc of the searchers).

The thing that makes me sick is that AOL did nothing to make this up to their members once they started realizing what AOL did. All they did was offer members who complained a free month of service (this is even described in the suit). *boggles*

Item 23 describes what happened to one woman whose data was released and the New York Times apparently wrote an article about her after tracking her down THROUGH HER SEARCH DATA. Quote from the complaint:

Once identified, the reporters contacted the individual and asked her questions about her Internet Searches, which included…. As expressed, by the AOL member, her “whole personal life” was revealed. AOL’s response has been to do nothing. AOL has not even bothered to notify its members that their private communications have been released. AOL readily admits that the release of the Database was wrong. In AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein’s own words, “This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it.”

Crazy. (the language-nerd in me cringes at the use of “AOL has not even bothered to…” because “not even bothered to” is not a very neutral way of describing AOL’s (lack of) response.)

Anyway… someone’s heads are probably rolling (three people lost/gave up their jobs over this incident already… I imagine a few more will too once this really heats up in court.)

Anyway… newsworthy, yes.

Distraction from work, yes.

Important? hell yeah.

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Mark Danielewski in Portland!

19-Sep-06

I’m insanely stoked. Mark Danielewski is coming to Portland, and I get to leave work a little early to drive up there and see him. My plan is to get House of Leaves and The Whalestone Letters signed if possible, and buy Only Revolutions while I’m there. God I hope I’m brave enough to actually talk to him and ask him to sign my books. It was hard enough to be brave when I was part of CWS and meeting authors every month (omg, Dinner with Sherman Alexie!)… you’d think I’d be over my shyness by now.

Credit Where Credit is Due: Cepcion introduced me to House of Leaves a long time ago, and while I haven’t ACTUALLY finished it yet, it’s disturbing and powerful all the same. Amazon.com has a good editorial review that talks about the meta-novel structure and the crazy “sometimes you have to hold the pages backwards and in the mirror to read it” typography, or you can google Mark Danielewski and read about his crazy blue hair and social-networking++ way of getting fan participation for his new book, Only Revolutions.

I was a member of the Only Revolutions forums, but not an active participant because I joined way too late, and kept telling myself that I wanted to finish HOL before getting more involved… little did I know that time was running out.

So… according to the Only Revolutions Website (careful, lots of sound and animation!), he’ll be at Powell’s Books in Portland at 7:30pm TONIGHT to read from his new book!

I’ll be there.

Will you?

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Google gives public domain books!

31-Aug-06

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.

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OpenOffice to become a native Mac App!!

30-Aug-06

Macworld shares the happy OO news.

Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, will ship in a native version for OS X next month.

You have NO IDEA how happy this makes me. It’s soo difficult for me to run OO on my mac, because NeoOffice and running X11 take up too many resources and slow everything down. NeoOffice is really buggy for me and has been both when I was using Tiger and Panther. It was just awful. Friends have tried to help me, have told me to stop complaining and buy some $20 word processor… no one seemed to understand my pain.

I’ve blogged about my wordprocessor pain before and it resulted in some big discussion, which basically added up to “you’re screwed because no one writes FOSS for OSX.

Well, I needed free, I needed open source, and I needed it to be stable. I especially needed this as an English major. And next month, I’ll finally have it!

Well, I wish this’d been released a few months ago. :) Sure would have helped… haha.

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Google opened Writely!

24-Aug-06

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before now (it’s been two whole days!) but, according to lots of news sources (news.google) google opened up Writely for general registration!

I’ve been a really big fan of writely for probably six months now… BEFORE Google acquired them! A friend of mine and I wrote a collaborative project last Winter (about online collaborative writing, no less) using Writely. (It was a very meta-meta written research project. good fun. sorta… actually, not at all. but that had nothing to do with Writely and more to do with the overwhelming nature of our project)

Anyway, I’m excited, aren’t you?!

Why I love Writely:

When my friend and I were searching for online collaborative writing software, Writely was the only one that seemed to be 100% aligned with our goals and interests in collaborative writing. At the time, Writely didn’t yet have the feature to track which writer made which change, and we thought that was a cool deviation from conventional writing tools because we were interested in truly blending two author’s voices and words (although, we’ve sinced learned that there is more to individual voice than a timestamp and a username attached).

Writely was also the only tool we saw that was apparently designed exactly for what we wanted to use it for: write an essay collaboratively. It’s marketed more generally, as an all-purpose wordprocessor instead of as something for technical writers or for corporate collaborative documents, or anything like that.

I loved writely because it was community based, open, and very easy to use. It represented a direction that I think more webbased tools should go in (and perhaps already are): target a specifically more general audience but keep the software simple and contained. Visual interfaces are GOOD when well-designed with “what people actually do” in mind. Keep the feature-set simple, intuitive and specific to the job it’s designed to do (feature-creep == bad). Use open communication forums like a web-forum or a blog to keep in touch with users and keep up with the “what people actually use/need” current.

It’s been my “mission” for a long time (well, since I met Alex Polvi, anyway… who made me realize that my perspective on technology isn’t worthless) to try and help bridge the gap between non-geek “end users” and the tools I know could help them. It started with me wanting to share OpenOffice.org with other English majors, or help them learn how to maintain their computer better so that stuff wouldn’t crash at 3am when they’re trying to write an essay. I tried sharing Ubuntu with some, but it was still too “intimidating” (read “different from windows/mac”) and “buggy” (read, when stuff does break, it really breaks, and sometimes its hard for someone like me to find a linux geek without feeling stupid, or annoying etc).

I want poor students (like I was) to know what’s out there and that they don’t have to pirate the most popular (corporate, closed source, buggy, vulnerable, EXPENSIVE) office suite in order to pass Wr121. They’re already paying enough on tuition and textbooks… their pencils, paper, and wordprocessors should be cheap, if not free!

I knew I was lucky, because I grew up geeky and knew how to search for free alternatives to what most other people used. I also had this nagging problem with pirating software after I left high-school age because I think that the need for piracy at all demonstrates that the industry isn’t meeting its userbase’s needs.

I want it to be possible to use powerful free things (like linux, OpenOffice.org) to do Whatever You Need WITHOUT the need to be a total tech-geek or experienced trouble-shooter.

Anyway, Writely seemed to be totally aligned with my views on collaborative writing, literacy, software, and openness, so I fell in love. Hard. :)

So obviously, I was thrilled when Google acquired them. And now I’m even more thrilled that they’re finally opening registration. Woo hoo!

Anyway, nothing but awesome can come of this… and I’m done blogging for now.

Oh, and btw, here’s the writely blog.

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How to write business emails

17-Aug-06

I’d been telling people I worked with in the Writing Center that in a business environment, emails should be short, easy to reply to, and direct.

I thought I knew what that meant… I’m a good writer, confident in my ability to be professional and clear… direct and concise… I asked a client a question 7 days ago about something related to their company… something I needed to know in order to finish something for them, and never got a reply. At all.

I basically wrote:

Can you give us more information about your [type of service] services? For example, which products on your site apply to these offers? How big can orders be? Do you have any electronic or print materials describing these services we can reference?

And then I said “my goal is to do x, y, and z with this information” in about 2 sentences…

I really thought that this was concise enough. It really only asks one question “can you give us more information” and then clarifies what types of information we need. If I saw an email like that in the Writing Center, I would have said “good job with being clear, clarifying, etc” and thought it fit the business environment.

However, like I said, I never got a reply, and today we were about to finish the project for this client and we still had these unresolved questions.

The bosses from Portland came down today and our President shot an email to this client to get the issue resolved because for one thing, time is running out. His email was literally 2 lines long and just asked

“Hey [name], do you do [x] or do you do [y] for your customers with your [type of service] services? Thanks, [Name].”

…

We got a reply in 5 minutes. He saw my email and suggested that it might have APPEARED that I was asking a complicated question simply by having so many words in my query.

So really folks, short is better. It’s better to shoot off a few emails several times a day with specific questions than to put them all into one email and send it out hoping for a long complete reply.

Moral of the story is: ask one question per email. Make it something that the person can answer sitting down in about 30 seconds. DON’T suggest options or alternative ways of seeing the question. “Either/or” emails work well. Essayistic thoughtful ones do not.

DON’T BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR.

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