Awesome Tapes From Africa

Tags, as long as they are accurate, are just what I’ve wanted. I long ago stopped bothering to seej just fantasy or just sci-fi – there are plenty of sub-groups within both that I just don’t care for, but there’s no quick way to spot them, even with the book in my hands. Tags could do that for me. I don’t need a genre, I need a range of subject matter.

And genre is a rather subtle limiter too. I would mentally classify quite a number of favourite 18th, 19th, and early 20th century classics as fantasy, but according to the world at large they are simply “literature” (and owing to their age and establishment as classics, people I speak to just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of, for example, the works of Dumas or Haggard being fantasy). If I went looking by genre I might never find them. Remove genre and just use tags like “adventure”, “swash-buckling”, “futurism”, or even “bodice-ripper”, and finding books to match your interests becomes so much easier.

As a virtual DJ, I myself find that the existing Genre field in ID3 tags is increasingly restrictive. Obsolete, even, given the way musical styles subdivide and combine, not just on a per-album basis but a per-track one as well.

Increasingly, a song, article, image – or book – will reflect the influences of more than one traditional genre. For instance, I have a catch-all genre I call ‘bronycore’ (i.e. music created by fans of the TV cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic), but in that genre are tunes whose style ranges from classic filk (e.g. The Beatle Bronies) to dubstep, chiptunes, rave… you get the idea, crude as this example is.

However, tags are only as good as the tagger. An item may emerge with no tags at all, or be plastered with as many tags as the tagger thinks are even remotely relevant.

Personally, I would prefer a more subtle system of weighted tags: searchers can add to the weight of tags they consider most important, or irrelevant to the content. Yes, such a system would be open to abuse, but so are any other cataloguing fields. (Twice I have obtained completely misnamed files through Songr. Not good when you’re performing live!)

Whether or not such a system is feasible in the real world, however, is open to debate.

Yes, the graphics look crude, but that’s deliberate. The gameplay is simple, but infinitely rich, depending on what you decide to do. Create a great stronghold with all life’s good things? Live as a nomad with just what you can carry, endlessly exploring? It’s up to you.

View from the bridge to my forest hut

As a Second Life resident, I tend to prefer the ‘sandbox’ style of game where you can simply wander and explore to your heart’s content; modifying the world arbitrarily on the fly, doubly so. And changing the face of the world is what you need to do in Minecraft simply to survive the night.

Playing alone, you are dumped into a world of cubes. Ground, water, clouds, trees, even animals – all are made of cuboids. But the square sun crossing the sky isn’t just for show. Today is your first day. You need to make tools to build trustworthy shelter for the coming night. Before the monsters appear.

To fend off the zombies, skeleton archers, spiders, the iconic walking suicide dildos known as ‘creepers’ and the threat of just looking at an enderman, you need to punch a tree to collect blocks of wood, then create planks from said wood, then make a crafting table, where you can make wooden picks and swords. Now, you need to find stone, to make sturdy shelter, and preferably coal, so torches can drive away the darkness. Where they spawn.

Perhaps you survive the night. It’s only half as long as day, but it can seem to last centuries. Time to venture forth and find means of further building. Stone tools to mine iron ore to smelt, then make armour, and more durable tools. Digging deeper uncovers redstone for creating the equivalent of electrical circuits, gold and diamonds, lava falls and pools – and of course more danger as you probe into the dark. But eventually you need to travel further afield to find ores, or food. You learn to make fences, how to farm grain and even animals for a steady food supply. The discovery of rail types and mine carts allows you to travel further in one game day. And eventually you find the stronghold.

The stronghold which needs the slaying of endermen to open the portal to The End.

For now, I play two games. One is a multiplayer survival game, where the charity of my fellow Caledonians helped me to establish myself quickly. Ecclesford was built, then rebuilt, then demolished and rebuilt again, now a flourishing farm of melons, pumpkin, sugar cane, grain, cows and sheep. If I apply myself, I make cake for the denizens of Caledon Cubidon. I also extended a railway, with stations, from the central village to an NPC town two days’ walk south – but with the somewhat laggy assistance of rail, you can get there in a day.

Ecclesford, in Caledon Cubidon. There is no private or distance-culled chat in Minecraft.

The other is grimmer. My home phone number dropped me in forest. Only when I looked out over a river did I save myself the effort of digging a hole in the ground, and instead fled to a nearby village in the desert.

And then I realised I didn't have to cower in a hole in the ground

The walls weren’t there at first. The villagers huddled inside at night as zombies pounded on the doors, spiders scuttled above, and skeletons rattled about. It took many days, excavating above and around the chasm to the west. If it had not been for the dungeon next to it being so shallow that it had no ceiling, I wouldn’t have spotted it.

Nobody here but us villagers... and the odd spider that climbs in.

With the safety provided by a reasonably secure food source (and eventually, walls) I began delving into the chasm. It wasn’t all that, but it was enough to make my first iron tools.

A dungeon, sacked even of the chests it held

Play here is more sheer survival. Every day, I am less concerned with exploration and aesthetic design of fanciful structures than trying to find where the next vein of ore – or source of food – might be. And moreover, deciding what I am going to do today: Explore further? Or follow the signposts back to the village and safety?

The obvious difference between multiplayer and single is that often there’s the chance to chat with folk… mind you, I also hear there are player-versus-player servers as well. A friendly server, with well-stocked community chests, is a treasure, a buffer against the business of survival and establishing yourself. Instead you can jump in and collaborate in grand projects, or simply strike out to claim new lands… in a world with six times the surface area of Earth.

Stone, Water, Lava and Darkness

Also, the world is self-contained. Unlike SL, you don’t need to pay for access to inworld resources. You simply have to work for them. Gather wood. Make planks. Make tools. Excavate stone and ore. Hunt or herd animals. Tend plants. Fend off hostiles. No money down apart from the initial registration fee. No rezzing prims out of thin air, you need to have them in your inventory.

And that, to me, is part of Minecraft’s charm: you have to work hard, against the clock, for your building materials. Every road you make, every torch you place, every object crafted, is a triumph against a world that is either indifferent or outright hostile.

Maybe one day I’ll make it to and through The End.

We fear the things – and people — that we do not understand far more than the things we do, even if the latter are much more risky.  For this reason, it’s not surprising that people fear technology. Its newness is confusing and no one’s quite certain what to do with the promises it offers.  Furthermore, technology allows us to see people who are different than us, the very people we are likely to fear.  We fear the unknown.  And technology is both an unknown itself and a vehicle to connecting us to greater unknowns.

Our fears are amplified when they intersect with our insecurities and challenge our ability to be in control.  Nowhere is this more palpable then when it comes to a parent’s desire to protect their child.  Much to my frustration, fear is the dominant emotion that drives our society’s relationship to young people.  We are afraid FOR them.  And we are afraid OF them.  We’re afraid of all of the ways in which our children might be harmed.  And we’re afraid of all of the things that children might do to disrupt the status quo.

From “The Power of Fear in Networked Publics” by Dana Boyd, as delivered at Webstock, Wellington NZ and SXSW, Austin Texas.

In a recent study published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, psychologists Gary Lupyan (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Daniel Swingley (University of Pennsylvania) conducted a series of experiments to discover whether talking to oneself can help when searching for particular objects… It was found that speaking to themselves helped people find the objects more quickly.

I talk to myself a lot, partly to try and help myself focus on and work through problems, and also shut out distractions when I’m trying to think or remember.

The only problem of course is that when you’re talking to yourself, people always think you’re talking to them.

I’ve had more bosses than I can remember. The ones who left an indelible impression in my brain were in the extremes: either great or horrible. There are many books written about how to be a great boss, for example Managing Humans. Today I’m going to take the contrarian position, and tell you how to be horrible at it.

Having suffered under a boss like this, I feel this is quite relevant to my interests.

Besides, it's supposed to be a COCK horse, not QWOP

From Dynamic Model of a Horse Gallop in 2D by Eddy Boxerman.

What’s this about cock horses and Banbury crosses?

Original PIU thread

Ecclesford, the early days on the Caledon server

First off, I finally cracked and purchased Minecraft, the sandbox game that’s become an indie gaming legend. I play on a private server run by Desmond Shang, the Guvnah of the Independent State of Caledon, one of the oldest and best-known regions in Second Life’s Steamlands.

The above image is of my home and farm about a game day’s journey south from the spawnpoint and Caledon town. There’s a lava pit in the foreground (the village dump) and an extra house for visitors. It’s a nice place except that spiders swim over and crawl around on the roof when I’m trying to sleep.

I’ll do a proper blog post about it later. But for now, random Tumblr likes after the cut.

Times are hard for dreamers

I’ve been busier than usual with the mail run, as another postie has been off for three weeks and I’ve been filling in. Up until the week before Easter, it was insanely lucrative. Alas, it’s over now, and I have to fill in time until the usual deluge of power bills.

The search for full time work has come to a standstill; there’s simply nothing out there that, well, works for me.

Mother of bier...

I think it’s time to bottle the latest batch of brew. It’s a Northern Rock bock kit using a Nut Brown Ale malted sugar mix. I also need to consider another DIY project: making a temperature-control box for the fermenter. My brews tend to stop working at 1.010 instead of 1.005.

Reminds me of the Steamlands for some reason.

I could do a whole bloggy picture post about my feelings about the job search, but that would be enormously depressing.

Frankly, I want to somehow escape this pathetic existence of mine. To enter a realm where I actually matter, where what I do isn’t treated as a waste of everyone’s time including mine – and that includes my efforts to find out what I can do in the first place.

Thank you and goodnight.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

– Charles Bukowski

Mermaid pandas with huge red lips drinking beer. Um, yeah.