Nate On The Net

So I’ve been working on getting my little browser-based MMO up and running again. I seem to have gotten the basic engine working on this server, so if you want to check it out in all of its pre-alpha glory, it’s at brainsuckingmutants.com – there are a lot of bugs to fix, be warned. Anyway, the basic idea is wandering around a city collecting items, beating up other players, and drawing things — so far. My plan is to get it much more playable and add a lot of content over the next few weeks.:)

This info is available elsewhere on the web, but it was hard to find, so maybe reposting it here will make it easier (and if I need it again, I’ll be able to find it myself!).

If you are trying to use BitmapData.draw() to create BitmapData based on some file that you loaded from a remote server, e.g., via loadMovie(), and your output BitmapData is blank/empty/all white space, there is a good chance that you need to force your AS2 code to load the crossdomain.xml file from the remote server via System.security.loadPolicyFile() in order for it to work. Without this, Flash decides that it doesn’t have permissions to write the image to a new BitmapData object, even if it’s already happily displaying the loaded image to you on the screen. Makes no sense to me, but this is the workaround.:)

Hope this helps someone else who hasn’t made the move to AS3 yet.

Well, September isn’t over, but my experiment with pricing my biopunk novel, Fourwar, on Amazon Kindle at $0.99 is. I reduced the price at the beginning of September, made the requisite announcements on Twitter and my other social networks, and pressed on with my (admittedly light) marketing efforts. Net result? Zero sales, no change from August.

To further my experiment, I’ve decided to go the other way and try a month priced at $4.99 instead. I suspect the price doesn’t really matter if you’re an “unknown” author. I also suspect that, like Robert Sawyer hints on his blog, self publishing is hard in SF generally – whether you take that as “speculative fiction” or “science fiction,” it seems like this stuff is just not going to fly off “virtual” shelves in the same way that a titillating romance novel or a traditional whodunit would. So, more work on marketing for me.:) Unfortunately, I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to spam the fuck out of every blog and forum in existence, so trying to find more organic ways of advertising has been challenging.

In terms of measuring general interest and exposure, I get somewhat confusing results comparing awstats reports to Google Analytics reports on my blog, and the latter can’t track certain things. What I do know is that my own website stats claim that, in September to date, the free PDF version of Fourwar was downloaded 19 times, and my first novel, Alice [free PDF], 10 times. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, Amazon doesn’t show Kindle page traffic to authors, so you’re out of luck trying to figure out if you’re even being noticed on Amazon if you aren’t actively making sales.

Anyway, the experiment will press on. My third novel, a sort of urban sci-fantasy tale, is sitting at about 50,000 unedited words now, so small progress! I’m hoping to have a finished draft by the end of the year (but I know I said that before). I’m also working on yet-another-edit of Alice, which I’ll then place on the Amazon Kindle store as well as leaving it available under a CC license here.

I’ll close with a couple of very rough-draft thumbnails of images I’m working on – more things that I hope to finish by the end of the year.:)

So today, we find out that Facebook changed everything on us yet again. Although I don’t use Facebook anymore, I have a “fakebook” account that I haven’t yet deactivated, so I note firsthand the utter impossibility now of finding out what any of your “friends” are up to since Facebook now decides for you what you should see instead of allowing chronology to do the job for you.:P

Secondly, my old MySpace band page has been, for some time, auto-accepting friends requests thanks to some old change they made that was supposed to help bands who have to manually approve hundreds or thousands of friends requests per day. But that has lately turned into the auto-accept-spamming-bands feature, where bands I’ve never heard of in genres I’m completely uninterested in befriend me and send me self-promotional messages in gangsta-ese or some other brand of English butchered for the sake of “cool.” Thanks, MySpace.

Finally, Google Plus has utterly failed to..well, do anything new at all since they added the games. One-sided API access is something, I guess, but not that interesting since it’s read-only. Ah well, at least they haven’t made it more annoying to use. Go Google+!

I just finished playing through Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and as a long-time fan of the series, I want to post my thoughts on the overall experience here. I should forewarn you that I actually liked playing Invisible War, although the original was still by far the best, so perhaps you’ll consider my taste suspect, but in any case…

Overall, the game was exceedingly well-done. I finish about one in ten video games that I play, maybe less, so the fact that I bothered to finish it in the first place is a testament to the degree to which I enjoyed it. (Other story-based game series that I’ve actually finished are Mass Effect, Halo, Uncharted, and Assassin’s Creed, for the record.) The experience was much closer to the original Deus Ex in terms of the depth of story and the room for improvisation in gameplay than Deus Ex 2, and visually superior to both. I tend to play stealthily and generally non-lethally, and this game actively rewarded exploration (I’m pretty sure you get enough XP to earn a couple of augmentation upgrades just from Explorer bonuses alone) of its more-or-less open world, which was nice.

Things that I didn’t like: the fact that only one energy cell actively recharges, ever. Many of your augmentations require energy, but most specifically, a hand-to-hand takedown or kill requires one full cell of energy. So you can have up to five cells through upgrades, but only the first one will recharge; the other four will stay depleted if you don’t find the stupid granola/protein/whatever-the-hell-they-are bars in order to recharge. This is pretty irritating when you are going through long sections without finding any of them (especially near the end of the game). Generally, I found the non-lethal approach increasingly hard to maintain as the end of the game neared, mostly due to lack of ammunition and energy (takedowns require energy), and by the end of the game, I was forced to extreme improvisation in order to take down the last boss without killing (I literally used a stray EMP grenade that I found after running around the entire map dodging enemy fire, since I’d previously depleted all of my tranquilizer/stun ammo and gas/EMP grenades). The game shoved literally stacks of heavy rifle ammo in my face, but I could not find freaking stun ammo for the life of me. And, of course, my one remaining energy bar was useless, since I couldn’t use a physical takedown on the boss (the option would not pop up when I was standing right next to the boss, not that they ever seemed to work on any of the bosses).

Speaking of bosses, I agree with reviewers generally saying that it didn’t suit the tone of the game to have it force you to kill the bosses even if you didn’t intend to. It would have been nice to have a way around it, but there simply wasn’t any choice in the matter. It wasn’t game-ruining, but it was a minor irritation.

The only thing about the game that actually sucked were the “Asian” accents. Argh. I can’t stress how horrible they were, although I guess 20 years from now, maybe it’s possible that Asians will have that accent…yeah, right.

The hacking minigame was okay, but got repetitive near the end (and was still worth doing for the experience points, so I spent a lot of time doing it even though I didn’t really need to – boring). I found myself wishing for melee weapons other than the built-in takedown kill weapons – Deus Ex had swords, and everybody knows swords are awesome.;)

Otherwise, the game was awesome. Tons of weapons, tons of detail in the world (books, emails, conversations between people on the streets, etc.), lots of hidden paths around pretty much every map, some nifty abilities (wall-smashing is lots of fun), and that nice Deus Ex-specific vibe of paranoia everywhere. The music was great. Yay for Final Fantasy 27 posters on the walls! If you are into biopunk and/or cyberpunk and you want a good story (besides my FourWar novel *wink wink*), this is a must-play game. 5/5!

(Note to self: in about six months, after people have had time to play the game, I’d like to post again about the storyline with a spoiler-laden review/commentary. Lots of thoughts about it, I just don’t want to ruin the game for anyone.)

In case you ever wondered about why I have a sort of strange dragon (maybe a sea-dragon or sea serpent?) as my “avatar” here and there, a few years ago I stumbled over this Strong Bad email (flash video with sound, SFW) and decided I could handle drawing an S with a more bigger S.;) One day I found myself a bit bored and had scrap paper and a pencil lying around, so I sketched it out.

Click below to see the original sketch, in all of its messy glory. But definitely watch the video first!

It’s not really a surprise to anyone that I’m a giant geek, and like many giant geeks, I follow a number of tech websites via RSS in order to stay on top of the mountain of news that piles up in the tech world every day. My RSS list includes a number of major tech sites – Slashdot, Engadget, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, etc. Until today, I also followed Gizmodo, but have done so with increasing distaste, so I’ve finally gone ahead and removed it from the list of sites I follow.

I don’t really know what happened, but in addition to Gizmodo’s widely-hated site redesign earlier this year, it seems like the writing quality has rapidly degenerated into the tech blogger equivalent of some little boys in a schoolyard trying to play “look at me.” Much of the language in any given article is now less about technology and more about trying to come up with clever one-liners, usually snarky ones, that don’t really add anything to the conversation – this is 1) annoying as a transparent cry for attention and 2) actively irritating as it takes me longer to sift through articles looking for the news. I suppose specific Gizmodo writers are more to blame than others – Jesus Diaz and Sam Biddle spring to mind as the foremost examples – but there are also an increasing number of articles coming through on topics that are only tangentially related to technology at all.

I realize that blogging companies exist to make money first and foremost, but I guess the purist in me still wishes people would write about subjects with some degree of concision rather than the verbal gaudiness that seems to occur. Technical people are often busy above all, so wasting our time is not really usually appreciated.

I think part of this phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that, increasingly, bloggers and online writers are being paid ridiculously tiny amounts of money for their work, so they have to compensate by deliberately over-writing, and/or writing tons of not-really-useful articles in order to make a useful amount of money. A look at any freelance site for writing work will show you that most companies are not willing to pay more than a couple of dollars for an article, at most; most of that work is writing articles basically padded with keywords for search engines (SEO “optimized” articles) to drive ad traffic, or just wanting people to write “exciting” things to do the same. From what I can tell, Gawker is ad-driven, so its child sites (including Gizmodo) seem to be sliding into that sort of black hole at an increasing pace. I suspect that their full-time writers are paid more than a couple of dollars an article — but with bonuses for traffic, it pays for them to be flashy and overwritten instead of simply writing what needs to be said.

With consumers mostly unwilling to pay for content, and companies short-changing writers, I don’t really see commercial blogging going anywhere but down in terms of quality. Long-term, independent bloggers will be producing more useful content because they actually care about what they write — only, without aggregation, it’s harder to find them.

I’m still following Lifehacker, which is another Gawker blog. If I’m right, though, it’s only a matter of time before that, too, turns into an unreadable mess. Anyone know of any DIY blogs that are decent competition?