Binary Bonsai

First of all, I’d like to express my elation with Barack Obama. And I really mean that. Even here, half-way around the world, in a country so liberal your scale doesn’t even go that far left, this will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of a reign of incompetence and negligence and will soon see the rise of what I truly believe to be not only a good man, but the right man for the job as president of the US.

Secondly, I have certainly been, if not incompetent, then at least somewhat negligent, namely in writing for this site. But there’s just been so much to see to lately. First I had a driver’s license to take — nailed it by the way — and then the gates of Hades opened up on the unprepared masses and unleashed not one, not two, not three… No, one BILLION games.

So I’ve eagerly been playing as much as I’ve been able to, so far making headway in Dead Space, Farcry 2 and Fallout 3. Tomorrow Gears of War 2 is coming out and I just got word that Little Big Planet shipped. And later, there will be cake. And more games. So…

This is all largely spoiler free, but not opinion free, so beware.

Dead Space

Oh dear Science. It’s so derivative. It’s sooo been done before, that it’s really kind of embarrasing to sit through the story as it unfolds exactly as you’d expect. System Shock meets Alien meets Event Horizon meets Bioshock. It’s like eating pre-chewed food; fairly unsatisfying.

I don’t like the whole ‘look, I build this power suit out of copper, and my guns look stupid and can rotate’-look, but that said, it’s very well-crafted and highly polished, which is more than can be said for so many other games these days, so…

I hope I can muster up the drive to play through it, but I’m not entirely sure on that one.

Farcry 2

I didn’t like the first Farcry. Luckily the sequel has pretty much nothing to do with it, so that’s something.

For the first few hours I really didn’t like it. It was confining and annoying and felt very unfocused. But then it slowly started clicking for me. I had some moments, the likes of which only a sandbox game like this can give. And then I loved it. And I loved it for a good 8-10 hours or so. The mechanics are great, the AI pretty nice and some of the landscapes are just downright gorgeous (even if the PS3 does start sounding like a jet when I take a boat down river and it needs to stream data faster than it wants to). The setting certainly has its moments, and it’s just great to see Africa portrayed so well and put to such good use.

But when you get the 10th ‘go across the map and do X’, and you know that doing so means passing through 5-6 checkpoints, all of which are hostile and all of which you’ll have to fight, after which you’ll have to find a place to stock up on ammo and maybe new weapons… Well, it loses some of its charm.

And it’s such a shame. Such a shame. Maybe I’m simply not far enough into the storyline for me to make alliances or something like that, but I would love to be able to pay off someone so I could be granted free access through certain areas, or something similar, which would make the world seem so much more alive. Hell, they even do it in the intro!

Furthermore, for such a cool world, it’s a damn shame that there are no civilians. Everybody has a gun, and everybody wants to kill you.

Ugh.

I don’t know that I’ll make it all the way through this one. But they do have some very cool stuff going on.

Fallout 3

This is what I’m actively playing at the moment. I’m some 18 hours or so in, and despite all of the ugly characters, horrible lighting, ‘animation’ and whatnot, really really enjoying it.

And it has made me realize just how much I’ve missed playing an old-school sci-fi RPG, like the old Fallout’s. How much I love getting lost in the story and the characters and the far-out world.

It’s far from perfect, certainly. As mentioned, it’s ugly as sin itself at times (though it does have its moments) and lacks the humor of the old games. But it just doesn’t matter when you lose yourself in the world of it.

And I really didn’t like Oblivion. I wanted to. But when I after 8 hours found out that the entire world kept leveling up as I leveled up (‘click’, now you never see a wolf again, it’s too low-level), I put down the controller, ejected the game, and never looked back.

But so far I haven’t been disappointed. And luckily, despite the game having a certain feeling of having been rushed, I’ve mostly seen aesthetic bugs, and not gameplay-related ones.

Gears of War 2

I’m not going to buy it. I’m simply too cynical and annoyed at the whole concept. Yeah yeah, the first one was entertaining and all, but I have to face the fact that I turn on to the fiction of a game more than I do the gameplay, and I cannot deal with the pubescent hyper-masculinity of Gears. It’s just too much for me.

And hey, I grew up with Commando and Cobra. I swam in testosterone. And then I kept growing. And hey, I love me some Predator and all, but haven’t we at least come to a point where we can do a game like that of Gears, and not have it be as ‘erect penis’ as it is?

It might even be better if the first one didn’t actually try to seem as if it had some kind of a story beneath all the pumped, oiled muscles. Or if Cliff Blezinski in all his rockstar developerness wasn’t also pretending just that.

Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a “going home” narrative: “There’s a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it’s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game.

And

When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, “there’s a lot of sadness there.” #

Dudes, the emperor has no clothes! Give it up! Gears of War is space marines vs aliens. And not even interesting aliens; but the same ol’, same ol’ ‘uuuuh, teeth and mean eyes and uuuuu’-scary. Yeah, the setting is nice, but the fiction of the world has no more layers than Pacman, it’s just wrapped up nicely.

Sure, it’s a relentless, stupid action game, and I understand that. But come on. It’s style over substance to the nth degree, and I’m just too old and too cynical for it.

E-Day. Give me a break.

Yeah, I’ll probably borrow it and play it eventually, but I just can’t get my manly panties in a bunch over it.

But yeah. Busy days and so many games to play.

So it’s that time of year where the deluge is about to hit, and I’m afraid it calls for some serious choices to be made. Not only about which games score high enough on Meta Critic to get to adorn the shelves and which on the same bill are left behind, out in the cold; but for those of us who run dual systems — that is, both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, nevermind the Wii — it also means figuring out which system to get said games for.

For me, this is the first time this has actually posed a problem as such. There simply haven’t been any games on the PS3 I’ve wanted to buy… Whatever has seemed mildly interesting — like Uncharted, which is recommendable — I’ve borrowed from friends.

But now, between Dead Space¹, Mirror’s Edge², Fallout 3, Far Cry 2³ and of course later this year plenty other cross-platform titles, I now get to choose which of the two consoles I want these games for.

And despite the fact that the 360 outnumberes the PS3 some 7-to-1 or so, in my circle of friends, and despite the fact that I’ve bought only 360 games so far, this time around I’m going to go with PS3 for the majority of the games.

It’s the noise.

It ruins all mood, chases my girlfriend out of the room and causes my stress-levels to rise far above healthy levels.

I can’t even play GuitarHero without thinking how nice it would be if the music wasn’t being drowned out by this damned thing.

I may be getting old, or I may have enough respect for our neighbors to not drown out the incessant fan and drive noises by cranking the volume, but I find myself using the 360 less and less, simply because I don’t want it dominating our living space.

And meanwhile, next to it, the PS3 is silent like the tomb.

So I’m getting my games for the PS3 this time around; and I guess I’ll just have to live with the fact that I actually like the 360 controller much more than the DualShock (or Sixaxis or whatever the hell they call that sized-for-Japanese-hands ‘thing’).

There’s Gears of War 2 of course, which is only coming out on 360, but other than that, the only title I won’t be getting for the PS3 is Left4Dead. Because after all, that is primarily a multiplayer game, and I want the Xbox Live network for that. Oh, and it’s not available on the PS3…

Hm. Maybe I should just buy it off of Steam?

Choices, choices.

1. I’m not too impressed with what I’ve seen to be honest, but it’s the vanguard of the deluge, so I have to get it just to get warmed up. Besides, it’s gotten pretty good reviews so far. ↩


2. I swear, the major design influence on this game has got to be Darude’s Sandstorm music video. Tell me I’m wrong. ↩


3. Well, I’m holding out for the reviews; I wasn’t too impressed with the first Far Cry really, and I have a history with Crytek, but it looks like it might be good. ↩

At 6.15 this morning, I had my first driving lesson, which, yes, at the tender age of 30, might seem slightly late in life, especially for you pesky American’s. But if you’ve ever lived in Copenhagen, you’ll know that really, a car isn’t the best way of getting around anyway, so why bother?

That was until I saw this little flick called Mad Max. I like dogs. I can get behind Vengeful Vigilantism. Shucks, I think I’ll get myself one of them there drivin’ licenses (licensi?).

It was an interesting experience, not least because it was still dark when we started, and rush-hour had set in when we ended. A friend of mine compared it to playing the drums on a track you’ve never heard before, which seems pretty accurate (crutch-ridin’ since ’08, and proud of it!). Though I’ll add that it’s like that, only you’ve also never played the drums before, and you’re doing it in front of an audience of some 50.000 metal fans.

It was a little tense.

But I didn’t cap any cyclists, bump into any cars or accidentally run over any pedestrians (whom I then subsequently sped away from, paying the instructor generously to overlook this minor accident, stopping at a gas station to wipe the blood off the hood, all the while grinning nervously and explaining to passerby’s how the ketchup truck had spilled its load on my hood).

So that was great.

They all look so frail from the inside of the metal monstrum. Those poor meatbags, their meat so tender and their lives hanging capriciously in the balance as I go from one to the other ‘not that one, not that one, not… no, not that one either… That one is good, I’ll take him!’.

Well, I’m not actually scared of driving. But it is pretty stressful finding yourself suddenly behind the wheels of a car in heavy traffic for the first time, thinking to yourself that the car is apt to run amok, Christine-style, with you powerless to stop it. But then you turn the key, and it mostly does what it’s told after that.

Mostly.

Next week I’ve got 5 hour and a half lessons, so be careful.

Or how I learned to stop worrying, and love Apple’s Time Capsule. Which, with the purpose of having you empathize with the effort it took to finally find a solution to my Time Capsule woes — a device I bought to rid us of previous problems, not to cause us new ones — requires a break down of our rather intricate home network setup.

Coming into the house we have a 20mbit tube, the router of which acts as a DHCP server and then goes directly into the 500GB Time Capsule under the TV, which is the backbone for the tethered part of the network as well as network entry-point for a 250GB HDD where I mainly store my music, its internal switch hooks up to the 1TB NAS, the media center Mac Mini (Godiva) running Plex and a wire running into our bedroom — to my workstation setup — where it connects to a 1Gbit switch, which goes into an old 802.11g Airport Extreme — which is also the print-point — and my MacBook Pro (Valkyrie), when I need the speed o’ teh wire. Right next to the Time Capsule, there’s an Airport Express, tethered to the Xbox 360¹ (Xuul) and a PS3 (Glortho) on wifi. And finally there’s a second Airport Express in the kitchen, again, simply for streaming music to the speaker there. Finally, aside from the consoles and the Mac Mini, there’s a MacBook Pro, an old Powerbook (Freya) and an iPhone (Monolith), plus various other devices from time to time.

Now, here comes the interesting part. I had been having some serious problems getting my money’s worth out of the Time Capsule up until this week. Not only did it suffer bandwidth degradation over time, but Time Machine would often have problems mounting the backup sparse-image on the Time Capsule (even if it was already mounted!)², which was concerning, as I’ve come to rely quite heavily on Time Machine keeping my stuff safe. Needless to say, I was mildly annoyed that the two things I bought the thing for, speed and backup, weren’t working as advertised.

And I had tried literally everything I could think of. At the end of the day, I had the Time Capsule set up as a WDS main unit, with the other three 802.11g airports running WDS remote. WDS being necessary for bridging the ethernet ports of the airport expresses, and it wasn’t working as intended.

I had a sneaking suspicion that the g-units were what was bringing the network down in speed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that since I really needed the g-segment. So it took me a little while, not being a networks expert, to figure out how to go about it, but what finally saved me was this:

I dropped support for 802.11g on the Time Capsule and instead tethered the Airport Extreme to the ‘backbone’ and set it up as a WDS main on its own 802.11g wifi network, with the Express’s hooking into it as remotes. Then I ditched support for g on the Time Capsule, and created an 802.11n wireless network, and set it up as 5Ghz (wide channels), and not 2.4Ghz, which is not only where our own g network is, but also a rather crowded frequency in our neighborhood.

Both wifi networks are on the same backbone, meaning I can easily stream music from my MacBook Pro to the Airtunes ports, control the MBP from my iPhone and otherwise go back and forth exactly as I please. And it’s fast enough for me to backup, serve music and even, for hobbiest levels, manage photos wirelessly.

Awesome.

1. Which is fucked for two reasons. One, the Xbox doesn’t have bult-in wifi, and I’m not paying the price MS wants for their wifi module, so it has to be tethered. And two, the Airport Express is only there because the Time Capsule does everything except Airtunes. Gee, thanks Apple. ↩


2. Check out the support forums; they’re flooded with people suffering Time Capsule woes. And not a word from Apple. I’ve had quite a few friends ask me about it as a solution to their problems, and I haven’t been able to recommend it to them, not least because of Apple’s lack of support for this unit. Not at least I can tell them what worked for me, but that’s hardly good enough. ↩

I love books. And I amass books. So much so, that between the two of us — Rikke and I — there is no doubt who is in charge of the appropriation and storage of dead trees, which might not have been so paradoxical, had Rikke not been a librarian…

In fact, bringing home new books has stopped being a monetary concern and turned into a volumetric one. Yet, against all odds, I brave both the imminent collapse of this 17th century building at the hands of ‘just one more Gibson, there’s good in him still, I can sense it!’¹ and such worldly concerns as where to store these damned things, and one-click-buy like there was no tomorrow and I had a fallout shelter to stock.

A few ‘art of’ books, a sci-fi romp here and there — which I usually find boring and long-winded, being rather hard to please — the occasional ‘real’ novel — which I inevitably find much more rewarding, and spend twice the time reading — some Alan Moore comics, a batch of Star Wars books — because I can’t be stopped — anything by Michael Herr, a stack of director biographies, some books on writing books — keeping the dream alive since 1978 — and the occasional technical manual of sorts, preferably ‘the definitive guide’ to something.

I wish I went wider. Insightful political commentaries or something similarly serious. Hell, even a self-help book here and there. But I don’t go wide, I go deep. No, not in the ‘4am-drunk-philosophy-deep’-sense. Rather, the completist-deep.

It’s not exactly new to rave against such utterances, but still; in spite of what Steve² might think, some people do read (you go Khoi!). You probably know a few of them. You might be one of them. I sure wish I was.

This is the real paradox, since I love reading as much as I love the books themselves. But in the cold hard light of day, I simply have too many other ‘things’ that creep up and peck away at my time, so that when night-time rolls around, I strip down and crawl under the covers, I either have no time at all or no scarcely 20-30 minutes for a small chunk of whatever book I’m currently deluding myself that I’ll eventually finish.

Insane! Because as much as I love the books themselves — the design, the layout, the type and all of that, which the American publishers do so much better than we Europeans can ever hope for — I love to read just as much! Hell, our trip to the summer house a few weeks back was literally all about reading books and watching films. That’s what we did, and that was all we did, and I loved every minute of it, finishing several books³ and thinking to myself these very thoughts: Gee, I know what? I should really put some effort into reading more.

But it’s one of those annoying things that is apparently easier said than done, which is evidenced by the fact that on this perfectly readable sunday evening, half-past nine, instead of reading Blindness or Citizen Spielberg two books on my active reading list — I’ll let the ones I’m ‘passively’ reading go uncounted for now — I’m writing an entry on my blog about not being able to find the time for reading…

How about that.

1. Spook Country. I can’t read that thing, it just feels so… irrelevant. ↩


2. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” # ↩


3. The Pixar Story by David A Price, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Skywalking by Dale Pollock — which I wrote about — and The Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K Dick. Oh, and some comics, but they don’t really count for this. ↩