Tuesday, August 31st

Had a very successful crafts party. The vibe was very conducive to getting things done. Usually, the crafts parties devolve into babbling about our lives, but I stayed up until about 10:30 actually working on my arts. Very nice.

Ran 5 miles. Whew. Going to consider taping my feet to prevent blistering. Currently, the blisters are the biggest thing slowing me down. Looking at Kinieso-Tex tape.

Played a bit of Deus Ex this morning. God that game is fun. Nothing makes me happier than sneaking around and beating people up. It is also reasonably realistic: you have to look through the iron sights to get a clear target with most guns, and normal characters don't have a HUD.

This makes me think about Japanese media, specifically their willingness to simply repeat a successful idea with no regard to continuity.

In Japanese franchises (for example, Tenchi Muyo), the original series is usually simply repeated, redone, reformulated, reimagined, and rehashed with no regard to continuity or canon. With Fullmetal Alchemist, I used to watch it with my girlfriend, and now I watch a completely new series with my wife (the same woman, incidentally).

Americans are starting to get better at this, but we still have this scurrilous idea that you have to wait a long time, usually a generation, to take a popular idea and update it with more modern visuals, fashions, technology and acting ability. You don't have to do this. And in fact, you probably shouldn't.

With the original Deus Ex, you had a lot of very good ideas, but the ending was a) player driven and b) cataclysmic in scope, so a sequel should have been impossible. Instead they effectively retconned the original game with Invisible War and said, "Actually, it was none of those things, and all of them." Which brings us to...

Reasons Why Deus Ex: Invisible War Sucked

1. It erased important decisions from the first game, effectively giving the player the option to choose between some of the same kinds of endings again. Also, it turned Tracer Tong from a neo-Primitivist into a group-mind evangelist.

2. It turned the 20 minutes into the future setting of the original game into Star Trek. Part of what made Deus Ex so compelling was that it was reflection of contemporary concerns: terrorism, pandemic disease, government/corporate conspiracy, inequality/poverty, fucking scary MIBs, aliens, body modification, cyberterrorism and the internet. The second game had many of these elements, but the fact that it was set in a future without nation-states with unrecognizable technologies causes it to betray its roots.

3. Same players in dumber costumes. You knew (or should have known) that the Illuminati would be back. You knew that the rag-tag rebels from the first game would be back. But rather than the complex web of deception from the first game, with front-companies, patsies, tools and splinter groups, you had the Illuminati, practically right out there in the open (WTO and the Order), a group of card-carrying Bad Guy luddites (the Templar), a group of card-carrying Good Guys (ApostleCorps), and aliens (the Omar).

4. Same choices with worse execution. Likewise, rather than performing one of a set of varied and interesting objectives (merge with Helios, overload the reactors, or shut down the base), the final mission of the second game had you simply selecting from 3 options on a drop-down, or doing nothing.

I caught a cold. It was pretty bad the first day - I had stomach cramps and had to go home. Played lots of video games and that made me feel better.

Began writing a comic - probably going to be a 3- or 4-page vignette. This will give me some experience with layout and characterization without having the burden of fleshing out a story. I think I will produce several of these while I work on the noir story.

I am experimenting with more aggressive zerg playstyles. My default had been ice fisher for all three matchups. It works super-well in ZvT, moderately well in ZvP, and terribly in ZvZ.

- Most gold-level Terrans do two rax rush, one-base MMM or marine/tank. Spine crawlers and queens can handily defeat a large number of marines, and by the time a decent MMM or marine/tank army can be assembled, I am usually far ahead enough to swarm them down with lings/blings and infestors.

- In ZvP, ice fisher (and fast expand in general) is a risky move. I have found myself in situations where I scout a 4-gate, build 4 queens and 4 spine crawlers and hold off the first wave. I build some lings, but then a second wave comes, and I can't quite hold off the 12 or so stalkers knocking at my door. Worse yet, I end up with about 1000 extra minerals just lying around and no way to spend them (no larva). Some ideas:

* Grab an early gas and build roaches.

* Build more spine crawlers.

Both strategies sound a little risky. On the one hand, building (say) 10 spine crawlers would handily defend against almost any number of stalkers. But then I'm (marginally) 700 minerals behind, and the spine crawlers take an agonizing 50 seconds to build. On the other, investing heavily in roaches is risky, since roaches are hard-countered by immortals, plus it costs more larva. Regardless, I think the roaches have slightly more long-term utility, so I'll try them first.

- In ZvZ, ice fisher requires significant adaptation, since the probability of an 8-pool or speedling rush is so high. Lately I have been trying an 8-pool-expand build with early ling aggression to try to put the opponent on their back foot, but then I get a roach-ling counterattack before I'm adequately prepared to defend.

The problem with all of these builds (with the possible exception of ZvT), however, is that they feel way too passive. If I sit back and let the Protoss macro, I'm going to be in a bad position around 15-20 minutes, and by the 12ish minute mark it's too easy for the protoss to simply park his ass in his base with a bunch of cannons and defend against whatever drops or harassment I throw at him. And with ZvZ, I feel like I'm letting the opponent dictate the terms of the game.

So I 8-pooled every single game for two days. That was pretty fun, but I'm not sure it's the way to go.

Some people are probably better off in cults

Children thrive on structure. The best way to help nurture a child's mind is to put it in an environment with a clear set of expectations, rewards and (fair, non-violent) punishments.

In this system, the child learns to regulate their behavior. But more importantly, they learn that the world and our culture have rules, or at least schema - that it is not a jumble of random sense data, but system in which there are consequences. This is the same reason why they encourage parents to read stories to children. You're not just teaching them that princesses (or ahem princes) need to be saved and dragons need to be slain, but a way to make sense of the world in terms of a coherent narrative that includes fundamental mental tools, such as empathy or cause and effect.

Or take something as simple (heh) as potty training. It is an arduous task to train most kids to use a toilet. Certainly their default impulse is to just shit and piss whenever and whereever they feel like it, but in order to function in the adult world, they have to learn to regulate it.

In an interesting way, though, I think that while we all strive to be self-regulating as adults and adolescents, community serves an important role in reinforcing our values - for that reason, most people seek out those who mostly share their values.

Cults and cult-like organizations such as 12-Step programs provide people with a surrogate parent structure which makes it easier for them to override their impulses. The problem with an alcoholic, for instance, is not just drinking: it's that they've developed a set of habits and impulses which make it easy to drink. It becomes a ritual. Go to lunch, have a drink. Come home from work, make yourself a drink. Get pissed off? Have a drink.

People who find themselves in AA often find themselves with new friends, new lovers and new lives, and it certainly isn't by accident. These aspects of their lives reinforced negative behavior. Similarly, an alcoholic can't just have a drink because they have deep reward paths in their brain, and were they to indulge, they would find themselves in a drinking feedback loop once again. It's not genetic - although developing these structures might be - it's just habit. Non-alcoholics don't have the same structures, so having one drink isn't dangerous.

People who don't drink but find themselves in situations where, similarly, every aspect of their lives reinforces bad behavior might benefit from a cult. My sister-in-law is probably one of these people. She's smart, yes. She has real mood problems, yes. But she's also got a rent-controlled apartment in an exclusive neighborhood that is literally eating her alive. She rarely leaves her house and hasn't worked in about ten years. She keeps getting involved with girls who try to save her, but then realize her issues are so deep-seated that one person can't hope to dislodge them. I really think the best thing for her would probably be to join a cult.

Today I got up early so I could go for a run, but I ended up working on my 3d program a bit instead. I did some pretty neat animations. Got into work too late to go for a run, so I took one at lunch. Some tourists didn't appreciate the fact that I was running shirtless.

This is the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Lots of people run here. I have seen plenty of older folks running around the bay area in various stages of undress. This is the location of the famous Castro halloween party and one of the biggest Pride events in the world, as well as the the Folsom Street Fair, where you are *guaranteed* to see naked guys of all body types - mostly 'stereotypically hot' but a many who are normal or overweight or older. So, I don't think most natives would really blink at a 200-lb guy who could stand to be 180 out for a run. Also, they were dressed in stereotypical tourist garb, and were at a place in the waterfront where tourists tend to congregate.

The thing that trips me out is the psychology of these people - and, of course, a lot of it comes down to the unrealistic standards of beauty that our culture has, especially in light of a food culture that's *designed* to make people obese. Instead of thinking women who are pleasantly plump and guys who are anything short of chiseled adonises are normal, even quite attractive, the media has twisted our perceptions to regard anything short of Brad and Angelina as somehow flawed.

It is also a function of youth, I think. The folks at the Saturday life drawing class - mostly an older crowd - were all too happy to have a young if imperfect model, and an older woman was also willing to do some posing. If any flak would have come from the college-age folks. It's not even that your average college-age art student is heroin chic-thin and that your average 50-year-old is getting saggy and paunchy. It's that young people are incredibly insecure about themselves, so they tend to be judgmental of others, while older people are more relaxed.

Yesterday I found an annoying bug in some vector code I was working on. Initially I thought it was a math problem, but then I noticed that some line segments were coming back from a function call modified. Basically, I was sending in a line with a random slope, and coming back with a flat line.

It turned out that I was attempting to re-use a struct that was almost guaranteed to be freed. The fact that it came back flat was because I malloc a set of flat lines to test for bounds. So, the fact that it was flat was totally coincidental - it just happened to malloc an area which previously stored a valid variable, thus resulting in undefined behavior. Probably when that line was later freed it would crash.

I went on a hike with some friends. We talked about movies and I watched Kiss of Death. Very decent movie. Features babysitter-fucking. Patched a huge rip in my bike tire. Thought it was too big to patch, but then it turned out fine. Cleaned house quite a bit. Did lots of laundry. Hardly cooked at all, mostly grazed.

Almost modeled at the weekly life-drawing class. Kind of disappointed that I didn't get to. The room was locked and the model hadn't showed up. We were going to improvise, but couldn't find an even moderately suitable location. It would have been a lot of fun, and I think out of all the young people there I was the only one who wasn't too self-conscious to get naked in front of strangers.

Dissociation

Today I watched Momento. What a fascinating movie. Of course, I couldn't help but feel that his condition was familiar.

I often wander around without a thought in my head.

I had some lamb curry in a pita pocket. It was delicious. I went down to the lobby and had a nap and pondered 3d math a bit. I drew a girl who was very thin but was wearing an interesting dress. It was difficult and I thought I would like to give her a sandwich.

I did a bit of programming for work and a bit of GL programming. The work they have planned for this sprint, unlike the last one, is not hard at all. I think I deserve a bit of time off, but I can't get it, so I just fucked around instead. And fucking around doing interesting programming is far and away preferable to fucking around doing something useless.

On Monday I stayed at work until 9:00 and then I got caught up in a BART computer problem.

Maybe one of the more terrible things about my childhood, at least with respect to actually getting help, was that it wasn't terrible in the way people normally think of. Isn't it bizarre that a human brain can produce the staggering wonders we see around us every day, but we think, somehow, that when that same brain has a problem, we think it's somehow not real? That we privilege physical pain over mental pain, when, in fact, all pain is mental?

So, when I tell people about how I feel, they respond with things like:

"You don't know what pain is."

"You should volunteer somewhere and see people who have it really bad."

"Your parents stayed together."

"You're not depressed. Just look at how much money you make/how well you do in school/etc."

"Your problem is that you haven't found God yet."

Which is exactly like the kind of shit that my mother used to say, in addition to:

"You must not love me enough."

"We give you everything."

One that made me laugh the other day was the one about appreciating people who are worse off. It's equivalent to a bully saying, "Sure, I beat you up, but you should see what other bullies do." It's not really comforting to tell someone how lucky they are to only suffer the amount of abuse you give them.

The problem, in essence, is that if I had been abused worse, or in a more privileged fashion, it would have been easier to escape. As it was, however, I just had to suffer, living with a mad torturer whom everyone told me loved me more than anything in the world and who I was lucky to have.

Yeah, right.