I picked up Bioshock in late summer for $10 during a Steam half-off weekend sale and spottily pecked at it to finish a relatively short game (under 15 hours) over a two month period. As a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, it raises the bar in the RPG/action shooter genre with top notch graphics, equipment upgrade systems, and inventive writing.

Over the past two decades, designers have been finding new ways to artificially enclose their game world. Early FPS games were always indoors (you can’t run into the vacuum of space). Then more advanced graphic engines went to the \_/ shape, using inaccessible buildings or canyons as boundaries in outdoor areas. Once skymap graphics were quality enough, we saw tall cliffs (Half Life’s “Surface Tension” chapter). So for Bioshock – why not throw it underwater?

Cookie recipes because I’m too lazy to keep cue cards around.

Chipits Toffee Cookies

• 1/2 cup Crisco golden (alternatively use Becel margarine)
• 3/4 cup lightly packed b sugar
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• Beat

• Stir in 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 pk skor bits

• Drop by teaspoonful onto greased cookie sheet
• Bake 350°F for 8-10 min or until golden brown
• 4 dozen Cookies
• Be sure to grease the pan

Peanut Butter Cookies

• 1 cup margarine softened
• 1 cup brown sugar packed
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup smooth peanut butter

• 3 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt

• Cream margarine and sugars together. Beat in eggs, 1 at a time. Mix in peanut butter

• Stir in flour, baking soda and salt. Shape into small balls. Place on ungreased cookie sheets allowing room for expansion. Press with flork. Dip fork in flour as needed to prevent batter stickiness. Bake 375°F oven for 12 to 15 min

Peanut Butter Chip Cookies. Add 1 to 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

…condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.

Fact: the last book I read took me more than a year. After completing Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon last June, I decided to backtrack in his catalogue to read his cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash. Problem is, if it’sn’t on a moving screen, I tend to lack the ability to focus. By sheer will and determination, I was able to overcome this obstacle. I’m going places!

Like Cryptonomicon, seemingly every character is a quick-lipped bad-ass to the n^th degree. You can tell it was written by a massive nerd for all the godlike abilities they possess, although it does poke fun at genre; mainly by calling the main character Hiro Protagonist. For being printed in 1992, its depiction of virtual reality (sorry, “Metaverse”) has a fair amount of accuracy when compared to modern MMORPG interactions. Of course, the holograms and private corporation Big Brother technology haven’t come to fruition yet in mass production, but it’s an interesting intellectual exercise to think about how this would affect how information flows in the future.

Somehow, he attempts to parallel ancient mythologies to the shift in modern man’s consciousness during the information age, which became a bit more fun (and confusing) when mixed together with a viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s latest film, Youth Without Youth. The book does get complex when the names of mythological deities are thrown about as if they were common English verbs. A Mesopotamian mythology cue card cheat sheet might be handy when it comes to interpreting just exactly what analogy the characters are attempting to express.

Beyond all the silly high thought process nonsense, I must say that Neil Stephenson sure loves his sexual innuendo metaphors. One of the main characters is a fifteen year old girl that acts as a courier making quick deliveries by attaching a magnetic harpoon to cars to street surf in a process called “pooning”. Then there are gems such as:

“…shopping carts performing their clashy anal copulations.”

“…a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus.”

Nerd.

My favourite idea in the book is likely the ruthless kayaking supervillian that has a H-bomb always to the immediate side, connected to his brain activity with a mechanism that’s set to trigger a ginormous explosion at the immediate absence of a signal. How’s that for a God complex? Think last season’s Lost’s finale gone extreme. Via kayak.

Now I’m a third of the way through Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Cliff Martinez – Solaris
Lush sci-fi electronic with a numb feeling.

Peter Gabriel – Passion: The Last Temptation of Christ
Tastefully appropriating other cultures.

Clint Mansell (Featuring Kronos Quartet) – Requiem For a Dream
Haunting movements built for curling into the fetal position.

Philip Glass – Koyaanisqatsi
Repetition ascending to a chaotic swirl.

Ennio Morricone – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo)
“The Ecstasy of Gold”. That’s all you need to know

I was tasked with writing a Java app with client-side authentication, with the ability to save the login information. So I needed to encode the password when saving the configuration to disk and also before sending login credentials through HTTPS. You think getting that information is a simple one line method call to a Java API? Hells no.

I obviously started via Google search, trying one of the first MD5 implementation results using Java’s MessageDigest class. This code is just wrong. I came across a couple strings that weren’t encoded to the same hexadecimal as MySQL’s md5() function. A couple entries down in Google’s search return was a more concise chunk of MD5 code. However, there was still an issue since its returned string wasn’t a 32 character length string that could be used to compare against a MySQL md5() password column. Here’s a proper method, with left zero padding:

public static String getPasswordEncrypted(String password)
{
    try {
        MessageDigest algorithm = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
        algorithm.reset();
        algorithm.update(password.getBytes(), 0, password.length());

        BigInteger encryptedBytes = new BigInteger(1, algorithm.digest());

        // 16 -> hexidecimal notation
        String encryptedPassword = encryptedBytes.toString(16);

        // padding left zeroes for 32 length string
        if (encryptedPassword.length() < 32) {
            for (int i = encryptedPassword.length(); i < 32; i++) {
                encryptedPassword = "0" + encryptedPassword;
            }
        }

        return encryptedPassword;
    } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
        return ""; // eh?
    }
}

The new Nine Inch Nails instrumental release Ghosts I-IV finally got music release methods down to the way they should be. By self-releasing five different packages choices, the consumer can make a decision on how much they wish to invest into the product. The higher-end selections are for the hardcore listeners that decide quality and support for the artist are paramount, while the digital download or 2CD set attract the casual listener. For any package, you get the immediate lossless, DRM-free download link so you don’t have to wait for your package to ship. You can even sample 1/4 of the release in a shareware-like plan to invite listeners to purchase more. This range of selection doesn’t devalue music, as I felt Radiohead’s deceiving blind 160kbps MP3 fiasco introduced and Saul William campaign represented for its fully-free download option.

Within hours of release, there was so much immediate demand that the web servers handling orders were down to a standstill. This, of course, exposes the limits of HTTP as a delivery platform; this is why the über-nerds prefer BitTorrent for data transfer. I bought the $10 2CD release however my FLAC download cut off at 161mb out of 608mb done due to the server overload. Now the best part about the new album is its licensing under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike, which means I can jump on The Pirate Bay to grab the album in full and it’s completely legal. The abandonment of outdated copyright law restrictions puts power completely in the consumer’s hands (hello to you, democracy). It doesn’t make the assumptive pretense that the artist or audience are a victim or criminal. They’re on equal ground and have the free will to define the value of a piece of art. I imagine in the next month you’ll find Ghosts I-IV is worth far beyond expectations simply due to the message its release represents.

Three days ago I purchased Audiosurf after a mere 20 minute demo of the game. It’s kind of F-Zero meets Wipeout meets Tetris while being completely soundtracked by you. The premise of the game is to use the waveform of any music file on your hard drive to create a virtual racetrack that’s used as a basis for a fast-paced puzzle problem. This sounds like a Winamp visualization plugin gone wrong, but’s actually pretty fantastic. There are multiple modes available, one of which includes collecting blocks of multiple colours to attempt configuring a contiguous sequence. My personal preference is “Ninja Mono” where you attempt to collect one type of coloured blocks (the colour transitions based on the music’s tempo) while avoiding gray barrier blocks. It’s very challenging on elite.

It’s the type of game you can jump right into without any instructions really. I made the mistake of using the keyboard for my first 15 or so songs but once I tried the mouse for movement, I quickly realized the err of my ways. The game is mostly single player, with a mode for two people to play on the same PC, but there is no online networking yet. 🙁

Since there are fairly low system requirements (1.6 GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 32MB video card, DirectX 9), trying out the five song Audiosurf demo is a no-brainer. It doesn’t quite have the party game appeal of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, but it’s available on Steam for only ten bucks, price including the attached Orange Box soundtrack.

I’ve tried a variety of music genres with the start/stop dynamic tracks having the best fit. Math rock (Candiria, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Minus the Bear, Q and Not U, The Dismemberment Plan), EBM/trance (Front Line Assembly, VNV Nation, Infected Mushroom), post-metal (Pelican, Russian Circles), and industrial rock/drum’n’bass fusion (Pitchshifter, Cubanate, Pop Will Eat Itself) all worked pretty well for the game’s fun factor. Check out that steadily increasing outro of PWEI’s “Karmadrome”! Just don’t try it with Venetian Snares unless you want to suffer from technology-induced epileptic seizures.

So in the future, musicians can use the following metric to decide on the quality of their music – is my song fun in Audiosurf?

Ritual Entertainment loves The Matrix

Since Steam started their holiday sale, I decided to pick up Ritual Entertainment’s SiN Episodes: Emergence, regularly priced at $14.95, for only $7.45 (also snatched Psychonauts for $9.95). This way, I could avoid the family, pull back my rate of drinking, and enjoy some old school FPS gaming.

A little too old school. For one of the design goals being emergent AI, the enemy behaviour is the opposite of intelligent. There is no cooperation or cover system. An enemy yells, “take the left flank”, while him and his mate stand awkwardly on a narrow skyscraper ledge. The game does have a difficulty system that adjusts according to your performance, however I didn’t find it too difficult overall, since you’re only taking headshots at endless mercenary grunts and fast-moving zombies mutants. It’s just a plain run and gun.

Constipation is no laughing matter

By cleverly packaging Half Life 2: Episode Two, POrtal, and Team Fortress as one, Valve jam-packed a barrel of fun to rate higher in Game of the Year awards. Priced at $49.95 on Steam, it’s a deal with the inclusion of Half Life 2 and Half Life 2: Episode One totalling the value at $129.75. Go, go gadget infomercials for this clever marketing technique. Considering their devoted followers already own these two previous games, The Orange Box inclusion makes up for a lack of content. By that, I mean from the perspective of playing time, whether it’s high-quality or not.

Bumper view all up in your grill.

EA Games has turned the NFS series into a 2 Fast 2 Furious-inspired mess focused on a desire for the New American Dream. Import ricers and the glorification of illegal ghetto culture. Great focus group-sourced market research, basditos. Beforehand there was Porsche Unleashed. This game exemplifies the history, class, and integrity of a Porsche, which I guess is too vanilla for kids these days.

Nike+ may continue commissioning the creation of iPod Nano exercise mixes by LCD Soundsystem and Aesop Rock to appease the hipster market share, but they don’t have my touch. Savour the flavour.

1. (6:12) The Knife – 2006 – Silent Shout – 07 – “Like a Pen”
2. (5:56) !!! – 2007 – Myth Takes – 03 – “Must Be the Moon”
3. (7:41) Celldweller – 2003 – Celldweller – 04 – “The Last Firstborn”
4. (5:44) Covenant – 1996 – Sequencer – 06 – “Tabula-Rasa”
5. (3:53) Skinny Puppy – 1990 – Too Dark Park – 03 – “Spasmolytic”
6. (5:01) E-Craft – 2001 – Dos Unit – 02 – “Embryonic”
7. (5:55) Cleen – 1998 – Designed Memories – 02 – “Freezeout”
8. (8:00) Infected Mushroom – 2003 – Converting Vegetarians (CD1) – 07 – “Scorpion Frog”
9. (9:37) Hybrid – 2000 – Wide Angle – 11 – “Finished Symphony”
10. (5:39) New Order – 2005 – Waiting For the Sirens’ Call – 09 – “Guilt is a Useless Emotion”
11. (5:01) KMFDM – 1995 – Nihil – 03 – “Flesh”
12. (7:18) Envy – 2006 – Insomniac Doze – 07 – “A Warm Room”

Running time: 75:57

After an eight month ordeal, I finally got around to completing Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I started it in October, but given its 900+ pages and my short attention span when it comes to matters not involving a screen or beer, its consumption was delayed. Now this isn’t an indication of the book’s dullness, because, in truth, it is an engaging read with a mind-boggling amount of ideas crammed into its long length.

When the author analogizes an organism to the effect of a spaceship warping in Star Wars, you know you’re in male-oriented territory. Stephenson manages to put across a geeky intellectual perspective, such as describing the coldness of a women as an “emotional non-disclosure agreement”. He also obviously knows the subject matter whether it be mathematics or computing, without having to dumb down the material ala 24 or a Michael Crichton novel. For example, to describe the German’s Engima encryption scheme, he uses a bicycle spoke analogy that even a layman could understand. That is, if they have enough focus to read through a couple pages detailing the comparison. Who is this layman, anyway?

The story takes places in two eras; World War II and current day, traveling across locations around the world. Connections between characters in the past and modern times are shown as the plot progresses, highlighted by American marine Bobby Shaftoe who has a proclivity to injecting morphine and Randy Waterhouse, a modern-day hacker of sorts, who is discovering just exactly how deep his grandfather was involved with cracking cryptographic algorithms for the Allies. In a way, all the characters are very similar, rarely being unsure of their actions and always being badasses. It’s like you’re reading a story of low-key heroes. Except Bobby. He just run and guns.

The book goes through many descriptions of how information flows through the world, of which many asides and funny analogies are used to express points. Of course, one of the most well-known tangents the book contains is half a chapter devoted simply to the proper technique for eating Captain Crunch cereal, of which I’ve quoted below (p. 479):

But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap’n Crunch eating strategy that resolves around playing the nuggets’ most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy’s strategy would never work. But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken-treasure-related shapes that the cereal-aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy’s purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap’n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap’n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body just has to learn the moves.

This is one of the many examples of someone hacking a piece of information, finding new ways to get a job done. There are plot points centred on Van Eck phreaking and the paranoia of working with sensitive material on a PC within possible proximity of others. Randy uses LED morse code to retrieve desired information from his PC with a possible phreaker being none-the-wiser. You may have noticed xkcd’s Online Communities comic containing its own Qwghlm reference, a tribute to Cryptonomicon’s imaginary country in the British Isles which has a grudge culture that jabs at Irish history; an Outer Qwghlm and Inner Qwghlm in their silent war with each other. The country’s language is without vowels, funny in its own right since all its written text looks like encrypted data. My favourite chapter is “Courting” (p. 543), wherein Lawrence Waterhouse uses graphs and formulas (involving limits) to explain mental clarity and his work productivity in relation to the number of days since his last climax, as he pursues his Qwghlmian love interest.

Overall, the book is quite funny and informative, however its length makes it a daunting task in our era of attention span 2.0. Most of the humour and subject matter is focused on the male geek, so this isn’t exactly transcendent material. It’s all about logic and purpose, so drop your emotional, empathic expectations at the door.

Working in reverse chronological order, I’m now on to Snow Crash.

Since moving last month, I was lucky to arrive at a home housing a Nintendo Wii. My initial tasks were to master the arts of Wii Sports. I decided boxing and golf were bollocks, but tennis and baseball needed my domination. Tennis is easy to gain points on once after the realization to just flick your wrist forward for hard hits. Don’t swinging your arms in an exaggerated movement.

Wii Baseball was another animal. Once reaching 900 points (with 1000 being “pro”-level), the computer AI’s hitters crushed every pitch. Then my contact was a sharp grounder straight to a fielder. A soulcrushingly-low BABIP. This was more upsetting due to my fielders constantly making errors, keeping in mind you can’t even control your fielders as it’s automated. All you do is pitch and hit.

After reading a few tips online, I turned 7-0 mercy rule loses into 10-2 drubbings of my computer opponent.

Wii Baseball techniques

1. Double-tap the directional pad left or right when pitching to ensure the ball goes off the plate. Sometimes when holding the button in, my balls would still go straight down the middle.
2. Try to never use a fastball, instead relying on Jamie Moyer-style junk. Just don’t emulate his 2004 season (44HR given up in 200IP!?)
3. If you’re a righty, pitch curve balls inside to left-handed hitters and screwballs inside to right-handed hitters. For southpaws do the opposite pitching techniques. This jams the opponent, reducing the likelihood of solid contact.
4. The odd time, mix up a screwball away to lefties and curve ball away to righties, making sure to throw the pitch slowly and off the plate.
5. You can sometimes get away with an inside 95MPH fastball to strike players out, but use it rarely. Keep in mind, if the computer makes contact, they’ll likely hit it harder than softer throws.
6. Mix in splitters to keep the AI honest as they’ll sometimes chase in 2 strike counts.
7. Change arm slots every couple pitches, using 2 to select sidearm and 1 to go back to overhand. I mostly stick to sidearm as it makes the softer pitches harder to lift for distance.
8. For hitting, recognize splitters by their lack of movement and do not swing as they are outside the strike zone 99.9% of the time and the only contact you can make is a come-backer or foul tip.
9. Do not swing at a pitch until you get a called first strike. Never. Seriously. 1000pt+ opponents throw splitters and junk outside for 75%+ of their pitches, so you’ll walk a couple times in the first inning alone. This tires the pitcher by the second inning.
10. … and a tired pitcher leads to failed splitters that end up being 70MPH meatballs down the heart. You’ll recognize these by the red exclamation mark that appears over the pitcher’s head. Anticipate and pull a sharp line-drive into the cheap seats for glory.

Use these tips wisely and become a master at being a huge nerd! Just remember, chicks dig the longball.

Human Head Studios’ Rune was built during an unfortunate period of video games where machinima was seen as a revolution. Game level designers were suddenly Stanley Kubrick despite never even taking an Intro to Film course in their life. But they saw Terminator 2 five times, so it must be ok. What ensues is awkwardly timed dialog, a confusing script, embarrassing gestures on models whose mouths don’t synchronize with speech, and a general distaste for actually sitting through the malarkey.