Archive for July, 2008
Pepper the hard-to-believe hamster
Sometimes things happen that you just can’t quite believe.
My sister is in Canada for two weeks, and my mother, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s son, Alex, went to Newcastle tonight for a concert I didn’t fancy. They will be staying over night, so I was given charge of Alex’s hamster, Pepper. She’s very sweet. There isn’t a lot to do: I’m not dexterous enough to handle a hamster, she wasn’t to be fed today, and she’d had her exercise. No problem. I went upstairs and sat back at my amazing desk with its dual monitors that I do intend to blog about eventually. A few hours later, I went downstairs to head out to the park for a quiet read, and noticed Pepper’s cage was open: Alex had left it so before he’d left. Pepper was definitely not in the cage. I let my mother know and began a hunt of all the places she could be. No hamster-level nooks were Pepper-inhabited, so I was about to call off the search, when I saw her dart across the kitchen opposite me. Not thinking clearly enough I went for her with a tea-towel and grabbed her, but she wiggled free. Foolishly, I’d now got her frightened, and she outpaced me back across the kitchen. I had her in a corner and was ready to make another attempt, when she appeared to climb upwards into what looked like solid wood to me. She’d dissapeared into a cupboard where the cupboard door hung over the kickboard. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an ordinary cupboard, it was a door over the washing machine. So there was no way I could get her out of the gap manually.
Removing the kickboard entirely, I assessed the situation: she had access to the back and space underneath the entire left side of the kitchen, including dishwasher (with pipes), oven (with gas pipes) and plenty of electric cabling. The situation was looking grim. There wasn’t a lot more I could do without further dismantling the kitchen, which my mother via the phone wasn’t prepared to let me do. So I left a trail of raisins across the kitchen floor to her cage with the door open in a vain hope, blocked off the kitchen with an old board for doing puzzles on and lots of heavy cookbooks, and went out to the park. On return, there was no sign of any change in the dire situation. So I went about my evening. Then suddenly about half an hour ago I was sitting here tapping away as usual, when I noticed a movement on the small landing outside my attic. It was a true jaw-drop moment: Pepper was moving about out there. How on earth did she manage to get out of a barricaded kitchen, and climb two flights of stairs? I have no explanation. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe she climbed up through the interior of the walls but I know of no exit up here. I tried to get her but was unarmed, and she ran under me into my room. I sealed her in and went to get a colander, all the time wondering if I had hallucinated from having a hot shower… After a twenty minute chase behind the computer, foldable bed and box of computer stuff involving Pepper’s girlish hijinks I had her under the colander. I got her ball and got her in that with raisins, and she’s now safely back in her cage, with a large pile of raisins in case she needs comforting. There is no way I’m getting her out to comfort her myself after this. But I’m not resentful of this: the simple awe of her teleportation was worth it.
Finally back into Wikipedia
One of the things that I’d been intending to this summer was get back into Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia arena, after having to go on wikibreak for all of this school year for simply not having the time. A few weeks ago as school wound down to the extent that I was barely going in due to so many subjects having finished I started gradually working myself back in, but found it difficult and not particularly entertaining: it’s hard to get back into the swing of things and I didn’t fancy working through the backlog of things under my wikibreak notice. But I went for it and now it’s great to be working away quietely. As a friend points out however I’m only going to become inactive again from September. But my workload will be a lot less next year because I won’t have my heavy-duty history since I’ve now dropped that subject. So we shall see.
I started off a few days ago by getting back into recent changes patrol. This involves watching the feed of edits to Wikipedia and opening and reverting if necessary problematic, nuisance ones we refer to as vandalism. I started off making good use of my new dual-monitor setup (which I will get round to blogging about) by having CDVF display a flitting list of changes on my smaller screen, with Firefox open on the other. It went reasonably well and I did a fair bit of vandal-whacking; reverting edits and posting warnings to the talk pages of the vandals in question using a pretty little script called Twinkle and if necessary blocking the users when they clearly weren’t going to be constructive. This is the old-school way of patrolling, although my use of scripts to speed some things up would probably be scoffed at by the really nostalgic Wikipedians out there. However, after a bit I found myself being repeatedly out-reverted by users of Huggle, an app that tries to make things even more automated, even faster, getting those vandals down in mere seconds. At first I kept going with my old-fashioned methods (that always used to work) but it was soon clear this wasn’t going to last much longer: I was out-reverted four times on one article by someone using Huggle (it was being vandalised repeatedly). Clearly, I needed to try Huggle if I was going to be a useful patroller.
So I booted over to Windows (the app won’t run in Linux, it uses .net – don’t worry if that doesn’t mean much to you…) and downloaded Huggle, read the instructions and got going. And got very, very scared. The sheer speed of the whole thing makes me worry about how many mistakes can so easily be made. Firstly, you work with two buttons in the main: one to advance to the next edit, one to revert the edit and warn the user generically. Other options are to leave messages (such as encouraging anonymous users to make an account if they are being a decent contributor) and to revert for other reasons, such as the introduction of copyrighted material grabbed from somewhere else on the web. Secondly, all of the above can be done with keyboard shortcuts. So with one hand on space to move on, and one on Q to revert and warn (and I note that such edits are queued up and done in the background for you without interference, so you can shoot ahead assuming you have a decent Internet pipe), I was rattling through hundreds of edits.
As I mentioned earlier, mistakes are very possible. Several times someone else got there before me but I had already hit Q as I could see their revert appear on the screen. So Huggle obiediently reverted their reversion (restoring the vandalism) and warned them for unconstructive edits. Eeek. Frantic scrambling to Firefox to apologise ensued. More simply, one finds oneself getting subconciously into a race to work through the edits and revert ‘before someone else does’. I caught myself thinking like this a few times and took a deep breath.
Another scary thing about this program is how it progresses from warnings to blocks. In general people get four warnings for vandalism, with wording decreasing in friendlyness, before they are eligible for a block, starting at for many of us admins one day, and then repeated violations gaining weeks, months etc. in an attempt to get people bored with the whole practice by not being able to do it for a while. Huggle takes this to the next level. If you hit Q when the user already has four warnings, a form comes up to block the user immeadiately. You get options for length, softness/hardness (if you block an IP address (i.e. an Internet connection rather than a logged in user) you can elect to disable account creation or not, and various other things), and a table displays the warnings, times of said warnings and who they were left by, including the various automated anti-vandal bots we have running. Okay, I thought, this is maybe just a little bit far. I was blocking someone without ever having seen their talk page or contributions beyond being told they had the warnings. But what else was I to do? The evidence was there that a block was appropriate and so I set it. But I was left feeling somewhat uneasy.
In any case the app is very impressive with everything that it can do (I’ve only talked about a small set of its features here) and I congratulate the author, Gurch. If used correctly it’s a great way of relieving the monotony involved in keeping Wikipedia vandalism-free. My only concern is that I would perhaps prefer a few more seconds of vandalism existing than the potential recklessness. But maybe I was just an abusive Huggle user. In any case, I shall now reveal my levels of geek with the fact that I was absorbed in my keyboard shortcutting for roughly two solid hours yesterday afternoon.
I’ve also got back into some admin-specific tasks. Speedy deletion is the process by which articles can be nuked without the usual consensus-building discussion when it is clear we don’t want them; for example blatant advertising or articles containing only nonsensical gibberish can be deleted on-sight by an admin. I’ve always found this to be a nice, useful little time-filler so I got going, and ended up creating controversy. Wow. Straight into the thick of it by spawning several sides of discussion on the administrator’s noticeboard over my deletions. This never normally happens to me! I’m normally very much under the radar on Wikipedia, only doing silly little things that keep me entertaining that aren’t often noticed. But this was a change. I’ve also been doing other such tasks. I spent an hour and a half or so this afternoon working my way through the Articles for Deletion backlog, that is closing discussions and determining whether or not there was a consensus to keep, delete, merge etc. So I’ve been keeping busy and being reasonably useful to the encyclopedia.
I worry, however, about my whole outlook towards things with the project: I’ve never been fantastically good at just getting on with jobs unless they are new (novelty value, which I am getting now since I haven’t been around for so long) or are exciting, such as answering press enquiries coming into Wikimedia. We all know of the right people to call on when things need doing and I’m probably not on anyone’s list (although I most definately have a personal list of *cough*slaves*cough* myself). I need to find useful things to do that I can beaver away at.
All in all, it’s good to be back on what still is a fantastic set of projects, for all its faults.
Review: Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
A squad of elite GDI Mammoth Tanks assaults a Scrin base.
The first violent game I got was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and I’ve always been a fan of the series. When you talk about top-down RTS (real time strategy games) you can’t do so without bringing the behemoth of a series that is C&C that really does define the genre. It’s fast-paced, generally balanced, and easy to get into and out of. And the series distinguishes itself by continuing to have proper filmed cutscenes with real actors, which is something that I definately appreciate. It really enhances the story of the games which is very reasonable (can be surprising at times). The series has had several story lines going simultaneously (explained very well at the Wikipedia article); some are related to each other and others are entirely independent. The main tiberium plot started in the original C&C, continued in Tiberian Sun and its expansion pack, and I was excited to hear of its continuation in this latest adventure. In the immortal words of the GDI computer, EVA, ‘welcome back, Commander’. That line is quite possibly the best line in any video game I’ve ever played, when timed correctly and said in EVA’s computerised voice.
Story/Plot/Characters
The basic plot is that a crystalline alien substance, toxic to humans, arrived on an asteroid on earth in the 20th Century and has been spreading ever since, by converting normal matter across the planet into more tiberium. It turns out that because it draws valuable minerals out of the ground in doing this, tiberium is an extremely valuable source of energy and cash. It is the main resource of the games. The Global Defence Initiative (GDI), originally something set up by the UN that has become a global superstate, aims to research and understand tiberium to the extent that its infection of the world can be reversed, while the Brotherhood of Nod led by the enigmatic Kane (who appears to die at the end of every game and always resurfaces) believe that tiberium is a wonderous gift that heralds the next stage of man’s evolution, and so aims to spread it. By Tiberian Sun‘s expansion pack Firestorm, various forms of tiberian flora and fauna have developed, and by Tiberium Wars whole swaths of the planet have become uninhabitable. Then half way through the campaigns (there is one for each side) in this game an alien race arrives and begins a takeover of the planet. Maybe the theories of GDI scientists about tiberium being a terraforming substance for an alien invasion were right.
While the atmosphere of a world slowly suffocating under the tiberium menace is well portrayed in Tiberium Wars, there are elements missing. Tiberium only comes in simple crystalline forms rather than things such as tiberium veins, and tiberium lifeforms only put in a minor appearance. The Forgotten, a group of mutants that are the results of failed Nod experiments to create tiberian super-soldiers, only have a token involvement as well. To me this harms the games continuity and doesn’t allow it to follow on so well in the slow degradation of the planet.
The characters in Tiberium Wars are as forceful as ever, but I feel it is a shame that few have been carried through from the prequel. Granted, many were killed off per the story (although I suspect this was mainly because getting the actors back for the expansion pack wasn’t easy), but it’s not quite the same without the character representing the player, Commander McNeil, and the overall GDI leader, General Solomon. On the Nod side, while the charismatic Kane is back and is as fanatical about his crazed religion as ever, the classic Commander Slavik isn’t present (I don’t know if he is killed in Firestorm; I never completed the campaign). On the AI side, GDI’s EVA unit doesn’t make as big an appearance. Its cool and collected tactical analysis has been replaced by an energetic intelligence officer, which I don’t think is as effective. The lack of Nod’s famous CABAL computer is adequately explained by events in Firestorm. Overall the characters just haven’t been as memorable as in the prequel.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Tiberium Wars is very much more of the same, but that isn’t a bad thing: classic C&C RTS gameplay is of an excellent pace, is very accessible and has a good depth of strategy. You build up a base and get a steady economy of tiberium mining, you construct your units and you launch an attack. However, I felt in the campaigns of this game there was less variety in the missions: almost all involved this basic procedure of building up a base and large squad and then pushing forward. This is in contrast to the prequel in which there were many missions without a base at all, when you would lead a small squad deep into enemy territory to achieve various objectives. To me this seemed to present a greater challenge because once you have established a foothold, as the RTS genre doesn’t seem to be able to escape from, a tank rush will pretty much guarantee victory. This is particularly apparent when playing GDI because their Mammoth Tank is in my experience very much overpowered. You can find your tiny base being overwhelmed by enemy assaults, but once you have a tech centre and war factory and have enough cash to build a few mammoths and build their railgun upgrade to make their weapons more powerful, you’re pretty much safe because you can just place a mammoth at each point the enemy is attacking you from and little gets through.
There are some welcome improvements however. Units can now, for a price, call in a transport to take them to another location on the battlefield which is very convenient. Bases can be expanded by sending out small vehicles that establish outposts, rather than simply building a line of power plants or constructing an expensive mobile construction vehicle that deploys into a construction yard. Superweapons are at last genuinely super and are something to be afraid of, rather than a minor annoyance when the same building keeps being destroyed.
While GDI remains a side with a strong, continuous and unique character, and the new Scrin faction is effective and follows the hints dropped in the prequel, I am dissapointed by how Nod is portrayed. It has become at least partially a terrorist organisation instead of an elite religion which relied on high technology. While it retains these elements, it also introduces suicide units and cheap, numerous militants and I don’t think this is what Nod should be in terms of its place in the C&C Universe. Carry-throughs such as the classic sound of a charging Obilisk of Light (which still scares me, I was young when I played the prequel) are very welcome however.
Presentation
The graphics in Tiberium Wars are superb: when two armies come crashing together and start firing their high tech weapons, everything looks fantastic. I only really care about graphics when they are either exceptional or are spoiling the game because they are so poor, and both of these situations are rare for me: I don’t mind very much what a game looks like. But in C&C 3 they are very well done.
The music in the game is also very good, with good sound effects for weapons. The way a lot of these have undertones of the previous game helps to enhance the feeling of the tiberium-infested planet.
Conclusion
Not as good as the prequel as a complete package, but a very good sequel and continuation of the series. Well worth buying.
The opinions of others
You can either hold yourself up to the unrealistic standards of others, or ignore them and concentrate on being happy with yourself as you are. ~ Jeph Jacques
Self-esteem has become a bit of a buzzword in modern society. Battles rage in education over how much time should be given over to less academic aspects of the experience, and how increasingly lack of self-respect apparently leads to most of society’s problems. I exaggerate here but a line in a book I read recently said something like ‘many teenage girls I know practically live off low self-esteem’ so it’s definitely an issue to be considered. But is it automatically right for everyone to have a high self-esteem? What happens when they’re doing something that actually they really shouldn’t be; should they have a great deal of confidence then? Clearly we would have the rest of society telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves and should stop whatever it is they are doing.
I bring this up because I have noticed over the past half a year or so I have become increasingly concerned with other’s opinions of me when for most of my life I’ve barely been affected by them. On the one hand, this is good: obviously I would rather not be ignorant of what others have to say, and I always (in principle) want to hear the opinions of others on pretty much everything including my own behaviour, in order to work out what I should or shouldn’t be doing based on as much evidence as possible. On the other hand, I fear that I am becoming overly concerned with the opinion held of me by certain other individuals. I’m referring to certain teachers, Internet friends (and superiors in the projects I am involved in), and certain friends I particularly respect the opinion of. This usually involves one of this group making a harsh criticism of me, or misrepresenting my position on something. To the former, I am distressed that I become so distressed over such things. Criticism is a good thing, when fair, and when unjustified it should not concern me – but increasingly it does. To the latter, I perhaps worry too much about correcting the situation when I should instead just correct it once and leave it. I chase things up for far too long and become nagging. Psychologically I’m sure it is me looking for approval from those I respect the opinions of. Simple impulses.
As usual I haven’t really expressed what I wanted to in this post. I need to follow my own mantra of debate over argument and hurt. I need to stop worrying if I’ve hurt or annoyed someone else when I know my intentions have been good and I’ve noted to them those intentions should they become unclear. I need to accept that I’m not perfect, I’m inferior and unoriginal but that this is not something to dwell upon. Because lately as described I’ve become emotionally hung up on this kind of thing and this is not a situation I want to be in. I don’t want to stare at a wall for three quarters of an hour because someone gives me a fair opinion as I did earlier this week. This isn’t me.