Sun Apr 01 2012 09:45 Dada Skies: Over the years, my series of "Dada" projects has brought meaninglessness to formerly meaningful things: board games, Shakespeare, comics. Today, for my April 1 project I present Dada Skies, which randomly rearranges things that were randomly arranged to begin with: the stars as seen from Earth. It's a view I find strangely relaxing.

Dada Skies works like Dada Maps, by transcluding image tiles from a web service into a mosaic. In this case the service is the one provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. There are enhancements I'd like to make to the view, but this is what I've got time for right now, and I want to do my part to keep alive the nascent tradition of releasing cool things on April 1.

Mon Apr 02 2012 10:22 Constellation Games Game Design Promo: My editor has an extra advance copy of Constellation Games, which she asked me to give away in a gala promotional event! This put me in a pickle: I love giving things away, but I really hate "promotional events". So I came up with something fun: you can win a copy of the paperback (or, if you're already a subscriber, a subscription upgrade), by fleshing out the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity.

For those who haven't read Constellation Games: the CDBOEGOACC is an enormous XML document containing metadata for entertainment software from countless alien civilizations, as well as the computers and peripherals necessary to run that software. Like, imagine if Jason Scott worked for the Culture. To give you the idea, here are some CDBOEGOACC quotes from the narrator's Twitter feed:

• "Ruins Deluxe": Two-phase game. Build a fake ancient-civilization city, then sell souvenir crap to tourists who think the site is real.
• "Only for use while in the death-trance. Does not include hardware for invoking the death-trance." They always get you on peripherals!
• Make That Sale Ehmeyur! "Restored to popularity 306 years later when the hapless saleswoman Ehmeyur became a folk hero." #ganbare
• "All editions of this computer were destroyed and it is known only from wall carvings and one set of programming notes."
• #cdboegoacc will cheer me up. "During each play session, the player avenges the destruction caused by their previous session." #maybenot

Every CDBOEGOACC entry is a tiny science-fiction story about an alien culture and someone who responded to their culture by making a game. If you like this idea, you are the target audience for Constellation Games and you should enter this contest to win a copy. The CDBOEGOACC is the part of the book that was the most fun to write, and I can't think of a better gala promotional event than asking you to come up with these mini-stories.

You can write something tweet-sized like the quotes above, or you can flesh out an idea a bit more and put it on your weblog, or whatever. It doesn't matter to me, so long as you somehow make sure I know about it. Only entries I know about will be judged. Surefire ways to make sure I know about it: send me email, post a link in the comments below, or use the unwieldy hashtag #cdboegoacc on Twitter or Identica.

The contest ends when I wake up in the morning on April 10, one week from tomorrow, and pick my favorite CDBOEGOACC entry. We'll mail the winner their advance copy right away, which means you'll get the book a few days before its official release on April 17. (As a bonus, this uncorrected proof contains a huge continuity error in chapter 35, which you can find and then feel superior to me.) I'll also pick a random winner, who will get a free base subscription to the serial, plus a collected ebook once the serialization is done.

Since the goal is to make cool things, you can enter more than once to improve your chance of getting the paperback, but the random drawing is one entry per person. I will judge entries on the twin criteria of "sensawunda" and "comedy", the binary star by which I steer my novelist's ship. Have fun!

(6) Tue Apr 03 2012 09:07 Constellation Games Author Commentary #19, "Implementation Details": We're more than halfway through the book! Traditionally, it's around this time that an author starts to have doubts about having signed on for this huge project. It's happened on all three of my books and it's happening again with this commentary. I have a great time writing this stuff every week, and I hope you're enjoying it, but it does take a lot of time. Time which might be better spent working on my second novel, "A Fire Upon the Derp".

Uh, anyway, last week's Twitter archive. Don't forget about the game design contest, which ends next week. This week we meet Dana Light 2.0, and the totally different human person who's not Dana, Svetlana Sveta.

• Speaking of stupid meme-puns, alternate title for this chapter: "The Pie Is A Fake".
• CG is getting LibraryThing reviews from people who got advance copies (average rating: 3.88 stars!), and one reviewer mentioned that "[t]he story, told in a combination of first-person narration, blog posts, e-mails, and text messages, gets complicated."

  I do not comment on reviews because I've seen what happens when authors comment on reviews, but I want to use that quote as lead-in to say that I think this chapter is where it really starts getting complicated. As of this week, the narrative has split into two different universes: one in which Bai's girlfriend is a Constellation AI modeled after a human AI modeled after a video game heroine, and one in which he's dumped the AI for a Russian mail-order bride. The narrator is now lying to you.

• In the second draft, "Svetlana Sveta" did not exist. Ariel talked freely about "Dana" doing this and that, unprotected even by friends lock. This was incredibly dumb, and in the third draft, Dana 2.0 tells Ariel this is dumb and to knock it off before he gets everyone into trouble.

  I couldn't just "real life" everything, because Dana shows up in some of the game reviews, and I didn't want to "real life" everything because one of the things I wanted to strengthen in the third draft was Ariel stressing out about lying to everyone. So I started here: I moved all the details of the Dana pickup into a "real life" section, and created two contradictory summaries for Ariel's blog, one of which introduces Dana's alternate identity.

  

• I've mentioned before that almost every character in the book has two names or identities. I didn't plan this, but it worked out that way and I like it, so I'm beating that drum.

  But what about the BEA agents? Recall from the chapter 5 commentary that in the second draft, Ariel referred to the BEA agents with ridiculous cop-show aliases. You never learned their real names. Perfect symbolism! But then Cheryl pointed out in writing group that if "Krakowski" is just an alias Ariel uses in his blog, I can't use the "Crack-housey" joke in this chapter. So I made "Krakowski" his real name. And that one stupid joke is why Krakowski and Fowler have only one identity each. That's what happens when you don't plan out your symbolism ahead of time.

• Svet is Russian for "light", so in a fit of pique Ariel has named this fake person "Lighty McLight".

  There's a reference later on to Svetlana being extremely tall. In the third draft Ariel "established" this in this chapter along with her silly name. I cut that detail in the final draft, but but decided to keep the later reference, because why not.

• For the record, the ridiculous Fowler line I mentioned last week, which everyone wanted me to cut, was "Don't tempt this planet with your pie!"
• I almost missed this while rereading: Ariel drops into the present tense in the "real life" section. "I couldn't [tell Farang apart]. I still can't." It's not a big deal, but it reminds that Ariel is the author of the "real life" sections as much as he is the blog posts.
• In "real video game" news: Bai makes an Altered Beast reference, but since it's not mentioned by name I don't count it. Sonic & Cipher is a fake Sonic the Hedgehog game, but of course Sonic is real. I mean he's a real-world fictional character. Sorry, kids!

  In various earlier drafts, the game Ariel imagined playing in the refugee camp was Cipher & Sonic (because in this universe Sonic was a minor character in Sega's Cipher the Whatever series) and Blizzard & Chaos (because Sonic didn't exist in this universe and instead we had Blizzard Lizard, who can still be seen in chapter 13). The work I put into these things; you have no idea.

• The Dana pickup scene was the only one that had Bai and Bruce in the same room, and the only one that really suffered when I got rid of Bruce. You may remember me mentioning a joke about Bruce's Simple Affect Metadata Exchange tattoo, which I moved to Twitter. (setup, punchline) That's fine, but I did have to cut a couple sub-jokes from this chapter once Dana (not Curic) told Bruce what the tattoo said. The best one:

  "This is why you don't get random tats!" said Bai. "Didn't Omicron Beta Digamma show you the informational video?"

  "Big talk from a guy with Chinese characters tattooed on his wrist," said Bruce.

  "Yeah!" said Bai, flashing his wrist. "It's my mother's name! You know how I know? 'Cause I can read! fucking! Chinese, Bruce!"

• I only named the fraternity because I thought it would be funny to use an obsolete Greek letter in its name. ΟΒϜ is probably also the frat Ariel got kicked out of (as recounted in chapter 2). Later on we'll see that Ariel met Bai right when he started college, so I imagine they became friends when they were both in ΟΒϜ.
• The scene with the Massmonger 31, like last week's Brilhantes review, is mostly to give you some fun gaming stuff in a plot-heavy chapter. After the novel got taken over by computers like the Brain Embryo and the False Daylight, I wanted to have just one scene where Ariel tries to use a computer that's completely incompatible with his physiology. The plot wouldn't allow for a lot of them, but I did get this one.

  The experience of writing this novel has given me some sympathy for stories where the aliens are not much different from humans. It's not that hard to come up with this stuff; it is hard to use it in a story that human readers can identify with.

That's the week! Stay tuned for next week's special tabletop gaming episode, when Ariel will say, "I think we should just nuke each other once and get it out of our systems."

Image credits: Wikimedia user Ecelan, Joshua Kaufman, Flickr user ePi.Longo.

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Wed Apr 04 2012 14:27 TUNS: For a while I've been gathering cool space-themed pictures to illustrate the Constellation Games commentary, but there's way more and they're way more varied than I need. Rather than abandoning this embarrassment of visual riches, I recently started posting a couple pictures a day to my microblog using the hashtag #retrorocket, so named because I mostly focus on cool-looking old tech and people working with or building it.

At the risk of revealing all my secrets, I'm getting the #retrorocket pictures by harvesting the Internet Archive's NASA Images site, one year at a time. I've combed through 1969-1988, and my technique will break down around 1994, when there start to be thousands of pictures for each year (even 1969 wasn't that bad). But 1994 is not all that retro, really, is it? Yeah, it's kinda retro.

Despite the name, NASA Images has a lot of non-images: mainly movies and technical documents. Recently one tech document caught my eye: Technology Utilization Network System, a 1987 document laying out NASA's recommendations for off-the-shelf PC hardware and software.

This document pulls no punches, naming brand names, presenting huge benchmark tables, and spelling out just what it takes to outfit an effective mid-80s networked office on the taxpayer's dime. This is a time before Windows, in an office environment without Unix. Let's take a look at this document and see which products have the Right Stuff, and which fizzle on the launch pad. (n.b. Entertainment Weekly didn't want this for some reason, and I'm too lazy to change the segue.)

We'll start with the basic PC recommendation. "The recommended workstation for TUNS is the Compaq DeskPro 286 with a 40 Mb hard disk." Each should be equipped with an EGA card and a color monitor. "The estimated GSA cost... is $4,087." (About $7700 in 2010 dollars.)

The use as a workstation of one of the newer 386 machines (based on the Intel 80386 CPU chip) is not currently recommended. The power provided by the 386 system is more than that required of the workstation.

Unlike a lot of offices in 1987, NASA understands the importance of networking. That's why each workstation is fitted with a 3Com Etherlink card ($451) and connected to a local file server running Novell Advanced Netware/286. Netware wins out over now-obscure competitors like 3Com's 3+ Share, Banyon VINES/286, Fox 10-net, and Lee Data's LANMASTER. The Internet stack is not even considered: I'm sure NASA's scientific installations are on the Internet by now, but it's not really an option for IBM PCs, and the term "intranet" doesn't exist.

The Compaq 286 used for workstations can also act as the file server on a small LAN. But for a larger LAN, you do need to buy that 386, and for the really big installations, it's got to be "a Novell T286B with a 183 Mb of hard drive space". And remember to buy name-brand:

Although many vendors claim to sell "AT clones," ISN has occasionally found very subtle differences in the performance of these "clones," which may result in problems during system integration.

For connecting to external sites and databases, each workstation is outfitted with a Hayes Smartmodem 2400 at $579.

ISN does not recommend installation of 9600 baud modems at this point. The lack of standard protocols, error-correction methods and data compression techniques for 9600 baud communications means that two modems from different vendors will rarely communicate with each other at 9600 baud.

Printer time! TUNS spells out recommendations for cheapo dot-matrix printers (the Epson FX-286e, $527), letter-quality daisywheel printers (the Diablo D80IF, $1523), and laser printers for impressing the boss (the HP Laserjet Series II, $1795). Note that the most expensive printer is half the price of the workstation PC.

Two printers, the Brother Twinwriter 5 and the Fortis DH-45, include both dot-matrix and daisy-wheel print mechanisms. The two companies are actually marketing the same printer under different labels. Although this printer was initially viewed as an exciting combination of functionality at a reasonable price, it was excluded from further consideration after the Twinwriter 5 vendor reported extremely poor reliability and great customer dissatisfaction.

What about software? For the most part, TUNS recommends off-the-shelf 80s office software, Lotus 1-2-3 (GSA cost: $305) and WordPerfect 4.2 ($173):

Although the evaluation scores for WordPerfect and Microsoft Word show only a two point difference, the evaluation team highly recommends WordPerfect because the evaluation team found it much easier to use WordPerfect's ACSII-to-document transfer features.

But they choose Unify, a database I've never heard of, over 80s heavyweights like dBase and Clipper. Why? Because Unity just has more stuff, like a C library.

Oracle was eliminated as a possibility because a LAN version of the software, although in development for some time, is still not available.

Each 286 workstation is loaded with about $100 worth of utilities: Popular ones like Sidekick and Norton Utilities, as well as some more obscure ones: "Sideways to aid in the printing of large spreadsheets; ScreenSave to protect the life of the monitors; KeyBuffer to allow the user to enter characters from the keyboard at a faster rate than acceptable under DOS; and FilePath to aid in the use of multiple directories and sub-directories."

But the best part of the whole document is the section on email. The document identifies a large number of requirements for an email system, such as:

The sender must be able to identify a single recipient, multiple recipients, and a "group" mailcode consisting of multiple mail identification codes but addressed as one unit.

And then presents a huge table comparing the competitors (again, Internet email is not even on the radar). And then decides to just keep using "the NASAMAIL system currently available throughout NASA." NASAMAIL was actually an installation of Sprint Telemail, which you can read a little more about in RFC 1168, including a mention of a Telemail-Internet mail gateway at NASA Ames.

It's a little odd that hardware of this description almost never shows up in the NASA Images archive! (I did see one mid-80s IBM PC sitting on someone's desk, but when I went back to look for it as an illustration I couldn't find it.) I think these recommendations were mostly for clerical workers and managers, and that the engineers and scientists (who show up quite a bit in the archive) used minicomputers, Unix workstations, and mainframes into the 90s.

I'm probably not gonna go through any more of these documents in any detail, but here are two others I found really interesting: the public affairs plan for STS-1, the first Space Shuttle flight, and the original press kit for Apollo 13.

Tue Apr 10 2012 09:18 Constellation Games Author Commentary #20, "Feature Creep": This week: Dana earns her paycheck, we learn the shocking (if you're a Farang) secret of Sayable Spice, and Ariel stresses out and gets a little stalkery.

I'm not sure who put a bunch of tags on CG's LibraryThing page, but they're pretty great. (and full of spoilers) Apparently CG is a bildungsroman about cosplay, douchebags, mecha-godzilla, real replicas, and vastening. I don't disagree!

Come for the Twitter archive, stay for the commentary. CDBOEGOACC contest winners will be announced as soon as I finish the post.

• Last week I mentioned that Svetlana Sveta did not exist in the second draft. There were a lot of scenes with Ariel or Bai carrying around and talking to a piece of paper. I think of the second draft as what "really" happened, the factual basis for Ariel's blog posts in the third draft.

  You can see that Ariel isn't trying very hard to conceal the truth. He left unchanged details like the way "Svetlana" dresses, and he added over-the-top winks like Svetlana boasting about supplanting Dana. Bits like "Svetlana held her smart paper against the TV screen" are minimal glosses on what happened in the second draft ("I taped the smart paper to the television").

• In SF that features humans among lots of alien species, there's frequently some BS idea that humans are special. I was going to write that TV Tropes probably has a name for it, and then I looked and yes, the name is: "Humans Are Special." This generalization takes many forms, none of which I like, but the one I dislike least is the one given in Babylon 5: humans are special in that they form communities.

  This one at least has some truth to it. Human cultures are all over the map, but almost by definition they involve a bunch of humans forming a community. I wouldn't go as far as B5's suggestion that humans form inclusive communities (TV Tropes: "Humans Are Diplomats"). But it is a real tendency which distinguishes humans from, say, octopus.

  Farang are more like octopus. There's nothing wrong with this, it's not time for them to learn a valuable lesson about what it means to be human, but it means their cultures have little in common with human cultures. A normal human put into a Farang body would be a misfit, the kind of person who produces offensive artwork like Sayable Spice. A human might be able to identify with such artwork, but probably not with its pugnaciousness.

  (nb. humans are not special in the Constellation universe; Aliens are very similar and they got there first. This is the subject of chapter 25's deleted scene, which I'll put up when the time comes.)

  

• We finally get the tense Ariel/Jenny scene I mentioned a while back, a scene that shows what Ariel thinks Jenny thinks of him, and hiding in between, a little bit of what they actually think of each other. "Found Objects" has an analogous scene from Jenny's POV.
• I've mentioned before that Tactical Nuclear Exchange is basically Twilight Struggle with the complexity dialed way up, but I really like that extra complexity: the ideology board with its traps, the simulation of the shortcomings of Soviet central planning where the Soviet player lays out a plan and the American player shuffles the plan cards. Most of all, the idea that the game can abruptly end and render all your setup time moot.

  In Twilight Struggle, the player who starts a nuclear war automatically loses. I sometimes find myself making decisions not to help me win, but to help the game go on a normal amount of time given how long it took to set up. I don't think this kind of decision-making is even particularly unrealistic in a nuclear context, but it's only half the story.

  Because really, who cares who started the war? You're both dead. In TNE the only thing that matters is who has more survivors. And although 90% of the time the name of the game is a lie and a "tactical" exchange will escalate until everyone dies, there's some mechanism in TNE constantly working to convince you that this time you can win but you gotta go for it now!

• It's a little Creative License-ish that people born in 1987 would be heavily into a board game about the Cold War. But maybe it's retro chic, and it does have all those cool expansions.

  

• Bonus mid-story Jenny facts: I discovered while looking at a very early outline that Jenny's name was originally Jenny Gallardo. I never explicitly changed it. Just, the first time I wrote her surname in the story proper, it was "Gallegos". Which I do like better.

  I saw The Middleman while finishing the second draft of Constellation Games, and I was a little upset to see Natalie Morales playing Wendy Watson very close to how I imagine Jenny: kind of ticked off all the time at how not everyone is as smart as she is. But I got over being upset.

• The launch of the Mars mission was the trickiest scene in the book to write. This scene has to do a ton of exposition about the mission itself, the way the Constellation uses ports for space travel, the star-draw ritual, and the evolving use of patches to display fluid overlay affiliations. It's got the first onscreen Gaijin and the first appearance of Colonel Mason. And the narrator's nowhere near the action! He's really stressed out and he's watching the action on the Internet as a way of taking a break. Which, believe me, I've been there, and it's not a good state of mind in which to write coherently.

  In the second draft this scene was also the introduction of the star-draw, and it was just too much for one little scene. So I had Curic introduce the star-draw back in chapter 8, and now this scene just has to remind you of it.

• I go back and forth on whether Ariel is being creepy in the mission launch scene. I mean, he does have a romantic relationship with Tammy, just not quite the one he thinks he has. But he is being kind of obsessive about watching that video (and notice the name of the chapter). It works either way.

Part Two's plot kicks into high gear next week, with the terrifying chapter 21, "Her". The chapter in which Tetsuo will say (but not demonstrate) "Sexual pair bonding!" Also next week: you can get a paper copy of the book and read the whole rest of the story! Then complain about how I'm not putting up this commentary fast enough.

Photo credits: US Army, US Department of Defense, Flickr user my_eye.

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Tue Apr 10 2012 09:56 CDBOEGOACC Contest Results: I was worried that no one would enter the CDBOEGOACC contest and it would be like a party where no one showed up. But ten people put in 29 entries, which is a pretty good party. I'm pretty sure all the entrants are Constellation Games subscribers, so I gotta work on my crossover appeal, but I'm happy with the turnout.

Once again, the grand prize is a galley copy of Constellation Games which will hopefully be delivered a few days before the paperback comes out. Even I don't have a galley copy, so you know it's exclusive. There'll also be a random drawing, and the winner will get a free basic-level subscription. Although since everyone who entered is already a subscriber, I don't know if you want that. Maybe you can give it to a friend, maybe you can negotiate a different prize with Kate, the publisher.

Anyway, let's take a look at the entries:

• First, you gotta check out Andrew Perry's nerdtastic entries. He took little bits of worldbuilding I'd scattered around the novel and created (AFAIK) the first piece of Constellation Games fan fiction, featuring realistic Farang, Alien, and Wazungu games, plus one created for humans by a Smoke submind. I especially liked the "Flase Daylight".

  In a non-ironic twist, Andrew's fidelity to existing Constellation Games canon was what cost him the award. Since I wrote the stuff he was stitching together, reading his CDBOEGOACC entries didn't make me feel like I was on a flight of fancy. But, I have asked Kate for dispensation to award Andrew the special CDBOEGOACC Jury Prize.

All the other entries were short concept quotes posted to Twitter. I've archived all of them here because I really hate the way Twitter's UI consigns the past to a dark, eternal oubliette.

• Ornithopter:
  • The Way Arounding: hide your shameful underscale color from your husband's husband while negotiating a wedding contract with him
  • "An invading army is coming. You have 3 days to store fat for hibernation and to bury yourself deep enough to avoid detection."
  • Young-Time Architecture: Design a nest for your eggs of sufficient complexity to prevent yourself from eating them.
  • Fish or Other Fish?: You are captured by Roetus. Arrange patterns of color to convince them you're sentient before they eat you. (The title "Fish or Other Fish?" comes from an event in Dolkoan history where a fish and its twin competed for war-minister.)
  • No Never Negation No No!: Find the lost start-card to your transport shuttle in a series of exotic locations. #cdboegoacc
  • No Never Negation No No No!: Sequel to NNNNN! You are the transport-shuttle's start card. Hide to extend your owner's vacation.
• George Buckenham:
  • Thermal Vent Orchestrator: Intended as a test of vent-controlling verisimilitude, but usually played for laughs with cheats on.
  • "When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate the Octopus" [he adds: "this is actually the title of a Wired article"]
• Benhimself:
  • Xarthru: "Falling shapes composed of four blocks descend from above, arrange them in lines to clear them and score." Wait, what?
  • Squigglers III: Eat delicious parasites off the tentacle monster on which you live without becoming a meal yourself!
  • Launch asteroids at a planet using the gravity wells of other orbiting planets to save energy.The other player will return fire. [This is very similar to "Occluded Occlusion", an Ip Shkoy game mentioned in chapter 33. -LR]
• Gus Andrews
  • Pentathlon: Behemoth bowling, cotyledon racing, flailing, cube dancing, bluntshooting
  • Aesthetics-driven, unscored "doing-the-dozens"-style attempt to outdo other players by producing the most nuanced cloud of gas
• Tikitu de Jager
  • Bloom: Rediscover the excitement of first pollination. Only this time YOU decide where the seeds fall.
  • Society: Out-game negotiations influence in-game status, and (where not prohibited by applicable social strictures) vice versa.
• Adam Parrish
  • one player must communicate a terminal semantic taxon to others without using distal mouthparts or pheromone glands
• Brendan Adkins
  • "Largely Automated Testimony Extractor:" Only a game inasmuch as one can play to lose.
  • "Hit The Button Before Anyone Else Hits The Button:" Popularity declined after players began using relativistic time dilation.
  • "My Friend The Modular Dissent Repression System:" Hacks a hunter-drone's neural core to prioritize cuddling.
  • "Inferior Gasband:" Created to defame a rival pseudofamily. Rivals later ate the designer and produced a successful sequel.
  • "If You Outscore This Game's Designer At This Game Her Agents Will Implode Your Home Village With Hydrocarbons:" No longer true.
  • "That's Enough:" designed for slowphase, an innovative anti-cheating system emits UV flares if the player displays life-signs.
  • "Meatchild:" An innovative control scheme allows up to 4 million of Her hive-units to cooperatively guide a single biped.
• Mirabai Knight
  • A long-scope evolutionary commerce game in which shoemakers must adapt to the cyclic disappearance and reappearance of feet.
• Evan Baer (who entered after the deadline, but I'll at least put his entry up here)
  • Stop, Memmings! subvert attempts of adorable figures to prevent access to Constellation drop boxes, which are empty when opened.

I thought all the entries were really good, although Adam may have been phoning it in. C'mon, Adam, this ain't Apples to Apples. Anyway, I'm excluding Adam and Brendan from consideration because they were beta readers. Here are my three favorites (apart from Andrew's, which I've already spilled the beans that it didn't win):

• "An invading army is coming. You have 3 days to store fat for hibernation and to bury yourself deep enough to avoid detection." [Ornithopter]
• Pentathlon: Behemoth bowling, cotyledon racing, flailing, cube dancing, bluntshooting [Gus Andrews]
• A long-scope evolutionary commerce game in which shoemakers must adapt to the cyclic disappearance and reappearance of feet. [Mirabai Knight]

And the winner of the Constellation Games galley copy is... Ornithopter! I loved their game concept because it tied into a theme I don't really explore in CG: the repurposing of really awful historical situations as entertainment simulations.

But don't give up yet, non-disqualified entrants! We've still got the random drawing. And here's some Python code to perform it:

>>> import random
>>> entrants = ["Andrew Perry", "Ornithopter", "George Buckenham", "Benhimself", "Gus Andrews", "Tikitu de Jager", "Mirabai Knight"]
>>> random.choice(entrants)
'Andrew Perry'

OK, well, that worked out. Andrew Perry will receive the random drawing prize, and we'll just call it the CDBOEGOACC Jury Prize.

And that's it for the gala CDBOEGOACC giveaway contest! I hope it was a fun time. I certainly enjoyed watching people come up with this stuff.

Mon Apr 16 2012 12:06 Beautiful Soup 4.0.4: I haven't been mentioning all the Beautiful Soup releases I've been doing, because they're just maintenance releases, but I'll mention them occasionally because fixing bugs (and determining what's a bug and what's not) still takes up a fair amount of my time. We're up to 4.0.4 and I've fixed/worked around a number of bugs, including one that prevented Beautiful Soup from parsing an XML document larger than about 512 bytes.

I've also updated the docs quite a bit to help people solve common problems. I'm not sure where to stop, because Beautiful Soup is the first Python library a lot of people use, so it gets caught up in questions like "how do I install Python packages on Windows?" (It's not easy.)

Mon Apr 16 2012 14:58 CS161: You could get a computer science education just by taking classes called CS161:

• "Introduction to Computing" (Drexel)
• "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" (Stanford)
• "Object Oriented Problem Solving" (Colorado State)
• "Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence" (UCLA)
• "Design and Architecture of Computer Systems" (UC Riverside)
• "Computer Security" (UC Berkeley)
• "Operating Systems" (Harvard)
• "Building High Performance Servers" (Brown)

(7) Tue Apr 17 2012 09:14 Constellation Games Author Commentary #21, "Her": This is one of the most important chapters in the book. I need you to start feeling the weight of the Constellation as a geological-time, astronomical-scale project, not just as the country where Tetsuo and Curic were born. The best way is to show you the Earth contact mission through the eyes of the one who's seen it all: the Her superorganism.

Twitter was quiet last week, and will be even quieter this week because the whole chapter takes place between 3 and 5 AM on a Tuesday. I think you should do some work this week instead of checking Twitter all the time.

Today is the official release of the paperback edition of Constellation Games! How does this work? I have no clue. I believe those of you who ordered the paperback will be getting it sometime this week, and those who have been resolutely refusing to preorder will soon be able to order it from the online store or get it from a local indie. In the meantime, how about a bulleted list? I know all about those.

• The other Constellation species take their human names from human words for "outsider". But some words for "outsider" you don't want to say; not in front of the children. So you might say "them" instead. You can't trust them. Who do they think they are. In honor of this, the members of Her are simply called Them.
• My high-concept idea for Her is a hive mind whose members are themselves sentient. Smoke is a recursive version of the same idea. I don't know of any preexisting examples of this in SF, apart from Internet-like "world minds", but I'm sure there are some and I'd like to hear about any you know of. It seems like a fun thing to read about.
• I like how a lot of Them strongly disagree with what Her is doing and talk back to her. (I should just abbreviate "conflict between partners" as CBP so I can refer to it more easily.) Her seems to operate on a system of democratic consensus with a supermind veto, which Curic interprets as an intolerable fascism.

  Curic's "problems with authority" bit was one of the last things I added to the manuscript. I think it works really well, especially given what happens between Ashley and Her in "The Time Somn Died".

• I came up with Her around the time I abandoned the first draft. In the second draft she was mentioned a couple times before showing up, but come chapter 21 the writing group felt like they had no forewarning of her existence whatsoever. Maybe you feel the same right now, but I did try to prep it a little better in later drafts. The biggest change was in chapter 9, where I greatly expanded an Ariel/Jenny disagreement about the relationship between Them and Her. (I think disagreements are the best way to do exposition.)
• Grammar time! Her's name is "Her", and she does identify as female, although I don't know what that means. So: "I met some of Her's members and they told me her opinion." You don't capitalize the pronoun; she's not God.
• There's a little bit of Arrested Development reference going on here ("Her?"), but not much. In related news, I did name a character Daisy just so I could have her say, "Hi, I'm Daisy!"
• Ariel's explanation of how game sequels get made is taken almost wholesale from a conversation I had with a friend who'd worked for one of those social-games companies. (I'm making this vague just so I don't burn bridges they'd rather leave uncharred; if they read this, they should let me know if they want real credit.) I've never worked in the game industry at all, so it's probably the novel's most accurate bit of insider info.
• Is Her's choice of Sarah Vowell's voice for her English vocalizer a good detail? I dunno. I mentioned earlier that the celebrity-vocalizer thing was from "Vanilla" and probably not something I'd use nowadays. But, when I was writing "The Time Somn Died", I imagined Her sounding like Fluttershy from My Little Pony. So the quiet cutesy voice is definitely part of the character.
• Back in January I had a dream about Constellation Games, a dream that tried to convince me that I'd written and taken out a scene in which Jenny has sex with the Her superorganism. Not the individual Them, but Her herself. I resisted this idea for the usual stodgy author reasons: I didn't remember writing any such scene, it made no character sense, it was ontologically impossible, etc. It was one of those early-morning dreams where you wake up briefly and go back to sleep, and when I went back to sleep I was presented with an actual draft of the Jenny/Her scene! A smoking gun! I thought to myself "wow, I guess that dream I had earlier was accurate WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS THE SAME DREAM."
• That binary star patch complicates the story so much. At least for someone like me who's spent months thinking about the characters. After reading the third draft, Brendan said he'd assumed Ariel was lying about this meeting with Tammy. It would be a lot simpler if Ariel were lying, but it clearly happened. It's a "real life" section, Tetsuo and Daisy were there, and Ariel even switches narration to the present tense and implies that he still has the patch.

  I use the patch in ways I'm really proud of, dramatically, but for a long time I couldn't imagine what Tammy might have said to go along with the patch, given what happens later. Fortunately, while writing this commentary I came up with something. I can't say more without big spoilers, so I'll come back to this later.

  The meeting only happened because of weakness on my part. In the second draft, chapter 21 ended with Ariel talking to Tetsuo and Daisy, then going back through the port. And then I wrote chapter 22, which did not turn out at all the way I thought it would. It turned out so poorly for Ariel (I don't think this is a spoiler--he warns you about it in this chapter) that in the third draft I added the meeting with Tammy beforehand. Remember how I said that every time Ariel gets laid, I'm about to ruin his life? The first time, I had dramatic irony in mind, but this time I felt sorry for him.

  This is the last time I'm nice to Ariel for the rest of the book, so enjoy it.

On that note: tune in next Tuesday (or read the paperback) for Ariel's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. During the course of which he will say, "I'm more worried about my friend's problem than in coming up with the perfect urine-related analogy for the problem."

Image credits: Joachim Barrande, Flickr user fubsan

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Mon Apr 23 2012 09:55 Some Interesting Game Aliens: Editor Kate pointed me to this list of the best and worst aliens in video games. Without wanting to say anything bad about that list, I noticed that it (and similar lists I've found online) focuses heavily on the visual design of humanoid aliens from first-person shooters. So I thought I'd make my own list, in honor of the print release of Constellation Games (Publishers Weekly calls it "fun"!), highlighting some video game aliens that I find interesting from a game design perspective. I'm sure there are plenty more I haven't heard of, so if you have any additional suggestions, I'd like to hear about them in comments.

The invaders (Space Invaders)

Just gonna get this one out of the way. Among the most iconic aliens ever devised, the invaders in the middle row have come to symbolize video games as a whole. Apart from their visual style there's nothing there, but the style is great.

The blobs (A Boy and his Blob)

These were my gut-reaction nomination for "best", because they're the only aliens I can think of that only make sense in a video game. The blob in A Boy and his Blob is a game mechanic personified: a sentient inventory. This causes serious problems if you try to think about the species outside the context of the game—when your toilet clogs on Blobolonia, do you feed your friend a jellybean and turn them into a plunger? But within the game, it works great.

The Melnorme (Star Control II)

If you want vivid alien characterizations, Star Control II is your game. Unfortunately, most of those characterizations are based on asinine stereotypes. That's why the Melnorme win it for me. It would be easy to make "the trader race" greedy and sleazy—in fact, SC2 does this with the other "trader race", the Druuge. But the Melnorme are friendly cosmopolitans who're fun to talk to. And they occasionally drop ominous hints that are never followed up on anywhere in the game.

That said, there's nothing game-y about the Melnorme, they just happen to be in a game. Every race in SC2 could guest on Star Trek, and many of them have. So I'm not pushing this one very hard. At least they're not humanoid.

Honorable SC2 mentions: the Zoq-Fot-Pik, who are silly and fun; and the Orz, who are similar to but not as well-executed as...

The Endermen (Minecraft)

From another dimension rather than from outer space, but aliens nonetheless. The Roadside Picnic of video game aliens; the Endermen follow rules that make perfect sense... to them. Their random rearrangement of blocks and sudden fits of aggro bear a twisted resemblance to your own behavior in Minecraft. Like you, they are interlopers in the game world, and their behavior was designed to challenge your dominance of it.

Giygas (Earthbound)

I almost didn't count Giygas for the same reason I'm not counting the Meteor from Maniac Mansion: I already gave the "cool aliens that happen to be in a game" nod to Star Control 2. But the final battle of Earthbound does some interesting things with the game's generic JRPG battle system, so sure, I'll count it.

"Them" (The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask)/The Martians (Metal Slug 2)

These aliens are composed entirely of pop culture cliches. The interesting thing is not their design but the fact that they show up at all. These aliens aren't just from another planet: they're from another genre. The Martians show up and abruptly turn your tasteless WWII run-and-gun into a '50s saucer flick. And "They" show up in a Zelda game. Albeit a Zelda game that also features a time loop and travel to the moon.

When I asked on Twitter for peoples' favorite video game aliens, the only response I got (thanks, Laura!) was also in the vicinity of this category: Crypto from Destroy All Humans, which I haven't played but which looks just like the movie Mars Attacks!.

Board game bonus! The Loser (Cosmic Encounter)

Cosmic Encounter is all about embodying game mechanics into alien species, and the Loser is the best, because it forces you to have debates about what it means to "win" a game. Whatever chaos is happening due to the other players' equally unbalanced species choices, the Loser multiplies it. My absolute fave.

And there you go. Let me know of any you think I missed—this is a bizarrely underexplored field, though maybe I just think it's bizarrely underexplored because I spent a long time writing a novel about it. I mean, I also thought it was weird no one had explained how game titles work.

Image credits: Flickr user philosofia, DeviantArt user aeonpants, DeviantArt user dczanik, DeviantArt user EliteParanoid, SNK, Felicia Cano.

Mon Apr 23 2012 15:21 Handheld Device:

(4) Tue Apr 24 2012 09:38 Constellation Games Author Commentary #22, "Nerfed": This chapter is bad news for Ariel but good news for me, because yesterday I got my box of author copies. That means those of you who ordered paperbacks should be getting them soon. This EXCLUSIVE SIDE COVER REVEAL shows the playtime synergies possible for those who shelled out for the Adamantium package with its USB key.

In a couple weeks I may do a special spoiler post so that those who've read the whole book can ask me questions about stuff that hasn't been serialized yet, rather than waiting until the appropriate chapter comes up in the serialization.

There's a solitary tweet in last week's microblog archive. Let's move on to the commentary:

I came into this chapter treating it like a chess problem. I had all the pieces on the board and the question was how Ariel would outsmart the BEA again, the way he did with Dana. I sat down and puzzled over this and had a long conversation with Beth trying to figure out how to get Ariel out of this scrape.

And after about forty-five minutes of being totally stumped I asked myself the obvious question: Why am I trying to get Ariel out of this?

At this point I knew how the book would end (it turns out I only knew how Part Two would end). I didn't have the plot planned out between now and then, but at some point I needed to break Ariel. This is the perfect time to start. He's stressed out from Sayable Spice work, shaken from his encounter with Her and the revelation of Curic's ambivalence. Let's just go for it.

So I destroyed Ariel's house. He tries all the clever gambits I thought of for him, and they don't work, and he loses. And that was the single best thing that ever happened to the book. From this point on the characters are developed enough that I can do whatever horrible things I want to them. They'll either figure something out and come out on top, or they'll lose, and either way it'll be interesting reading.

A lot of this week's commentary is me telling stories that are at best tangentially related to the chapter. But if that's good enough for big-name DVD commentaries, it's good enough for me:

• This was a little clearer in the third draft, but hopefully it's still clear. Something's going to happen around October 13 that makes Ariel willing to tell the truth about his house. The backdated post is a little flash-forward to the end of part two. So live in suspense! Or read the paperback, whatever.
• I got tons of pushback about Fowler's pie line in chapter 19, but apparently "That fucking snitch crate!" is A-OK.
• The Legend of the Bystander review got stuck in the beginning of this chapter because that's the last possible place it can go—after September 2 there's no more Brain Embryo. Because I placed that scene without thinking about it on a plot level, I didn't notice until just now that it creates a bizarre incongruity. Ariel keeps going back to Curic in the house-losing conversation ("You need to talk to Curic about this," "Maybe Curic can stop this."), even though he's just learned that Curic is crazy.

  I'm gonna file this under "accidental awesomeness" rather than "correctly regarded as goofs", because I think it fits in very well with what we see of the Ariel/Curic relationship. But it was totally unintentional.

  

• The missile defense joke is super inaccurate (much like missile defense itself—heyo!), but I left it in 'cause it's a funny failure mode. Inaccuracies: 1) An object with negative mass would probably look like nothing at all. 2) If that glitch did happen, the investigation would take months and a low-level State Department bureaucrat would never hear about it. 3) The port + its casing + the telepresence robot probably has a positive net mass anyway.

  The most likely in-story explanation is that Krakowski found out about Ariel's trip through old-fashioned HUMINT and is now trying to dazzle him with technobabble (a favor Ariel will return later). After all, the Constellation's not very good at keeping secrets. But I'm good at taking... Creative License.

• There's not really an "Austin Building Inspection Division" per se. Krakowski is clearly referring to the Building Inspection Division of the city's Planning and Development Review Department.
• The Greenland Treaty has been mentioned before, but now it's a done deal. Although it's mentioned several more times throughout the book, I deliberately left the details vague, because 1) who cares, and 2) if I set down the details I can't change them later to fit a future story. But non-canonically, Greenland has gained independence from Denmark and is now effectively a client state of the Hierarchy Interface overlay.
• When I took this chapter to writing group there was one person who really loved Fowler's line about using a black hole as a lathe. Yes, it's a good line. Very evocative, if I do say so myself. But this person was stuck on it. They said I should expand on that line in flashback, and spun a fantastical scene describing the port's construction, like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings movie where you see the Rings of Power being made.

  One of the rules of my writing group is that the person whose story it is doesn't talk until everyone else has given their critique. So I said nothing. But I thought: what the hell?! I can't put that in a comedy novel! It would read like Spinal Tap playing "Stonehenge"!

  I have no other complaints about this persons' critiques (they're not with the group anymore), and I've certainly delivered my share of idiosyncratic critiques. But that moment has stayed with me, perhaps because it's the kind of random obsession I expect from my characters.

• Ariel's defense of his parents' toilet-training techniques was inspired by one of my earliest memories. When my mom was training my sister Susanna, she bought bags and bags of cheap grocery-store candy to use as bribes, because Susanna was being difficult. This did not sit well with me, as my access to candy had always been severely constrained, despite my willingness to get on board with the pee-in-the-toilet program.

  In particular I remember coveting a bag of circus peanuts. Circus peanuts! I had never even heard of such a thing. Like a peanut and a candy at the same time! Oh, how I longed for those circus peanuts. But they were for Susanna.

  I told this story to Susanna last year when I went to visit for Christmas, and she had absolutely no memory of it. I don't remember my own toilet training, so it's quite possible my mom went the bribery route with Susanna because I'd been so horrible. Or that I'd had circus peanuts and forgotten about them.

  Anyway, if you subscribe to that archaic psychology theory that explains everything about a person in terms of their toilet training experience, you've now got a bonanza to work with.

• And closing out this week's commentary with another personal story explaining something that doesn't need to be explained. Dana's plan to disguise herself as a flyer for a chiptune concert is a super-obscure reference to a surprise birthday party I planned for Sumana in 2008. I came up with an imaginary chiptune concert as a way to get out of the house without making her want to come with. I don't even think that qualifies as a "reference", but that's why Dana says "chiptune concert" and not something else.
• Puzzle Korner: next week, Krakowski's going to ask Ariel about something Her said in chapter 21. Do you know what that might be?

Pretty chunky commentary this week, hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to tune in next week for chapter 23, when Jenny will say, "I don't masturbate to it."

Image credits: yours truly, the city of Austin, NASA/Ames, Wikimedia Commons user Hoshie.

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Fri Apr 27 2012 12:01 o Invasion: There are some rogue os in the Constellation Games acknowledgements. "N. K. Jemison" should refer to the Nebula and Hugo-nominated author N. K. Jemisin, not to a person who doesn't exist. And "Beth Lermon" is of course my friend Beth Lerman.

Surely these are far from the only typos in the book [I originally wrote "on the book"], but they're really bad, and deserve a special correction, and my apologies.

Sat Apr 28 2012 08:55 Hidden Treasures: There's a competition going on right now called "Hubble's Hidden Treasures", a competition to identify amazing but overlooked images within the Hubble Space Telescope's massive twenty-year data archive. I have no special expertise in image processing or astronomy, but I so coveted the prize of an iPad[0] that I thought I'd try my hand.

See, most people who enter this contest are taking pictures of nebulae and galaxies and setting up the colors to represent different wavelengths of light. Here's a nice example. These images have aesthetic value but are merely emblematic of Hubble's scientific value, which comes from the raw data. As long as we're playing that game, why not find aesthetic satisfaction in Hubble's glitches? My innovative thinking will surely net me the prize.

Just as an example, here's a super-washed-out image that could have the date and place of your punk show written in the middle of it. Lots of images have glitchy edges, and my original plan was to make a collage of the glitchy edges. But then I found the image to the right, which blew my stupid idea out of the water.

I call this ghostly image "hst_05909_01_wfpc2_fr418n18_pc", because that's its Hubble dataset ID, but if I were hanging it in an art gallery I'd call it "Cygnus", because that's the search I used to find it. Here it is big and zoomable. Here's a larger image (it's the full WFPC2 image--the one to your right comes from the Planetary Camera bit of the WFPC2) which I think makes it clear the feature you see is a photographic artifact and not a real thing in space.

I don't have anything more to say about hst_05909_01_wfpc2_fr418n18_pc; it's just a nice piece of abstract photography. The Hubble Legacy Archive is great stuff in general, though.

[0] Can the winner get 5 minutes of Hubble observation time or something contest-specific? Just trying to think outside the box here. The box labeled "box of iPads for use as contest prizes".