Isqua Istari

This article is written under the assumption that you want to win arguments. If you don’t care about being right and having other people verbally acknowledge it you probably won’t be interested in what follows.

Winning an argument is about mind control. It’s about changing the way your outspoken foil confesses his understanding of reality. With this in mind it becomes clear that many arguments are impossible to win. Many people are not interested in having their minds changed, or prefer to change your mind instead. Therefore every argument is really two sub-arguments, with both sides stating:

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I was looking at games the other day. Figured I’d support the Indie scene and… what’s this? SpaceChem? Okay, that looks like something I’d enjoy. I picked it up along with a couple others.

Turns out I was disastrously right. Here’s why:

SpaceChem is a training tool for many of the skills I value.  Process optimization, design problems, spatial layout, programming, continuous flow problems. It fits snugly in my mind.

There is no “right” solution (just like in real life!), only better, worse, and wrong.

I find SpaceChem really difficult. There’s a constant struggle to create a linked sequence of elegant solutions to unique process challenges.

I think I’m good at it. Judging from the “others solutions” charts (which is a brilliant idea by the way) I’m coming in below average (which is good, since they are all minimize optimal) on all three metrics at once. Consistently. Often on the first try. Of course, this only drives me to attempt ever more elegant solutions, making the game harder.

The game concept is very nanotechnology relevant, which I love. These kind of design problems could end up being very applicable in the near future, so it feels even more real and useful.

Review Summary: Good craftsmanship. Bad message. Dumb characters.

Anna and I watched “The Adjustment Bureau” a few days ago. A number of friends had said it was “great” and “fun”, so expectations were high. By the end, we were both dissapointed, not only with the film, but with our friends. You know who you are! Feel ashamed of yourself.

Feel ashamed.

“Wait, what? That was a fun movie! It was great!” you may exclaim. Well, if you do, read below and I will explain how you too can destroy a “great fun” movie using your own latent mind powers. (Fun fact: The “thinking” trick works on books too. Try it at home kids!)

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Occasionally, we meet with a Midas thought, massive, unexpected, totally transforming. It will transmute the landscape of our thoughts, if we let it. Gold is a poor structural material, however, and this transformation often leads to wholesale collapse. The worlds in our heads which we imagine to be real are rarely designed for such weights and spans as eternity presents.

Thoughts though (like Midas powers) can be flinched from, resisted, repealed. How often have we stepped forward over the ever murky depths of knowledge, slenderly on a whim or thought, and saw heaving up from beneath a concept like Leviathan. “Behold, you are overcome at the mere sight of him…” and all the soul can mutter is “what…” as the masonry congeals into metal and begins to yield under its own weight. (more…)

I’ve been reading through the writings of Fredric Bastiat. There are so many great statements in there, and whenever I find one I want to tell everyone. My resistance to quoting him has been waning, and it finally snapped today.

Although he states a very specific case, I believe this is his idealization of the speech that any government official should make, from the heart, on taking office. From Economic Harmonies by Frederic Bastiat:

“We have tried so many things; when shall we try the simplest of all: freedom? Freedom in all our acts that do not offend justice; freedom to live, to develop, to improve; the free exercise of our faculties; the free exchange of our services. What a fine and solemn spectacle it would have been had the government brought to power by the February Revolution spoken thus to the citizens:

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Introduction

I’ve been reading a lot of Frédéric Bastiat recently. He makes a very strong argument for freedom, government focus on criminal justice, and non-involvement in everything else. I want to believe him, and have been doing some thought exercises to test the idea. So far, it’s coming out alright. To see where I’m coming from here, read The Law and (if you’re up to it) Economic Harmonies.

So, I figured I’d read through the US Constitution with this in mind and find out if it matches up with this idea of liberty. As Bastiat says, “The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.” (emphasis added) Is this the kind of “liberty and justice” the United States is founded on? Let’s find out!

(spoiler: My conclusion is that Article 1 and the 18th amendment are the main offenders. The rest are quite respectful of liberty.)

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So for a while now I’ve been writing fairly small programs that will add stuff to Minecraft savefiles. I call them scripts, but you could call them programs, tools, software, or mods. The point is, it does something quickly that would take a long time to do in-game. You can see the specifics on my Minecraft Scrpits page if you like.

I’ve been thinking recently though, about how sometimes things are just too easy. If you could push a button and get a stack of whatever you want, it wouldn’t be as fun as hunting for it. There’s a certain satisfaction to overcoming difficulty, arguably the reason we prefer games to lying on our backs in our free time. Of course, if it’s too hard it’s no fun either. The scripts I write are designed to address the latter. You could build a huge tree, block by block, or you could run the Forester script and spend your time building a tree fort instead. It comes down to a question of what you prefer.

I think one of the reasons that Minecraft is so successful is that it mimics real life, but is also much easier. Want to plant a garden in Minecraft? Click the mouse a couple of times and you’re done! Want to plant a garden in real life? Three hours of hoeing, turning soil, planting, getting dirt in your eyes, and (if you live in an arid environment like I do) watering later and you’ve accomplished the same thing! If you’re doing it for the satisfaction of “planting a garden” then it’s much better in Minecraft. Of course, if you like to eat fresh picked carrots real life wins every time.

So the advantage of Minecraft is it allows us to enact some of the creation, construction, and conquering fantasies that I’m sure plague many of our mowed-back-lawn hearts. I want to build a castle on a mountaintop! Minecraft: possible! Real life: millions of dollars worth of permits, materials, and labor. I want to dig a huge hole and make an underground base! Minecraft: Feasible! Real life: Danger of tunnel collapse, OSHA red tape, water tables, and asphyxiation. I want to build a tree fort in a humongous tree! Minecraft: um… no humongous trees.

So that’s why I write scripts. To set up the environment for great fantasies! I think this kind of thing is extremely healthy. Especially where local regulations and finances don’t allow most of us to do these kinds of things in our back yards.

Minecraft is a great game. I had the great privilege to write a little code for it: right place + right time + a bit of elbow grease = Sweet! Recently however, a large number of people have been cooking up their own code and want to have access to the source. Some of these mods are really neat! Some of them are barely strung together in to a half-working jumble. The real problem, though, is that mods require constant maintenance. When a new official release comes out, it will probably break all the mods, requiring a lot of work to keep them up to date.

So, why doesn’t Notch just let everyone have access to the source code and allow everyone to commit their own mods to the game? Then the game would get way better way faster, right? Well, there are a few problems with this.

1. Some people are not good at coding. They can write mods that (barely) work, but are difficult to develop or maintain. This is like allowing your bum nephew to re-plumb your kitchen. It might work now, but when you have to fix it later you’re going to be really annoyed.
2. Some mods don’t play well together. Even if they are well written internally, they may not have been designed with the overall architecture (and future development) of Minecraft in mind. Getting three people’s code to fit together is hard enough; with thirty (or hundreds) it would be a job in itself.
3. Some people (actually, all people, but that’s not the point) are evil. Since you can’t tell who, you would have to either allow malicious additions to the game, or screen everyone’s contributions. Both are bad solutions.

Of course, Notch could just release the source code freely, not officially support mods, and leave it at that. This would essentially make Minecraft free for anyone to use, develop, and give away. Although this is pretty drastic, he has already promised to do just this when the game stops selling so well. So really, the question is if Mojang should let others contribute to the game development or not. Notch let me contribute, and I am grateful. But he doesn’t have to. No one is forcing him.

I’d hate to see Mojang bow to pressure and release the source of their cash cow at the height of its popularity. I’d also hate to see the modders locked out as second class citizens. Really, I think the modding community has just gotten started too soon. Wait until the game is fully developed and has stopped selling so well. Notch will release the source code then, and we can all make it into whatever we want.

A few things clicked for me about death. There were several factors that worked together.

The first is a conversation I had a few weeks ago (I think with my brother Kevin, but I could be mistaken). We were talking about how almost every culture (except the “western”) views death as a celebratory occasion. Like birth and marriage, death can be greeted as natural and thus joyous. I’m not sure this is actually true, but let’s assume it is. (more…)

There is something about huge objects that is very intimidating. Even if they are totally dead, or even inorganic, the bulk of a thing has a weight in the mind. Why is that?

Part of the effect could stem from the understandable desire to be able to look at “the whole thing” all at once. When you walk up a hill you lose sight of the whole. That, and it doesn’t feel like there will be interessting close up. The windowless, monolithic, blank concrete side of a warehouse advertises few enticements, even if there are lichen and lizards in the cracks.

I think this is worse when it’s something that used to be alive. (more…)