malvasia bianca

I didn’t play any of the Resident Evil games during the last generation. That was probably mostly because I didn’t have a Playstation back then; eventually, RE2 came out for the Nintendo 64, but it didn’t make enough of an impact for me to want to buy it. Also, the genre didn’t excite me too much: I don’t read horror books or watch horror movies, so why would I want to play horror video games?

The remake of the original on the Gamecube got a lot of attention, though. So I bought a copy, and I’m glad I did. While I’m not a big fan of the genre, it’s healthy to dip into different genres every once in a while to learn from their best examples. The graphics were stunning – this was near the start of the current generation, but even now they’ve held up well, I suspect. I wouldn’t want most games to have a fixed camera, but they used it to reasonable dramatic effect, and if that’s the price to pay for the graphics, so be it. I’m not a big fan of respawning enemies, but if there’s any game where that makes sense, that was the one. Limiting saves was a bad idea, the control scheme was awkward, there were probably other flaws, but even so, really good game.

Not a good enough game to make me go out and buy the rest of the series, mind you, or even to get me to buy the first new game in the series on the Gamecube, Resident Evil Zero. But then Resident Evil Four came out to much acclaim; the acclaim is well deserved.

To start with the superficial: it turns out that a fixed camera is not necessary for excellent graphics, you just need a really good development team with time to get used to the hardware. So they use an intelligent mix of third person with moving camera that goes into first person when you aim. It looks just as good as the earlier game; the cut scenes are done by the in-game engine, and look as good as most game’s pre-rendered cut scenes, but without compression artifacts.

On a side note, it would be interesting to track the development of POVs in action games; maybe it’s my imagination, but in this generation, it seems like there are a lot more games that are mixing first and third person, where last generation would have settled on one or the other. For example, I can imagine this game being a FPS in a previous generation, but third person plus first-person aiming works well. And, in the opposite direction, this generation’s Metroid games have gotten a completely different feel out of first-person than a traditional FPS, but those also drop into third person when necessary (morph ball).

Interestingly enough, it’s actually not much of a horror game. At the start, it was pretty scary: after fighting off the initial horde of enemies in the village, I was afraid to wander around much, being wounded and low on ammo, lest more people attack me. But more people didn’t attack me: after finding a save spot, I went back into the village, and wandered around it more, completely unmolested. So once the scary music stops, you really are safe for a while. Once I got used to that, I found that the game had a very nice balance in its enemy attacks: some areas have a few enemies around every corner, some areas have almost no enemies, some areas throw a horde of enemies at you that you just have to try to survive, and there are several boss fights. It keeps you on your toes, it’s pleasantly varied, and there’s always time after fighting enemies for you to explore and get to know (and loot) your environment. And no respawning to be found, unless you re-enter an area after being gone from it for a very long time.

The save points completement this well. You can’t save everywhere, but there are enough save points that, while there’s some tension getting between them without too much damage, you don’t have to constantly reload your game or block off hours of playing time to make sure you’ll make it between save points. (And you can usually go back to your previous save point without encountering enemies, should you so desire.) In addition, most times, when you die, it restarts you at a more recent point than your previous save spot: for example, if you die in a boss battle, you just have to refight that boss. And, mercifully, they gave up on the stupid “limited number of saves” idea from previous games in the series.

They also threw some bare-bones RPG-ish aspects into the game. Every video game has to have some aspects that make no logical sense, but are utterly necessary for gameplay reasons; items are a classic area where suspension of disbelief is necessary, and we see that here. You start off with a pistol, and pick up a shotgun quickly; periodically (once every save point or two), however, you find merchants, who are happy to take the gold that you’ve stolen and either sell you new weapons or, more commonly, upgrade your existing weapons. Exactly what these merchants are doing there and why they haven’t been infected by the parasites that have taken over everybody else’s body is never explained (good thing, too), but as a gameplay technique, it works fine. There are a few classes of weapons distinguished by the kind of ammo they use; you end up picking (at most) one weapon from each class, and upgrading it.

But they couldn’t let you carry around arbitrary numbers of weapons or other items – that would be unrealistic! Instead, you have to fit your gear into an attache case; as you progress in the game, merchants will sell you larger and larger attache cases, so in practice the size of the case is rarely a problem. So instead of something horribly unrealistic like letting you carry arbitrary amounts of items, you instead carry around larger and larger attache cases (which never show up in the third-person view, oddly enough), with loads of weapons, ammo, and healing items (but not key items or treasures – those you carry in some other, unexplained way), being able to switch weapons in and out of your attache case instantly! Much better.

And, like other games in the series, there’s ammo scattered around the environment; the amount is very well chosen so that you’re always under some amount of ammo pressure, but if you’re reasonably careful, you never quite reach the end of your ammo. The merchants can’t actually sell you ammo (even though they’re happy to buy ammo from you), except that they’ll refill your gun if you upgrade its ammo capacity, so you end up not reloading a weapon that you think you’re about to upgrade. None of this makes any sense, but the gameplay is very well balanced; the resulting illogic is more than worth the results.

The plot revolves around trying to save the president’s daughter; half way through the first part of the game, you find her, and get to protect here. (And occasionally she gets to help you, too.) Which is a pleasant enough change of pace, but ultimately an Ico style of gameplay wouldn’t fit this genre very well. They solve this problem by having her get recaptured three or four times during the game. So, as a result, she’s only with you maybe a third or a quarter of the time: you get the benefits of variety, but it doesn’t compromise the basic gameplay.

What else? There are some Shenmue-style quick time events; not many, but it makes the cut scenes a bit more interesting. The plot is interesting enough. It’s a good length (25 hours, maybe?). The boss fights are well designed. The levels are well designed. The puzzles, while hardly intricate, provide some structure to the game other than battles.

Don’t let the details here distract you: this is a great game. At every point, I felt that I was playing a game written by people who are confident in their artistry, who know the ins and outs of game design, who can throw in variety and interesting gameplay elements appropriately, and who are more than capable of painting some very attractive pixels on a television screen. My only regret was that, since I didn’t want to play it while Miranda was around, I was lucky if I could play it for as much as two hours a week; it took me months to finish, which I’m sure lessened the impact. But they were very pleasant months indeed.

My first attempt at adding CSS to dbcdb was nice, but it had some flaws. In some places, I didn’t express the syntax as gracefully as possible; it put in an ugly and unnecessary scroll bar if your web browser was less than 900 pixels wide; and bright red is pretty unsuitable for a header color. So I’ve changed all that. (I’ve read through most of the CSS standard, though alas not yet the part about lists. Reasonably well-written.)

There are still some issues. I looked at pages with Safari, and in some cases the vertical spacing on the complex lists wasn’t what I wanted. I tend to think that the spacing between the header and data is a little large. Also, right now the header is an h1 where I override the font size to make it look like an h2; if I replace it by an actual h2, the page looks subtly different. (At least in Galeon.) It may well be the case that, in a month or two, I’ll have a reason to turn the header into an h2 (I haven’t decided yet); so I’ll defer that decision until later. And the spacing isn’t that big a deal; if I get enlightened by reading the list part of the spec, that’s great, but otherwise I won’t worry about it too much for now.

Busy weekend; I don’t have time to work on this much. Which is just as well, because the next big step is to tell it to use a SQL database as its backend, and I don’t know anything about SQL! So I really need to spend time reading about that. I can probably do some little steps in the meantime; a list of recently read books would be nice, for example.

So I was just thinking that I would avoid Dell and get a Sun Ultra 20 and a Powerbook, when along comes this post; I guess I’m on to something.

(Part of the reason for my Powerbook craving is that all of the cool people at Sun seem to have one, including employee #1.)

Our laptop took an unfortunate tumble the other day; it turns out that it’s not the best idea to pick up a laptop from a high shelf while carrying a dog in the other arm. Most of the laptop survived the journey, but the CD drive tray snapped in half; oops.

So I went to Dell’s web site, looking for a replacement drive. After a bit of clicking on links, I think I found the page that should list optical drives for an Inspiron 8200; unfortunately, no drives were shown.

Which annoys me; I guess Dell is of the opinion that I should have to replace my laptop every few years. (Which is consistent with other problems I’ve had with it recently: it doesn’t seem like it was made to last forever.) But I thought I might be missing something, so I tried to find an address to e-mail them to ask.

And I couldn’t find such an address; the only e-mail addresses they publish are for stuff that’s under warranty or for orders that you’ve already placed. Which is crazy – I want to ask a question which might (depending on the answer) cause me to give them money, and they don’t want me to be able to do so?

So it seems unlikely that our next computer will be a Dell.

Which raises the question: what should that next computer be? Some constraints:

• It has to be able to run Linux.
• It should probably be able to run something other than Linux. The main reasons here are that Liesl would prefer that, and that there are some video games that I’d like to play. (Civilization 4, recent Mysts, and Spore, when it comes out.)
• At some point soonish, Miranda will want to start using the computer. It’s not clear if Linux would be adequate for her needs; it would be nice if it were hard for her to infect the computer with viruses, spyware, etc., though.
• It would be nice to have a relatively lightweight, WiFi-enabled laptop to bring on trips, etc.
• It would be nice for it to be easy to, say, add large hard drives.
• It has to be able to drive my iPod.
• It should be powerful enough to last for a few years.
• Wireless networking will be increasingly important at home, as I buy new WiFi-enabled video game consoles.
• I don’t mind spending some amount of money, but I don’t want to go overboard.

When I put this all together, it looks like buying a desktop as well as a laptop makes sense: the desktop machine is good for cheap power and expandability, the laptop is good for portability (and use in the den), and it will probably be cheaper and more satisfactory to buy two machines with different strengths than to try to buy one machine uniting their strengths. Plus, there will be more and more times when multiple people want to use a computer simultaneously.

I’m pretty tempted to get an Apple laptop: they’re some of the best designed laptops out there, I get the feeling that the operating system is good, and it would probably satisfy our desires for a non-Linux OS. (I think the video games that I’d want to play are popular enough that they’d be available for the Mac.) Of course, there’s Apple’s x86 transition coming up; I’m not sure which side of that fence I’d want to be on. (This purchase probably won’t happen for another year or so, so I really will have a choice.)

As far as a desktop machine goes, Sun’s Ultra 20 is pretty nice, and I can get a 35% discount on it. (Whether it will look so nice in a year isn’t so clear; I hope so.) It should satisfy my computing power needs for the time being. It can run Linux and Windows if necessary, but having it Linux-only sounds good to me. And the laptop can be MacOs-only, since I can run Linux applications remotely on it with X. (Which is another reason to make the desktop machine Linux-only, so people aren’t tempted to reboot it to run Windows while I’m in the middle of using it remotely…)

There’s no cable connection in the room where the desktop machine would go; I guess we’ll buy a wireless router and put it downstairs, and put a wireless card in the desktop machine?

It’s not clear how I’d migrate my existing music library to either Linux or MacOs to drive the iPod, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it; that’s certainly not a good reason to stick with Windows.

This is all a bit pie in the sky for now: I want to milk my existing setup until either the machine breaks or some external factor (Miranda, lack of disk space, whatever) makes an upgrade more urgent. On the other hand, judging from past experience, the machine could break at any time, so I should be prepared.

Suggestions, anybody?

I added a stylesheet to dbcdb; here is an example of what it currently looks like. Move your mouse over a link without clicking on it and notice the a:hover effect.

Most of the issues involved formatting definition lists properly; this page was helpful. I did have to modify my HTML, though; before, for compound entries (e.g. the list of volumes in a series), I had a single dt followed by a bunch of dd elements. I probably could have formatted that reasonably by adding an appropriate class, but I decided I liked bullet points for those lists, which I couldn’t figure out how to handle. (Hmm: looking at the CSS spec, maybe I should have dug deeper, but it looks fine now.) So I ended up nesting a ul inside a single dd, which is fine. (I still had to add a class to the latter dd.)

Let me know if anything looks wrong; I’ve only testsed it in Galeon, so while it should work in Firefox, Mozilla, etc., I don’t know about other browsers. And let me know if you have suggestions for ways to make it look better; I certainly won’t claim that it’s a marvel of web design as it stands.

Incidentally: books that I referred to during this were Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer’s Edge, which I wasn’t that thrilled with, and The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, which was fabulous. The latter is a discussion of the CSS Zen Garden web site; take a look. The CSS spec was useful, too; I should read the whole thing at some point.

I just did my first work on dbcdb in about a month; if I was too sick to program for work, I was too sick to program on my pet projects. What I did was convert dbcdb to generate XHTML instead of plain old HTML. Which was trivial; the hard part was validating it. I still haven’t found a good standalone validator; I ended up running HTML Tidy on my generated output and comparing it to the original (after whitespace munging). But enough munging was necessary that I’m not sure I completely trust that; maybe I’ll end up using the W3C’s web validator instead.

I recently read Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler. Pretty amazing; they give a remarkable amount of control to their workers, have remarkably few layers of management, and are remarkably open, flexible, and responsive.

And, if the book is to be believed, it works extremely well. I was really impressed with their adapting to circumstances, to the extent that people would recommend changes to the company that ended up with their own job, even their own division, being eliminated. The ways they nurtured worker’s growth and development (both within the company and forming spinoffs) was great, too.

I have a lot to learn about how to manage, that’s for sure.

Bill King, the radio voice of the A’s for the last 25 years, died two days ago. I loved listening to him; he was an excellent play-by-play announcer, and he pulled in a delightful wealth of external referents. It will not be the same listening to A’s games next year.

(At least those of us in the Bay Area get a little more Jon Miller than the rest of the country; that will help somewhat.)

I bought Battalion Wars for the Gamecube a month or so ago. Even as I bought it, I was thinking “why am I buying this when I have Jade Empire waiting to be played?” (Answer: I cut Gamecube games way too much slack.)

Anyways, I gave it a try. It’s a sort of RTS, which is a genre that I think I’d like but have essentially zero experience with, because of its PC-only nature. (Part of me is glad, because I suspect that its mouse usage would kill my hands.) It’s apparently a pretty basic example of the genre: you have set missions with set troops (both friendly and hostile), controlled from a third-person point of view (not top-down), where you’re directly controlling one character (you can change whom on the fly) while giving orders to other characters. No building units, no long-term development.

I could go into more details, but I won’t; after playing through four or five missions, my brain again asked why I was doing this instead of playing Jade Empire, to which I had no good answer. So I switched over to the latter, which proved an excellent choice.

(Addendum to my Xbox post: one thing I don’t like about the controller is the D-pad. It only has one major job, to tell if you’re pushing up, down, left, or right, but can’t do that reliably.)

I finally bought an Xbox a few months ago. One thing it does right: it has a general console settings screen where I can tell it what my audio and video capabilities are. It’s just silly that I have to tell every Gamecube game “yes, I want surround sound; yes, I want progressive scan”. If I’m going to want those on one game, I’ll always want them.

The controller seems decent; I think I prefer the Gamecube controller, but it’s better than the PS2 controller. (In particular, the PS2 puts the left thumbstick in the wrong place.) If you leave the controller lying around upside down, it takes a while for the thumbsticks to recenter properly, but I can work around that now that I’m aware of the problem.

The machine has a bad optical drive: when I first turn it on, it has a hard time reading the disk. Fortunately, this can be worked around by opening the drive and then closing it. The annoying thing is that, when you open the drive, it kicks you out of the game you’re playing – why can’t it just put up a screen “drive is open, please close” like the Gamecube does? Too bad I threw away the receipt, though.

I’m not sure how many games I’ll play on it. I’ve already talked about the interestingly excellent Shenmue II; I spent about six hours yesterday playing Jade Empire, which is also excellent. Given how good the latter is, maybe I’ll give Knights of the Old Republic a try. Pirates sounds great. The Halo games have gotten good reviews, but I’m not convinced that their single-player modes are so hot, and FPS’s aren’t my favorite genre; given my lack of desire to play online, and my lack of local video game playing friends, I’m not sure I’ll buy them. What else? One of the Burnout series? If so, which? How is Fable? Any other suggestions?

Fortunately, the pneumonia drugs are working nicely. Compared to my dim memories of what I normally feel like, I’m still probably not doing too hot, but compared to the recent past, I feel great.

So: back to our normal subject matter. Today: Shenmue II. The second part of a three-part series telling the story of Ryo Hazuki’s quest for revenge in his father’s death. At least I hope it will be a three-part series: sales of the first two parts were such that Sega will need some convincing to produce the third part.

I played the first part when it came out on the Dreamcast five or so years ago; as I believe I’ve indicated here, it had quite an impact on me, the best of the games from that console’s short but glorious life. (Others being Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5.) It’s mostly an adventure game: get to know your map, figure out what the next key item or event is, find/trigger it, repeat. It also has a full-fledged fighting engine built in, with a hundred or so different moves.

Which is a distinctive enough combination, but there’s more. For one thing, the world of the game is glorious to explore. You start off the first part in your house, very closely modeled with tons of items that you can pick up, examine, carry around if you want to. (And not if you don’t: this is one game where the text adventure reflex of picking up everything will lead you astray.) As you make your way into the world, there are apartments full of doors to knock on, streets full of stores to shop in, and a pleasing wealth of other characters to talk to. You even get a daily allowance that you can use in those stores (or in vending machines): buy soft drinks, collectible toys, casettes, or play old Sega games in the arcades. And then you can just sit in your room (in the game) listening to those casettes, as I frequently did, if you’d rather do that than make progress in the game.

The other impressive aspect of the game is the theatrical nature of the game: it tries to feel like a martial arts movie (at least when you want it to, when you’re not listening to music or drinking random soft drinks), and carries it off better than any other game I’ve seen. The plot progress is very well done; while that’s a point of emphasis of most RPG’s these days, Shenmue has nothing to be ashamed of on that front. Such scripting, of course, depends on a variety of events coming off in sequence; the game provides the basic structure through key (adventure-game style) events triggering cut scenes, which are elaborated either by using the fighting engine (when appropriate) or, more simply, by forcing you to press buttons at certain times to get your character to, say, dodge appropriately in a cut-scene chase. These latter “quick-time events” may sound hokey, and obviously you wouldn’t want them to be a game’s main focus, but they really do work to keep you involved in long cut-scenes that are necessary for dramatic purposes. (Resident Evil 4 has also adopted QTE’s to good effect.)

And, on top of that, it has a pleasant selection of quirks, of which my favorite was the fork-lift races. What more could one ask for?

Well, a game that didn’t end in the middle of a massive cliff-hanger, for one. Apparently the original game was planned as the first of 16 (!) parts; I don’t really think they ever thought they’d release 16 separate games in the series, but the second part (the boat ride to Hong Kong) was jettisoned, parts 3-6 (Hong Kong, more Hong Kong, Kowloon, the road to Bailu) are in Shenmue II, and the remaining 10 parts will all be crammed into the third game in the series. (Given how the plot has progressed, I don’t think they’ll have any trouble coming to a successful conclusion in one more game’s worth of play.)

When I started playing Shenmue II, I’d forgotten the details of the first game. (It came with a preview movie, which I skipped.) Partially because of that, it took me a while to get back into the game. (There were other external causes; in particular, either I got a bad disk or have a bad optical drive in my Xbox, and the game wasn’t programmed to handle that gracefully.)

But the truth is, Shenmue II doesn’t start out nearly as well as the original. In the original, you could just spend time goofing off, getting to know the game, even getting an allowance every day to buy stuff. In the sequel, you have to earn money to pay for your hotel room every day; unfortunately, the main way to do that (working in a warehouse) is really tedious. They try to make the job interesting by turning it into a game, but fail miserably at that: the game has control issues, and it’s impossible to play the game well enough or badly enough to change the amount of money you make. (I suppose it’s possible to play badly enough to lower your paycheck, but you’d have to work hard at it.) And the amount of money you make in a shift of work, while more than a day’s rent, isn’t enough more to give you significant spending money. (Especially since you’ll want to spend most of the remaining money on maps.)

They do, I suppose, ease the pain by not giving you as much frivolous stuff to buy, but I can’t exactly see that as an improvement. And, if you wanted to break realism, I suspect that the game would let you get aways without paying for your hotel room; it also starts you off with items to sell, if you wish. But I didn’t like either of those solutions to the problem.

It gets better half way through Hong Kong, fortunately. On a game mechanics level, you stop having to pay for your hotel, freeing up your days. And even though I’d been spending my days with my nose to the grindstone, I’d seen enough of the city that I was starting to enjoy just wandering around in it. At the same time, the plot was getting me hooked again, getting me to care about characters I’d been meeting and introducing me to some interesting new ones.

So the rest of Hong Kong was a lot of fun, as was Kowloon. The level design in Kowloon was pleasantly different: most of it takes place in skyscrapers. Kind of weird skyscrapers, though: they arbitrarily decreed that most elevators would stop on a random subset of the floors. Well, not entirely random: it let them set up puzzles getting from place to place when an elevator ride would otherwise suffice.

The details of the gameplay felt pretty different from the original; I still enjoyed it, but I’m not sure it was a rousing success. There’s still a fair amount of fighting, but a lot more of other sorts of puzzles (e.g. having to press buttons to make it across rickety bridges). Unlike the first game, there’s no way to actually practice your karate, so you have to hope to be able to fight well enough in battles just by button mashing. Which, it turns out, you can; in fact, some key fights can be gotten through by just hitting X over and over again. (I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked in the first game, but who knows.) I’m not sure this is a bad choice – it means that you can enjoy the game even if you only enjoy adventure games, not fighting games. Still, it feels like a bit of a loss.

So that’s Hong Kong and Kowloon; next comes Guilin, specifically the road to Bailu. And here the game takes a completely different and wonderful turn. No fighting, no shopping, no wandering around a town. Instead, you’re just walking down a road, through gorgeous scenery, talking to a new character you just met about her and your past. It’s basically an extended cut scene, with a few events thrown in to give you some buttons to press, existing only to advance the plot. (And to look pretty.) By the end of this, the plot threads are coming together, you know what the game is named after. (A tree, it turns out.) And somehow you’ve spent the last two hours of a video game doing basically nothing, watching an extended cut scene, and having a great time doing it.

So I’m looking forward to the third game. I just hope they make it…

Two doctor’s visits later, it would seem that I have pneumonia. Sigh.

Now I’m in my second week of flu. I could do without this.

From the virus’s point of view, the only point is to spread itself. Which breaks down into two components: reproduction and transmission. I’m not sure exactly where the reproduction is happening in my body; is it all over the place, or are some parts of my body hotbeds of disease reproduction while other parts aren’t helping in the cause?

As far as transmission goes, the mechanism is pretty clear: I’ve been coughing like crazy for the last few days, once my throat got irritated enough by the flow of mucus that’s been going down it. So are the nasal cavities where the virus has been reproducing itself? If so, is the mucus production somehow directly involved in the reproduction, or is it triggered separately somehow? Certainly a convenient mechanism for the virus: make lots of yourself, hang out in mucus that irritates the throat, causing said mucus to be coughed out into the rest of the world.

For that matter, why does the mucus lead to coughing in the first place? Why does it bother my throat for all that mucus to be going down it?

And what about the headaches? What causes them? Are they some sort of necessary byproduct of this process, or just a random side effect? Hmm. And the temperature changes?

At least I’m not getting serious body aches, like when I came down with the flu in college. That was really awful.

I just watched the first episode of This Spartan Life. I’m pretty sure that my liking it wasn’t solely a byproduct of the fever-ridden state of my brain.

I think (though I’m not completely sure) that we’re done with our lice infestation. But we’ve also had some diseases running through our house recently; the cold wasn’t so bad, but last weekend was Liesl’s turn to get the flu, and this weekend was mine. (Where by “weekend” I mean four or five days for Liesl, and at least as long for me.) I hope to return to normal existence at some point, but I can’t imagine when.

I really hope Miranda isn’t going to come down with it; that won’t be fun for any of us. She might have had a mildish version of it a few weeks ago; we’ll see, I guess. I should probably work from home for a few days even once my brain becomes capable of programming again, both to preserve my strength and to reduce the chance of infecting my coworkers. Pair programming is great for knowledge transfer, but disease transfer is a side-effect that I’d rather avoid.

The A’s were eliminated from the playoffs last night. Unfortunate, though a third (or a half?) of the way through the season most people would have considered it a miracle that they’d come this close. A bit of a let-down after the amazing tear that they went on, though.

All things considered, I’m quite happy with the season. Their preseason nominee for Rookie of the Year turned in a credible but not stunning rookie season (no surprise; I didn’t think he had RoY material myself); what I was not expecting was for him to be the fourth best rookie on the team. I’d never heard of Dan Johnson before; I had heard of Joe Blanton and Huston Street, but I was not expecting them to be quite possibly the two best rookies in the league. (Hmm; hometown bias showing. According to Baseball Prospectus, though, Blanton leads the majors in VORP among rookies (edging out Joe Mauer; does he really qualify as a rookie?). Street is third in rookie pitcher VORP (behind Blanton and Toronto’s Gustavo Chacin), and among all rookies, he’s also behind Tampa Bay’s Jonny Gomes and Detroit’s Chris Shelton. Personally, I’d give him several bonus points for being a closer, though: that gives him fewer opportunities to accumulate VORP, and he was one of the best relievers in the league, rookie or not. I don’t care that he didn’t pitch as many innings as a starting pitcher: a rookie closer with a 1.63 ERA is stunning.) (Hmm: judging from that list, it looks like a bad year for NL rookies…)

And Bobby Crosby and Rich Harden both had excellent sophomore seasons; I was expecting that from Harden (though he surpassed my expectations somewhat), but I was not expecting that from Crosby. Also, Mark Ellis came out of nowhere and had a great season, and the Mark Mulder trade already looks like a steal (Danny Haren pitched just as well as Mulder this year, is younger and has more upside, and apparently one of the position prospects we got in the deal is really good). I’m still not thrilled with the Hudson trade, but he didn’t pitch as well as I was expecting this year (all the more surprising because he was in Atlanta), and Zito put in quite a nice season. The relief corps is in much better shape than last year (Justin Duchscherer was also excellent, with a 2.26 ERA). I have a hard time imagining a more solid starting rotation (Kirk Saarloos, our fifth starter both conceptually and statistically, had a 4.10 ERA), but it actually could get better: all five are young, all five will be around next year, and we have at least one more prospect waiting in the wings. And the Jay Payton deal turned out nicely.

Downsides: Eric Chavez continues to obstinately refuse to step up his hitting to the next level, and in fact rather regressed. I thought the Jason Kendall deal was a good one, but he sucked. (He hasn’t hit a home run in his last 800 at-bats.) More key injuries than I was happy with. Our outfield can’t hit. Too bad that Durazo was out all season, but that made an opening for Mark Johnson to come up, so I won’t complain about that too much. And, as good as they were in the second half of the season, they were awful awful awful for a while there.

So I’m looking forward to next year, and for years to come after that. I’m worried about the hitting; I’m worried that some of the pitchers won’t be able to match their numbers this year. But with so much young talent, with a well-stocked minor league system, and with Billy Beane, they’ll be contending for the indefinite future.

A while back, I wondered if I’d ever buy another GBA game, and decided that the answer was probably no. Which would have been correct based solely on the quality of upcoming games for various systems, but I couldn’t exactly bring my copy of Resident Evil 4 on vacation. (Well, I suppose I could have brought it, but I couldn’t have played it. Just as well: it was hard enough to get to sleep with jet lag, and dreaming of (not-)zombies would not have been an improvement.)

So before we went on vacation I got a copy of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, as well as the Zelda II remake. To get the latter out of the way first: I only bought it out of historical curiosity and the fact that it was on sale for ten bucks; I played it for a couple of hours, enough to decide that it probably would have been a decent game in its time, but that I have better things to do now.

Fire Emblem was better, though. I’d played the earlier GBA version up until around the next-to-last level, at which point I got sick of the length of its levels. It’s by the same team that does the Advance Wars series, and like it is basically a turn-based strategy game. The main difference between the two series is that Fire Emblem works the levels into an RPG theme, so you have persistent characters instead of faceless troops. Or rather, they’re persistent until they die; when they’re dead, they’re dead. So you end up playing levels not simply to win but to massacre your opponents without losing a single one of your characters. (Actually, it’s a bit more gruesome than that: because of the way the experience system works, it’s best for as many of your characters to take their cuts at an opponent before somebody finally gets to kill it.)

Which doesn’t thrill me, but I can deal with it. Of course, it combines this with a more traditional annoyance of RPG’s: you have a cast of thousands (well, dozens), but you can’t actually use them all in any given battle, forcing you to pick and choose among your characters to decide whom you are going to level up and whom you aren’t. This is not something that I enjoy, this is not giving the player a constructive choice of options: this is lazy game design.

I don’t have much else to say about the game. It was a good choice: I could play it when lying awake at night, and basically enjoyed it. By the time I was over my jet lag and had better things to do, I was also done with the game. I wouldn’t recommend that people rush out and buy it, though. Of the two series, I recommend Advance Wars much more highly; then again, the second game in that series was a total rehash, while the story elements in Fire Emblem meant the sequel felt reasonably fresh.

(Still playing the superb RE4 and Shenmue II, though I’m near the end of both. Just went out and bought Killer 7 and Battalion Wars.)

Author pages now contain links to their books and series, and I can now handle books with two authors. (Not three, not four, just two. Or one, of course.)

I wrote my first generic Java method; whee. There was one mystery there: Book is a subtype of Entity, and at one point, I passed a Collection<Book> to a function expecteding a Collection<Entity>, and it worked. But then I did the same with a Collection<Series> (where Series is another subtype of Entity), and it didn’t work. I understand the latter, but not the former; is it a bug, or am I missing something? Anyways, making the method generic, expecting a Collection<T extends Entity>, worked fine, as expected.

I also got rid of a legacy exception that was annoying me; I’m still not at peace with Java exceptions, and there’s no sense doing extra typing because of code I don’t need any more. I did give in and pass a Collection where I would have liked to use an Iterator, though…

Hmm. Now I’m starting to wonder: exceptions and generics are both places where Java is statically typed and C++ is dynamically typed; in both cases, I like the C++ solution. I really should try a dynamically typed language sometime soon; maybe once I do that I’ll switch back to the dynamic typing crowd.

I finally got around to plugging the digital camera I bought before going on vacation into my computer. It’s only been just over two months since we got back; to put this in context, right before going on vaction we developed a roll of film that contained pictures from not only Halloween 2004 but also Halloween 2003. There is a reason why my pictures page hasn’t been updated in just shy of three years, though with luck that will change soon.

Anyways, I wasn’t surprised that I got it to work in Linux; I’d heard good things about gphoto, it’s a mainstream camera, and I’d just talked to Jordan the previous weekend about his successful experience with cameras in Linux. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to find that I didn’t have to lift a finger: I plugged the camera into the USB port, turned it on, and up popped a dialog on the computer.

So: yay for Linux. Nice to see that more of what the rest of the world considers basic functionality works there, too. Now I just have to sort through the pictures, remind myself how gimp works, and do a bit of cropping and resizing. The last time I tried this, gimp was easy enough to use; I just have to stop being lazy.

One of the things I realized while reading The Arcades Project: I don’t know squat about French history. There was this revolution at the end of the 18th century; I don’t think I care about French history before then. (1789? Yes, says the wikipedia; I guess I should read that article, shouldn’t I?) It’s supposed to be very important, but the only facts that stuck are that lots of people were guillotined, and Napoleon came to power soon after. There was also a Napoleon III at some point (1840 or so?), but no Napoleon II worth mentioning; I don’t think their terms were consecutive, and for that matter I think Napoleon I’s term had a gap in the middle, but I don’t know what happened in the gaps. When I started reading about anarchism, I heard favorable mentions of the Paris Commune, but I never hear about it from mainstream sources. (I did get a book on it when I was there this summer; who knows when I’ll get around to reading it.) There was l’affaire Dreyfus some time around the turn of the century. At some point they turned into a standard democracy; I’m not sure exactly when, or what the key events were. I could mutter vaguely coherently about a few facts related to the world wars, but I won’t if for no other reason than the book in question doesn’t directly address that time period. (Though its writing was certainly affected by it…)

At this point, I imagine my European readers are rolling their eyes and muttering something about ignorant Americans. To which I would have to plead guilty. (Or maybe they’re not; maybe Europeans focus on the history of their country just as much as we focus on the history of ours.) I imagine that Americans approach other countries’ history from a particularly bizarre standpoint: we have this idea that a country’s history should basically start with a revolution, after which its political structure is more or less fixed. Which is, of course, not the norm in many parts of the world; for that matter, it’s not necessarily accurate even as a picture of American history.

Anyways, The Arcades Project cast a rather different light on French history, or at least Parisian history. It makes it sound like a constent hotbed of revolution, affecting the structure of the city itself. For example, according to the book, the streets were paved in cobblestones until the citizenry started using them as weapons (dropping them on the heads of the police or soldiers or whatever from high on buildings); and while I’d heard something about Haussmann and his boulevards, I had not heard that one of the reasons for widening the streets was to make it harder for people to build barricades across them. (Is it true that one of the motivations behind the architecture of Harvard’s Currier House was to make it easier to control student revolts?)

And the book is full of references to revolutionaries that I’ve never heard of. This is, I think, a systemic flaw in history as it’s taught in American schools; we can hardly help mentioning Marx and Engels, but we avoid putting them in any sort of context whenever possible, preferring to see them as an eccentric and tragic aberration in the course of human progress. Similarly, various utopian writers get mentioned, of whom Fourier is the only one that I’ve heard. (Should I read him at some point? I’ll probably never get around to that, but who knows.) Judging from A People’s History of the United States, we have similar blinders even towards our own history…

Really, just understanding the French Revolution would be a good start for me: like I said, American schools can’t manage to avoid talking about it, but it’s usually presented in a context of mindless bloodshed. Which begs the question of why the French stubbornly insist upon its importance. I think the subtext here is that, while of course we revere the American revolution, we also revere elites, and we don’t like it when they get killed. (Is it true that twenty times as many people were killed when putting down the Paris Commune as were killed in the French Revolution? But of course the deaths of the citizenry is hardly worth mention.)

All issues of politics aside, the book is wonderful. The book had been sitting on my shelf unread for a couple of years: it’s big, and I wasn’t that thrilled with Illuminations. But Samuel R. Delany has written interestingly about The Arcades Project, and of course Trilectic is enough to make me give Walter Benjamin another shot, so I finally gave it a try. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy books written as a series of disjointed paragraphs; it pulls out all sorts of fantastic tidbits (about things I’d never thought I’d care about: expositions, use of glass and steel in building construction, arcades, paving stones, boulevards, utopias, the stock exchange, …) vaguely relating the paragraphs but also letting them stand quite well on their own as interesting curiosities.

And the RIAA (and its other content-producer allies) would like to make books like this impossible to write in the future. Sigh. Just a month or two, I’d been reading some books that, among other things, emphasized the importance of sampling in creative works; at the time, I agreed intellectualy that sampling should be legal but wasn’t convinced that its loss would be so tragic (aside, of course, of idiocies like preventing people from having a snippet of a TV show appearing for 5 seconds in a movie background), but now I see how wrong I was…