tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51967290763491909202024-02-20T18:07:53.103-08:00Horrible BastardRandom thoughts on gaming, programming, politics, and whatever shiny things happen to catch my eye.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-24814701073235875632011-09-04T11:07:00.002-07:002012-03-31T10:20:58.776-07:00Splashing in the Shallow EndI've been sitting on this for a long time because I didn't want to spoil things for people, so, heads up: big fat Deus Ex 3 spoiler. I mean, I'm going over the very end of the whole game. Go away until you've played through it, unless you really don't mind having it spoiled.<div><br /></div><div>That said, this is less of a spoiler than it should be in some ways. I'll set the scene.</div><div><br /></div><div>You, Adam Jensen, ex-cop, head of security for the bleeding-edge human augmentation corporation Serif Industries, rebuilt from practically the ground up after a raid by paramilitary goons leaves you broken, are headed to Panchaea. Panchaea is a project built by your boss's mentor, Hugh Darrow, as an ambitious project to take control of global warming. It also turns out that it's got a system which is tied into the world's augmented citizenry--a recent "fault" in the neural interface caused everyone to go to their clinics to get a "fixed" version which, it turns out, allows for an alarming level of control of any person with such a fix. Darrow sent out a global signal which caused everyone to basically go mad. You, paranoiac that you are, avoided the upgrade before finding out how awful it was.<br /></div><div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out that Darrow had lost faith in the secret project he was really working on, or perhaps intended to go rogue the entire time: a shadowy cabal of people calling themselves the Illuminati intended for everyone to get the upgrade to become controllable, so that at any time they could simply immobilize anyone with augmentations. Other individuals you meet suggest this could further allow them to control a person's memory to a degree, or make them do things they wouldn't in their right mind. Darrow intended for his action to be a painful object lesson, to teach people not to trust the augmentations or the people behind them.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>You manage to dig to the heart of the system to shut it down, and are presented with four choices:</div><div><ol><li>Darrow set up a recorded message laying everything out. It is strongly suggested that the revelation will drive massive anti-technology backlash, trashing the infant augmentation industry. This is Darrow's preferred ending.</li><li>An edited version can go out which hides the failures of the corporation but leaves in all the bits about Illuminati control. This version will cause people to not shut down augmentation technology. This is David Sarif's preferred ending.</li><li>An edited version which places the entire blame on Sarif and hides the Illuminati string-pulling. This version will cause people to demand stronger regulation of augmentation technology which will ultimately lead to control by the powerful. This is Bill Taggart's preferred ending.</li><li>Don't send out any recording and destroy the facility, leaving it at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and rendering the entire event a mystery. This will allow people to make a decision without the influence of Darrow, Sarif, Taggart, or you.</li></ol>If you view them as "who do you want to win" positions, it's okay if a little unsatisfying; ultimately I tend to prefer Sarif's futurist philosophy to anyone else's, but then they build a moral for each of them, and this is where it falls apart, giving you a "why would you take this option" summary, and each of them are questionable in their own special way.</div><div><br /></div><div>Darrow's ending finishes up with a message straight from the Unabomber: technology is bad. People can't be trusted with it, and it must be ended. No one ever really puts it this way in the game, so it seems out of left field, though it is a real philosophical position, it's just not a generally coherent one. There's some noise about the technology risking what makes humans human, but it's a position taken in a vacuum, with no thought given to alternatives and the risks inherent in them. However, his is the only ending in which the truth in its entirety is revealed to the outside. I found this fundamentally frustrating, in that I feel that getting the truth out would be vital to the informed decision making of others, yet it's spun with an unpalatable philosophy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sarif's ending, the one I sympathize most with, is basically a futurist one, in which it is seen as vital to progress. However, his ending suggests that we should turn a blind eye to those hurt by progress and simply accept the harms without any redress. There's also a strong underpinning of, "well, we won't let this happen again," but we've got no real reason to believe it won't. Further, you have to lie to get the message out and cover up Sarif's failure.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Taggart's ending is as bad as Darrow's, in which we advocate control by "our betters" in order to preserve social order. We do this by, of course, hiding a different set of the truth. In some ways this one is just stupid, though, in that we're trusting the Illuminati to control things for the greater benefit of all, or so it's suggested, yet the very endgame scenario illustrates that the Illuminati are a bunch of incompetent clowns who should never be handed the reins of the world. One of them had a fit of philosophical conscience and <span style="font-style: italic;">drove everyone mad</span>, remember?<br /><br />Finally, we have the ending where you destroy it all in the name of letting "humanity" decide, but this is probably the most ridiculous of the options. It suggests that doing otherwise is not "trusting" people to do the right thing, yet I don't see how hiding the facts of the events allows for people to make a rational decision about what happened. It further suggests that the messages constitute "meddling" in humanity's collective decision-making process, yet it fails on a number of fronts: the collective meddling is what happens in any decision made, and destroying everything leaves the majority of the Illuminati out there and in control of what is allegedly the most powerful media institution in the world. You're even told by the media corp's AI that it can make people believe any position you want them to.<br /><br />So, why did they do this and pigeonhole us into four endings, none of which is what I'd really want? I'd guess they simply can't do everything, but at the same time I can't help but feel like most people would be dissatisfied in the endings. It feels like they've provided us with synopses of larger philosophies without providing adequate underpinning to make them seem reasonable. That part of the story just felt half-assed.<br /></div>Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-14645065158226869832011-08-30T11:02:00.000-07:002011-09-04T11:06:47.075-07:00Everything I Need To Know I Learned From Deus Ex 3<ul><li>Police are totally cool if you wander into their offices and mess with their firearms. That combat shotgun resting over in the corner look nice? Take it, no worries!</li>
<br /><li>Similarly, dropping loaded firearms off in their office will also provoke no reaction.</li>
<br /><li>Hacking their computers in front of them, though, that will piss them right off. Other people--generally those with no combat training--are totally cool with you messing with their computers.</li>
<br /><li>Feel free to take cash left lying around, no one will ever miss it. Even if it's on a desk someone is sitting at.</li>
<br /><li>People embed money in their door locks. I have yet to figure out how or why.</li>
<br /><li>Trained military and paramilitary troops find nothing unusual about their buddies abruptly going missing, even leaving their weapons dropped on the floor. Maybe they really, <b>really</b> had to go to the bathroom.</li>
<br /><li>Similarly, they either have no gear that can monitor life signs, or they don't really pay attention to it. If you don't see or hear someone get hurt, they're probably okay. Perhaps this is metacommentary on the quality of military equipment. Take that, military-industrial complex!</li>
<br /><li>Security systems are best laid out in a decentralized fashion, in such a way that a station has no more than four cameras attached to it. There should be no way for anyone to actually see what's going on at a station remotely.</li>
<br /><li>When raiding a company, send in security ninjas to set up all the security gear to notice special people and promptly leave so that no one left knows how the security gear works. The people left should be unable to even tell if the gear is turned on, despite the indicator being big fat glowing circles of colored light visible at long distances... or maybe this is yet another hit on military intelligence. OXYMORON, AMIRITE?</li></ul>
<br /><hr />Okay, let me interject here that this list and my further gripes are really testament to how well the developers did with this game. There's a lot of verisimilitude that makes it feel totally immersive, which makes the bits that aren't right stand out a little more than other games. For example, in most other games, I'd guess cops wouldn't have firearms in their offices, though it doesn't seem unreasonable that they would, so the fact that they're there is a point in their favor. That the cops don't care if you dick with them... well, that's just <b>funny</b>.<div>
<br /></div><div>But I did mention I have further gripes, and they're loaded with spoilers. So stop reading here if you want to be surprised.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>There's one real sticking point for me: Adam's kind of dense. There are reveals made much later than I've put the pieces together on, which makes it less of a revelation than a "you just <b>now</b> figured this out" moment.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Take the first real mission: Zeke Sanders, militant anti-augmentation terrorist has stormed a Sarif factory. Midway through the mission, you discover that one of his goons with serious augmentations has been hacking the systems. You get the opportunity to chat with Zeke at the end, and I chose to to see what I could learn and see if I can negotiate him to surrender. He indicates that he's surprised at the hacking, frustration that he and his brother (who was involved in planning, not execution, of the raid) were played by someone, and, if you let him go, he swears revenge on whoever it is. Okay.
<br />
<br />Now, at some point, I forget if it's before or after the mission, you can find out that Zeke's got a bit of a background: he shot up a shopping mall at some point. Piece number two of the puzzle.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Shortly after, Sarif HQ is visited by William Taggart, noted and respected anti-augmentation speaker. His aide, Dr. Isaias Sandoval, comes along, and if you talk to him he will talk about how he got into the anti-augmentation movement: his friend shot up a shopping mall due to some sort of augmentation issue he had. Hm, that's familiar. But wait: Sandoval hesitates before saying "friend," suggesting he was going to say something else but didn't. Further, Sandoval is hispanic, and so is Zeke. It's not airtight, but at that point, I was pretty sure Sandoval was Zeke's brother and had been involved in the earlier raid, despite being a public face in a strident but non-violent organization.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Now, it would have been nice if I'd been allowed to act on that realization, or somehow indicate that I knew what was up. However, there wasn't really any way to do anything about it, no one really cared, so it just kind of dropped and I half-forgot. But then, hours later, it is revealed to you by a third party that Sanders and Sandoval are brothers and Sandoval is neck deep in whatever shadowy bullshit is going on... and Adam is shocked. Seriously, Adam? I put this together hours ago and this would have been an "okay, suspicions confirmed" but Adam is dumb as a post.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>There are a few other instances of this throughout the game--the tricksy owner of the Hive nightclub, who first misleads you as to his identity and surprises Adam in a later reveal, despite the initial deception being solidly undermined by a psych profile my augmentations put together for me in my first conversation with him. Zhao Yun Ru, corporate overlord known as "the Dragon Lady," cons Adam into believing her a helpless pawn in mere moments, misdirecting him long enough to shove him out the door, since it turns out he's invaded her panic room. It's a little frustrating to be behind the steering wheel in his head allegedly and being completely helpless in the face of his relentless obliviousness. I vaguely hoped for some sort of twist at the end--you're really David Sarif steering around a puppet!--but that doesn't seem to be the case.
<br /></div><div>
<br /></div><div>Still, very fun.</div>Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-41730600538984909332011-06-05T20:33:00.001-07:002011-06-09T07:32:13.971-07:00Working with Citadel MetallicsI've been experimenting with Citadel metallics and painting some bits (as well as finishing up the piece I last worked on), and it's interestingly different. From what I've been able to gather, most metallic paints get the shine from ground mica flakes--there are genuine metal metallics, but they're more finicky in that the metal flakes will rust in contact with water, so you have to thin with nearly pure alcohol, clean brushes used with alcohol-based cleaners, etc. The Citadel line, from what I've read, uses a finer ground mica than other lines but is otherwise a water-based acrylic. These qualities give the dry paint a smoother, thinner finish. So far, so easy.<br /><br />The tricky part with the Citadel metallics line--especially the gold--is that the coverage is weak in comparison to others I'm familiar with. To thoroughly cover a basecoat would require 3 or 4 layers of the unthinned paint, and even then the underlying color might come through. On the other hand, this color can be used to my advantage--subtle shifts of hue can be had just by basecoating the area with a different color, and the metallic effect is strong even when the basecoat is still coming through. I've found a couple of basecoat mixes I quite like for various shades of gold, and the end results are nicely distinct to my eyes. Citadel discontinued one dark copper entirely which I use pretty heavily for one scheme in its Vallejo formulation, and I'm interested to see how well I can mimic it with a dark undercoat and the light copper.<br /><br />I'd actually be interested to know how the rest of the Citadel line has improved in its latest incarnation. The pots alone are a vast improvement over their previous version, which was probably the worst possible choice in every way--hard plastic with a screwtop lid is difficult to the point where I had to use a wrench to open a used pot, yet simultaneously more air gets in, giving the paint a much shorter lifetime. I've got decade old paints that are still fluid, but the last Citadel paints dried up after a year.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-33522252445497084172011-05-11T21:44:00.000-07:002011-05-13T13:21:48.201-07:00Futzing with MetallicsAfter reading <a href="http://handcannononline.com/blog/2011/04/25/tutorial-basics-%E2%80%93-heavy-metal-using-metallics/">this post</a> I decided to get some Citadel metallics, and... I'm debating whether I agree. The post claims that Citadel's metallics are higher quality than Vallejo's, but I'm having a hard time seeing any advantage at all to the Citadel metallics--they are uniformly less pigmented yet thicker. I'm not really seeing much difference by way of the claimed difference in mica flake size; after five coats of lightly thinned Citadel Burnished Gold, I'm <i>almost</i> but not quite to the coverage of three coats of lightly thinned VGC Polished Gold. However, the texture is much smoother, and I'm not seeing much by way of flattening the surface out, so maybe it will ultimately look better.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-8801178925909733722011-03-14T09:54:00.000-07:002011-03-14T10:01:06.570-07:00Paint Review UpdateTwo updates to my last paint review.<br /><br />First, I'm less satisfied with VMA metallics than I was. All of five months after I purchased them, they've become sludgy and difficult to use. If you plan on using them very quickly you may be just fine, but if you use them like I do, you'll probably be annoyed. I'll probably be tossing out about two-thirds of each bottle.<br /><br />Second, Reaper has released an "HD" (High Density) line for their Master series of paints. It sounds like these are intended primarily for basing, so I'm not sure what's up with their Pro line. I'll have to see if there's anything I want to try out.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-28218223225825830212011-03-14T09:04:00.000-07:002011-03-14T09:54:06.718-07:00EJB3, JNDI naming, and a question of the necessity thereofOne of the more interesting things I'm picking up in my new job is EJB3. My background is almost entirely in non-JEE technologies--Spring, Hibernate, and everything built around those. EJB's purpose is very similar to Spring's, and the two have functionally converged over time to the point that annotation-based EJB3 is very similar to annotation-based Spring.<br /><br />The aspect I'm looking at right now is EJB's dependency injection system. EJBs may declare fields with an @EJB annotation. This informs the EJB container that that field should be populated with an EJB which implements the class of that field immediately after the bean with the field is instantiated.<br /><br />One thing to be aware of when doing this is that multiple EJBs may implement a given class. I'm not sure if the container's behavior is prescribed by the JSR or if it's just per-implementation, but JBoss uses multiple tiers which it analyzes. Multiple EJBs implementing the class in a given tier results in an exception, but if you have one in the "closest" tier and another in a different tier, you should be fine.<br /><br />In thinking about the problem, it seems to me that multiple instantiations of an EJB interface should be relatively rare. For the most part they represent distinct pieces of the system which should be well encapsulated--having multiple implementations suggests to me that the responsibilities of the bean are not properly defined and the functionality which differs should be analyzed to determine whether it should be broken up, and I suspect that it probably should.<br /><br />Regardless, it may prove necessary in some cases, and in those cases one can disambiguate between the beans with a string called a <a href="http://java.sun.com/j2ee/tutorial/1_3-fcs/doc/Resources2.html">JNDI name</a>. The JNDI name is passed to the EJB annotation. This should be unique within the system, so collisions at this level are illegal.<br /><br />One of my coworkers is of the opinion all @EJB annotations should include this JNDI name. However, based on my thinking above, I believe the actual value of this to be incredibly small, and doing it just introduces overhead we don't need, and based on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_ain%27t_gonna_need_it">YAGNI </a>principle, should be avoided until it actually becomes necessary. We'll see how this is resolved.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-30809278877799942642010-09-18T07:33:00.001-07:002011-03-14T09:54:35.627-07:00Paint ReviewSo I've now used something like a dozen brands and lines of miniature and related paints, and I have opinions.<br /><br />First off, a couple terms. Saturation refers to the "strength" of a color. Low saturation means closer to grey, while high saturation is very colorful. Coverage refers to how dense the pigmentation within the paint is. Paints with strong coverage are generally easier to work with for most purposes.<br /><br />I've found a few paints that are all equally solid in my opinion: <a href="http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/gb/modelling-products-gb.html">Vallejo's various model lines</a>, <a href="http://privateerpress.com/formula-p3">Privateer Press's P3</a> (P3), and <a href="http://www.reapermini.com/Paints/master">Reaper Master Series</a> (RMS). Even among these, however, there are better and worse colors, and I've found experimentation is key to determining which is best for a given color.<br /><br />Of Vallejo's lines, I've primarily used the <a href="http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/gb/game-color-gb.html">Game Color</a> (VGC) line, though I have some of the <a href="http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/gb/model-color-gb.html">Model Color</a> (VMC) and a few <a href="http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/gb/model-air-gb.html">Model Air</a> (VMA), specifically metallics. The VGC line is solid, but there's some weakness in the yellow/bone range, and there seems to have been a malfunction in their dark green, in that every one I've tried has been somewhere between a wash and an ink, good pigmentation but really, really thin. VMC is generally okay, though I've found the metallics from this line to pop nicely. The VMA metallics, however, are really impressive... except when they're not. The Chrome and Rust colors look incredible, but the Copper and Brass are painfully bad for their names, looking more like a tinted silver than either copper or brass. They might have a use, but it's something other than what they call themselves.<br /><br />Privateer's lines seem to specialize in very vibrant, saturated colors. They have excellent colors across the gamut, though there's a little too much specialization in browns and olives, in my opinion--a few of the browns I have difficulty telling apart, and probably ten of their colors are olive or olive-tinted. I've yet to find one of their paints I was dissatisfied with, coverage-wise. None of this applies to their metallics, however. I've heard that the paint manufacturer managed to screw up all of P3's metallics in their first batch. I've further heard that the issues have been corrected, but that there's so much of the first batch floating around that all new orders for the metallics still get that bad batch. They are universally awful in my experience, which is really too bad in that they have some distinctly unique colors, such as Blighted Gold.<br /><br />Reaper's Master Series line seems solid. It's not quite as consistently vibrant as P3, but it has a broader range, and the "Violet Red" is the best looking red I've seen in miniature painting lines. The metallics are good, but I have a hard time saying they're better than Vallejo's. They have a few different colors, however; the Old Bronze is a particularly nice somewhat green gold.<br /><br />To be honest, I haven't used too much of Citadel's modern lines. I generally preferred the VGC line years ago, which has a color-for-color match to the Citadel paints, and even the problem dark green I thought better substituted by P3 Gnarls Green. I also have yet to try Reaper's Pro Series line. Per their marketing, they suggest using the Pro Series for base coating and the Master Series for further layers, much like the Citadel Foundation and VGC Extra Opaque lines in comparison to their respective standard lines.<br /><br />Containers strongly affect the usable life of a paint. The worst offender is the modern Citadel line; its hard plastic containers with their hard plastic tops appear to allow more air in and let more moisture out than any other line I have. After two years in my kit, they're dried to solid lumps in their pots. By way of comparison, I have older Citadel paints (made by <a href="http://www.gladiator.clara.net/coatd.htm">Coat d'Arms</a>, now an independent) that are over a decade old that are still usable. Silicone tops appear to be the best at keeping in moisture; nearly all of my <a href="http://privateerpress.com/formula-p3">P3</a> paints are good, even after around five years. Dropper bottles appear to be very good as well, though I probably lost 1 in 5, and many 1 in 10 remaining are a little thick.<br /><br />One trick I've found is moving paints from pots to dropper bottles, which can be purchased relatively cheaply. The transition is slightly tricky, but in moving 25 P3 paints to droppers I had no significant mishaps. You'll be left with a small amount in the pot, but it's not too hard to use that up. Bonus for that is you now have empty pots, which do have a use in my experience: wash containers. I have about a dozen washes of various colors in my empties, and the generally leak-proof nature of the P3 caps is hugely useful.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-29207904258346282802010-07-18T17:57:00.000-07:002010-07-18T18:27:24.057-07:00Warhammer 40k: The Half-Assed WargameI've had a squad of Games Workshop Space Marines kicking around in my stash of miniatures for a couple years that I finally dug out and started to paint. In looking through the various chapter options I could paint, I decided to go for Dark Angels--I liked the bizarre hybrid of armor and monastic style. I paint them a lovely shade of primarily dark green, and start thinking, do I want to actually build up an army? What else would I get and/or want?<br /><br />This leads me to poking around on the internet and finding out that, first, there was a major revamp to the Space Marines in general about three years ago, but the Dark Angels chapter wasn't really made up to date as well. The miniatures line for the Dark Angels lacks a number of unit types which would take a lot of work to model. They've never really bothered making the chapter rules fit with the current edition. It's kind of an eternal cycle of making things work for one faction, then the next, and never really building a coherent, unified, here-is-how-all-the-sides-work set of rules. They'll probably get around to fixing up the Dark Angels eventually, but not until they have the miniatures to support it, so until then, they'll pimp other factions and units.<br /><br />Oh well, I'll put the space marines on the shelf.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-31713195334442886642010-07-13T09:10:00.000-07:002010-07-13T09:23:07.167-07:00Painting With Thinned PaintsFor whatever reason, it took me close to a decade to get serious about my painting techniques with miniatures, but now I have, and it took me far too long to figure out how to work with thinned paints.<br /><br />First off, pretty much every line, regardless of the hype, has paints that are a little too thick for use straight from the container. Personally I'd prefer this was the case, in fact, since I can by thinning materials far more cheaply than I can buy the paints. Right now I am trying what is alleged to be Jennifer Haley's thinning mix: 1:1:2 retarder-to-flow improver-to-water. Usually I'm finding, for base coats, 1:1 works reasonably well with P3, Vallejo, and Reaper Master paints, and for tinting coats, around 3:1 works well, but at this point it's much more dependent on the line or even the individual paint. I've tried washes at very low paint ratios (10:1) and have found it almost too thin, but I'm still working on my patience.<br /><br />Next, once you have your paint, what to do with it. At first, I had the biggest pain working with these thinned paints: I couldn't control the flow, they'd sweep into crevasses or over other surfaces abruptly. Eventually I became conscious of exactly what I was doing wrong, however, when I watched my subconscious behaviors working with the normal paints. I frequently use the edge of my painting station to wipe excess paint off the brush after dipping it; the reduced paint volume allows for increased control. Once I'd made this connection, I watched the spread of the thinned paints as I stroked the brush against that surface and could easily see that it would start off bleeding every which way, but within a few strokes became controlled. So for now, every time I load the brush, I watch the area I brush until the paint gets to the control level I want.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-80033987229168398302010-07-05T09:14:00.000-07:002010-07-05T09:34:57.936-07:00Miniature Painting: PrimingI'm not sure if anyone will ever see this, but I'm throwing out what I've figured out about miniature priming out there in case it's useful to anyone else.<br /><br />For years, I would use the standard aerosol primers from Citadel, Foundry, and a few other companies, and overall it was okay, but annoying in places. If you look carefully at some primed figures, you'll see a roughness of texture that isn't the detail of the figure but how the primer dried. This in turn may be caused by poor technique while applying it, atmospheric conditions, or other issues, but I found something I prefer far more.<br /><br />Plain old acrylic gesso makes for a superb miniature primer. It's something like a mix of acrylic binder, glue, and a strong pigment, very thick in comparison to most miniature paints, though I've never noticed any of the pigment grains distorting the priming surface. It has a few peculiar properties which make it surprisingly good.<br /><br />Foremost is that it shrinks as it dries--out of the bottle it's quite thick, but it can be immediately brushed onto a miniature with no watering whatsoever and result in a good priming coat. I've found that it's a little too thick to get into the details straight from the bottle, so I tend to add just a little water to thin it, though this tends to accentuate the minor downside of its shrinkage: it tends to pull away from ridges or out of areas where it wasn't thick enough. As a result, gesso priming usually requires two passes. I've read that it should be allowed to dry for at least 24 hours before painting; I'm not sure how accurate that is, but I wait it out, though I might do a second pass early if the unprimed spots become obvious.<br /><br />Secondly, the actual dried layer of gesso is neatly uniform and pulls nicely into details. It seems less prone to obliterating them than aerosol primers.<br /><br />Third, it doesn't outgas horrible fumes. No need to find a well ventilated area to apply it in.<br /><br />Finally, it's not quite as "thirsty" as aerosol primers are, though I've yet to see an issue with the paint not adhering. If you've worked with washes, you may have tried and been dismayed at the failure of washing a freshly primed figure--the primer layer tends to negate any levelling of the wash and simply uniformly color the figure. Gesso priming allows for this technique, if you like. I've found even thinned paints will tend to spread out much more than I'd like, making it difficult to control layers until there's enough paint down to suppress that flow.<br /><br />Other things worth noting: it's more time consuming to apply, but it's far cheaper than the aerosols.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-37253430726266561772010-06-09T08:46:00.000-07:002010-06-09T09:19:58.057-07:00The Dilemma of AdblockingSomething I very much prefer to do without on the web is advertising. Sometimes it is acceptable, but many times it is annoying, sometimes horribly so. Opening a webpage and having my computer abruptly blare a toothpaste ad pisses me off no end. Ads are best when they are silent static images or text.<br /><br />However, annoying as they may be, the impulse to install and adblocker may harm the sites I enjoy, in that they receive less revenue from the advertisers, without which they might go under, and I'd prefer that not happen. This is assuming, of course, that they're working on a CPM model--if it's CPA then I don't know how to answer that, in that I avoid clicking on ads when I do see them.<br /><br />So, I started thinking: is there a way to accomplish both goals? Could an adblocker be built that still retrieves the ads but simply pipes them to /dev/null? On the minus side, such an adblocker would negate two of the advantages of the standard ones: privacy and bandwidth, though perhaps the privacy one could be negated by providing some form of specialized cookie cache.<br /><br />Maybe even a slicker form could be made. For example, could the blocker:<br />1) intercept the request for the advertising;<br />2) perform the request;<br />3) grab the headers to determine its MIME type;<br />4) return a piece of stub data to the browser window while discarding the request payload<br />This might work around some of the more annoying forms of ad enforcement while providing the same advantages.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-35424734019930318482010-05-11T08:10:00.000-07:002010-05-11T08:29:46.469-07:00Apple's Comical iTunes FailureOne of the things that has bugged me a bit is trying to get my iPod and iTunes to work together as I would expect them to. At work, I've got a macbook that I use a bit, and one day I decided to plug my iPod in and listen to music via the headphones in the macbook. This turned out to be a surprisingly annoying proposition.<br /><br />First off, you have to enable manual management of music and videos. This is probably the most baffling part of the whole thing, in that I have no intention of managing anything. As a bonus, whenever I resync my iPod at home, for whatever reason, the manual management flag turns itself back off. Next, you have to go into the music interface for the iPod. You can't use the iPod itself and simply stream the music into your computer, and instead you have a menu which is about one step beyond what we had in '95--a list of all your songs. You can't shuffle or repeat or see the album art or limit play to a single album. You must listen to all your songs in order as sorted. At least you can control the sort order.<br /><br />The comedy of all this is how astonishingly clumsy it is, given every bit of it is Apple hardware and software. Usually the Apple experience is clean and just works exactly how you'd expect it to, yet here they've dropped the ball pretty badly.<br /><br />As a bonus: I can plug my iPod into my ubuntu 10.04 machine, and it pops up in Rythymbox like magic. I believe the prior version couldn't read the iPod Touch, but the latest works great. All the things I want, it just does, with the minor exception of a lack of album art. How I suffer. Have I mentioned how ubuntu is turning linux into a great OS?Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-58216970244595595822010-01-31T11:01:00.000-08:002010-01-31T12:15:31.040-08:00The Future of FlashI've been developing Flash tools, specifically Flex, for a few months now, and my current opinion is that it's a pain in the ass. I've worked with various javascript toolkits over the last few years, and so far all of them make building a functional, attractive UI far less painful than Flex; the only thing Flex has on the other tools is the ability to integrate Flash elements and animations. HTML5, however, is on the near horizon, officially supported in all of the major browsers' current versions, and with canvas, svg, audio and video tags you can pretty much do anything Flash can do without the pain of Flash. All of Apple's portable devices, iPhone, iPod and iPad, support it (and not Flash).<div><br /></div><div>In fact, Apple's stance on Flash is<a href="http://www.blogger.com/w.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra-is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve-jobs/"> surprisingly harsh</a>. My experiences with Flash in Linux back Jobs' assertion that Flash is buggy, however; I regularly find the Flash process spinning out of control and taking down my computer until I can kill it. On top of that, the universal binary approach Flash takes means that viruses can be built to infect any platform on which Flash runs, and one researcher even built a special virus as an experiment that would infect Windows, Macs, or Linux machines.</div><div><br /></div><div>So in the end, I'm inclined to side with Jobs: Flash is doomed. There's nothing notable that it does that HTML5 doesn't, so Flash now has a lot of competition, and Flash just doesn't do much very well. Hopefully I can convince my company of this sooner than later.</div>Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-24455925418427524882009-09-29T08:37:00.001-07:002009-09-29T09:09:36.702-07:00On the Weirdness of Netbook GamingAs a terrible addict to the dark vice of video games, I've been compelled to try getting games to work on my new netbook, and so far it's been a frustrating experience. The biggest problem: the netbook screen resolution. The device itself may or may not be able to run modern games—I've been unable to get Civilization 4 to run on it, for example, despite appearing to meet the system requirements—so I've focussed on installing older games. The trick there is that, while the netbook is surely powerful enough to play games circa, say, 2005, the display is only capable of a maximum resolution of 1024 x 600. At that point in gaming history, games were pushing around 1600 x 1200, and it was pretty much assumed that a baseline system would be capable of 1024 x 768.<br /><br />Note that the netbook screen doesn't meet that.<br /><br />So now I have to dig through games capable of that resolution--or its nearest standard-aspect cousin, 800 x 600--which is throwing me back to around the year 2000. There are good games from that period, but I've gotten rid of very nearly all my games from then, meaning I now have to hunt for some. Then on top of that, I have to find patches and ensure compatibility with my hardware.<br /><br />One of the funnier finds is Master of Orion 3, a game I bought primarily on the strength of its predecessor and the writings of the lead designer, who had all sorts of really interesting ideas, the vast majority of which were cut from the final product. It's a curious game in that it has all the trappings of a standard 4x game, but over all of it there's an abstracted interface that makes it feel less Space Fleet Commander than Imperial Bureaucracy Wrangler. It wound up rushed out with horrible bugs, and apparently one of the other things cut was any resolution higher than my magic target, 800 x 600. Third-parties have put in impressive efforts to clean up the bugs that remained after the devs quit supporting it, and it's quite playable, though I'm still trying to decide if I want to play it.<br /><br />At this point I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't try my hand at building games myself, as it might be less hassle.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-18805529568170825892009-09-21T09:08:00.000-07:002009-09-21T09:27:03.364-07:00Apple's iPod Touch RacketWay back when Apple first put out the iPod Touch, I thought it was a great idea. The thing is practically a computer! It fits in my pocket! I looked at the iPhone as being a waste out the gate because really, AT&T? Might as well chuck myself off a bridge.<br /><br />Years later, I've found myself in an annoying conundrum. Every major OS revision that comes out costs a fairly small fee, $10. Certainly not terrible. I paid to upgrade to 2.0, but now we're at 3.0, and looking at the feature set, I think, meh. Nothing I really care about--sure, copy and paste are great for text apps, but I rarely use my iPod for text anything. Music, games, web browsing. So I chose not to pay their fee.<br /><br />But now my apps demand I upgrade. I foolishly allowed them to update themselves, and they promptly broke because they all require I have OS 3.0, minimum. I'm not sure if it's a contractual requirement of building apps for the platform, but none of the apps I've seen still support OS 2.x. So my device is now shackled to the basic functionality supported, which is nice, but I can't get any apps for it without jailbreaking it. Apple is attempting to extort me to get the functionality advertised. Seems like fraud to me.<br /><br />In the words of an iPhone dev I know, "anyone not willing to upgrade their OS is also not likely to pay for apps so, fuck you." Thanks, Apple, for letting your representative tell me how you really feel.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-7380913923467731972009-09-13T22:42:00.000-07:002009-09-13T23:10:02.540-07:00EULAsI've been thinking about the nature of EULAs recently, and I've got questions and concerns.<br /><br />First off, I like them and I don't. As a software developer, I can definitely appreciate some of the terms of most EULAs; the no-liability clause is probably the most important, because without that, there is a remote chance of any given piece of software I write being potentially responsible for, or connected to, a near infinite amount of damage. At the same time, there are so many more common clauses that I find objectionable: mandatory arbitration, the stripping of a consumer's right to control what happens on their hardware, the claimed right to change the contract without notice.<br /><br />That said, I wonder exactly what legal standing they have in the first place. At least one article I read (which I should link if I can find it again) suggested that there exists already some legal tension with EULAs, in that they act like contract, but the product they are tied to is sold like a good, which should preclude the attachment of contract terms. Further, it was suggested that a contract in which one of the parties has no control over the terms is not a legally binding contract. I'm not sure I'd want to test these too hard personally, but that's because I'm ignorant.<br /><br />On top of those complaints, there's the fact that EULAs help to make the entire transaction of purchasing software borderline fraudulent. When you go into a store and pick up a piece of software, it appears that you have gone through the process of purchasing a good. Except, of course, that EULAs often require you to give up the rights you have with a good (though those clauses are usually legally unenforcable). The usual claim here is that you have not purchased a good, but rather a license to a product, but this too is misleading. You can't simply have the disk and use the software, you're required to "agree" to the EULA first. You haven't even purchased a license, you've purchased the right to license the software. That doesn't seem entirely clear from the presentation of the initial transaction at the store.<br /><br />So as for questions, does the installation of software constitute proof of a legal agreement? If one were brought up in court for violating a EULA, and one simply asserted that no EULA was presented, what recourse would the plaintiff have? An expert could rightly say that it should not be possible to install the software without agreement, but I don't think it's actually impossible. Or, on another more legally questionable track, what if one were to have a piece of software which automatically agreed to any EULA via an installer in such a way that you never even saw it. You then could say you honestly never agreed to the EULA, though it seems plausible this could be some form of fraud.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5196729076349190920.post-72149050191308857752009-09-13T17:56:00.000-07:002009-09-13T18:02:34.975-07:00On Sid Meier's Alpha CentauriI picked up a netbook recently and attempted to run Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri on it and experienced massive failure and fixed it. Hopefully if you're having problems running it, this will help you.<br /><br />SMAC doesn't like running under funny aspect ratios. If you're running at 1024x600 like I was, the executable will immediately crash, since it tries to use the desktop resolution and it wasn't programmed to allow for that one. So, to fix it, run at 800x600. I suggest turning off the scaling in the driver if you can--there's an option to "center the desktop" or some such on the Intel 945 chipset graphics driver, that will prevent it from looking like ass. You can also use the schemes on that to set up wide aspect and standard aspect schemes to go back and forth more quickly.Robhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10091773813344489544noreply@blogger.com0