Monthly Archives: March 2011

But who would be so callous as to take out their resentment on others? Besides, y’know, conservatives.

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Opposing sex ed is way more important than abortions. [...] I don’t care if there’s a billion abortions! I just can’t stand the thought of teenagers doing it. Those taught, firm bodies exploring one another with the kind of excitement that I’ll never experience again in my life.

Let’s play a game! Is this:
A) An accurate summation of the anti-choice psyche, or
B) A quote from Robot Chicken?

Trick question! It’s both. Honestly, in our current political climate you have to appreciate this kind of candor. Our news media is intent on playing along with anti-choicers’ lies about their motivations for opposing legal abortion, and the general public doesn’t think about it enough to cut through the bullshit. That, of course, is exactly what conservatives want. As such, it takes a genuinely thoughtful person to notice that the anti-choice platform is based on bitterness and resentment, not concern for fetuses. So again, kudos, Robot Chicken. If you want to watch the clip that the above quote comes from, here you go:

Straight Male Privilege Dude Sez: Stop making games for people that aren’t us!

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(h/t No More Lost via Lady Victoria at Manboobz)

I had a real problem with the sexuality in Bioware’s RPGs prior to Jade Empire. Namely, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, where you had two romance options: one was the opposite of your PC’s gender, and the other was a woman. In other words, your choices, depending on your choice of PC gender, were two straight romances, or one straight romance and one lesbian romance.

Commander Shepard finds that it's far easier to transgress traditional gender boundaries when the genderless alien he's having sex with has breasts and is voiced by a woman.

This tends to give off the impression that the lesbians are only there because it gives their target demographic of young males boners. But in their other (relatively) recent RPGs they’ve done something about this. Jade Empire and both Dragon Age games have hetero, gay man, and gay woman romance options. This is an excellent move away from heteronormativity on their part, and I was pleased with them for doing it.

But a certain Bioware fan is not happy about this one bit. As a straight male, he’s accustomed to being pandered to exclusively, and he’s got all sorts of rationalizations about why it should stay that way.

His name is Bastal, and he’s here to call Bioware out:

To summarize, in the case of Dragon Age 2, BioWare neglected their main demographic: The Straight Male Gamer.

I don’t think many would argue with the fact that the overwhelming majority of RPG gamers are indeed straight and male. Sure, there are a substantial amount of women who play video games, but they’re usually gamers who play games like The Sims, rather than games like Dragon Age. That’s not to say there isn’t a significant number of women who play Dragon Age and that BioWare should forego the option of playing as a women altogether, but there should have been much more focus in on making sure us male gamers were happy.

But Bastal, you might be asking, how do you know straight males are such an overwhelming majority of Dragon Age players? Oh, don’t worry, Bastal has you covered with exact figures and percentages pulled straight out of his ass:

The straight male demographic is a huge demographic. I’d put the number that over 80% of RPG fans are males. They all like different things, this is a group numbering millions. Now you also have another group, the homosexual group, I’d say generously, that this group represents 5%.

Well, that settles that. And like your average conservative pundit, Bastal sure does long for the days when you could just pretend that the unprivileged groups didn’t even exist:

Its ridiculous that I even have to use a term like Straight Male Gamer, when in the past I would only have to say fans

Those women and gays have invaded our games, dammit! They’re moving into our neighborhoods, taking our jobs, and now they’re playing our Dragon Age! I’ll bet Obama forced the banks to approve loans for unqualified gays and women to purchase Xbox 360s, too!

David Gaider, a senior writer at Bioware who served as the lead writer for both Dragon Age and its sequel, responded to Bastal in an appropriately pointed manner:

The romances in the game are not for “the straight male gamer”. They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don’t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant… and that’s ignoring the idea that they don’t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The “rights” of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent “right” to get more options than anyone else.

[...]

And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.

I take my hat off to you, Mr. Gaider. I was impressed enough when Bioware started including gay romance options in their games, and I’m even more impressed to see them standing firmly by their decision without flinching or apologizing.

Bastal replied with the cluelessnses and predictability of someone who wonders why there’s no White Entertainment Television:

The idea of privilege is ridiculous. The “privilege” always lies with the majority because if your goal is to make a game that will be liked by as many fans possible, then it makes sense to focus on that largest group. Why should one fan’s enjoyment be more important than five others? It’d more accurate to call “privilege” the idea that some minority group gets special preference for political points. If you really want to be all-inclusive, then I don’t see why homosexuals should get special preference while leaving other minority groups out.

I don’t think Bastal understands the implications of Gaider’s statement that Bioware has “good numbers [...] on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO.” See, Dragon Age contains a layer of Internet interactivity that, frankly, was forced on it by Bioware’s new owner, EA. I’m not a fan of it, but the point here is that Bioware’s servers kept track of the path each player was following through the game, and every decision each player made. I know this because the information is reflected in my online profile at Bioware’s community site. It makes perfect sense for Bioware to compile this information in order to get a statistical overview of what parts of the game people most liked, and use this information to inform the design of the sequel. That’s just good business sense.

But as Gaider himself points out, it doesn’t really matter. Unless their numbers showed that nobody was taking advantage of the gay romance options (and we all know that’s not the case), the fact that the people who do are in the minority doesn’t mean they have less right to play a character who reflects their sexuality. I’m certainly not saying that you should have to player a character that reflects your sexuality, but the ability to do so is a privilege straight male gamers have enjoyed for a long, long time. And Bastal doesn’t like women and gays getting to sit at that table with him. If they must play games, they could at least have the decency to pretend to be straight men; wouldn’t want to offend poor Bastal’s sensibilities.

This is the American idea of morality

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I got to this controvery a little late, so perhaps my point is moot. But I don’t think so, because it suggests a general principle to me about America’s idea of morality.

The controversy in question, and you may have heard about it by now, is the app that was sold through the iTunes App Store that promised to help gay people become straight. Now, the app has already been removed by Apple, so like I said, the controversy is kind of over. But I still think we can observe something significant from this. From the first story:

The app seeks to help gay individuals become heterosexual. It received a ’4′ rating from Apple, which indicates the company considered the app to contain ‘no objectionable material.’

Here’s why I have a problem with this: Apple has been waging a very inconsistent battle over nudity in the App Store. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to what gets banned and what stays, but the overall message is that Apple does not like boobs. That’s their right, and if they want to keep boobs out of their App Store, it’s their business. I think it’s a bad choice, but it’s their choice.

What I want to call into question is that Apple apparently believes that nudity does constitute “objectionable material,” while homophobia does not. I’m not saying either one should be censored. I’m not saying nobody finds boobs offensive, or that everybody finds homophobia offensive.

But Apple’s kneejerk reaction to nudity appears to be, “We’d better block this, because somebody might find it offensive.” Whereas they appear not to have this response to homophobia. They were wrong about that, and they’ve responded to the offense others have expressed over the gay cure app. That’s fine and dandy. What’s not fine and dandy is that they initially felt that there was nothing objectionable about the homophobia in the first place, while there is something objectionable about boobs.

That’s morality in America, something that I got into when I discussed censorship in my very first post. People are terribly concerned that their child might see a breast, but evidently not concerned that their child will be exposed to bigotry. We as a society need to seriously rethink our value system.

Android protip: If you want Gingerbread on your Droid 1, Simply Stunning is the way to go

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I suppose this is a good time to post about a hobby of mine that I’ve never brought up before (except for the earlier post about how much I want a Motorola Xoom): Android.

Since I’m not rich I’m still coasting along with my original Droid, but if there’s one legacy Android phone to own, it’s definitely the Droid. And yes, I think the Droid does qualify as “legacy,” since it won’t be getting an official update to Android 2.3. But here’s an important thing to know: Motorola’s decision not to update the Droid 1 has nothing to do with the phone’s hardware. It’s eminently capable of running Gingerbread. Presumably the move was a case of engineered obsolesence, which is fine with me since, with the right ROMs and overclock settings, the Droid 1 doesn’t have to be functionally obsolete at all. In fact, in a moment I’ll show benchmarks that rate my overclocked Droid 1 almost as fast as a stock Droid X.

There are several good Gingerbread ROMs out for the Droid now. It was a rocky road for the developers, along with those of us who jump on these builds before they’re out of beta. While the Droid, as I said, is powerful enough to run Gingerbread, without Motorola providing the layers of compatibility necessary for the 2.3 software to operate the Droid hardware, the ROM devs had to build them from scratch. Well, not entirely from scratch – it was a combination of importing and adapting the Droid’s Froyo APIs, some of which worked with Gingerbread to some extent, and adapting APIs from other phones such as the Nexus One. But that’s not to downplay the efforts of the Cyanogen team, Blackdroid, ChevyNo1, Liquidroms, and the rest of the devs. They all put a lot of sweat into making the Droid run 2.3 flawlessly, all without the resources of the software engineering teams at Verizon and Motorola.

And it was a rocky road, but they’ve finally made it. Cyanogen, Ultimate Droid, Simply Stunning, Liquid Gingerbread, and more, all have fully functional Gingerbread ROMs available to the root-enabled masses.

Ultimate Droid 3.0 was my original favorite, and it was one of the first Gingerbread ROMs to reach Froyo levels of speed. I jumped onboard with UD back when there were relatively few options – Liquid Gingerbread was reasonably good but had awful battery life. This may have been fixed by now, but I haven’t gone back since LGB’s pre-release builds. Cyanogen Mod turned out to be the source of pretty much all of UD3′s positive developments in terms of speed and functionality. In fact, as I had already known, the Cyanogen team’s incredible hard work is at the core of almost every Gingerbread Droid ROM, including Ultimate Droid and Simply Stunning, so my past aversion to Cyanogen Mod is something I’m kicking myself for. Plus, the same team is responsible for the excellent Clockworkmod recovery

What ended up driving me away from Ultimate Droid was its RAM usage, which was poor, even post-release. I had heard that low available memory can result in things like lost SMS messages, but I had never experienced it on my Droid before. UD3 gave me the pleasure of missing an entire weekend’s worth of texts from my girlfriend. I had already been tracking its sub-20-MB RAM availability with concern, and that event was the final straw. In my search for a replacement, I found that Simply Stunning 5.0 had reached final release. I had never tried it in beta but I wanted something other than UD and LGB.

The creator of Simply Stunning,  ChevyNo1, is a fantastic developer who has a good track record of streamlining the Droid’s performance. I had serious performance issues with Simply Stunning 4.x for some reason, but even with other ROMs I would replace the stock kernel with one of Chevy’s. His low-voltage kernels can make an overclocked Droid’s battery last longer than a stock Droid’s, which is impressive. (He’s not the only dev with good low-voltage Droid kernels, I hasten to point out; but I go to him for consistent quality and, to be honest, because as kernels go it’s what I’m most familiar with.)

Simply Stunning 5.0 impressed me. The usual Cyanogen Gingerbread innards are accessible in the Settings, along with the Gingerbread variant of the ChevyNo1Tools we all know from previous iterations of SS. The stock theme looks very nice, with a blue aesthetic that’s substantially less overbearing than most blue Android aesthetics. Chevy finally just packed the ADW.Launcher (long a personal favorite of mine) in with the ROM, though he left the default Gingerbread launcher in place as well.

Protip: Pick which launcher you want to use, and delete the other. Don’t just select one as default – remove the other. You don’t want two launchers locked into memory and sucking up your RAM when you’re only using one. You can’t “officially” uninstall the stock launcher, but as a root user you can flex your mighty root access and simply delete Launcher2.apk from /system/app. Just be careful in there.

SS5.0 was about as fast and smooth as UD3 was before I started having the RAM issuse. SS5.x has yet to disappoint me on that front: RAM usage was reasonable in 5.0 and only got better with each update.

SS5.1 was a good update, but not overwhelmingly different from 5.0, especially in terms of subjective experience. It did seem to run a bit smoother.

Simply Stunning 5.2 is the update that got me excited enough to write this post. I installed it this morning, and holy balls. It’s leagues better than 5.1, and so far, in my opinion, the best Gingerbread experience you’ll find on the Droid thus far.

On the surface level, Chevy has provided a third launcher option: the launcher from the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. I never thought I’d say this about a launcher made by a phone manufacturer (especially Sony!), but it’s excellent. It’s smooth, fast, and minimalistic. Absolutely nothing like Motorola’s clunky Motoblur or HTC’s okayish but, let’s be honest, overrated SenseUI. It has nice pop-out folders. And in combination with Chevy’s excellent kernel, it is virtually lag-free. I’m using this as my one and only launcher without reservation. I’ve deleted Launcher2, but I backed up the ADW apk in case the Arc Launcher (ha) ended up having unforeseen issues (it is from Sony, after all, even if it’s Sony Ericsson).

Under the hood is where SS5.2 excites me the most, though. Chevy has made a couple tweaks that had very noticeable effects. First, he disabled the OS’s logging in order to free up that share of CPU time. This is something that the vase majority of users will never notice, so it was a great idea. But if you by any chance need your Android to keep a log, you can enable it in ChevyNo1Tools.

The other tweak is a compromise in Android’s bitter ambivalence about task killing. Task killers on Android are a divisive issue, with some people swearing by them and others denouncing them as unnecessary and counterproductive. In theory, they make your phone run faster and save battery life by killing background apps that you aren’t using. In practice, claim the denouncers, any app that is truly not in use will already be killed automatically by Android; meanwhile, auto-killing other tasks will just cause Android to recall them, resulting in an endless cycle that will actually eat more battery life than it saves.

I’ll be frank: my personal, admittedly anecdotal experience puts me in the camp of denouncers. I haven’t had a task killer installed on my Droid in a long time.

Chevy has created, as I said, a compromise. SS5.x does have a native task-killer beyond that of the even more native task-killing that stock Android enforces. It is more limited than the task killers you can download on the Android Market, however; it keeps a short list of auto-kill tasks that can only be modified by the user with non-trivial effort. So while I was never happy about it, I begrudgingly tolerated it.

As of SS5.2, however, the task-killer does double duty: it auto-kills the designated tasks and prevents Android from recalling them for a period of time. This sidesteps the endless loop that normal task-killers create. I really want to be skeptical of the very necessity of a task-killer in Android, but from anecdotal evidence so far, I think it’s actually very effective. I’ve never had more free RAM, and more consistently, on my Droid than I do with SS5.2. I’m pretty much always seeing around 75 MB free, where with other ROMs I would almost never see more than 50, and often less. Chevy’s under-the-hood tweak appears to finally make task-killing a serious boon to Android performance.

My Droid is running smooth, my RAM is well-managed, and I have a pretty, lag-free new launcher to play with. So yes, I’m very exicted with Simply Stunning 5.2 so far, and if you want Android 2.3 on your Droid, it is by far my top recommendation.

After the break, benchmarks and other pretty pictures!

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For no real reason, an amazingly terrible opening paragraph from a book

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A dizzying montage of abrasive red and white splashes from the overhead light slathered the room and savagely doused her sleeping form without effect. But when the red alert horn’s undulating shrieks stabbed mercilessly at her body and knifed their way to the marrow of her bones, consciousness aggressively irrupted into Jenetta Carver’s sleep-anesthetized brain.

I suppose it’s kind of mean-spirited of me to ridicule some amateur writer’s fiction that I pulled off his Deviantart page. No, I’m just kidding, this shit is actually being sold for money. I suppose it’s not the worst fiction ever sold for money, but it does happen to be something terrible that I stumbled upon randomly on Amazon today. So there’s that.

The IRS versus the company store: who has the more legitimate claim to your soul?

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(via t/w)

Wisconsin teacher Jeri-Lynn Betts committed suicide on March 8, and the The Progressive covered it as being connected to the union strike and Governor Walker’s policy proposals there. I do think The Progressive seems a little too eager to subsume this suicide into the overall story of what’s going on in Wisconsin, and that bothers me. But, even The Progressive article describes her long history of depression, and it’s completely understandable that the current situation in Wisconsin would compound her depression, and it’s an undeniable fact that Governor Walker is doing his damnedest to make the situation as stressful and bleak as possible for the teachers. So I do think it’s believable that the situation in Wisconsin precipitated Betts’ suicide, but again, she already faced depression and anxiety. Rather than letting her disappear into the admittedly very important narrative of workers’ rights in Wisconsin, I would rather see her death allowed to stand alone as the tragedy it is, a tragedy that would be equally painful no matter what precipitated it.

Okay, so I may have my reservations about the way The Progressive handled it, but Jim Hoft is not happy about it at all, not one bit, sir:

The Progressive, a liberal website in Wisconsin, reported this week that a Wisconsin teacher committed suicide because of Governor Scott Walker’s union bill. The website says she was “distraught” to learn that she was going to have to pay 12.6% instead of 6% of her insurance premium cost?
Really?… Really?

Let’s take this claim at face value for just a second. This is coming from Jim Hoft, who like every wingnut in the blogosphere spends about 80% of his time moaning about taxes. He and his fellow wingnuts make an entire career out of over-the-top whining about taxes and how they’re too high and the government’s stealing from us, etc.

But the notion that somebody’s upset about paying higher insurance premiums leaves him shaking his head in disbelief? Am I to take it that Jim Hoft is okay with giving up a portion of your earnings to those who will likely mismanage it and spend it on things you don’t approve of, as long as the one taking it is a corporation and not the government? What am I saying, of course I am.

But Hoft’s zeroing in on this 6% to 12.6% business is actually completely disingenuous. “The website says she was ‘distraught’ to learn that she was going to have to pay 12.6% instead of 6% of her insurance premium cost?” he asks in disbelief. Well no, Jim, no it doesn’t.

See, Hoft pulls a neat little trick at the end of the post, where the source of the information about Wisconsin teachers being asked to pay 12.6% of their insurance premiums actually comes from a completely different source. There’s no mention of it at all the in the Progressive article.

Now, the Progressive article does mention that Walker “has demanded that public workers, including teachers, contribute a significant amount of their salaries to health care and pensions.” But this is just one of many contributing factors the Progressive links to Betts’ suicide.

But Hoft is trying to imply that those specific percentage figures come from the Progressive article. Why? Presumably because he’s trying to downplay and mock any notion that Walkers’ policies might be taking a heavy toll in stress on teachers and other state workers in Wisconsin. Please, it’s just a six percent increase, he says, asking us to pretend with him that the entire Progressive article was about that six percent increase.

I say it’s Hoft who’s diminishing Betts’ suicide by denying that her job and her role in the Wisconsin fiasco could possibly have been causing her any psychological distress. If she really did kill herself over this, he seems to be saying, then she’s just silly. And as the t/w article linked at the top of my post shows, Hoft’s commenters were more than happy to jump on this implication and run with it, refusing Betts any sympathy and besmirching her as a teacher and as a human being solely on the basis of Hoft’s mockery about six percent rises in insurance premium obligations. Who’s the one who’s disgusting here, Hoft? Liberals or conservatives?

A fiction writing character sheet

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I’ve heard it suggested on one or two occasions that writers might benefit from using RPG-style character sheets to sketch out characters for their fiction. With this idea in mind, I made a simple one that suits my purposes. Here’s the top half of it:

Download the whole thing if you really want to (PDF).

The “base motivators” cross is a device I use when creating characters. It applies very broadly to their personalities and general motivations. Yes, I know it’s simplistic. And while it works for me I’m not necessarily suggesting you use it for yourself. I make no claims to being a great fiction writer. But if you wanted to use it I wouldn’t stop you.

The axes are pretty self-explanatory but I might as well say words about them anyway. The materialism/spiritualism axis refers to the character’s overall drive: toward material gain or toward self-improvement (spiritual in this context doesn’t have to mean religious, although obviously it can). Naturally the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but that’s why it’s an axis. Power/submission could be seen as a conscious desire or simply as an unconscious impulse. Most people probably tend toward the middle of that axis, but people at the power end make for charismatic, powerful characters who get what they want. As such they make great antagonists; using them as protagonists requires careful balancing if you want to keep them sympathetic.

Opinions? Suggestions? Harsh criticisms? (I say this as if anyone’s reading my blog, but seriously, if you are, you could totally offer an opinion.)

Instead of bitching about patriarchy, let me take a moment to bitch about a video game

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Gamers everywhere are filling their underwear with whatever sexual-arousal-related emission applies to their gender at the release of the new Elder Scrolls V trailer. Allow me to provide a voice of dissent.

I mean, I just have to wonder: Has anybody looked past the bombastic music, the voice of Max von Sydow, and the effin dragons long enough to notice that this is terrible? Generic fantasy world, generic fantasy story, and blatant rips from Dragon Age, and everyone is excited about this? (In fairness, Dragon Age‘s setting is pretty damn generic, too, but as a game it’s also far superior to anything Bethesda has produced ever, sooooooo…)

If it follows the pattern of the series thus far, culminating especially in Elder Scrolls IV, it’ll have a pleasantly huge, admittedly well-detailed game world, brought to life with shallow roleplaying, simplistically implemented factions, AI that’s so advanced and groundbreaking that it manages to be laughably terrible, and the worst leveling/stat system imaginable. Oh yeah, and a generic, overblown story.

I will admit that Elder Scrolls IV had me excited about its story, until I realized that the only reason I was excited was because it was being narrated by Patrick Stewart.

What’s particularly funny to me is that some people are convinced that Bethesda is just so great at making living, breathing worlds. They’re not. They’re good at making large, reasonably well-crafted worlds. But living and breathing? Please. They spent a great deal of time making NPCs that walk around and stare at a different wall depending on the time of day, all to mask the fact that their worlds are actually pretty static and, beneath the surface, have no real existence beyond what’s needed to serve the story and the player’s perspective.

There are games that do a far better job of portraying a persistent, living world, but they don’t generate the hype that Elder Scrolls does because they look like this

and this

That’s right. I went there. I just implied that Elder Scrolls is too mainstream. I’m the gaming equivalent of a hipster.