M. Caspian's Blog, page 11

March 13, 2017

Music Monday: 80s flashback with DD Smash

We had a hell of a week here in Auckland. The wettest March in 58 years, and all in a few days.


 


[image error]Pic by Lawrence Smith for Fairfax Media
[image error]Pic by Lawrence Smith for Fairfax Media

A tiny town called Whangamata got three months’ rainfall. The media started calling the storm the Tasman Tempest (the Tasman is the ocean between Australia and New Zealand. Fun fact: my pen name was going to be M. Tasman but a friend suggested Americans had no idea the Tasman was a sea.) A sinkhole opened in New Lynn and 300 homes were flooded.


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Lightning hit the substation near my home, but I was lucky enough not to be one of the many who lost power. I spent the six days of the storm tucked up at home, safe and warm, with books, the internet, and copious supplies of hummus and hot-smoked salmon. I am so damn lucky and privileged it’s insane.


Let me share with you the first song I have a conscious memory of being #1 on the NZ charts. The production values give you a good idea of the state of NZ music in the 80s, and the way Kiwi music legend Dave Dobbyn randomly flourishes a prop handgun would no longer be regarded so cavalierly.  Here’s DD Smash with 1983 hit Outlook for Thursday.



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Published on March 13, 2017 00:16

March 6, 2017

Music Monday: Aloy’s Theme, and Horizon Zero Dawn first impressions

My body clock is utterly horked. I stayed up all night playing Horizon Zero Dawn, slept briefly, played more HZD, slept through the afternoon, now I’m about to eat some kind of combined breakfast/dinner dealie and play all night again. You’re gonna laugh: I’m only 10% of the way through the game. But my carrying capacity is maxxed out, and small animals throughout the land have learned to fear me. No rat is safe.


Fuck the main quest. Tonight I’ll be combing ruins again to find remnants of the Before times. Wanna know when I fell in love? When I found a text detailing Schott V. Frost, in which the Supreme Court “granted corporations the right to run for and hold political office through proxy candidates.” Hahaha, we all would have said thirty years ago. Now, I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t happen.


One text is about New Zealand, and I HAD ALL THE SQUEES! (Devs, please note, you meant to say “Hokinga Mai” – welcome back/welcome return – not “Haere Mai” – welcome.)


When I saw the first trailer I said it looked like Far Cry Primal: Mecha Edition. And it is Far Cry Primal Mecha Edition. But it’s so much fun.


Things I like about the game:


The tendrils of melody as I wander and hunt.


When you kill an animal because you need to craft stylish accessories from its corpse, you no longer have to search the long grass for three hours to find it (helloooo Far Cry 3), because a marker pops up at its location.


Colored markers indicate uncommon/rare items. If you’re hanging out for a boar bone you can litter the woodland with boar corpses and not waste time searching them, because their  marker is white. You’re looking for a green or blue marker. Go ahead, shoot that goose across the river. White marker? Nah, nothing you need there. Don’t bother swimming over to get it.


Large-scale machine slaughter. It’s so satisfying to lurk in the long grass, lure Watchers to me, and impale them in a single thrust of my mighty spear. There’s erotic subtext going on there, don’t tell me there isn’t.


Tallnecks. Climbing a Tallneck is 10,000 times better than climbing a radio tower. The ground shakes as they walk by. They’re impossibly beautiful. They feel real.


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The ruins. Oh, the ruins *happy sigh*. God, they’re gorgeous. Burn it all, bring down the world, let me wander through unspoiled wilderness, beside trout-filled streams, to poke through the husks of churches and office blocks.


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The whole soundtrack, which is here on YT, and also on Spotify.


Things I don’t like about the game:


Variable-ratio positive reinforcement. When you kill machines, or animals, sometimes you get rare and uncommon items. But not all the time. This is classical operant conditioning, and is why I decide to play for 10 minutes – just to upgrade my backpack to level four – and five hours later I’m a drooling, dehydrated mess. The devs added this feature because variable rewards are cracky. And when you get a rare item, there’s this sound. Oh, that sound. It’s brief, quiet, and satisfying, a kind of electronic sliiiide-thunk, like part of your soul is slipping into place. I have killed foxes just to hear the sliiiide-thunk. I hate myself.


Aloy. I keep wanting to type Ayla, from the Clan of the Cave Bear series. Also I think her name is supposed to remind us of Alloy, and how two together are stronger than one. Anyway, she holds her arms out too far from her body and it looks dumb. Also she keeps repeating stock phrases as I force her to wander the wilderness collecting tat so I can craft more tat. “A useful little plant . . . and bitter!” “This was easier when I was a kid.” “So much for being careful.” The first time is cute, but it’s constant. Now it’s nails down a blackboard. And you play as her. There’s no getting away from it.


The tribe’s called The Nora. Every time someone says the name I hear “bloody Nora.


Aloy literally says the line, “Who says I’m like other Nora?”


The aim assist with arrows. I’m playing on medium difficulty. I hope this goes away on hard, but currently it’s almost impossible to miss my target. I’ve seen an arrow get pulled off flight by 25 degrees in the last foot to embed itself in the carcass of a bunny. Dude, I know I missed. My ego is not so fragile that you have to cheat on my behalf.


Combat against humans. This is introduced poorly. You train against machines and then suddenly you’re in the middle of a battle with multiple waves of *redacted because spoilers*. It’s trial by fire, man!


The devs fridged  a character to give Aloy motivation for the rest of the game. She got to say a few lines, befriend Aloy, and then die horribly.


Killing Striders.


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They’re horses. You can override their code and ride them. Sure, they’re metal, but they’re horses. When you whistle they clop-clop right over to you with their big inquisitive heads, and then you lunge out of hiding, spear them in the heart, and their huge bodies sag to the ground with a last, sad snort. In the initial stages you have to kill Striders to get enough metal shards to make progress.I hate killing them.


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I have no problem killing Watchers: they look like velociraptors, wheee.


Static side quest characters. Right at the beginning I helped some dude who’d hurt his leg, and saved his daughter for him. Days later he, his daughter, and his bum leg are still in exactly the same place by the river.


A big problem:


The guy hearing voices bashed someone’s skull in with a rock someone because the voices told him to. Of course he did. Devs, it’s not the 1950s. This kind of characterization of mental health issues is not OK. It’s not like he even has more personality than this. He’s the guy who hears voices and who bashed a man’s head in. That’s literally all we can ever know about him.


Even worse problem:


In a grievously horrible developer decision the Nora warriors are called ‘braves’. This is cultural appropriation, and their response to having this pointed out to them show they gave it zero consideration. Just call them warriors.


Overall recommendation:


The long list of things I don’t like make it seem I don’t like the game as a whole. Incorrect. I love it. It’s gooood, buy eeeeet.


My inclination is to do nothing but play this for a week until I beat it and can rest. It’s the only way I know to stop myself obsessing.


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Published on March 06, 2017 22:54

March 2, 2017

Dave Seah’s Emergent Task Planner (with free downloads)

Designer Dave Seah has a kick-ass range of free downloadable time management templates. They’re called the Emergent Task Planner range, and I love these suckers.


There’s space for your top 3 tasks and 6 additional tasks, each with four hours worth of 15-min time trackers so you can record how long you actually spend on the work. The left holds an open time scale in 15 minute increments. At the bottom is scratch paper space, or room to write new tasks as they, well, emerge.


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This graphic is from Seah’s website and you should totally go there immediately and download the planners for free and try them out, and, if you like them, pay him $12 for the dated 2017 version. Seah also has a whole range of free productivity downloads you can find here (including a concrete goals tracker and a NaNoWriMo word count tracker)


You can also buy ready-to-go printed versions on Amazon. There’s an " target="_blank">undated 3-month spiral-bound notebook, an A5 spiral-bound version, and an unbound version you can punch for your own Franklin Monarch etc. I’m annoyed at myself for not needing the 3-month bound book because I want one.


But I did buy a couple of packs of the Stickypad ETP.


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These 4″ x 6″ sticky notes fit into an A6 notebook, or on a larger planner page. The stickies  – and the A5 version – don’t include the time tracking boxes and I wish they did, although I can easily add in boxes by hand for the purpose.


Even when you don’t need a tightly scheduled planner, there are always those days where tasks, appointments, and meetings collide, and you end up with a jammed day. These planner sheets are perfect for that. You can print one off just when you need one, or add a single sticky to your regular everyday carry notebook.


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Published on March 02, 2017 17:41

March 1, 2017

Jelly of the Day

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Published on March 01, 2017 22:03

February 28, 2017

Not gonna lie, I would watch this

The first season, anyway



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Published on February 28, 2017 23:26

I have Horizon Zero Dawn in my hand

Goodbye, world. See you on completion.


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Published on February 28, 2017 13:12

February 26, 2017

Music Monday: Neutron Dance

Because I’m dancing with excitement: in October I’m going to GRL 2017, in Denver, Colorado! Let me know if I will see you there. There shall be squeeing! (Also I do dance when drunk: just warning you in advance).



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Published on February 26, 2017 07:31

February 24, 2017

Review: Kanmido Time Management Notebook

I mentioned last month I was using the Jibun Techo as a time log so I can see how I am spending my day. The Jibun is a fucking expensive option for this and there’s a much cheaper but very similar product: the Kanmido 10 Min Weekly Time Management Notebook.


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This is an undated planner designed to work in tandem with the Kanmido To-Do Board.


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Each day gets a vertical listing from 7am through to midnight, with 15-minute increments marked in a grid faint enough to ignore if you want to.


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There’s a notes column down the left hand side. Saturday and Sunday get equal space without the 15 min grid and without times.


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The sewn binding is lie-flat. It’s 14.5cm x 21cm, or 5 3/4″ x 8 1/4″ aka standard A5 size. And it’s super thin: only 3mm.


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Here’s the Japanese instructions, which I am basically putting in for Gillian St Kevern, as she will understand them.


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As you complete each task from your To-Do Board Today list you can move the sticky note to the book to track how you spent your day and what you schieved, and you can also use the notebook for forward scheduling without the board. Of course the Kanmido sticky notes fit in these columns perfectly: a thin one equals half an hour, the thicker ones an hour.


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Hobonichi stickies work just as well as the Kanmido ones. You’d want to trim 3M or generic ones, as you can see from the photos.


Each book holds 22 weekly layouts, so you’d need three to get through the whole year. However this notebook goes for a lot less than the Jibun. I’ve seen it for USD$8 and USD$10 on ebay (although the only one on there today is USD$14). Compare this to current copies of the Jibun A5 biz for around USD$100. And because it’s undated you can start at any time of the year without wasting pages.


The tradeoff you’re making is the paper. The Kanmido notebook cannot handle the pens the Jibun can. As long as you’re using a basic gel pen or ballpoint you’re good, but it just won’t handle drawing pens, or even my Uni-Ball Vision Needle, which was in a lighter shade. On the bright side, it had no problem handling my Lamy fountain pen in Dark Lilac.


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if you’re looking for a small, light, inexpensive planner or time tracker, check out the Kanmido Time Management Notebook.


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Published on February 24, 2017 19:22

February 22, 2017

Book release: The Salt of Your Tears

I have a new book out on Amazon today, The Salt of Your Tears. Huge thanks to Natasha Snow for the amazing cover.


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This is a collection of three short stories.


In His Skin

Harrison offers Dylan the world. All he asks in return is Dylan follow a few simple rules.

(10,731 words)


Asking For It

Cole was looking for one night of casual sex. Garrett’s going to give Cole everything he thought he couldn’t have.

(7059 words)


A Song in the Blood

Corran MacKenzie signed up to fight a war that wasn’t his. In the desert he found Sephtis. And his fate.

(6522 words)


A Song In the Blood was originally released as “It is our bounden duty to protect the Empire” for the Goodreads BDSM group free story event in 2016. So was In His Skin, but it was, at the time, In Her Skin. I tried, guys. I tried to write m/f and I just can’t. This story has been rewritten and now it’s m/m and I like it a whole lot more. You haven’t seen Asking For It before. It’s smut. If you liked Mine, this is your book.


The Salt of Your Tears costs USD $3.99 US dollars: just over a buck a story. Cheaper than a coffee.


 


 


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Published on February 22, 2017 23:13

I for one will not be welcoming our robot overlords

If you haven’t been following what Boston Dynamics is up to lately, it’s time to get shivers down your spine.



TLDR: Skip to 3:41 for wheeled action


Boston Dynamics’ early products were designed in a research partnership with DARPA, aka the US Department of Defence. Google X currently owns them, although they are looking to sell: mainly because developing machine AI is a harder task than software AI, takes longer, and offers a much longer lead time before producing profitable enterprises. While Boston Dynamics’ robots move realistically, they still can’t think for themselves. In all those shots of robots walking around forests and deserts a human is guiding them by radio control.


Guess who has the money for long-term investment?


I’d like to think these guys evolve to delivering pizza and  safeguarding kids at the playground, but the realistic part of me knows this technology will inescapably end up with military and policing capabilities (these two are increasingly the same).


How about we combine Boston Dynamics tech with these transparent gel robots from MIT.



Big can be avoided. Big can be managed. What’s really fucking scary is miniaturization.


So, you’re invading a country. Maybe you’re after some dwindling natural resources.  Drop ten thousand transparent, waterproof, gel-like robots in the waters of the harbor. Another ten thousand in ponds and lakes. At beach resorts. Program them to pull under and drown any human not wearing the right transmitter.


Follow up with ten thousand of these self-organizing suckers on land.



Arm them with poison. Or tiny tiny scalpels. Or explosives. Just enough to really terrify the populace, disrupt everyday life, and reduce resistance.


Sure, they need to follow a projector’s instructions. For now.


Forget military uses. How about you just deploy them in a city, listening to and recording conversations and digital communications to identify undocumented immigrants. They’re small. They could be anywhere. Hey, disguise them as discarded coke cans. Or Starbucks cups. Better check under the bed at night.


This tech will develop faster than we think. We’re not ready for the consequences of what we can do. Drones and missiles will be the least of our worries.


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Published on February 22, 2017 00:32