Just spent the better part of the day helping my uncle and grandparents move from their recently sold, 250% appreciated value house of 5 years to a nearby apartment complex of much smaller size. I personally dread moving, so having to drive 2 hours back home just so I could assist in wrecking my fingers while other family are relaxing on their Spring Break vacations irks me a little.
This latest event has reaffirmed my suspicion that the wealthier a person is, the stingier they are when it comes time to spend money to get something done easier or faster. These are the people you see driving Mercedes’s on the street and go to expensive dinners with friends, but would not hire professional help (thinking they could always do it themselves) and would squeeze you for your last penny if you’re unfortunate enough to be under their position of power. My former Berkeley landlord was such an individual; and I’m sad to say that my uncle confirms to the mold.
Sometimes the most exciting things turn out to be the simplest. Lately, two very simple yet surprisingly satisfying games have threatened my thumbs with crippling arthritis: Tetris DS and Grid Wars. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes both games so addictive.
The other game, Grid Wars, is a copy of an XBox Live game Geometry Wars. It almost feel like Asteroids on steroids – you have one little ship with a lot of firepower, and polygons of all shapes and sizes chasing after you on a rippling blue grid. Particles and polygon bits are flying all over the place, so you hold up on the controller and hope that your ship can squeeze through that tiny little gap between 30 enemy pieces and escape to freedom.
Wow…that sounded more like a review or the back of the game box than an honest personal opinion. It’s interesting to see how these relatively simple games are just as, if not more, attractive than some of the complicated games that they release nowadays.
As I sit here, a good four day’s worth of work on the screen in the concise and almost insulting form of a site banner, I’m reminded at how frustrating inefficient and painstaking the design process can be. It’s awful repetitive, and you can tweak the smallest detail for days before you realize what you thought looked good in your head is a monstrosity when brought to life and would kindly ask for euthanasia.
I like to think of design as a trifecta of processes: creation, elimination, and consolidation; or, in non-corporate speak, the artist, the critic, and the editor. The artist serves as a factory of prototypes, taking ideas to reality; the critic’s job is to apply Sturgeon’s law and strip away all the bad ideas; the editor takes what’s left, combines the good ideas within each remaining design, and tweaks the result.
Then start again from the top.
One of the defining characteristics of the modern Internet is anonymity – you are free to roam the maze of cyberspace revealing nothing to fellow travellers beyond your online alias and maybe IP address, the social constraints that might have bound your lips to silence absent in the virtual world. You exist in the hard drives of hundreds of servers around the world, holding different names, personalities, histories, each residing in its own community.
But anonymity is a doubled-edged sword: the absense of reasonable social constraint allows for some…pretty crappy voices. Much like a democracy, giving everybody a voice means that most of what’s said is of little value (), so much effort goes into tuning to those voices which seem to shout louder, perhaps with a touch of sense.
What does this have to do with blogs?
Recently, I was sent by my company into the bowels of Berkeley to collect resumes for our planned internship program. Potential interns, unlike full-time hire and industry candidates, tend to have much less interesting resumes and the same cookie-cutter class experience, which means you tend to spend most of the time selling your company and determining how well they lied on their resume.
Which makes it all the more interesting when you get one of those resumes: more higher-education degrees that can be listed on a page, in 5 or 6 different fields, reading more like a brochure for a university than someone’s personal achievements, asking about what they can do to secure a position meant for third year bachelor’s. It’s also virtually guaranteed that they’ll have a heavy accent and come from either a Chinese or Indian institute of technology or engineering.
Since that impulsive night when I sped off to Bestbuy and bought a Nintendo DS for the heck of it, I’ve been able to convince six other people to invest their time and money on one of their own, and in the process given my girlfriend something to distract herself from her mostly meaningless last semester as a MCB major.
As it turns out, there’s a semi-underground homebrew community for the DS as well, although it’s not as famous as the PSP community. What is homebrew? It’s the idea of unlocking a piece of hardware’s potential (usually without the consent of its creator), then using it as an open-source platform for the user’s own applications and programs. Of course, one of the side effects of unlocking hardware is doing away with the security of said hardware and the ability to run pirated games on the system.
One of my friends got pretty intrigued with the idea of homebrew and came up with his own little addon to the community, DSLua, some sort of easy-to-use scripting language that makes the creation of DS games easier. Apparently he chose Lua because the PSP has a similar development tool – PSPLua – which people have been making pretty cool games out of.
Ah, free software.
