Gism Butter

I am able to update the blog!

I’m still ignoring this blog. In case you hadn’t noticed.

So, there’s this little museum I want to start. But it’s a big, hairy, long ass plan, so I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say that the IRS needs $ for the non-profit application to be considered, and it’s money I kind of don’t really have. Not to mention the money needed to start the actual non-profit in Delaware (the ONLY place to start a business!). Anyway, to support my efforts, I am auctioning some of the less unique prototypes in my collection. I should state that I won’t be auctioning off anything that was never seen before I found it: no Dragon’s Lair, no Cabbage Patch Atari, no Sword and the Sorcerer. But I am auctioning some Colecovision prototypes that, as far as I know, are unique in that I’m the only one who has such protos. Go and bid on them and give me money to start my dream.
Also, let me know what I should auction after the 2010 Action Game sells. If it sells.

Over the years, I have met my fair share of gamers. One-on-one, in person, there are few I cannot tolerate, or get along with, or even befriend. They’re a generally nice bunch, and there are many types: board, video, PC, Role Playing, LARPers. I love all manner of gamers, and I really don’t have a reason to generically hate gamers on sight, though some of them can smell a bit.

Anyway, I still wanted to have a massive rant against a certain type of games enthusiast. This sort is typically a PC or console gamer, usually focused on whatever’s new and cool, rather than some sort of fetishist. I suppose I could be called a fetishist for my love of antique game collection.

The sort of gamer I am talking about has no idea how to use IRC. This is my chief concern. I’ve spent about 14 years on IRC, now, and I have never once encountered a channel full of real nerds and hackers that I couldn’t get along with. Of course, 90% of all IRC talk is about dongs. I’d even postulate the Jerkcity Principle, which states that for any given set of IRC channel logs, any portion of text totaling less than 10 lines could be substituted for the text of a JerkCity cartoon without modification.

But  on Enterthegame, the IRC network for gamers, it would seem as though many gamers don’t understand this fact. I’ve been run out of a number of IRC channels on that network, despite my extreme videogame scene 31337-ness. There are always folks in these channels that are cool with the dongs, but invariably, the Ops in said channels are repugnant, intolerant goobers. The sort that think their being an op makes them the coolest fucking person in the world.

And this falls right into this sort of odd confidence some gamers have. Some gamers are really exceptionally skilled at gameplay in a certain genre. Some are just generally pompous. I think there may even be a mirror in the cinema nerd world. There are certain folks who you can talk to, and your words are setting you down in stone with them, forever. You say “dongs” once, and they’re convinced you’re a homosexual rapist 14 year old with a graffiti can and a Slipknot t-shirt. I dunno where I’m going with this…

But it’s this strange, slow-moving entitlement that gamers feel which really pisses me off. Like when they get a game, and it’s not 100% perfect, they go off on the developers and how bad they are. Generally, I would say this sort of gamer knows nothing about the software development that goes on behind a game. Sure, there are some super shitty games out there, but any finished game took a shit-ton of work for somebody. I’m not saying that every gamer needs to respect the companies behind their games, but when a company makes a bad design decision, they’re not attacking the ethical and moral underpinnings of your very being.

I think the PR world is partly to blame though. This whole Infinity Ward, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 debacle is a perfect example of what I am talking about.

OK, backstory: Infinity Ward developed CoD:MW2, and decided not to release a dedicated server for the game. This means that people who want to play online can’t host their own little world for people to play in. Other shooters, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament allow players to run servers. I can see exactly why Infinity Ward did this. First of all, I’d wager 90% of their sales for this game will be on consoles. Consoles don’t and can’t use outside hosted servers: both Sony and Microsoft have built walled gardens for their online players, and there is no breaking out of them if you want to be published.

Second, Infinity Ward was likely changing code up until the last second before the gold master shipped for duplication. Games are never finished, they are only shipped. Any developer can tell you that no one ever finishes making a game, they just stop working on it. Like a novelist or film director who looks over their work and thinks “I could have done this, I should have changed that,” games require a ton of work and attention, so there’s always something else to do. To ship on time, it’s essential that you cut out all extraneous work. Building an entirely separate server product that would be used by your consumers–not to mention a product that won’t leave anyone open to nasty DOS attacks or exploit–is no small feat. Plus they’d have to document it all and provide tech support.

So, when Infinity Ward decided not to offer a server, I was all like “What-ev-arr!” But the gamer types I am talking about above are incensed! This is fucking affront to their very nature! How dare Infinity Ward not release a server! These gamers are entitled!

Whatever. So don’t care. It’s a game, and a modern-style shooter at that. How many 1000’s of other modern style shooters are there for the PC? Go play something else if it really matters that much.

Muther fuckers throw me out of their little game chat room? I met Shigeru Miyamoto, mother fuckers. I’ve found long lost, unkown game prototypes in piles of garbage and given them to the world for free. What have you little shits done? Sat in yer IRC channels and whined about MW2. Infinity Ward shipped a game that encompasses the work of 100’s of talented individuals. Be happy with what you got!

Anyway, I fully understand this is a childish rant. Whatever. It’s my blog. Fuck you.

Someone has finally put up a site about Jesse Sartain. I did that once, but the man called my father and harassed him. I decided it wasn’t worth it to bother with the old coot. But I have to say, seeing someone finally decided to go public with stuff on Jesse Sartain does give me a warm fuzzy. Maybe I will find this person and hand them the 80-some-odd comments that were posted here about what it’s like to work for Jesse.

I only worked for the man for a short time, but I have to say, he left a mark on my soul. The sort of mark that will be burnt into the flesh of my mind forever. No matter how many drugs I take, no matter how far out of reality I wander (not drug related, San Francisco is not within reality…) the specter of Jesse Sartain is always popping up every so often. It just peeks into the folds of my reality, through other people I meet who used to work for him, or through strange happenstances on Craigslist and in supermarkets.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about the guy. I’ve just linked to this new site that cropped up. Ya’ll can talk about him there. Now I get to try and figure out which one of ya’ll finally did it?

There are a few ways to do this out there already, but this one actually works. Just using the Jaunty backports doesn’t work, as it gives you very flakey drivers. You have to run the absolute newest kernel. My buddy Kripto laid out the following commands to make wireless actually work properly under Ubuntu Jaunty on the Asus Eee PC 1005HA. Just paste the following into a terminal, in order:

• wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb
• wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903_2.6.29-02062903_all.deb
• wget -c http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.29.3/linux-image-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb
• Then run “sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb linux-headers-2.6.29-02062903_2.6.29-02062903_all.deb linux-image-2.6.29-02062903-generic_2.6.29-02062903_i386.deb”
• Reboot

This blog becomes increasingly irrelevant the more other people want me to blog for them. I have only so much brain I can encode into any given place. So, I’ll just post some pretty pictures here.

Naturally, you came here first for your uninformed, poorly devised economic solutions. Until now, I’ve avoided talking about the economy, beyond calling a depression a depression. Dumbass. But I do currently desire to pontificate on something I know nothing about. Money.
Earlier, with a large bit of butter on my chest, I was inclined to watch This. I am deeply pissed, now. I’m not entirely sure that everything this William K. Black fellow says is true, but he is certainly reputable. And incendiary.

Based upon this interview, I whole heartedly agree with this gentleman. I think he has the answers we are looking for. And he also seems to be into the idea of stringing up the fat cats. Whatever that actually means. I’m in favor of any plan that gets me a house.

The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.” The havoc wrought by him is described in mythology and fain’ tale as being universal throughout his domain. This may be no more than his household, his own tortured psyche, or the lives that he blights with the touch of his friendship and assistance; or it may amount to the extent of his civilization. The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then- more miserably—within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land.

This was laying around in my drafts folder. It’s by Campbell. It’s also obliquely about the ACCRC, though it’s now gone.

I’ve been depressed all year. Every day, another print publication vanishes. They’re not moving online. They’re not morphing into a video program, or changing over into a [ick!] podcast. They’re dying. Or they’re limping through irrelevance in some sickly half-shapen zombie form online or inside another dying magazine. So far this year, at least one magazine or newspaper has ceased publication every single day. Electronic Gaming Monthly. Dr. Dobbs Journal. Redmond Developer News. Hallmark Magazine. RCR Wireless News. Arena. Penthouse? DID I JUST LINK THE WEEKLY WORLD NEWS AS A REPUTABLE SOURCE?

What’s the world coming to? Not that it’s surprising. We all knew it was doomed. Reporters saw the train leaving the station, and waved goodbye. “The Web doesn’t pay enough yet,” we’d say. “It’ll even out slowly over the next dozen years. Then, by 2050, there won’t be any more print.”

How completely wrong we all were. Print has been dead for six years. Maybe ten. It just didn’t know it. And 2009 in the reckoning. I now believe that print as a business will be dead in the next year. Maybe books survive. Maybe not. Magazines don’t. Newspapers don’t. Unless it’s subsidized outright, it’s dead.

And now that it’s dying, reporters are left out in the cold. They can’t get jobs online: they don’t pay! And some schmuck in Alabama is happy to write that piece for free! They can’t find jobs at other magazines because they’re all dying too! All around me, I see out of work editors and reporters. Good people! They’re moving in with their mothers and fathers. But the parents are broke too! Worse than the kids!

I could go on. But to say the least, I am scared to death. There is no money in writing about life. In writing about people. My editors drilled into me, over a dozen years of hard-nosed newspaper-style years of working. “People like to read about people!” They don’t want to hear grain prices are down, I was told, they want to know how Steve, the farmer feels about his grain not selling!

But now Steve has a fucking blog. He doesn’t need me! He doesn’t need the grain! He just plays Fallout 3 all day and vegetates on his couch while the empty row homes–on what was once his farm land–rot.

What’s the answer? Hell if I know! It’s not being rich, as the dood at The Week said. Cause I have to write. And, frankly, finishing my novel doesn’t exactly sound like a profitable alternative!

And to add insult to injury, these vanishing sites are taking my clips with them. I can’t paste links to my best stuff in my pitch emails anymore! I have to mirror the stuff on my own site, which looks shady. GameTap no longer makes my stories available. I could post my raw originals, but that’s not got the same credibility. I wanted to show someone my piece on the 25th anniversary of the C64. I could not. I don’t think I’ll get that story with Rolling Stone now. Dammit!

I guess I’ll just save my money and hope for the best. And count the ways my former employers have changed over the years.

Cox News (No longer seems to have a Web news feed. Used to be like the AP)
The Atlanta Journal Constitution (site redesigned, all old content dumped)
The Austin American Statesman (Never posted paper stories online, anyway)
The East Bay Express (Left New Times Holdings/Village Voice media, now an independent weekly. Still good!)
Gamespot (Nothing anymore. Probably better that way.)
MobilePC Magazine (I guess that’s it now. Crashed and burned print-side a few years back.)
SecurityFocus.com (God bless them! Same URL after almost 7 years!)
BusinessWeek Online (No old stuff anymore…)
Information Security Magazine (Took me a while, but I found one. They moved them, but they have all mag articles online! Nice!)
Gizmodo.com (I think the url changed, but still!)
Rotten.com
Wired Magazine (Mag stories online online from recent issues)
Computer Games Magazine (Headless Zombie. The first PC game mag to die.)
Make Magazine (Solid link structure)
Gamasutra.com (Links changed? Not sure. Still there!)
Game Developer magazine (They sell PDFs of old issues. Nov 2004 anyone?)
MacAddict Magazine (Now Mac Life)
MacHome Journal (Dead)
Computer Gaming World (After 27 years as the oldest continuously published digital gaming magazine on Earth, and a name change to Games for Windows… CGW is dead.)
MacDirectory (Still there!)
GameTap (No link. They had an editorial site. It’s gone now.)
Total PC Gamer (British, maybe still going?)

Long list….

I’m going to go work on my bomb shelter.