The Quixotic Engineer

Earlier this week my laptop suffered a rather frustrating hard drive crash. I can’t say that I didn’t see it coming; I had a near-crash 2 months ago and my computer had been running exceptionally slowly lately. Fortunately for me I had backed everything up to my terrific 320GB external hard drive about a month ago, but I still lost a few dozen important files (including my copy of In Rainbows) that will require re-downloading.

While waiting for my new hard drive to arrive, I spent most of this week borrowing my dad’s MacBook. My father is the kind of person that Apple has been aggressively marketing to these last few years: someone who is interested in what computers can do but doesn’t have the inclination or the patience to learn the details of using them (the “I just want it to work” type). As such, this MacBook fits him like a glove; he hasn’t even downloaded any new software for it, content to use first party applications such as iTunes, iPhoto, and Safari.

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Normally I try to resist the urge to make a post devoted entirely to linking to another article; adding the Google Reader widget was supposed help me develop discipline in that regard. However, this post about superstitions in MMORPGs from The Daedalus Project was just too excellent and funny to pass up.

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In keeping with my love of excellent short stories, particularly dystopian science fiction, I highly recommend Raccoona Sheldon’s Nebula Award-winning The Screwfly Solution. The title is a reference to the sterile insect technique used to eliminate the Screwfly worm in the USA, Mexico and parts of Centreal America. The story is a shocking one, dealing with themes of sexuality, violence and femicide, and is told in a great disjointed style through a combination of several narratives, letters and newspaper articles.

Read the story first (seriously, do it!), then consider the following: wouldn’t it be great to see a video game set in the middle of an end-of-the-world scenario (not after one)? One where you start out in the near future, in a big city living a normal life. You start to hear dangerous rumours, maybe a deadly manmade pandemic, a militant religious organization, or some other Margaret Atwood storyline. From there you could have branching paths: do you petition the government? create a militia? go into hiding out in the country? Perhaps there could even be an element of randomness, where sometimes the rumours really are just rumours and you end up a paranoid conspiracy theorist!

This idea would definitely need some polishing and refinement (and I may have drawn liberal amounts of inspiration from Indigo Prophecy), but properly executed I think it could be really interesting. Leave a comment if you have any ideas on how this game could be implemented (or just call me crazy! That works too).

I recently came across Scott Meyer’s terrific webcomic Basic Instructions. The premise is “your all inclusive guide to a life well-lived”, so each strip is a life guide to doing one particular thing. For instance, consider “How to Open a Snack Quietly”, “How to Fake a Smile” or “How to be Suave”.

What’s especially great about Basic Instructions is how it manages to be funny on two levels; both explicitly through jokes and dialogue, and implicitly by describing uncomfortable situations that we all deal with in our daily lives.

Interesting side note: Dilbert author Scott Adams has recently been advising the other Scott in how to get his comic published in newspapers (a medium that requires considerable artistic compromise, but is much more lucrative). The comics that are only three horizontal panels long are the result of these experiments, in an effort to use the traditional newspaper format.

For those who are perhaps not aware of the situation, for many years the Canadian dollar was worth 0.70 – 0.90 cents to the US Dollar. Recent events in both countries have pushed the exchange rate closer to 1.035, which is great news for consumers in theory. However, many US-made goods have yet to match their prices to this new parity, video games included.

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