Walking Dead: Episode 3

Spoilers below. Do not click if you don't want to be spoiled.

Do Something Someone!

You often here that someone should do something. I have some very important insight on that front. Just because someone should do something doesn't mean X should do Y. For example, you should not jump out a window. That is a thing. You are a someone. You should not do that thing. Sometimes, someone doing something is counter productive to a thing getting done.

In fact, sometimes, something is worse than nothing. Just food for thought. In gaming, sometimes the right thing to do is not burn a cooldown or to pass the turn. That's tactical play. In politics, you need to also remember to not do something for the sake of doing something. Keep your powder dry, so to speak. Inaction is sometimes the right choice.

With that in mind, go do something.

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P.S.,

Today someone got to my blog by Googling my name. Now for the eternal question: Stalker or fan? Please be fan.

Internet, We Need to Have a Talk

Hi Internet, can you sit down for a second? We need to have a talk. We seem to have cross purposes. See, when I make a claim, I provide proof or links. When you make a claim, you provide cat pictures, if that.

Guild Wars 2: I Am Playing It

Not right this exact second, but in the grand scheme of seconds, it is an activity that takes up many of them. You could say, GW2 is now in my rotation of games to play. I am a Sylvari Elementalist as my main. This is a new departure from my normal play style, as I am playing a sticky melee-ish burst DPS. My world, it is being rocked.

One thing I like about GW2 is that it is simple, yet complex. It is a lot like the Secret World (and Guild Wars 1) in that regard. Expect to get some more specifics about team building and character tweaking as I get more familiar with the game. For now, all you need to know is that I'm on Sea of Sorrow and that you can ask for my account name if you want to play with me.

From what little I played over the weekend's pre-release, here are a few things I really like:

1. Weapons give you an identity. They mean something to your character and define what you do.

2. Traits and utility skills shape that identity.

3. Each class can be competently played in many ways with a variety of tweaks, without each class just feeling like a hodge podge of abilities. Class hit their theme well and feel like they flow in combat.

4. Events are fun, quick to join and dynamic.

5. Playing with your friends is painless.

6. You can fiddle around in PvP with your character then return to your PvE progression without falling behind in PvP.

7. The game world is laid out well and logically (you know where you should be going next.)

Those are the big things; go play.

The Moon and the Man Who Walked On It

Yesterday, Neil Armstrong died.

"One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind," indeed. There are a lot of rumors about that trip, and Snopes as usual is reliable in rebutting and explaining them. There are plenty of tributes out to him that are better than I can do.

I wasn't even born when he walked on the moon. But, the fact that a man had walked on the moon changed history. Between his death and Sally Ride's, we can see history starting to fade. Luckily, we have much better record keeping than we've had in the past, so we won't be losing nearly as much as we used to lose when great people passed on.

The moon seems so far away, yet it has a huge impact on the planet. Not just in the literal, tide altering ways. Eclipses, full moons, whatever you can think of, the moon has been a part of mythology since we've got records of it. Walking on the moon, however, has done very little to demystify it. It is still a powerful symbol, even if we've planted American flags there.

Lucky for us, I think, we've had an amazing space program that's done more for humanity than simply beat the Soviets. America's astronauts will inspire our country probably for as long as we're a country. I tried to find a way to explain that more succinctly, but I was beaten to it: "As long as there are history books, Neil Armstrong will be included in them, remembered for taking humankind's first small step on a world beyond our own," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. Entirely true.

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P.S.,

Curiosity, the nifty Mars rover, has some pretty big shoes to fill. Some day, when we get people to Mars, we'll need to try and recover Curiosity and the other Mars rovers to put them into the proper museum.

Drake Calculator, Guild Wars 2 and a Joke

This is why you don't do stress tests on weekday afternoons then release on weekend nights and think everything'll be hunky dory. This, of course, being that Guild Wars 2 is suffering through the normal MMO launch pains of the servers having died. The next problem is that I have been sorely misunderstanding the Hall of Monument rewards; they are not starter weapons/armor. They are skins. On the one hand, this means they literally are purely vanity awards, which makes me happy. On the other hand, this means I was wrong, which makes me unhappy.

So, while you wait for the servers to come back up, play with this. It's just... SPACE! If you recall, I actually wrote about a lecture I attended that covers NASA's attempts to find these habitable planets. The short end being, this is so totally awesome I needed to share it.

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P.S.,

Oh yeah. My joke.I am sure other people have thought of it. But, ahem.

Dairy Queen to increase its offering: Now offering Cool Treats, Hot Eats and Phat Beats.

... I'm not a funny person.

Get It Fast, But Get It Right 2

Where "it" is the story. Journalism has been kind of going down hill lately. Because journalists are not taking my advice to not be suckers. Which means that sometimes a news organization needs to admit that they rushed to a bad faith assumption and accidentally slandered someone. Yes, calling someone a liar is slander, which is why the correction is so prominent. And the WaPo even tweeted an apology, so, kudos to them.

I think we should replace "Correction" with "Groveling for forgiveness" in this case. The WaPo shot its load early, was wrong, and then had to retreat under the withering fire of the Twitter-verse. Is it really that much effort to verify that the person your news organization wants to call a liar really is one before you jump on it? Though, it is unlikely a candidate for the highest office in our country would spell something wrong.

Wait, typos are common and happen routinely? The deuce you say?! Well, I guess that makes sense why the WaPo took the extra step to verify... wait, they didn't? Well then.

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P.S.,

A few of those links are not like the others. Also, I did not realize I already had a post with this exact name, hence the 2.

Last Words on Zakaria Plagiarism

The whole cycle of the plagiarism story is coming to an end. While it was clear from the start what happened, and that it was unacceptable at most institutions, some held on and ignored it. CNN and Time didn't see enough of an issue with the plagiarism, and some at the Daily Beast insist it wasn't plagiarism at all, or in fact, racially motivated jealousy. It seemed that it should have been clear that plagiarism is unacceptable. Maybe the world of news aggregation has blurred the line between journalism and copy/paste. But, for now, at least, even Zakaria acknowledges what I went through pains to point out in my first post on this: academic institutions have clear policies on what counts as plagiarism and his actions fit the bill. Kudos to him for accepting responsibility with more than just saying "I'm sorry."

CNN and Time though? They've got some learning to do.

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P.S.,

Good morning! I know I say I want to try and only have a post a day. But, if I do a quick hit like this in the morning, I might push out something else in the evening. How will you know if I do? Follow me on Twitter @mjs69002!

Panels on Preserving Playing Pong

The lecture I attended today was called "Playing Pong in 2100: How to Preserve Old Video Games." There was a live stream, but I've been unable to find it anywhere online. If I do find it, I'll put the link here. Before you read below the fold, you may want to get up to date on The Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian. Luckily, I have some insights on that front already. Once you've read that and seen this wonderful squirrel a nice young woman was feeding, you can click below to get actual coverage of the lecture.

So adorable!

Unacceptable CNN and Time

Zakaria keeps his job. Unacceptable. Plagiarism is a firing offense. It is not a journalistic lapse; it's plagiarism. I'm glad to see ethics are important to CNN and Time; it was plagiarism, even per Yale's standards.

Unacceptable CNN and Time. This is really disappointing; you're supposed to be journalists, act like it. So, now you know. Nothing wrong with stealing ideas. If you're famous enough.

From the Smithsonian Blog

Dear Smithsonian,

When one of the most comforting counter measures is: "We could just set a nuclear warhead off in our atmosphere and effectively destroy all technology, sending us back to the pre-electrical age at the minimum," you're... doing reassuring wrong. This is the sort of hubris that leads to our downfall.

This link was too fun to wait to share till tomorrow night's link round up.

Go have fun now.

New Concept of End Game

Part of the problem with MMOs, I think, is that there needs to be a new concept of "end game." Everyone (including me!) wants "end game" gear, this is reasonable. Not everyone (including me!) wants to do end game raiding. The main catch, I think, is that we need to define end game the same way we do in a single player game.

F-Bomb: In the Dictionary

No, literally. I guess it matters how you view the dictionary whether this is a good or a bad thing. If you view it as the sort of official lexicon of a language, that which is accepted and recognized, then this was an inevitable result. If you view it as something else, a sort of gatekeeper of language, guarding it from the barbarians at the gates, then this is a bad thing. I am undecided as to my thoughts on the matter. So, convince me.

Plagiarism Is a Firing Offense

There seems to be some extremely slow feet dragging at CNN and Time. Fareed Zakaria seems to have been suspended for a month for plagiarism. Now, the interesting thing with this is this is right on the heels of Jonah Lehrer resigning in disgrace for fabricating some quotes (which I learned about at Ann Althouse's blog.) The New Yorker, apparently, holds its writers to a higher ethical standard than Time and CNN.

Healing in The Secret World

I've been reading the forums over at Funcom's site. Just like when I described soloing builds, I have some very basic thoughts on putting together a healing deck. This is going to involve a little more heavy thinking for you than the post on solo builds, but it is also hopefully going to help set you up for success.

First, unlike soloing, there are some must-haves for healing. You can heal the early instances without them, but they are just so powerful that not having them makes your build suboptimal.

Unscripted Random Images

You are lucky that this random picture does not involve unexpected goose poetry.

I did not touch this. This is what I saw on my way to work.

Curiosity and Books

I finished "The Drunkard's Walk" today on my ride home. Yet, I still feel a gaping hole in my life, as though I have accomplished nothing of value. Because I have not landed robots on Mars. Do you know how much that puts your life into perspective, not landing a robot on Mars? The robot even has a verified Twitter feed!

If you are curious about Mars, start reading. Go forth, learn. Meanwhile, I need to go look for a new book.

On Coins

Here's a thought experiment I can't remember where I heard it. Imagine you have a coin. How many (unbroken) flips of it turning up heads would it take for you to consider the coin not a fair coin? I'm sure someone out there can do math or something to find a statistical answer. But, go from your gut.

How many times do you need to lose before you think a game is rigged? It's kind of a tolerance test; they have them for pain. The marshmallow test, for example, is another kind of tolerance test. That tests how much self control the kid has; this is testing how much trust you have. Would your threshold change if the person proctoring the flips was someone you trusted? How much?

I've been thinking about this off and on again for a few months. A few flips in a row of heads could be a natural fair coin. A string, of say, HHHHHH, is theoretically possible, if unlikely. As the string gets longer, it gets less and less probable, but not -- technically -- impossible.

Some people are comfortable pulling the trigger sooner. I doubt, in real life, there is anyone who would say they could never make that choice since the improbable scenario in front of them was technically possible, therefore it must be proven the coin is unfair through a hard proof as opposed to an indirect proof (such as a 1,000 unbroken string of heads).

How certain do you need to be before taking action, such as always betting heads or walking away from a cheating coin?

Now, let's reverse this. How long of a string of losses would you take before you decided the coin was unfair? Assume that you are free to change your bet from heads to tails each flip, yet each time you are wrong. How long would it take you to assume you were being cheated and not just unlucky? More importantly: Would you ever reach that threshold, or would you walk away before you hit that point? Would that threshold change if you were making penny bets as opposed to dollar bets?

The problem with this, though, is I've poisoned the well. You know you will always lose the next bet from the rules of the game. Now, you could try and do man-on-the-street style interviews to test it with people who don't know they are about to be cheated. You can't really take their money though, since, you know, you are going to cheat them. That changes things again; they can only gain, never lose. You offer them up a dime each win, and tell them they can only lose from their winnings, but never go negative. How long would people keep going?

Just some thoughts; thinking about it now might help you know how to deal with future events. Or it might not, it may just be frustrating because you can't come up with a good answer. Even with math. So, keep on trying! Or just watch corgi cam. Your choice.

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P.S.,

Don't cheat people at games of chance. Also, direct link to the corgi cam YouTube page.

Theories On Games...

... which is different from game theory. Badminton is getting a lot of news for obvious reasons. Now, read and get up to speed on that. There are a few key take-aways from this story and lessons learned. First, you should always give it your all.

Second, if you want to encourage a certain kind of behavior, structure your rules to encourage that behavior. I'm sure there are probably different, more cogent ways of explaining this, but let's look at why this scandal happened. The teams wanted to increase not just their odds to win the gold but their country's odds as a whole. To do so, a loss at this juncture was a surer bet than a victory, to avoid having to knock each other out at the next round. However, what the Olympics wants is for players to play their hearts out (see the first lesson.)

ABC News: Man Steals Puppy... in His Pants

What the heck people? Can't I go to sleep without the world going crazy? I don't think it is asking too much for people not to stuff merchandise down their pants.

Especially when that merchandise is living, breathing puppy. Look, this is not the most heinous crime in the world. No one died, so, it really isn't even that high of a priority crime in the grand scheme of things. But, a person who will steal a puppy? That's... the lowest kind of person.

Oh, also, ABC seems to have fixed its habit of auto-playing videos.

Oh, and Gore Vidal is dead.