Alec Austin

04:42 pm: Mathematicians investigate optimal packing patterns for d4s
...no one surprised.

Tags: dice, misc

09:37 pm: Grr
Occasionally, one becomes irked at the fact that Amazon lists items that are already in stores and have been for some time as available for Pre-Order.

(Irredeemable Vol. 2, in this case. But if I was still buying Exalted books as they came out, I'd be annoyed about them too.)

Tags: misc

11:41 am: Books, Books, Books (part I of who the hell knows)
Been a while since I did one of these, largely due to the last two months of work and job search-y stuff draining my motivation to do anything other than sleep and read and play Civilization 4. Once I get home from Hawaii, I'll probably do a makeup post or two on books that I missed/forgot this time around.

( Books, mostly Fantasy )

That's not all the books I've been reading since the last time I posted regularly - probably not even a quarter of them - but it's all the fantasy I want to talk about at the moment.

ETA: Just noticed that I was really grumpy about almost all of these books (aside from the first volumes I liked that led into sequels I didn't), so next time I'll talk about Dan Abnett's Titanicus and C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station and Regenesis, all of which I liked quite a bit.

Tags: books, sequels

09:41 pm: Motorcade sighting
I was having dinner with my parents at a restaurant on South King Street here in Honolulu a few hours ago, when we notice that there are a ton of cops going down the street and parking in driveways with their lights flashing. For a bit we thought we were seeing a dragnet, but after a bit it became obvious that we were seeing the advance guard for President Obama's motorcade, which swept past a few minutes later on their way to Alan Wong's, just down the street.

The procession of black SUVs flanked by outriders on motorcycles and patrol cars was pretty standard, but watching its effect on traffic patterns was kind of interesting. First the street was completely cleared except for the vanguard of the police escort, including one car across the street in the Zippy's lot, and one motorcycle cop blocking off Mekong II's driveway. Then, once the perimeter had been established, the motorcade came through, then the street was empty except for cops for several minutes afterwards, as the police were keeping people from leaving parking lots. Then the police next to our restaurant pulled out, allowing people out of their parking lots, and a cluster of police cars (which had presumably been manning the roadblocks that kept the street clear) went past us, closely followed by a wall of traffic, which clogged up the street again when it hit the chunk of street where the motorcade was parked (taking up 2+ lanes with all the SUVs and the police escort).

Hardly an actual brush with fame, but *I* thought it was interesting...

Also, monster book post coming soon. I promise.

Tags: misc

11:50 pm: Because My Life is a Fountain of Joy...
...my Xbox 360 just red-ringed after just over a year. At least I shouldn't have to resort to turning it on and off constantly, or cooking it in a towel, like other people I know who've had slightly less severe problems with their Xbox have had to resort to doing to actually get Microsoft to replace their console.

On the other hand, this makes me very glad that I bought Borderlands on the PS3 so I could play with the people I drink with on Tuesday nights. This way I have another game I play (other than Dragon Age and Torchlight and all my portable games... okay, so the statement of "another game" is kind of absurd) while I'm waiting for Microsoft to replace my console.

Tags: misc

11:18 pm: Stuff
So, yeah. Anon was farther away than I thought when I last posted, due to a pretty varied combination of factors. I'm really liking my new living situation, but work has not really been so good lately. Details are too tedious to go into, but yeah: not a great scene, and rather distracting from posting to LJ.

Anyway! Started playing D&D again fairly regularly, which is definitely one of the high points of my week when we can schedule a game - it's always good to be able to hang out, roll dice, push miniatures around and shoot the shit with your friends. I'm also thinking of starting to go to Tai Chi classes again (after a hiatus of more than a decade), because I could really use something to help calm me down in a way that walking doesn't.

Beat Professor Layton 2 and Muramasa, the Demon Blade in the last couple of weeks. I thought I posted about them and Scribblenauts, but apparently not? Anyway, Layton is a neat little collection of puzzles (though I'm not sure the plot actually makes sense if you look at it closely), while Muramasa is better than Odin Sphere (also made by Vanillaware) because it's not nearly as unnecessarily long, hard, and complicated. Scribblenauts is a pretty neat tech demo, and a great way to pit dinosaurs in combat against God or the Devil, but I'm not sure it's actually a very good game, as some of the levels seem like they're impossible unless you use certain universally applicable creations (i.e. Black Hole, Wings, Shrink Ray). Still pretty fun, though, and I'm glad I got it. Civilization Revolution for the Xbox is also fairly solid, though I suspect that the difficulty scale isn't granular enough to make me happy - I creamed the AI on King, but my initial forays into Emperor have made it pretty clear that the AI cheats too much for my taste.

Anyone read any good books lately? I'm probably going to finish Busman's Honeymoon this coming week, but I've been a big video games kick lately and I'd like to get back to spending more of my free time reading.

Tags: books, misc, video games

10:52 pm: Stingray Sam + updates
So I went to see the premiere of Stingray Sam tonight with a friend from work and my godmother (whose husband did the audio engineering for the film & the live webcast of the premiere). It was the best Space Cowboy Buddy movie musical I've ever seen, which could be taken as faint praise but shouldn't - it was really good! The first episode doesn't quite live up to what follows it, though? It communicates the premise, and has a bit of the charm of the later episodes, but it doesn't really have a standout moment, either of perfect timing or sheer, awe-inspiring insanity, while the later episodes have several. (It was directed by the same guy who did The American Astronaut, if anyone saw that*.) I'm gonna have to get it on DVD so I can inflict its lunatic awesomeness upon others.

In other news, I've moved into my actual room as of a week and a half ago, I've played quite a bit of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (not very diabolical so far, but there's a way to go), played all the way through The Beatles Rock Band with my roomates as of last Friday, and just got Scribblenauts today. Haven't been reading much of late other than D&D books, though (hoping to put together a 4e campaign), and I've written a grand total of two pages of prose since the last time I posted. Waking up early has signally failed to a panacea as well - it appears that when I wake up early I just wake up early. And lie in bed, feeling tired. Something else appears to be required... (Strange, that.)

Also, Amazon Prime is the devil, because it encourages me to spend money on games that I really, genuinely don't have the time to play right now (but want anyway).

More anon.

*: I didn't.

Tags: misc, movies

08:54 pm: Moved
So the coordination of moving in and moving out wasn't quite as perfect as hoped, so I am currently ensconced in the guest bedroom of my new home, where I'll remain until the roommate who's just purchased a house moves out of his room. Still need to grab a few last things from the old place and do some vaccuuming, but aside from that, I'm done with the move, and glad of it.

The guest room is a tad cramped, but I am currently surrounded by what appears to be a near-complete collection of old and new World of Darkness, Exalted, and various Palladium books. None of which are mine. So I appear to have chosen a better caliber of roommate than last time.

30th birthday tomorrow. Which I will probably spend at work/doing something very exciting, like watching a Roomba vacuum my old room.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to fall over.

Tags: misc, moving

12:48 am: Dear Popcap:
While I otherwise am extremely fond of Bookworm Adventures 2, Chapter 5, when you have your artist spend time animating Chinese characters as opponents, please ensure that when you use words like "Dao" (for knife/sword) that you actually use the character for knife/sword, instead of say, the "Dao" of Taoism. It makes me wonder about all the characters I didn't already know (though at least you got "Men" for door/gate right).

Tags: chinese, video games

09:09 pm: Book Loff
So I finished Gaudy Night on Tuesday. At 5:00 in the morning, admittedly, which made me semi-zombified all day, but it was totally worth it. Such a good book, with such perfect character moments. The solution to the mystery became fairly obvious once ( semi-spoilery spoilarz ), but the surrounding personal bits were so good and so interesting that that hardly even mattered. Now I need to go back and find a copy of Have his Carcase, which I seem to have missed when I was vacuuming these up a while back.

Before Gaudy Night, I finally finished the copy of Half a Crown that I picked up at Fourth Street. papersky's writing is top caliber, as always, though I found the conclusion somewhat strained my credulity, even as I desperately wanted to believe it. I suspect that I liked Lifelode a little more, though that may just be that it was a bit uncomfortable to read first person narration from Elvira's perspective, given the sort of things she took for granted and felt she had to spell out (all of which was obviously deliberate).

Also, I just picked up sartorias's Treason's Shore from my not-so-friendly local Barnes and Noble, which I know will be excellent. So I currently have an abundance of books that I want to read, despite having packed up most of my books for the move.

Tags: books

02:17 pm: Moving again
Should you need it, my new address ( is behind the cut )

I'll probably be friends-locking this in a bit.

Tags: misc, moving

01:53 am: Brief Book & Game Reviews
Dead Men's Boots, Mike Carey: Not as squicky and dispiriting as the previous installment. Still very good, as might be expected from Mike Carey writing John Constant- *cough* Felix Castor.

The Instrumentalities of the Night and Lord of the Silent Kingdom, Glen Cook: Cook's prose in these is jagged and often heavily laden with exposition. Still, for whatever reason, his use of third person works for me here where it completely failed to in the Dread Empire books. ETA: I noticed that I might've given the impression that I don't like these. I do! They're full of political and world-building goodness. I'm just hyper-aware of the fact that their prose style might not work for others.

Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie: Abercrombie's narrative drive is as compelling as ever here, and while the ending is still bleak, it's not as utterly barren of hope and redemption as The Last Argument of Kings. Recommended for those who like cynicism, revenge stories and politics.

Sid Meier's Civilization IV, Firaxis: In the multiplayer Pitboss game I'm playing with my co-workers (which has eaten my life), your humble servant Qin Shi Huang Di has the point lead with 1065 points, and just won the race to Liberalism & Economics. Also: man, is this game complex.

Bookworm Adventures 2, PopCap Games: ...and this has taken over the rest of my life. Combat scrabble is still one of the best game mechanics ever invented.

Tags: books, games

11:05 pm: Late Mythcon post
Attended Mythcon last weekend, and had a good time meeting & talking to people, whether I'd met them before (voidmonster & kirizal), was meeting them in person for the first time (sartorias), or for the first time ever, online or off (shweta_narayan, elsmi, and emily_jiang). I then lapsed into a semi-zombified state that lasted all week, due to chronically insufficient sleep, and only now, at the end of the week with no need to wake up early tomorrow, have I started feeling vaguely human again. So even if I was even remotely prone to being the kind of person who writes full con reports, this would not be one. I will, however, mention a few things that stood out.

* The Khazad-Dum book toss was a fairly small-scale affair, with only about half a dozen people throwing books, but the ones I'd read thoroughly deserved being denounced and thrown against a wall. (Orphans of Chaos can go die in a fire.) Also, it introduced me to a book that may possibly be worse than The Eye of Argon - Cynthia Leitich Smith's Eternal. The premise (guardian angel screws up, allows charge to be turned into a vampire) boded poorly for its chances, but the vampire princess's daddy has a coffin with a Nascar logo on it which he bought off the internet for 75% off (a *totally* relevant detail), and the guardian angel's archangel supervisor sends him a memo indicating they should meet with the addendum "see attached Yahoo Map", and the introduction is seriously skeezy and makes the angel sound like a stalker, and I know all of this from having heard about 100 words quoted from the book. I've done a fair amount of thinking about how to parody the excesses of the vampire & urban fantasy genre in my time (see: Blood Valley High), but Eternal goes far beyond anything I could have imagined in terms of genre parody, despite apparently being intended completely seriously. I'm not usually one for the public mockery/pillorying of books, but in this case I think it would be well-deserved.

* I played Once Upon A Time again for the first time in, um, 5 years? And discovered that while the stories the game produces will inherently have a certain incoherence to them, that the game as a whole tends to go better when players are willingly using or introducing traditional fairy tale elements so that other players may have a chance to actually play their cards. (Versus, y'know, introducing space aliens as a means of not being interrupted.) Also, shweta_narayan's custom cards were a wonderful addition to the game, and I'm not just saying that because I won the first game via the use of the card 'Divine Intervention'.

* It is possible that I have yet to learn how to be a good panelist, but I appear to have a singular talent for being put on panels where I am the sole representative of the video game industry, and as such have pretty much nothing to say, because all the other panelists are artists/contributors to Shadow Unit/telepathic squid people, and the panel rapidly becomes a conversation about topics on which I have little or nothing to contribute. I guess I need to maybe get better about asking questions? I vaguely recall something about that from a panel at Fourth Street.

* Farah Mendelsohn (fjm) was amazing at the YA fantasy roundtable that Shweta and Emily moderated, and while I haven't read the copy of A Short History of Fantasy that I picked up (co-written with Edward James), I'm really looking forward to it. I do rather hope that the inscription she left with her autograph was meant to be "loves with great grace" rather than "loses with great grace", though - the cursive is rather ambiguous.

Anyway, I hope that no one who I met at Mythcon will feel slighted that I've taken this long to get around to saying anything. I really did have a good time, despite departing before the banquet on Sunday; it's never bad to spend time with people who take books seriously.

Addendum 1: As I mentioned to people at the con, I am looking for an LA area writer's group, and while I live on the West Side, I'm willing to drive a fair distance if needs be.

Addendum 2: Shweta put up a very interesting post about the difference between prose and poetry earlier this week which I highly recommend. Just saying.

Tags: books, conventions, writing

11:11 pm: Finally.
Well, we've finally announced (officially, anyway - there have been leaks out there for weeks). The project I'm working on (as lead - read: only - AI designer) is Command and Conquer 4.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to teaching tiny tanks how to kill other tiny tanks.

Tags: command & conquer, video games, work

10:19 pm: Writing Post
Progress: 6 pages/~1500 words.

Subject Matter: Nazgul apologia + naked theological exposition

Prognosis: Theological exposition perhaps a little too baldly expository/vernacular in tone (I blame all the Glen Cook I've been reading). Nazgul apologia seems good enough for the moment, though I suspect one of my characters will be protesting that he was blinded by science before too long.

Also, I get the feeling the I use the same reserves of mental energy to write as I do to figure out what I should be working on next at work. Which would serve as a partial explanation of why I haven't really been doing much writing lately.

Tags: writing

04:51 pm: Genre Fantasy, Style, and Grit
Lots of stuff collided in my head lately to produce this essay, so forgive me if it rambles a bit.

There's a bit in "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" (the central bit, actually) where Ursula LeGuin talks about how the (mis)use of language can undermine a fantasy novel's value. There's a excerpt from Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising which she rewrites into a piece about modern politics by changing about five words, in order to make the point that both the specific language/idioms used and the sentiments they express can destroy a work's 'fantasy nature' (my gloss, not her words). That essay was one of the reasons I ended up writing my essay on Quality in Epic Fantasy. It also expresses many of the reasons why it took me so long to get back to reading the fantasy work of Glen Cook, despite The Black Company being a significant influence on how I read and write.

In the course of eviscerating the passage from Deryni Rising, LeGuin states that "Nobody who says, 'I told you so,' has ever been, or ever will be, a hero", whereas The Black Company starts with one character saying (in essence) exactly that. The reason I accept this, of course, is that no one in the Black Company books is supposed to be a hero. Even when the books' protagonists take on a positive moral valence, they're still a gang of self-interested mercenaries, albeit one that's turned against the empire they once supported.

matociquala recently wrote that "There's a whole subgenre of beautifully written, steampunky high-gore fantasy about generally reprehensible people that I think just has too many guy cooties for me: they don't fill me with love." While most of the examples I'll be talking about here don't overlap with hers, and in fact aren't steampunky at all, I think that the guy cooties she refers to are probably elements of 'grit' - 'realism' in violence/politics/whatever (and I use the scare quotes advisedly) - that are in conflict with (ETA: or overwhelming) the more fantastical or SFnal elements in the work that contains them. This is a problem that many people I know have had with one or another of China Mieville's New Crobuzon books - the tension between the sense of wonder produced by his world-building and the elements of horror and outright grotesquerie that permeate his work is enough to throw people out of them when they reach something that strikes them as just too awful or gross or gratuitous. And Mieville is an author whose style & language is almost never anachronistic in the way that Cook's dialogue often is.

The question becomes, then, how does Glen Cook manage to balance the tension between grit and the fantastical and make it work (assuming, for the moment, that he does), and what, if anything, does that illuminate about the work of other high-grit fantasy authors such as R. Scott Bakker, Steven Erikson (with his obvious and self-confessed influence from Cook), Joe Abercrombie, Richard K. Morgan, and so on and so forth?

( Audience Expectations & Internal Consistency )

Tags: books, dark dark dark, genre

10:25 pm: Not a Con Report
Back from 4th street. Had a great time catching up with people, eating good food, going to panels, and talking about book stuff. Mildly annoyed at the reminder of how bad the bookstores are out here, though I gained a net total of 5 books via the dealer's room. Also signally failed to play Dominion with ckd, due to conversation (on Friday night) and then exhaustion/a gas attack on the con suite (on Saturday night). I need to pick up copies of that and Agricola and play them with people at work.

Also, I forgot to do this before I left, but I just registered for Saturday and Sunday at Mythcon up at UCLA, since there is pretty much zero probability that I'll ever be able to attend LosCon, due to the ease of spending Thanksgiving weekend with my parents in Berkeley.

Tags: books, conventions

12:34 am: Guh
So, after spending 4 hours listening to friends and acquaintances tell stories about working at independent game studios, I have begun to appreciate the benefits of only ever having worked for third party publishers.

While Activision and EA are large enough that the left hand doesn't always know what the right hand is doing, at least they aren't generally in the habit of handing their employees bonuses in the form of stapled-together hundred dollar bills, billing two other companies for the full-time work of a single employee, or keeping around technical directors who say things like "we're leaving the bug there to encourage you not to make mistakes", or "that's not possible on a computer" in response to basic tools requests.

Tags: industry stuff, misc

10:10 pm: The Wisdom of Individuals
Apparently, you can leverage the statistical benefits of the wisdom of crowds on your own if you approach making estimates correctly. Neat!

Tags: misc

09:59 pm: Also
Due to savage shaming, I'm on Facebook again, this time with an account linked to an active email address (i.e. not my MIT one).

I expect that I'll probably keep doing most of my long-form nerd writing here, though.

Tags: misc