Looking over metacritic scores today, it hit me that it might be interesting to see a ranked list of the difference between the professional reviews and the user reviews for a given title, cross indexed with any available marketing data. While being far from scientific, it might paint an interesting picture of the correlation of marketing dollars and review scores.
Utah Pride 2010
[An edited version of this post appears at the XMission blog transmission.xmission.com]
The Utah Pride festival is happening this weekend. Although I’m straight I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Pride. I see Alternate lifestyles as just another form of diversity, but its diversity that involves a personal choice. This actually makes the diversity more meaningful in my eyes because choice implies power and taking action rather than being acted upon. There is something to be said for being comfortable enough with yourself to choose a lifestyle that puts you directly at odds with some of the most vocal and conservative sectors of America.
But I digress. The Pride festival is this weekend and those who count themselves among the gay, or the gay friendly are getting excited. The tents and fencing around the City/County building festival grounds started going up a few days ago and friends are already making plans to celebrate. Its been nothing but Pride weekend event advertising on Facebook for the last 2 weeks and the local a(A)lternative press have been running ads for all sorts of ancillary parties, club nights and events for a month.
I’ve heard from some people that the Salt Lake Pride is one of the biggest in the country. Having never been to one outside of the state of Utah I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that we have an amazing gay community in this city, and one that has been reflected here at XMission longer than I have (and I’ve been here since 2000!). I’d like to thank Pete Ashdown for cultivating such an accepting and diverse workplace at XMission, and I’d like to thank my gay coworkers and friends – Harley, Roger, Jeff, Chris and Mikey especially – for making Salt Lake City a much more vibrant place to live!
Posted in Random.
– June 3, 2010
Quick Bits 1 – Packing Peanuts
“The book was kept in the center of the old wooden box by the souls of one hundred and six children, their grey and blue formless mass twisting into a vague facsimile of an arm outstretched here, a head down there, a back curled under strain, all writhing in anguish, pressing against the demons contained within its pages, desperate to hold off the forces that sought to consume them.”
Posted in Random.
– May 29, 2010
The Newbies Guide to Packing For Burning Man
I was asked by a friend recently for advice on planning for his first Burning Man and I figured it would make a good post to put on the blog. These are some recommendations that I have based on 6 months of reading every guide I could before my first Burn and 2 subsequent years of actual on-playa experience. I’m no salty veteran of the Burn, but by now I have started to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
This guide makes no assumptions about the composition of your greater camp (if any), its only intended to be an individual guide for getting ready.
Clothing
Light, airy, clothing for the day (leave your t-shirts with graphics or slogans at home), warmer clothes at night. By 3 am it is COLD so fancy robes, cloaks, furry coats etc are all recommended. Good boots have worked well for me (get gel inserts to make them more comfy to walk long distances in). If you buy new boots for the Burn make sure they are 100% broken in before you go. The playa dust is alkaline and the mixture of sweaty feet + dust can give you a chemical burn affectionately known as playafoot. You don’t want this. It will ruin your Burn. Lots of people seem to enjoy sarongs or utilikilts, but I haven’t tried either.
Bring good wide brimmed hat of whatever style pleases you. Goggles that seal. This is important, if your goggles don’t seal you might as well not have them. You can get a pair of Oakley snowboarding goggles for like 70 bucks at backcountry.com. Decorative Steampunk goggles are cool, but generally do a terrible job at protecting your eyes from the dust.
Costumes
Don’t bring Halloween costumes, be creative, make up your own stuff. The more you do here the more rewarding it will be when you’re actually out wandering around, (quality over quantity!) If you don’t bring enough costumes, or you don’t put enough time into them, you’ll wish you did. Costume envy sucks! Its much more fun when people are excited to see what you’re wearing. Burning Man is about stimulation (visual and otherwise) after all!
Personal Care
Bring baby wipes. Unless your camp is bringing a shower, or you’ve arranged with another camp to use theirs this is the only way you’re going to get clean. Even if you’re bringing a shower baby wipes will come in handy. You won’t usually feel sweaty and gross because of how dry the climate is, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t filthy!
Vinegar and water in a spray bottle. The vinegar will neutralize the alkali dust and you should clean your feet with it once a day. a quarter to third cup of vinegar its plenty. Don’t forget the clean socks!
Dust masks: my first year I took a respirator, and while it was ace at handling the dust storms it was clunky, and I couldn’t talk to my friends easily. The second year I just took white dust masks and they worked well enough.
Gatorade/Emergen-C to keep your electrolytes up. Sunblock. Chapstick. A hand pumped bug/weed sprayer makes a great evaporative cooling unit (make sure its brand new, don’t want to hose yourself down with chemicals). Ear plugs are a must. Bring several pair. A High-powered moisturizer. If you have an RX, Xanax, Seroquel and Ambien can help you sleep through the chaos. A first aid kit.
Food
You need a good 5 day cooler. Keep it out of the sun and elevate it off the ground with bricks to make the ice last longer. Bring cash for ice, its the only thing you can buy on the playa (besides coffee at center camp) and even with a 5 day cooler you’re going to need more by day 3. Freeze anything you won’t be eating before Wednesday. It will help your ice last longer. Make sure everything in your cooler is sealed tight, contaminating the cooler water is just asking for food poisoning.
A food sealer has worked well for me (I scored an $80 Seal-A-Meal at Big lots for $20). I’ll go to restaurants and get take out then seal and freeze it. Then when I’m out there I can just boil some water and I’m eating like a king. Plan 2 smallish meals a day as you’ll be surprised how little you feel like eating when when you’ve been in the heat for so long. Also lots of camps serve breakfast, lunch or dinner daily so if you think you’re running low on food you can supplement it by hitting up one (or several) of these camps. My personal favorite is the White Dragon Noodle Bar. Those guys are badasses and their camp is themed around the White Dragon in the movie Blade Runner.
Water
Make sure to bring lots of water. Plan on 4 gallons per day. You definitely don’t want to run out here. I also strongly recommend a Camelbak; don’t put anything in it but water. Bring a separate water bottle for other beverages. Lots of places will serve you a drink, but you have to have your own cup to put it in. Since you will be traveling with your beverage you’ll find a bottle with a sealing lid will be ace. Don’t bring the plastic drinking water jugs they sell water in at the grocery store. They will break and you will be sad. If you want to use this kind of water, transfer it into a solid camping water container.
Water disposal is something you don’t really think about before you go, but you should because there is nowhere to get rid of your grey water while you’re out there (this is and isn’t true, but for the newbie its best to assume there isn’t). Bring at least one empty 6 gallon water jug to store your grey water. (this is why its so nice to just boil your food in the bag, no nasty grey water to dispose of). The majority of this is going to come from your cooler water. Larger camps have other ways of dealing with this problem. A quick Google search for ‘burning man grey water disposal’ will offer up lots of advice on this topic for the curious.
Trash Disposal
Pack everything out as there are no community trash cans. Leave all packaging at home. A 5 gallon painters/brewers bucket with a lid has worked well as a trash can for me both years but you’ll want to estimate how much disposable stuff you’re actually taking and bring 2 if you think you’ll need them.
Shade Structure
This is super important. You need something that will give you shade all day. Temporary carports that they sell at Costco for around 200 are perfect. They hold up to the crazy wind if you secure them properly and they’ll give you somewhere to set your tent up out of the sun. Bring at least one length of re-bar per shade structure support bar and plenty of rope to tie it down. Don’t forget the mallet to drive the re-bar. Also bring tennis balls and cut holes in them to make effective re-bar caps. Trust me, you don’t want to trip in the dark and land on one of these.
Lighting
There are no lights on the playa so if you’re not lit you’re just asking to get run over by an art car. Make your lighting fun and incorporate it into your costume. Also bring a good headlamp. Flashlights are ok but you don’t want to have to carry it around all the time.
Bikes
This has varying levels of utility. If you spend a lot of time riding art cars the bike will be a pain in the ass because you cant take it with you. Bring one anyway because Black Rock City is huge, and you can always leave it at camp. A cheap Walmart cruiser works well (like 80 bucks or so) and you’ll see hundreds of people riding them. Make sure you light it for night travel. Whatever bike you bring make sure it has the fat knobby tires. Road bike tires are completely useless out there. Bring a pump and a patch kit and a lock. Bike theft at Burning Man is usually an act of convenience, rather than profit so even if you can’t lock it to a bike rack or other structure, you can just lock it to a friends bike and be reasonably sure it isn’t going anywhere.
Final Advice
In all if it is your first year I would over-prepare. You can read all the guides and tips that are floating around about what to bring and what to leave home, but until you actually get there you wont have any experience to guide you. After your first burn you can make a list of what worked and what didn’t and then start tailoring your supplies for subsequent burns.
Lastly, this is a gifting economy. This doesn’t mean a barter economy though. You wont have to trade something you made in order to eat breakfast at Porn and Eggs. The concept is that you bring something of yourself to give to the community and other people will do the same and at the end of the day it will even out. Pick something fun. Don’t go and buy cheap trinkets to give away. Make something yourself, or provide a service to passers by. Don’t underestimate simple pleasures. One way to bring a smile to anyones face at 4pm is to give them a spray with your sprayer bottle. Don’t go too overboard with your gift the first year. Take everything in and enjoy yourself, you only get one first Burn. You can come back with a crazy art project or theme camp next year!
Posted in Random.
– May 27, 2010
Unleash the Kraken!
So I was looking for something new to read after I finish Chuck Palahniuks new book Pygmy and I ran across an author by the name of China Mieville. I had seen his name on a promotional blurb on the front cover of my last read, M. John Harrisons Nova Swing so I decided to check him out.
Turns out this guy writes stuff that is right up my alley, and as the deterministic cogs of the universe slowly clicking into place would have it, he has a new book coming out in June called Kraken. Check out the promotional copy and tell me that it doesn’t sound like the most awesome book ever written:
In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.
As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.
There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery
with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.
All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.
Hey China, did you write this for me? Because it sure sounds like you did!
Posted in Random.
– May 26, 2010
How does television work?
1. Hire JJ Abrams
2. (Fill in the blank)
3. (Fill in the blank)
4. Profit
For example, 2 could be a bowl of soup, and 3 could be a sleepy little town on the banks of the Colorado. Or 2 could be a triceratops sitting in on a UN hearing on global warming, and 3 could be an army of escaped convicts from the future. You could really put anything in here. 2 a pizza, 3 a hastily imbibed Corona Light. Socks. A toaster. You get the idea.
Can’t wait for the Abrams helmed spinoff Lost in Space.
Posted in Random.
– May 26, 2010
My tender flesh has been incinerated
Been trying to play some SC2 tonight but its laggy as hell! It sucks but 2 clearly superior opponents timed out before I did giving me the win in each game. Small victory for team p3t3!
I’m still having lots of trouble vs Zerg. I’ve yet to win a single match against them as Protoss and I’m usually getting murdered in the first 5 minutes. Practice is the only way I’m going to get better, but I’ve yet to find an even slightly workable strategy against them.
Tips gladly accepted.
Posted in Geekery!.
– May 24, 2010
Bayern Comes Up Short
And there was much sadness in the land.
Was anyone else expecting Robben to feature more prominently? His ability to control the ball, keeping it just out of reach of the opposing team is really something to watch. His razor sharp skill resulted in several goals in the lead up to the tournament and I was really disappointed that he didn’t get much of an opportunity to shine in this match.
As much as I don’t care for the style of Inter Milanos strategy, I have to admit that they had defense on lockdown and ultimately that the game was decided on the defense. Inter had a great game keeping Bayerns opportunities to a minimum, and only giving them a few lukewarm attempts to score. Meanwhile Bayerns own defense flagged and left the box wide open for 2 beautiful scoring opportunities, both of which Inter capitalized on.
I had a great time watching the game with friends down at Lumpys despite the outcome and I can’t wait for the World Cup to fire up here in just under a month.
Now that the UEFA Champions League tournament is over I wonder how I will get my soccer fix… EA Sports FIFA 2010 anyone?
Posted in Random.
– May 22, 2010
UEFA Champions League
[This is a repost of an article I wrote for my work blog at transmission.xmission.com]
I have to admit, I wasn’t always a fan of soccer (football!). Growing up I wasn’t the most in shape kid in the neighborhood so when my parents signed me up for a local city league it was like torture. I dreaded practice and I hated games… all that running! Later I played indoor soccer, but our teams weren’t ever very good (probably because I sucked) and so the soccer bug just never clicked with me. Based on these early experiences I carried a passive indifference to the sport with me all the way through my twenties.
Years later while working here at XMission, I had seen several of my coworkers crowded around the big screen in the break room avidly watching various European matches of teams I’d never heard of and considered them with bewilderment. I’m also pretty sure I openly mocked them for their dedication to the sport on a few occasions. But then something happened. I found out XMission was sponsoring the newly formed Real Salt Lake team. Part of the package included tickets to every home game that were up for grabs for those employees who were interested. As it turned out, the diehards here already had seasons which decreased the ratio of employees to tickets down to a manageable level. Never one to turn down a free anything (I previously had spent several boring Sundays watching Buzz games while we were sponsoring that team. Never underestimate the entertainment value of cheering on the first base coach when the action of Triple A baseball fails to impress) I signed up for a couple of games.
Because I had no clue about the rules of the MLS, I brought along a friend who had played and enjoyed way more soccer than I had and was glad to come along and babysit me through my first live match. I honestly didn’t think I was going to enjoy it, outside of the ‘hey its something to do on a Saturday afternoon’, but by the end of the first half I was hooked. I started to see why this sport was so addictive. I won’t bore you with the interim details but by the end of that season I was watching away games at bars, following other teams and I had even gone so far as to purchase the Sega game ‘Football Manager’ so I could get my fix during the week between games.
Even though now I was enjoying soccer I still hadn’t gotten into the European leagues, and the concept of callups, national teams U-21 and U-17 was still a foreign (cough) concept to me. Feeling the World Cup buzz though, I decided to sign up for FoxSoccer.tv to start to educate myself on the teams and players the US National team would be facing in South Africa this June. One of the first matches I decided to watch was a Semi-Final (I think) UEFA Champions League game between Manchester United and Bayern München. Manchester United dominated in the first half, scoring three times to Bayern München’s single goal. After the half though Bayern was a team on a mission. Tightly focused, they turned the momentum of the game around and kept Manchester on the defense for the rest of the game. Although they were pressing the attack they only converted that momentum into a single goal and at the buzzer the score was Manchester United 3, Bayern München 2.
And this is where things got weird. Manchester United walked off the field with their heads down, dejected, frustrated and upset, while Bayern München was dancing in the field and participating in group cheers with the small section of away fans that had taken up residence in the upper stadium. Had I misjudged which team was which the entire match? I felt a little embarrassed, even though nobody could even have been aware of my confusion. Why was the winning team sad and the losing team obviously celebrating a grand victory? I decided to check out the uniform patches and sure enough they matched up. I was reading the score correctly. Clearly more research was required.
I headed over to the ufea.com site and started poking around. After a couple of minutes I found this page http://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/matches/index.html which contained a sidebar explaining the rules of the tournament. As it turns out, the matches were decided by most goals scored in a 2 game set. Apparently Bayern had scored more goals in their previous meeting and had come out on top, even with the loss. Suddenly I understood: I was in unexplored territory, the rules of the MLS completely failing to prepare for the new world of international soccer (football!) that lay before me.
The final match in the tournament is this Saturday at 12:30 MST and you can bet I will be watching it live. The soccer bug has bitten again. The World Cup is coming up quick and I will be watching as many games as I can. Maybe you might even see me at a pub cheering for the US National team, or simply enjoying a high-caliber game of the worlds most popular sport. I’ll be the guy in the jersey having a blast.
Posted in Random.
– May 19, 2010
Idle hands
So, I’ve given up Facebook in the hopes that the time I waste there can be put to use updating my blog and working on some other projects. My writing skills are getting rusty and I need to get some practice. Go easy if things seem a little rough 
Posted in Random.
– May 18, 2010
Only Entertainment
Why does the right wing have so many dancing monkeys in its ranks? Palin: dancing monkey, Beck: dancing monkey, Limbaugh: dancing monkey, Hannity: dancing monkey, O’reilly: dancing monkey. And let me explain what I mean by dancing monkey here, I mean ‘entertainers’ masquerading under the guise of political commentating.
Why does the right package up its message in a fancy box with a shiny ribbon and elaborate and intoxicating tag saying TO: Americans From: America. Is it because if any American were to actually sit down and evaluate the GOP’s position on a wide range of topics independent of the nightly confectionery , finely woven ties, cropped hair, smiles, righteous indignation and tears that American might realize that the same position was in direct contrast to his or her best interest?
The right has cultivated a climate of making emotional choices rather than intelligent ones by allowing these dancing monkeys to breast feed duplicitous Americans the apple-pie and arsenic tapioca milk gushing from their engorged bosoms and warmed by halogen glow of the stage lighting and blemish disguising makeup artistry. And I say duplicitous because those Americans who are begging at the teat for more have willfully discarded rational thought for the comfort of having their daily intellectual meal fed to them by those dancing monkeys who neither live, nor thrive by the same means as those they claim to inform.
Posted in Random.
– May 18, 2010
Monday Morning Game Design: Chiron Beta Prime
Title: Chiron Beta Prime
Genre: Farmville-Like
Players: 1 (social)
Premise: The Robot Council has decided to relocate you to the beautiful planet of Chiron Beta Prime in an effort to provide you with more comfortable living away from the cold metallic, robot dominated life of your homeworld. You will be provided with a homestead and a means to provide for yourself. The Robot Council wishes you good luck in your future endeavors!
Upon arriving at Chiron Beta Prime you discover that the planet has suffered a devastating catastrophe, and while the surviving half of the planet is indeed beautiful, the side you were assigned to has been blasted into thousands of city sized asteroids which are now slowly beginning to orbit the planet. Cheerfully ignoring your protest your robot pilot (piloting a robot spacecraft) drops you off at your assigned chunk of land assuring you that it its perfectly safe and healthy for a human to live on a rock in space. He explains that in return for this generous grant of land you will be expected to fill a storage container with various trivial things such as ore which will be picked up once a week. Admitting that this plot of land is in somewhat of a worse condition than when it was assigned to you by the Robot Commission on H.A.I.R. (Human Affairs and Interstellar Relocation), and wishing to make your new home as comfortable as possible he leaves you with an extra month of air and departs with a whistle.
Gameplay: The player works and develops various mine shafts throughout his assigned asteroid drilling out various exotic substances such as ‘Photon Salt’ and ‘EM Broccoli’ (so named for its crystalline structure resembling terrestrial broccoli). Each substance takes different amounts of time to harvest. The collected material is then placed in the storage unit for weekly pickup.
The Robot overlords protectors set a production quota every month and if this quota is met the player is awarded with additional life support such as air for the air tank, or batteries for the radiation shielding. If the quotas are exceeded the player is rewarded with a selection of items from robot-themed holiday decorations to fun improvements to his/her asteroid (such as a new soylent green processor) and even more efficient mining equipment. The items available would never be anything a human would be happy to receive under normal circumstances but will be presented as if the player should be ecstatic to have the opportunity to have them.
The player must check on his mine shafts to insure that there are no jams or other delays. Unlike farmville, a shaft (finding its equivalent in the farm plot) constantly produces ore at a fixed rate. This rate drops over time or can temporarily halt altogether until input from the player restores it back to 100%. There are other things that can be done to get people hooked on clicking, but since this isn’t a formal game proposal and I’m late for my drawing class I’m not going to hash them all out here. Maybe I’ll edit this post later with more.
Edit: Holy crap I forgot to mention that this was inspired by the insanely awesome Jonathan Coulton song of the same name.
Posted in Geekery!.
– April 12, 2010
