Stuff++

A Reminder

Ampaire — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:11:21 +0000

You will never have enough pylons.

Never.

PAX East: Retrospective

Ampaire — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 06:10:48 +0000

PAX begins, as many large gatherings do, with queues. But walking in, it’s easy to see that this isn’t the usual motley assortment one might see while waiting for an ordinary concert to begin. People here share similarities – they wear clothing adorned with the logos of games, snippets of Penny Arcade, or markings of allegiances Horde or Alliance. Some display no plumage at all, while others clothe themselves with costumes elaborate and fun. People standing in line range all sorts of ages and ethnicities, but despite all the difference for appearances, the difference in origins, everybody in the queue stands together. Everybody knows, that on some level, all the people around them share the same loves – loves for gaming, for sitting with friends going through a dungeon, for fragging a noob with a sweet headshot, for taking down a raid with guildies in record time. Everybody stands together, because they have all stood together before, in queues to enter a busy realm, in lobbies waiting for a new game, in chat rooms shooting the breeze with other bored questers. This is a culture usually traveled by electrons, bridged by silicon and copper, brought together in real space. It’s a sweet note, to be able to see and smell and feel for one’s self that their culture is a real thing, built and inhabited by people who exist.

Days go by quickly like this, as people talk to one another, as they share stories and favorites. Time slides by while looking through exhibition halls at ridiculous amounts of computers, games, and merchandise. It sneaks forward while one wanders the floors, looking in on games of D&D and LAN tournaments. The only parts that really seem to stick, where time holds still, are in the moments. Anybody who was there could probably think of a few – watching the witch from L4D chase somebody – seeing, for the first time, Hokins and Krahulik onstage, answering questions and being witty right before one’s very own eyes – hearing a crowd, waiting in another queue, burst into song along with Still Alive. These are the moments that stick, the moments that make this culture really seem like something worth being part of. But the grains of time still go, people tire, and too soon it becomes time to say goodbye.

As quickly as it assembles in the mornings, PAX flies apart again when it ends. People go flowing out the doors, back to hotels to check out and get luggage. There’s a large group here in the lobby, and still a few on the street, but then the highway or airport is reached. One might see a few badges at a rest stop on the Interstate, and then maybe later one or two again, but eventually they are gone as people separate back out into their homes, like particles flying out of an atom that can’t hold itself together anymore. But we take back more than we left with; we take back the CDs, DVDs, and books signed by the physical incarnations of our favorite charming geeks – we take back the memories of our culture, implanted safely in metal archives to be drawn back and remembered. We return to screen names, and forum handles, but know more than ever after PAX that what we have is real – made by real people who are friendly, charming, and likable, and we know that someday we can see them again in the shining, cohesive forces of PAX.

queue stands together. Everybody knows, that on some level, all the people around them share the same loves – loves for gaming, for sitting with friends going through a dungeon, for fragging a noob with a

sweet headshot, for taking down a raid with guildies in record time. Everybody stands together, because they have all stood together before, in queues to enter a busy realm, in lobbies waiting for a new

game, in chat rooms shooting the breeze with other bored questers. This is a culture usually traveled by electrons, bridged by silicon and copper, brought together in real space. It’s a sweet note, to be

able to see and smell and feel for one’s self that their culture is a real thing, built and inhabited by people who exist.
Days go by quickly like this, as people talk to one another, as they share stories and favorites. Time slides by, while looking through exhibition halls at ridiculous amounts of computers, games, and

merchandise. It sneaks forward while one wanders the floors, looking in on games of D&D and LAN tournaments. The only parts that really seem to stick, where time holds still, are in the moments. Anybody who

was there could probably think of a few – watching the witch from L4D chase somebody – seeing, for the first time, Hokins and Krahulik onstage, answering questions and being witty right before one’s very own

eyes – hearing a crowd, waiting in another queue, burst into song along with Still Alive. These are the moments that stick, the moments that make this culture really seem like something worth being part of.

But the grains of time still go, people tire, and too soon it becomes time to say goodbye.
As quickly as it assembles in the mornings, PAX flies apart again when it ends. People go flowing out the doors, back to hotels to check out and get luggage. There’s a large group here in the lobby,

and still a few on the street, but then the highway or airport is reached. One might see a few badges at a rest stop on the Interstate, and then maybe later one or two, but eventually they are gone as people

separate back out into their neighborhoods, like particles flying out of an atom that can’t hold itself together anymore. But we take back more than we left with; we take back the CDs, DVDs, and books signed

by the physical incarnations of our favorite geeky bands and people – we take back the memories of our culture, implanted safely in chemicals to be drawn back and remembered. We return to screen names, and

forum handles, but know more than ever after PAX that what we have is real – made by real people who are friendly, charming, and likeable, and that someday we can see them again in the shining, cohesive

forces of PAX.

Left 4 Life 2

Ampaire — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 07:15:33 +0000

Fighting zombies in L4D2, making comics

that is all

Photos

Ampaire — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:25:33 +0000

Not dead, just resting – and busy. Here are some photos I’ve taken with my new camera, the DMC-LX3 from Panasonic. By a long shot the best camera I have ever owned.

It makes a nice panorama too – for full size I recommend right click save as and then view, as the file is ‘rather large.’

The flickr pool of the LX3 is generally full of great stuff, it’s a good thing to check out. While I am mentioning flickr:

Stormtroopers Three Sixty Five

Radiographs

That is all

Obscure Instruments Saturday

Ampaire — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 01:48:39 +0000

For all the attention given to music in the world, most people only recognize a small, ‘famous’ portion of musical instruments. There are many obscure, wonderful instruments that produce unique timbres but which couldn’t be identified even by people who have probably heard them in a piece of music. This post will be examining two relatively unknown, but heard and slightly related instruments: the theremin and ondes Martenot, their obscurity reinforced by the fact spell check recognizes neither of them in its judgements.

The theremin is most likely the more recognized of these two instruments, as it has a rather iconic shape and unforgettable method that is used to play it. The theremin is controlled by two antennae, one controlling volume and the other, pitch. It is one of the simplest arrangements conceivable, and yet so very difficult to master.

As one’s hands move closer to an antenna, it changes the magnetic field around it. The closer a hand moves to the right antenna, the higher the pitch becomes, and the closer a hand moves to the right antenna, the quieter the instrument becomes (generally speaking). This is, naturally, an electronic instrument, and its pitch is recognizably so. The theremin’s sound can most commonly be found in the early sci-fi horror flicks, where its radio-like sound was used to produce eerie tones. A prominent example is from the wonderfully titled The Thing (From Another World).

The theremin provides the oscillating, electronic tone that can be heard in the music. But the theremin isn’t limited to only electric tones. Most theremins can change the waveform of the pitch provided to make the timbre different. One of my favorite timbres that it can produce is an almost vocal sound. Lydia Kavina, the most famous virtuoso of the theremin, masterfully demonstrates some of the best sounds the theremin can produce in a rendition of Claire de la Lune for the theremin.

For a relatively unknown instrument, theremins are still very easy to find and buy, most likely with thanks to the fact that the formidable Moog Music has had a long-running production of theremins.

The next instrument, the ondes Martenot, is similar to the theremin in that it is electronic, and its sound takes inspiration from the noise of radio frequencies. But that is very much where the similarity stops, and the differences begin. The ondes Martenot appears at first to be a regular keyboard with a few extra add-ons, most notably a slider that holds a ‘ring’ that is next to the keyboard, as well as a pull-out box that holds several controls.

The ring’s position next to the keyboard produces the pitch of the key to which it is closest, although unlike a piano, it can produce the pitches that are inbetween keys, producing smoother transitions. The ring alone doesn’t produce the full sound, as the volume or intensity key controls the volume of the note produced. The ondes Martenot is similar to the theremin again in this respect, that it has a method of addressing pitch with one hand and volume with another. The ondes Martenot also produces notes in a more ‘traditional’ keyboard style – by simply striking the correct key to produce a note. But once again, the ondes Martenot one-ups the piano; the keyboard of an ondes Martenot has the ability to slide back and forth, bringing the possibility of vibrato into a keyboard controlled instrument. A good demonstration of all of these features of the ondes Martenot is below.

As stated in the video, the ondes Martenot is definitely one of the most ‘alive’ sounding electronic instruments produced. And with the accessibility of a keyboard, one might think that the ondes Martenot might still be wildly popular. This however, is not the case. From what I’ve found, there is a tiny number of ondes Martenots available, with mainstream production having ended in 1988. The ondes Martenot is one of the key sounds used by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, but even with this exposure the ondes Martenot remains obscure and rare enough to make every one valuable. My wish is for some company to discover this void and fill it with lots of cheap, functional ondes Martenots, but the possibility of this seems slim.

The ondes Martenot and the theremin are only two of so many obscure but impressive instruments that should get more attention. The moral, perhaps, is to go and find those for yourself. Instruments have been revived before; all they require to do so is the demand.

Patch 3.2.0 Translations

Ampaire — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:52:26 +0000

In reading the patch notes to World of Warcraft, it is easy to see a certain critical intelligence behind the notes, belying a certain amount of critical undertones in the notes. I have attempted to extract these undertones from the notes and put their meanings out where it’s easy for the average player to see.

# The quest log is now double-paned for more easily viewing quest information. The list of all quests a player has will show in one pane, while the quest details of any highlighted quest will display in the next.

Do your poor, strained eyes tire from the tiny morsels of story we still attempt to fruitlessly inject into your grind fest? Fear not, all the irrelevant information pertaining to what your quest is actually about will be helpfully segregated off to one side of the quest log, leaving you, the treasured player, to be free to easily scan the objectives and determine how many of what you have to whack with unprecedented ease.

# Mathiel in Darnassus has finally earned himself enough money from your repair bills that he was able to buy himself an anvil.

We realized an armorer should have an anvil.

# A new repair bot has been added, and his name is Jeeves. He is the ultimate gentleman robot butler, able to perform all the mundane tasks of repairing, selling and buying junk for your entire raid.

Somebody at Blizzard likes P.G. Wodehouse and Stephen Fry.

Author’s Note: They failed, however, to make the distinction that Jeeves is not a ‘butler,’ he is a valet.

# Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar – both located near the Battlemasters in either city – and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.

STOP PANICKING, TWINKS

# Construction of the Crusaders’ Coliseum is complete. New raid normal and Heroic modes for the Crusaders’ Coliseum can be toggled using the Dungeon Difficulty setting. This applies to 10 and 25-player versions. 10-player (normal), 25-player (normal), 10-player (Heroic) and 25-player (Heroic) all share separate raid lockout timers.

After months of having the lower classes of Azeroth slave away in the icy, forsaken reaches of the north on a Coliseum that hadn’t grown a brick in size, the Coliseum will be instantly completed. After much debate about what to do with this new and exciting zone in Icecrown, we’ve decide to turn it into yet another raid, because only one was released last patch and that’s disappointing to the people who sink enough time in to become well-equipped enough to get into a guild good enough to be able to even enter one of these raids. There is also a 5-man instance in this patch for the peons, and players on higher levels of the Coliseum will be able to look down upon them from on high and use the /spit emote. The bosses of the raid will laugh along at this point for comic effect.

# Just when you thought you had seen the last of the Black Knight, he makes his astonishing return to the tournament. Wait, didn’t you kill him?

Guess what! If the fact that we’ve generally fallen into a cycle of alternatedly releasing raids and dailies isn’t enough to tip you off to the fact that we’ve lost much of our creative edge becoming bloated on profits, we have a surprise for you! Instead of making new NPCs and character dialogs, we’re continuing with an older quest that you thought you’d completed! It’s good times for all of us, except you.

# Wolvar and Gorloc orphans have arrived in Dalaran and need your help! Players can find out more by visiting the Eventide District (completing the quests being offered for this event will not count toward any Children’s Week achievements). Players have a limited amount of time to care for these orphans before they take their leave. They will then return again for the regularly-scheduled Children’s Week next year.

After much debate, we have concluded that the orphans’ quests weren’t already annoying enough. Now we have finally removed the dreaded ‘cuteness factor,’ and put two of our ugliest races’ orphans up on the stage. Reflecting their lower intelligences, we will make their demands more banal and irritating. The monetary quest rewards have been more fittingly replaced with dirt or a piece of string.

# Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
# Journeyman Riding (Skill 150): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
# Expert Riding (Skill 225): Can now be learned at level 60 for 600 gold from trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar. Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold for Alliance; Thrallmar for Horde). Flight speed at this skill level has been increased to 150% of run speed, up from 60%.

We laugh at you, players of old, as you recall the days where you bought your first mount after scraping, scrabbling, and hoarding gold, your characters’ stomachs rumbling because you couldn’t spare the money to buy them food. We relish the sweet sound of tears dripping off your chin, as you think of the wasted hours spent clambering around the world looking for the most profitable spots and fighting others off for the privilege of getting a few extra silver an hour. You could have been out in the open air, under the sun where creatures of light come and frolic in the springtime among the bucolic pastures reminiscent of your halcyon days of yore. But now those days are gone, gone like ashes into the wind, and you stand aged, jealous, and bitter of the rosy-cheeked newcomers who prance about like imbeciles on their cheap, cheap mounts. We do all this as we go out to eat with the money that you send us every month, our raucous laughs echoing off platters heaped high with caviar and champagne.

Area of Azeroth, More Conclusions

Ampaire — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:25:31 +0000

After the last sessions of analyzing the lengths of Azeroth, I still had no concrete values as to how big Azeroth really was in terms of its area. Proceeding from where I last left off on measuring the length of Azeroth, I took the pixel-length measurements and ran with them. From last time, I had determined that one pixel on the scale of the map I had been using at the time was .034706 kilometers to one side of a pixel. So, the area of one pixel should therefore be 0.0012045 kilometers². The next step was to remove the pixels from the map that weren’t navigable land or water, so basically just the oceans. This proved a bit trickier than it first appears, since the minimap has lots of different colored water and gradients to take out. Once that was done, the following outline emerged.

Finally, I took all the unnavigable parts of Azeroth that I had colored monochromatic, replaced them with white, and colored the landmasses of Azeroth in black. From there, it was a simple matter to use Photoshop’s measurement features to calculate all the pixels that were selected. It came out that there were 242,993 pixels that make up the landmasses of the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor on this map of Azeroth. Multiply 242,993 pixels by the area that each pixel contains – 0.0012045 kilometers² – and you get the number 292.67 kilometers², or 101.42 miles². Take the square roots of these numbers, and it gives 12.207 km or 10.071 miles, the side of a square that could contain, roughly, the landmasses of Azeroth.

Here is also some more information on the perimeters and areas of Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, Darnassus, and the Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles.

The perimeters of the landmasses contain all the islands so perimeters may be slightly / greatly inflated.

292.67 kilometers² and 101.42 miles² are distant, unfeeling numbers, so in order to put them into terms more understandable to the average WoW player, I have used the benevolent god of eccentric data, Wolfram Alpha, to give one a better idea of what 292.67 kilometers² comprise. I got the following results:

Unless Wolfram Alpha is secretly Skynet and is skewing my data, not only do the areas of Azeroth comprise roughly a tenth of Rhode Island, they also are only 2.4 times the size of Walt Disney World.

However, I believe this figure to hold more than it first appears. Two point four times the size of Disney World is a figure that is suggestive of, nay, portentous of, a time when an executive at ActiBlizzard will look at some figures together – say, the aforementioned Number, the fact that all of Disney World cost about $2.6 billion to build, their skyrocketing revenues, and reach a conclusion. This conclusion can only be one conclusion, The Conclusion. I do not know whether I might adulate or disparage the day that this Conclusion might arrive, but I believe I have created an accurate depiction of it below.

A vision of heaven, hell, or the product of an absurd reaction where the two planes intersect?

I would rather not find out. (Photo butchered from here)

End note: The way I had to play with data from an interesting variety of sources reminded me of the masterful collection of essays in Content, which everybody who uses the internet frequently should read. Oh yes, it’s also free, along with all the rest of Cory Doctorow‘s amazing works.

This blog post is not for consumption by the sarcasm-impaired.

Google Trends

Ampaire — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:50:24 +0000

Or: Data Mining for Everybody

Stumbling through the internet today and trying some new things, I began to realize the power of Google Trends and what it’s capable of showing. The unique situation of Google as a search monopoly has given it the position to monitor what the majority of people are looking for on the internet at any given time. The Hot Trends page shows recent events with an almost stunning similarity to news feeds and blogs, although searches aren’t intended to reflect what’s the news. This might seem like old news, with things like NPR proclaiming the power of Google in detecting flu pandemics and the like, but it didn’t fully hit me from things like that that these tools aren’t just available to researchers, the Google Trends page allows anyone to compare the prevalence of a search. Setting out on my own scientific endeavor, I looked for what G. Trends would have to say about Cake vs. Pie.

(cake = red, pie = blue)

Naturally I was vindicated to see that cake had search supremacy over pie, but a closer look yielded some interesting questions. What were all those little spikes on the pie graph? A look at data point A revealed it to be, of course, related to pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving! A separate trends search validated this, showing an extreme seasonal spike in pumpkin pie searches.

(Pumpkin pie)

Seemingly irrational spikes like that brought up more questions about the cake vs pie trends, and I noticed a weird spike that seemed to come up on the cake and pie graphs around what I assume is the spring line (1/4 way through the year). What could cause this jump in searches for delicious baked goods? Is there some sort of seasonal longing for pie and cake that crops up as spring comes? Unfortunately, there weren’t any data points that I could use to research this further, so the explanation for that little bump still lies shrouded in mystery.

The news reference volume is also interesting, particularly in so when concerning cake vs pie. Why are there more searches for cake, when there are more news stories tracked about pie? It could be some random use of the word pie in language of which I was previously unaware, but the difference between the two graphs still seems strange. My theory is that the insane media has become disconnected from the people, and obsessively carries stories about pie, when it is truly cake about which the populace wants to hear.

Language related searches, in addition, provide even more questions. Why do significantly more people search about pie than cake in Spain, defying the trend? Goodness knows.

Random spikes, dips, and otherwise weirdly outstanding patterns in search graphs is what makes Google Trends so powerful and interesting. Trying to correlate the irregularities with causes certainly proves to be a somewhat fun waste of time, even if it is mostly fruitless. There’s an endless stream of graphs to be analyzed (another interesting one is Yahoo vs Google – why are there more searches for Yahoo on Google, than Google on itself?), and it seems like each has some unique and funny graph to look at. Lastly, G. Trends always seems like its information hides some sort of deep hidden secret or potential – more than just tracking disease queries to a location, but imagine putting some sort of pattern detection to search queries and seeing what it might predict? The possibilities are endless, not to mention fun in a weird way, so just go play around with Google Trends for a while. It’s good times.

Google Trends

Wikipedia Freeware Galore – Terragen / Sterling2

Ampaire — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:13:22 +0000

Recently I was lucky enough to discover the application Terragen while navigating through Wikipedia. Its render quality is absolutely fantastic for an application that is both free and several years old, and while mucking through it I thought that it might be fun to import a few heightmaps from games and render them into near-photo quality images. This was easier said than done, however, and after exporting heightmaps from Fallout 3 in a myriad of formats (RAW 8/16 bit, Targa, Gif, Png) I finally got an accessory application for Terragen to properly import the bitmap version of Fallout 3′s heightmap. Originally, the map was much too flat in Terragen, but after scaling it up and changing the colors to be a little bit muddier, the following result was yielded:

From Terragen

The roughly corresponding view in Fallout 3

As you can see, the results are very different in many respects, namely the lack of game objects from the Terragen render, but rendering landscapes from video game heightmaps is still an interesting exercise for a boring weekend!

BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE!

Another application I’ve found through Wikipedia is Sterling2 – a small but very powerful application that renders fractals beautifully. Not just the classic Mandelbrot Set, mind you, but a nearly endless amount of filters and permutations that can make an amazing bunch of fractals. I’ve included one of my own below, but the site for Sterling2 and the Wikipedia page on Sterling have more examples.

Liberty Prime

Ampaire — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 07:53:43 +0000

Recently I took the task upon myself to make an image in dedication to Liberty Prime, chief among the most awesome of robotic companions. After editing different parts from my Fallout 3 screenshots (it’s hard taking something from Fallout 3 out of a background, because you have to guide the magnetic lasso between brown-grays and other gray-browns), I assembled together the following image attempting to depict Liberty Prime in all his zealously patriotic glory.

I can hear him in my head, "DEMOCRACY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE"

The only thing left, naturally, was to make an appropriate satirical caption poking fun at both how ridiculously over the top his pro-American slogans are, while mentioning how his pseudo-cold era mentality still applied during to the last administration. Unfortunately, after conferring with the co-writer of the blog, the conversation took an unfortunate turn and this came out of it:

Sometimes the creative process makes great things . . . other times it fails

This, unfortunately, is in the latter category. I’m afraid it falls upon you, the valiant readers, to apply a more suitable caption. Suggestions are welcome!