The Blogg

May 19, 2012

Game Review: Diablo III

Filed under: Gaming — chadhogg @ 6:18 pm

I first encountered roguelike games while I was in high school, but never played their graphically-enhanced, dumbed-down version, Diablo. In college, however, my roommate and several friends had been big fans of Diablo II, and when the Lord Of Destruction expansion was released they restarted playing and got me hooked as well. Thus, my memories of Diablo II are mostly of playing in groups of five or six, yelling across the room to warn of danger or plan strategies for epic battles. I ended up playing the game for far more hours than could be considered healthy. That was in part because the game perfectly uses operant conditioning to keep you excited about that next fabulous item you might find, but also very much because it was a social activity. (It’s not a surprise that the only game that may tie it for greatest time sink of my life is Counter-Strike, which was also introduced to me in college, and that also involved large team of my friends collaborating against other “clans”.)

We waited 11 years for a sequel, helped along by the release of a cheap knockoff, Torchlight, in 2009. During that time Blizzard built up a lot of goodwill by not only keeping the game servers for Diablo II up, but doing half a dozen incremental updates to the game long after they had likely extracted all the revenue they would get from it, rebalancing features and adding new ridiculously rare and difficult challenges. Thus, every couple of years I would get sucked back in and play for a while. After many delays, it was very kind of Blizzard to release Diablo III three days after the end of my work, so that I could spend a solid week doing not much more than playing it. Of course, in the first 24 hours after it was released there was at least 8 hours of downtime in which no one could play because in their infinite wisdom the developers have decided that we should not be allowed to play without a connection to their servers, and they failed to plan for the needed capacity. (I would call this unacceptable, but I still bought the game, didn’t I? Thank that goodwill I mentioned earlier.) Still, I managed to finish the game (on Normal difficulty; there are three others that will take much longer) by five days after launch, having played for probably 35 hours.

In this game they make more than the cursory attempt of Diablo II to have an engaging and coherent story. And they have succeeded a bit more than in Diablo II as well, but the story is still fairly perfunctory. Fortunately, that’s not what I expect from the game, and it succeeds quite well at giving you new randomly-generated maps to explore, many monsters to slaughter, and plenty of loot to collect.

There are a few unequivocally good changes from the prior game. Neither identifying items nor transporting yourself back to town require scrolls anymore, eliminating one of the major annoyances of the early game in Diablo II. The player’s inventory is greatly expanded, and their stash (long-term storage) can be greatly expanded as the game progresses. Inventory management and constant trips back to town to dump loot were the major annoyance of the medium-to-late game of Diablo II, and caused significant “fake difficulty”. Furthermore, items can now stack in the inventory. There are a variety of “events”, pre-scripted events that occur randomly to make each game unique.

Then there are a few things that I think are probably improvements, but am not sure yet. Potion use has become time-restricted, and to compensate enemies have a probability to drop “health globes” upon death that can be run over for an instant life boost. This should make the game more tactical. Character death in this game is much less significant than in Diablo II (except in hardcore mode, of course). I have appreciated this as the final boss just killed me 8 times in a row, but it does take most of the stakes out of what you are doing.

There are also some changes about which I am less excited. Primarily, the old skill tree system has been completely replaced. Instead of having the player choose a few skills, which he could then improve with each level, every character now gets every skill (unlocked at different levels). This means that if you want to be an optimally effective character, you need to change which skills you are using nearly every time you gain a level. I can certainly see why someone might view this as a positive; I’m just not sure I agree. Two of my favorite types of items, runes and charms, do not exist in this game. That is not so surprisingly, actually, because both were introduced only in the expansion of Diablo II and may be held back for an expansion of Diablo III as well. I seem to remember there being a much wider variety of magical prefixes and suffixes available at the beginning of Diablo II. Here, virtually every item is “Adventuring”, “Scouting”, or “Mending” for a while, and even at level 30 there does not seem to be that much variety. I have not come across a legendary item yet (the replacement for set and unique items in Diablo II). Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky, but I liked that in Diablo II there were a few very common special items, and almost every player could expect to find a Manald Heal and Cathan’s Seal.

And there is at least one thing that I am positive has been a step in the wrong direction. In Diablo II, when you looked at a skill you got a quantitative description of exactly what it does, so that you could make an informed decision. In Diablo III you get an extremely vague qualitative description, like “summon a spirit to haunt an enemy”. I guess that’s a good thing? If you want to know what it actually does you have to go to Blizzard’s website.

Perhaps it is early to be issuing this review, but it is rare for me to actually play something before everyone else in the world has moved on, and in a sense I have completed the game and seen the credits. I haven’t tried the higher difficulties yet or played multiplayer (we are waiting until each of us has completed the game at their own pace). I am sure I will find more great features and also more disappointments, but I think I am ready to issue at least a preliminary judgment. Many of my friends who have been playing seem to absolutely love the game. I will not go that far; I think it could be better. But I do like it and am planning to give it a lot more of my time.

May 17, 2012

Game Review: Fallout 3

Filed under: Gaming — chadhogg @ 9:55 am

I only played Fallout 2 after much cajoling by Ryan Michaluk. For the first hour or two of that game I was unimpressed, but the detailed story and extreme attention to detail in crafting this post-apocalyptic, 1950′s era homage drew me in. I ended up loving it so much that Fallout 3 was added to my list of games to eventually find time to play as soon as it was released. (That is, 4 years ago.)

I finally had a chance to start playing through it (or finally prioritized doing so over other things) in January 2012. During the four week semester break I managed to put in about 90 hours, and felt as though I was only about halfway through the game at that point. I expected to be able to continue the game through the Spring semester, but that did not really work out; during the next 16 weeks I only found another 10 hours to play. I started again in earnest during finals week with a goal of finishing the game before May 15, when Diablo III would be released. I more-or-less met that goal, relying on a wiki to help me quickly find and explore all but half a dozen of the world’s locations, then completing the Waters Of Life through Take It Back questline. In all, I ended up with about 140 hours in the game.

The beginning of the game, brief vignettes at the player character’s birth, 1 year old, 10 years old, and 16 years old, was a bit corny but well-executed. At about the three-hour mark I was out of the vault, exploring Springvale Elementary, and loving it. The team that worked on this game did a great job of retaining the spirit of the earlier incarnations and building a world of fantastic detail. Upon leaving Springvale, however, I was struck with my own hypocrisy. I claim to hate linearity and love games that give players choice, but when confronted with the ability to walk to literally anywhere on the map I was paralyzed by choice. I knew I was supposed to go to Megaton, but many years of playing RPGs has taught me that following the quest instructions before exploring everywhere else is a fool’s game. After wandering around for quite some time and getting lost, I decided to do as I was told.

Before I made it to Megaton, however, I ran into serious stability issues: for every 20 minutes in which I was actually playing the game, I spent 5 minutes killing a hung process and restarting it. If I managed to get through 5 minutes of gameplay I would usually be OK for another hour, but most of the times that I started a game I would experience a freeze within a very short period of time. I was about to give up on playing the game at all when I found this advice to modify the “bUseThreadedAI” and “iNumHWThreads” options in the game’s configuration file. Since then, I have had no other random problems. (Wouldn’t it be nice if the publisher were aware of these sorts of things?) However, I still cannot task-switch away from Fallout 3 without it freezing. This is exactly the kind of game in which you would want to take notes, which makes this even more frustrating than it would otherwise be.

Indeed, I found myself constantly wishing for an in-game way to record the fact that I had or had not explored down a certain tunnel or where I had found that tunnel to lead to. There is an extensive modding community, but as far as I could find no one had implemented something like this. Another annoying user interface limitation is the inventory management system, which divides the hundreds of different item types into just four categories for things in your inventory, and no categories at all when you are looking through containers where you had stored things. Just a little bit of foresight would have made managing items much less tedious.

With some experience and a heavily marked-up notebook I became more confident in my ability to freely explore the world without fear of missing some content, and ended up spending many of my original 90 hours just roaming the Capital Wasteland and the extensive metro system seeing what I might find. (And liking much of what I did find.) I also completed many of the game’s side quests and the main quests through Tranquility Lane. I remember being completely engrossed in the game at this point; when driving around in the real world I could not help but notice lawn mowers (their blades can be extracted in-game) and mailboxes (a surprising number contain bottle caps, ammunition, and occasionally even more useful things).

Upon returning from my long hiatus I was much less engaged. By this point I had already exhaustively explored half of the map, collected many copies of every available item, and approached the Broken Steel-expanded level cap. So I abandoned my own exploration and record-keeping to follow knowledge collated on the Internet. This was much faster, but also a lot less fun. I did the Mothership Zeta add-on content, but completely skipped Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, and Point Lookout. (I had purchased the GOTY version, which included all of the DLC.) I was sorry to have wasted my time on Mothership Zeta, which simply was not up to the high standards of the rest of the game. Parts of it had inspired design (the Cargo Hold in particular), but most depended on the laziest of level design tropes, like doors that were mysteriously locked until the plot required them to be open, with no explanation at all of why this would be true.

The last DLC is Broken Steel, which takes place after the normal end of the game. I found it to be better, but still somewhat lacking. It starts directly after I had chosen to place my character in the path of lethal radiation in service of humanity, and made no attempt to explain why or how I had survived. I completed the first two Broken Steel quests, but lost interest something in the midst of the third. I think this is partly because the standard game had such a good ending that I did not want to continue, partly because with a max-leveled character who has more of everything than he could ever use I had little incentive to not simply run through everything, partly because I had already put so many hours in, and partly because I had something else I wanted to start.

I hate to say this, but I think the game is somewhat cursed by its sprawl. It is difficult for a completist like myself to feel satisfied with the game unless we have done everything, and there is just so much to do. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the first 90 hours and the proper ending. A few interface improvements and bug fixes would have been nice, but this was a great game that lived up to its promise.

May 10, 2012

Goodbye, Ursinus

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 1:16 pm

Pfahler Hall Tomorrow I leave Ursinus College for the second time and, though I am sure I thought this the first time as well, probably for the last time. It is easier after a year as an employee than it was after four years as a student, but still not easy. Then again, that time I was moving on to something new and exciting, while this time I am moving on to essentially the same thing, just not at the place that I love (though I’m sure I’ll grow to love it too). Apart from the whole not-living-at-home thing, it has been a wonderful year. Thanks to my students and colleagues, and congratulations to the seniors.

April 1, 2012

When The Poker Gods Smiled On Me

Filed under: Gaming,Personal — chadhogg @ 12:44 am

Saturday night I played cards for the first time in about a year. Five players, Texas Hold Em’, $10 buy-in, $0.10 / $0.20 blinds. For four hours I hovered between around $6 and $16. We have a rule that you cannot just leave whenever you want to: you must announce your intention to do so two full cycles of the blind bets around the table in advance. At 11:00pm I had already been away from my wife and my work far longer than I had intended, so I made such an announcement. Over the next seven hands my fortunes continued to rise and fall, and as it came around to my third-to-last hand I noticed that I happened to have $10.30 left. This is fortuitous, because I could pay my two blinds and cash out my initial investment of $10, which is much easier than trying to make change.

So I immediately folded the trash dealt to my in my third-to-last hand. Then the second-to-last hand came up. I paid my $0.20 big blind and looked at my cards, though I had no intention of playing them: ace of clubs and queen of clubs. That’s the second-best hand I had been dealt all evening, which threw a possible wrench into my plans. Everyone else checked or folded pre-flop, leaving me with the option of raising my blind bet. Normally I would have done so without hesitation, but I decided to let it go. If the flop cards came out looking good I could think about betting, and if not I could stick to my original plan.

So here come the first three community cards: ten of hearts, queen of hearts, queen of spades. I now have three-of-a-kind of the top card on the board, with the highest possible kicker: a very strong hand. My only concerns are someone with a pair of tens in the hole and straight and flush draws. The possibility of not betting on this hand is no longer conceivable. As it turned out, someone else made the bet of $2.00 for me. Now comes the turn card: the ace of spades. I now have queens full of aces. There are now only two ways I can possibly lose. One is that the river card is a ten and someone is holding the other two tens (extremely unlikely). The other is that someone is holding the other two aces (fairly unlikely). Flush draw and straight draw hands are still very much alive, and I would like very much for someone to make one. So I am not going to bet at this point, but someone else does another $2.50.

The final community card is the four of spades. Perfect! Now only the pocket aces can beat me, and one of my two remaining opponents probably has two spades in his hand, giving him a very strong hand that would nonetheless lose to mine. On the other hand, this now has the potential to turn out exactly like the opening scene of the film Rounders. In it, the protagonist has an ace and nine of clubs, and the flop comes up ace of spades, nine of spades, eight of clubs. Then the turn comes up nine of hearts, and the protagonist has something full of aces, same as I do. In that game the river comes up as a three of spades, meaning that a spades flush is possible (just like this hand). Now the two aces are the only hand that can beat the protagonist, and he is confident that his opponent has a spades flush. After he wagers all his money we get the answer: “You are right, I don’t have the spades — Aces full, Mike”, and the hero loses everything.

Back in our real game, the player in first position bets $5. There’s a chance they have that one hand that can beat me, but I’ll gladly wager $5 against that low probability for a chance at the $20 already in the pot. Calling that bet leaves me with $0.60, so I go all in. The original better calls my slight raise, but amazingly the player in third position calls the full $5.60 as well. Like in the movie, neither of them have the spades, but fortunately both were hoping their two pair would be good enough. Instead, I paid my $0.10 blind (plus an extra $0.50 that would have been difficult to convert), donated $4.00 of chips to someone who had no money but was interested in playing, and left as scheduled with not quite three times what I had been expecting to take home.

March 27, 2012

Concert Review: Van Halen / Kool & The Gang

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 11:00 pm

On Monday, March 26, 2012, Van Halen played the Sovereign Center in Reading, PA, with Kool & The Gang supporting. I had not planned on attending, since I was teaching the next morning, but decided at the last minute that this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Eddie Van Halen, David Lee Roth, and Alex Van Halen playing together. (EVH and DLR can have a falling out at a moment’s notice.) I would have much preferred to have Michael Anthony in the band as well, but it doesn’t look like that will happen ever again.

After missing the beginning of the last show I attended at the Sovereign Center, I decided to arrive 40 minutes early. Getting in was much easier this time — possibly because I arrived a bit earlier, possibly because I was shunted to a different parking garage further from the venue, but most likely because the initial crowd for this show was much sparser than that one. Having entered the concert traffic jam at 6:50, I had picked up my ticket and was in my seat by 7:10. My best-available among the least-expensive level of seats purchased two days before the show was at the very back of the floor section, and as far to stage left as possible.

Kool & The Gang started early, at 7:25. (Perhaps Thin Lizzy had done so as well, and this is why I missed part of their set.) They played a 50 minute set. For the uninitiated, they are a funk band with two vocalists (one who played some guitar), trumpet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, trombone, keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums. I am mostly unfamiliar; I recognized three of their songs — “Get Down On It”, “Celebration”, and “Jungle Boogie” — and I had thought that the last of these was an Earth, Wind, & Fire tune (likely the victim of a mislabeled track downloaded from Napster 15 years ago). They sounded good, but I think I prefer my funk a bit more hard-edged and less poppy. My favorite part was probably the two saxophone players trading 4′s on an extended “Get Down On It” jam.

I like the practice of good bands from different genres sharing a bill, but it did not do Kool & The Gang any favors. The average Van Halen fan don’t give a damn ’bout any trumpet-playing band, and as a result the place was only about 20% full when they started playing, slowly filling to about 90% when they left the stage. Furthermore, they kept exhorting the women in the audience to participate and referring to this as “ladies night” while the demographics disagreed. Had they been paired with an R&B act I suspect they would have gotten a much larger, more interested crowd. Finally, the style of music seems much better suited to a club, where people could dance, then a stadium where the best you could hope for is people standing.

There was a 45-minute delay while they reset the stage for Van Halen; far longer than could have reasonably been necessary. But the band probably needed to eat their undiverse collection of M&Ms. Having a usable smartphone made this infinitely more tolerable than the delays at previous concerts I’ve attended.

Van Halen opened the show with “Unchained”. The rest of the setlist was something like “Everybody Wants Some!!”, “Runnin’ With The Devil”, “Somebody Get Me A Doctor”, “Romeo Delight”, “(Oh) Pretty Woman”, “Dance The Night Away”, “Ice Cream Man”, “Jamie’s Cryin’”, “You Really Got Me Now”, “I’ll Wait”, “Women In Love”, “Hot For Teacher”, “Beautiful Girls”, “Panama”, “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love”, and “Jump”, with solos by Alex and Eddie and four new songs. The only song I really want to hear but did not was “On Fire”. (“Right Now” would also have been nice, but I didn’t expect they would do any Hagar-era tunes.) They played virtually non-stop for 110 minutes, not even leaving the stage between “thank you, goodnight!” and “do you wanna hear one more song?”. The only exception was a long, boring screed by DLR about his sheepdogs before “Ice Cream Man”.

Sometimes, when songs that were recorded with 1970′s era production values are played live with modern sound reinforcement I realize they are much harder and heavier than I had ever imagined. (This may also be because bands deliberately play louder, faster, and with more distortion than they would have wanted to back in the day, as a response to the development of metal since then.) I noticed this effect more at this concert than any other I’ve attended. But Eddie’s guitar was actually too loud for my taste — not in an absolute sense, though it was deafening, but relative to the bass and drums.

Still, the parts of the band that I could hear well sounded great. My opinion of the band’s new-ish single “Tattoo” has not changed (I do not care for it), but I liked their other new material and will have to buy the album. Alex’s drum solo was accompanied by synthesized horn stabs that I at first thought he was triggering by striking electronic pads but eventually realized must have either been pre-recorded or played by someone off-stage. I did not care for it. Eddie’s solo mostly consisted of pieces of “Eruption” and “Cathedral”, and was breathtaking.

Having now seen him live, I feel pretty confident in saying there is no one better at what David Lee Roth does, defined as grabbing your attention, shrieking melodically in time (actually, out of time surprisingly often), jumping around while twirling his microphone stand like a drum major, wearing sequined leather pants yet not looking ridiculous — being the frontman of a rock band known for excess. Then again, I haven’t actually seen Robert Plant, Bon Scott, Roger Daltrey, or Axl Rose, so perhaps I should reserve judgment. But I cannot fathom how some people (friends of mine included!) prefer the Sammy Hagar-led version of the band. And Eddie seems like virtually the only person who does what he does — sublimely mixing rhythm and lead parts, inventing new playing techniques, and coaxing sounds out of his guitar that no one else had ever heard.

Although it does not seem like a very rock & roll thing to do, I am glad they ended the concert at 10:50, since I had responsibilities to return to. Of course, I did not get out of the parking garage until 11:30 … The next morning was not pleasant, but it was definitely worth it.

March 11, 2012

A Half Solution

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 9:35 pm

Regarding the decision I wrote about last week, we have committed to one of options 1, 2, or 3. That is, I have accepted an offer to join the faculty of King’s College. I explicitly discussed the possibility of leaving after a few years with my new colleague, so if it comes to that I will not feel too bad. Rachel is still in the process of looking into physician jobs in Wilkes-Barre, but my guess is that I will be commuting from near Williamsport.

March 5, 2012

Seeking Approximate Solutions To The Two-Body Problem

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 12:49 am

The two-body problem is a well-known type of system that can be modeled in physics. It is also used informally to describe the difficulty of two academics who are married to each other finding jobs in the same city. That is not my situation, but I think it generalizes reasonably well to any married couple trying to find jobs near each other that meet their requirements. It is possible to find exact solutions to the real two-body problem, but I am not so sure about the figurative one.

As regular readers know, my wife Rachel and I would both like to have professional careers: I am an academic and she is a family physician. Through my time in graduate school and then in temporary jobs, and hers in medical school and then residency, we have made this work. Meeting our disparate career objectives has meant spending a lot of time apart from each other, but as a temporary measure we have found that to be acceptable. But this coming year is different. Rachel will finish her residency in June and I will finish my current temporary contract in May. The time has come for both of us to find employers we would like to work for for the next 35 years. And while we have liked to pretend that this day would never come, we need to make some difficult, life-altering decisions within the next eight days.

What I am looking for is an institution dedicated to primarily teaching undergraduates, for a balance of responsibilities near 75% teaching and 25% research, for courses that I find worthwhile and interesting, and for students who are talented and engaged in their studies. In the entire eastern half of Pennsylvania, there are six such long-term jobs available for the coming year. If I can extrapolate from the few data points that have been shared with me, there were probably around 150 applicants for each of these positions. Fortunately, I have been offered one of these six jobs, and if I could make the decision in a vacuum I would accept it in a heartbeat.

What Rachel is looking for is a medical practice where she would have long-term relationships with patients of all ages, where she could have a healthy work-life balance, and where she would have the opportunity to offer obstetric services to her patients. While demand for primary-care physicians is high virtually everywhere that we would consider living, opportunities for family physicians to do obstetrics are quite uncommon, and especially rare in urban areas (where almost all institutions of higher education are located). Fortunately, Rachel has been offered a job that has all of these features, and that would allow her to continue working with people that she knows and likes. If she could make the decision in a vacuum, she would not hesitate to accept.

What both of us want is to settle down, buy a house, have children, and live and work in the same area for the rest of our pre-retirement lives. We would prefer to do so in an area that is at least semi-rural. We would like to spend more time together than we now do (currently, I live 3.5 hours southeast of her Monday through Friday for my job). We would like to live close to our extended families in southeastern Pennsylvania, and we would like to be as involved in our future childrens’ lives as much as is possible while both working in fields where a 40-hour work week is laughable. Unfortunately, the two opportunities that would be great independently do not very compatible with these desires.

We seem to have five options:

  1. We accept both jobs. This sounds great, but it would mean a combined 3.5 hour daily commute split between the two of us (mostly for me, since she need to be close to the hospital). That means not just a frustrating amount of time driving, but very little time awake and at home together (and with the children we would like to have at some point). I would likely need to be on the road before 6:00am each morning and would not return until 7:00pm. And we would remain a solid three hours away from our families. Part of me wants to take this option, but others scream that it would be insane.
  2. We accept both positions, but intend to stay only until something better becomes available. This makes the unappetizing parts of option 1 temporary, but has major problems of its own. First, it would feel to me like acting in bad faith. I’ve been counseled that “the institution feels no loyalty toward you; you should feel no loyalty toward the institution”, but I do feel loyalty to my would-be temporary colleagues who would be left to clean up the mess after I left. Second, it is not clear that this would even work. There are four schools reasonably close to my wife’s job offer. One does not offer a major in computer science, one has had such difficulty balancing their budget in recent years that they have been cutting entire departments, one only offers two-year degrees, and the last has already had three opportunities to hire me and chosen someone else each time. Realistically, we would probably both have to get new jobs in a few years for this option to make sense, and that means that we must push off putting down roots for another few years at least.
  3. I accept my offer and Rachel looks for a job closer to where my offer is. This is great for me, but pretty bad for her. It looks like any jobs in that area would not include obstetrics, and I am not sure I can ask someone to give up a part of her dream for my sake.
  4. Rachel accepts her offer, I reject mine. In this scenario I am hoping that another temporary position like I hold now opens up. If it does not, I basically give up my dream and what I spent the last seven years preparing for. But even in the best case this ends up looking a lot like option 2, but with me being an even less attractive candidate in the future. Unless I think there is a real chance of a local position opening up in the next few years and I being the most attractive candidate to fill it, this either ends with me in a long string of temporary positions that involve living apart from my family or with me outside academia entirely.
  5. We reject both offers and keep looking. This is perhaps the scariest choice of all. There are still chances that I could get offers from other institutions, but looking at the numbers these chances are not very high. And even if I did, none of them are really in better places for Rachel to find a job she would love.

We must make a decision about my offer at least by March 12. It seems silly to complain about this situation when 8% of state residents cannot find any job at all, but this is where we are. Do you have any wisdom that could help us choose one of these options? Or could we take a sixth option that hasn’t occurred to me?

January 18, 2012

Perspective: SOPA Vs. NDAA

Filed under: Computing,Politics — chadhogg @ 11:31 am

The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act are bad policy. I hope that they are defeated, and I am delighted that so many individuals, organizations, and businesses are engaging in activism against them. But where were they when the National Defense Authorization Act was passed last month?

The stated objective of SOPA (and its Senate version, PIPA) is to reduce copyright infringement. Following is my understanding of their contents, based on a lot of reading but no legal training. In short, the bills require that websites declared to participate in or facilitate copyright infringement be censored, through techniques such as requiring search engines to remove those sites from their results, requiring businesses to sever connections with these sites, and perhaps even requiring Internet Service Providers to forcibly block their customers from reaching these web sites. The procedures under which a website could be declared website non grata range from the relatively reasonable (a court order requested by the U.S. Justice Department) to the completely insane (a request from a copyright holder directly to third parties, which they would be legally obligated to follow unless the accused could prove their innocence). The bills would criminalize types of infringement that are currently matters of civil liability. Perhaps worst of all, they would make the operators of websites responsible for content posted on their websites by third parties without the consent or knowledge of the operators. It is, overall, a very bad idea for everyone other than the MPAA, the RIAA, and their lobbyists and representatives.

The National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2012 does a great many things, most of them routine and uncontroversial. But it also allows the U.S. government to without a court order, trial, or any oversight whatsoever indefinitely detain U.S. citizens in military prisons. President Obama has issued a signing statement promising that his administration would not exercise these powers, but his successors may have no such qualms. The act itself states that it “may not be construed to affect any existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States”, though the language of the bill plainly does so.

SOPA is terrible, but if you think SOPA is the biggest threat to American liberty, or the government action most worthy of protest, then you and I are of very different minds. (This is also true if you think abrogation of the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is necessary and proper but requiring companies to compensate society for the negative externalities of their actions is tyranny, but that’s a different discussion.)

December 28, 2011

McSweeney’s And Christmas Music

Filed under: Music — chadhogg @ 9:11 pm

Last night I stumbled across a short series of essays by David Hill. In each, he tells a story about a bet he made (blackjack, chess, professional boxing, or horse racing) juxtaposed with either an unrelated story from his life or a broader perspective. I am still learning to enjoy short fiction, thanks to Cocca, but I can spend all night reading beautifully-written non-fiction.

So then I wandered over to a much longer series by Charlie Hopper, in which he describes his attempts at songwriting and hopes of selling a song to a country musician. I fall into the category of Nashville haters that he describes in the second iteration: I can respect the work of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, but find pretty much everything played on a modern country radio station to be schlock. But as someone with a fair amount of musical knowledge and ambition but zero songwriting talent, I could not stop reading. Even if you have no interest in music, Hopper has some fantastically frank insights into interpersonal conversations and internal monologues.

The most recent entry in Hopper’s Dispatches is about Christmas songs, and he states “It’s true: I have a lot of opinions about Christmas music”. That’s true of me as well, and this is what I really intended to write about.

For not the first time, I was called a Grinch this year when I declined to listen to Christmas music, even early on Christmas Eve. I acquiesced later that day, but with a request for “traditional” songs. What I meant was something like “Angels We Have Heard On High”, “Away In A Manger”, “The First Noel”, Hark The Herald Angels Sing”, “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear”, “Joy To The World”, “O Little Town Of Bethlehem”, “Silent Night”, and so forth, most of which I adore. What I got instead was the like of “The Christmas Song”, “Frosty The Snowman”, “Let It Snow”, “The Little Drummer Boy”, “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “White Christmas”, “Winter Wonderland”, and the like, most of which fill me with nothing but queasiness and annoyance.

You might look at these two lists and infer that I only like sacred Christmas music, and there is probably some amount of truth to that idea. I think it would be more accurate to say that I like Christmas music that was written in the 19th Century rather than the 20th Century. I like a lot of music that was written in the 1930s through 1960s, but it just does not work for me in this context. Popular Christmas music is chock-full of cringe-inducing features that are not otherwise prominent in music of the big band and rock and roll era: syrupy string arrangements; deliberately cutesy, child-like, sing-songy voices; and Spector-like production chief among them.

Unfortunately, those features are present in most recordings of those songs I like as well, which is why I am generally opposed to listening to Christmas music at all. And really, that’s the point. For me, Christmas music is not something you listen to; Christmas music is something you do. So if you want to go caroling, I’ll be there. If you want to turn on a mainstream radio station in the month of December, “bah, humbug!”

Note: This topic seemed familiar. It appears I wrote about approximately the same sentiments three years ago. Other note: Is it a bad thing that whenever I read something I wrote even a relatively short time ago I find myself mostly wishing I had never written it?

December 13, 2011

Hockey, Pugilism, And Brain Damage

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 9:28 pm

Every hockey fan should read this excellent series of articles from the New York Times about the life and death of Derek Boogaard. Given that he played for the Rangers last year (a division rival of my favored Philadelphia Flyers), I am a little surprised to not recognize the name.

My earliest hockey-related memories are of attending Hershey Bears games with my father and some family friends. All of us enjoyed the games, but when there was a fight on-ice (and in the AHL circa 1990, that was often) my father’s friend and his son cheered with an intensity that I found deeply frightening. Violence made their eyes light up in a way nothing else did, and looking around the arena it was clear they were not alone. Fortunately, I had many later and more positive hockey experiences as well. For a few years my father and I played all-ages pickup games of roller hockey most Sunday afternoons, and then I played 10 seasons (Fall and Spring) in an organized, age-partitioned league.

The Times reporting makes it clear that Boogard’s brain damage might have been caused by his many fights, but his drug use may also be at least partially responsible. And it sounds like he had developmental issues prior to playing hockey that may have indicated there were already problems in his brain. It is also clear that while the same kind of damage has been found in other former players, the level in Boogard’s case is an extreme outlier. But if you ignore the brain damage entirely, there is still plenty in the article to be angry about. This, for example, just breaks my heart:

Exactly what happened that winter’s night has been left to the rusty memories of the few dozen in attendance. This much is clear: Melfort was losing badly, and 15-year-old Derek Boogaard was suddenly inside the other team’s bench, swinging away at opposing players. [...] Players scattered like spooked cats, fleeing over the wall or through the open gates. “He had gone ballistic,” Len Boogaard said. “It was something I hadn’t seen before.” Eventually subdued and sent to the dressing room, Boogaard re-emerged in his street clothes. [...] Len Boogaard nodded toward the few unfamiliar faces in the bleachers. There were about 10 scouts from teams in the Western Hockey League, a junior league that is a primary gateway to the N.H.L. Among them were two men representing the Regina Pats — the chief scout, Todd Ripplinger, and the general manager, Brent Parker. “All the Western League scouts’ jaws are down like this,” Parker said. His mouth fell open at the memory. Ripplinger and Parker scribbled a note saying that the Regina Pats wanted to add Derek Boogaard to their roster.

There are so many things terribly wrong with this anecdote:

  • Rightly or wrongly (more on this later), on-ice fights between two willing and aware combatants are tolerated in many hockey leagues. That is not what happened here. A person whose emotions are so out of control that he is assaulting 20 people at once needs serious, professional help. Instead, he got a contract.
  • Fifteen year old children should not be playing on semi-professional sports teams. They should be living at home, attending normal schools, and being kids. No other major sport that I know of has something equivalent to ice hockey’s junior leagues.
  • It is clear that Boogaard was signed to the team for one reason: to fight. And it becomes clear later that he was expected to do so, and did so often. Let’s temporarily assume that fighting should be tolerated in hockey and that teenagers should be playing junior hockey. Even if that is true, paying a child to fight, and expecting him to earn it, is unconscionable.

In theory fighting is allowed in (some) hockey as a way for players to prevent and punish other illegal or dangerous acts through vigilantism. That has never made much sense to me. If player A, from team 1, makes a questionable play against player B, from team 2, this may result in players C and D, from teams 1 and 2 respectively, fighting. This is supposed to somehow deter player A from future dangerous plays? I cannot see how. The real reason fighting is tolerated is because spectators enjoy it (some more than others). It is certainly not an important part of the game. The 2010 Winter Olympics, in which fighting was considered a very serious offense (and thus did not happen), was some of the most exciting hockey I have ever seen.

It may seem odd that a fan of the “Broad Street Bullies” would be arguing against fighting. Well, the team earned that nickname before I was born. They do have an enforcer-type on the team currently, and I strongly dislike him. (Jody Shelley, who interestingly also played for the Rangers, perhaps just before Boogaard did.) They also have a potential enforcer-in-training (Zac Rinaldo), about whom I am still making up my mind. But among recent players I liked Dan Carcillo and loved Ian LaPerriere, both of whom served more than their fair share of major penalties.

The NHL has been very diligent about policing and severely penalizing the kinds of body checks that they believe are likely to cause serious injury. It seems strange that the same league who is very concerned about the danger of being thrown into the boards head-first would have no problem with being repeatedly punched in the head. I presumed this was because they had some evidence that the former really was much more dangerous than the latter. But is that so? The one data point of Boogaard certainly indicates that it is worth carefully considering.

Then again, brain damage at times seems nearly unavoidable. I have been writing this during intermissions and commercial breaks in a game where the Flyers are playing without 15% of their usual lineup. Claude Giroux, Brayden Schenn, and Chris Pronger are all recovering from concussions and “concussion-like symptoms”. None of their injuries were causes by fighting. Worse, none of their injuries were caused by the kinds of illegal plays that are known to be dangerous. Rather, they were the freak results of very normal-looking plays. Sidney Crosby, the face of the league, is out again, having returned for only 6 games after missing most of a season with his own head injury. As is happening in football, it seems to be increasingly clear that no simple rule changes or better enforcement are enough. Do we need drastic rule changes? Better equipment? Something must change if contact sports are going to survive.

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