Xenogears / Xenosaga

Xenogears was once described to me as "the best book I've ever played." I understood and agreed immediately: it has more text than any other game I'm familiar with, of any era or genre. (Including any work of interactive fiction.) Its fan-transcribed script on GameFAQs weighs in at a total of 826K. (For comparison, Odin Sphere's is only 300K; Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, 454K; Final Fantasy XII, 303K script + 341K bestiary.)

(I did like it, but it's been seven or eight years since I played it, so I'm afraid I can't give a reasonable review.)

Immediately following the above comment, Xenosaga (I, as II and III hadn't yet been produced) was recommended to me by someone else as "the best movie I've ever played." Which, again, I agreed with, although I had to first borrow the game from the recommender and play it through.

Unfortunately, unlike Xenogears, the RPG elements suffered for it. I recall getting through the entire game without using the A.G.W.S. after their introduction; they seemed pointless. (Perhaps I was overleveled?) It also suffers from repetitive and too-large environments — explained almost plausibly via appeal to nanotech, but that didn't stop me from getting lost, or bored walking from one side of a huge room to the other for the kth time. Alas, while XsII and XsIII fixed the mecha battles, the environments stayed annoyingly sterile through XsII and in many parts of XsIII.

While the story began interestingly enough — even the vaguely Evangelical Gnosticism-based technology and rambling (Jungian-flavored, for a change) — and the main characters stayed actual characters (unlike NGE), in the end it still succumbed to the common failing of overly-allusive videogames that many of the events depicted made no sense whatsoever unless interpreted solely as metaphor, growing increasingly rarefied and symbolic as time went on. It feels surreal saying this, but I have to credit the "Erde Kaiser" sidequests — gleeful, tongue-in-cheek homages to pre-Evangelion mecha anime — with giving the game some much-needed grounding in (at least a literary excuse for) reality.

I have no conclusion. But then, neither did the series, really, so I'm fine with that.

Subtle villainy

I ran the vacuum-brush over the tracings in the surface, clearing away the last of the scattered filings, and stood back to review my work. The inscription looked right, but it wouldn't be the first time I'd botched a₂ and not realized it until well afterward — not that anyone would likely ever have noticed, but it was the principle of the thing.

As far as I could tell, however, it was correct, and the namcub was complete. I allowed myself to believe, for a moment, that it was perhaps the only functional namcub ever — but no, surely some Assyriologist had said in jest, to a friend, "You will not understand these words;" and it was no more than that, really.

❧❧❧
Some weeks later, a story in the paper caught my eye. A local man had been injured by swinging his mass-produced ornamental sword, which had snapped under its own weight, shattering along a line in its engraving. The company had disclaimed all responsibility, pointing out that the documentation with the blade clearly stated that it was for display only, not for actual use, including practice or demonstration purposes; and that any warranty would have been voided by the after-purchase engraving done on it.

(The namcub had read, in translation: "When swung, this blade shall break." I allowed myself a smile, and moved on.)

G1 Applications

So I haven't looked the Android Market in weeks; I completely missed the memo about for-pay applications being released.

However, I'm a cheapskate, so I shan't be purchasing any of them. Furthermore, I'm mostly in it for the random entertainment value, so I really only look at the useless applications. Here's a quick rundown of a few relatively recently released free applications that I've grabbed:

G-Force (by Blake La Pierre)

The G1 has a built-in accelerometer (among other sensors); this application simply displays its current value (constantly graphed), as well as the minimum and maximum acceleration detected. Goes up to at least 5.02G (it's all in the wrist) and down to 0.03G (except when it's not).

Color of Orientation (by higaki_k)

Despite the title and rainbow icon, this application has nothing to do with sexual orientation; it uses the accelerometer (and possibly the magnetic sensor as a compass) to detect the current orientation of the phone and display different colors. Unfortunately, it seems to use Tait-Bryan angles as input values to the color functions; this leads both to unsightly discontinuities and to a total inability to produce yellow under the default color settings.

Vampire Repellent (by Nobody special [sic])

A program intended to repel vampires. I cede that I was not, in fact, attacked by vampires while the program was running, but it seems likely to me to have as much as a 33% false positive rate.

... so yeah, actually it just displays a Gothically gaudy cross design while playing music.

Blue Screen (by Hongbo)

Locks up your phone, displaying a strangely believable Blue Screen Of Death. None of the buttons help.

Terminal velocity

In the game Portal — which needs no introduction — there is an achievement entitled “Terminal Velocity”. Under Portal's physics engine, actual terminal velocity is reached much more quickly than the not-quite-stratospheric 30,000 feet (9144 m (yes, exactly)) that Chell must fall to be awarded this achievement. This is one of the easier achievements to unlock; all it requires is a flat ceiling, a flat floor, and a little patience.

The physics engine doesn't appear to discriminate — for a number of reasons — between in-portal and out-of-portal terminal velocity; `v_t` is a constant for Chell, regardless of where she's falling either from or to. Given the observed effects of the portals, though, this isn't actually what would happen: there would be a small but measurable — perhaps even noticeable — increase in terminal velocity in the case where she is falling from one portal directly down into another.

As can be observed in several locations throughout the game, objects above (or below) portals are affected by gravity exactly as though the portals were not present. Relevantly, this necessarily includes a) Chell and b) air (especially the air Chell is pushing). Thus there will be a significant downward component to the velocity of the air in the column of space between the two portals. This would be true even if only air were present in the column: the entire column of air would simply undergo free-fall.

There are limits to this, of course: the air in the column will not necessarily stay in the column due to Brownian motion and interaction with the air (or walls) adjacent to the column. Still, there would be at least a standing downward breeze. (The actual force of the breeze in the equilibrium state would, ceteris paribus, be roughly inversely proportional to the surface area of the air-column, where interaction takes place; intuitively it seems that the shape and size of the surrounding room should affect it, but I can't think how to state that at the moment.)

At any rate, the air in the column would exert less backwards force on a falling Chell, since it would be falling with her; her actual terminal velocity would be her normal `v_t` plus the speed of the equilibrium-state breeze. (Whether or not her presence would affect the latter value I am not at all sure.)

Directions

So picture a space with seven labelled directions. (As shall be clear, I am not quite sure how many dimensions it really has.) We shall use the names north, south, east, west, aust, up, and down. (I am told the direction name aust comes from Rats and Gargoyles, by Mary Gentle (though I haven't read it myself, and don't know what properties it has therein.)

We shall refer to up and down as the vertical directions, north and south as the polar directions, and east, west, and aust as the parapolar directions. Each polar direction is perpendicular to each parapolar direction, and the vertical directions are also perpendicular to all the rest.

Let `n`, `s`, `e`, `w`, `a`, `u`, and `d` be operators, meaning to move one unit in the corresponding direction. The space and directions are such that these operators have the following properties:

• Associativity and commutativity. (They are generators for an abelian group.)
• `ns = ewa = ud = 1`.

So far, so banal. There's nothing terribly interesting here yet, as this space has a simple model that can be reasonably embedded in `RR^4`: a lattice of unit equilateral triangles in the `xy` plane, duplicated along a lattice of unit squares in the `zw` plane. (It may be easier to picture it without the vertical directions; that will fit in `RR^3`, since it's just a stack of triangle lattices.) An east-west-aust trip runs around a triangle in the lattice, returning you to your starting point.

Now for the fun part:

• When a human stands up and faces aust, and raises her hands up from her sides to point away from her, one hand will point north, and one hand will point south.
• When a human stands up and faces north, and raises her hands up from her sides to point away from her, one hand will point east, one hand will point west, and one hand will point aust.

Ico

Ico is a third-person action-adventure game produced and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and released in late 2001 — unusually, in September in North America, and only in December in Japan.

At the time, the game was notable for its use of bloom, an effect hitherto little-used in games due to the large processing capacity necessary to render it; the new Playstation 2 console's “Graphics Synthesizer” was significantly more powerful than any other consumer-available graphics hardware of the time, and Ico showed off its capabilities well. (It was not for another console generation that bloom would become common: Team Ico was no doubt assisted in their efforts by two years' worth of attempts to get the game running on the original Playstation, a task they eventually abandoned in favor of the then-still-in-development PS2.)


Ico's use of bloom is still notable today: not so much because it uses bloom more heavily than most modern games — although it does, I think — but because it does so without being obtrusive or trite. There is a certain freshness and an honesty to it, aided by the sense of almost Myst-like wonder that the game manages to consistently evoke.

The game is relatively short, and the storyline simple; it's the characters — the protagonist Ico, the sinister Sorceress-Queen, and our little firefly of a glowy damsel-in-distress Yorda — that bring the game home. Their characterization is (writers take note!) aided, rather than constrained, by their inability to communicate verbally with each other.

The gameplay itself is admittedly nothing to write home about, reaching its none-too-widely separated zenith and nadir in, respectively, the puzzle-interaction and combat action sequences. (Many would reverse these, complaining about their inability to direct Yorda; strangely I never found that to be the case, though I did once or twice find myself playing a 3D version of the old game hunt-the-magic-pixel with various scenes.) Still, ‘nothing to write home about’ is very good indeed for a game designed, as Ico explicitly was, to be first and foremost a work of art and only secondly a game: such rarely succeed at even the former endeavor. Ico does.

As such, I suppose, my usual metric doesn't do Ico justice; but for the sake of completeness, it does receive a 1 out of 1 — a humble enough thing to give, in return for a fairy-tale's worth of memories.

Pathfinder Chronicles (9/9)

(This is the conclusion to a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Pathfinder Chronicles is, from my perspective, a pretty good hamburger.

Juicy, but not overly so; made with good meat, not cooked to long or too little. The bun has been lightly toasted, and isn't so greasy you have to wipe your hands every time you pick it up. There's lettuce and tomato and onion and pickles, which I don't really care for, but it's in one piece and easily removed — not like you get from some places (I'm looking at you, Sonic) where the lettuce is shredded and it takes forever and a fork to get it all off because it's all been smashed together and you have to pick it out of the mayonnaise.

But, y'know, I've had a lot of hamburgers in my life, and I got tired of them eventually.

The more I read of Pathfinder Chronicles, the more I kept seeing similarities between Golarion and Abeir-Toril. (I haven't enough familiarity with the world of Greyhawk to know if I should be seeing similarities there, but I suspect I ought.) I didn't, I should emphasize, see similarities with the paella-like Planescape or the nabemono we know as Eberron.

At any rate, the setting of the Inner Sea appears to have been specifically designed after the fashion of the major fantasy settings, and to appeal to fans of what is called "European fantasy," or classic sword-and-sorcery. That's just not what I'm looking for right now.

Now if you want a hamburger, well, it is a good hamburger. And if I were just hungry, it'd certainly be nothing to turn up my nose at.

But I was really in the mood for pad Thai. Or chicken Marsala. Or unagi-zushi. Or key lime pie.

Pathfinder Chronicles (8/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

The prestige classes themselves are mostly interesting thematically — I have some reservations concerning the Harrower's powers' high variance of usefulness, mind, and 'augmenting existing spells' isn't much, flavorwise, for tactical cartomancy. (... and now I want to design a full-fledged tactical cartomancer class. Oh well.) The Red Mantis Assassin isn't particularly intended for PCs (although even that's plausible in certain campaigns with certain play groups), but it fills the function of a villain template well: I recommend that players intending to play in Golarion, rather than GM, not read the powers of this prestige class.

(Sadly the almost-eponymous Pathfinder Chronicler does not live up to the standards of novelty -slash-interestingness set by the other four; it reminds me of the loremaster or that one Forgotten Realms Harper prestige class.)

The non-rules-text chapters are by turns dull and droll: the aside concerning the alleged hallucinogenic properties of thileu bark was very nearly worth the price of admission all on its own, but the Darklands (for instance) are only roughly sketched, with few or none of the points of exemplifying detail that bring life to a setting.

A few appendices fill out the remaining 12 pages: a guide to the currently published Pathfinder adventures, a pronunciation guide, a collection of random encounter tables, and — both usefully and interestingly — a collection of sample characters, usable as either allies or antagonists (depending on need and context).

Pathfinder Chronicles (7/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Chapter 5 of the PCCS is, appropriately enough, titled as is the final card of the Major Arcana: The World. (Insert your choice of .hack, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, or Escaflowne reference here.)

A ten-thousand-year-long timeline heands the chapter: it's been ten thousand and one years since Earthfall, when the Starstone's arrival kicked off a nuclear winter. (Well, ten thousand and two, now, since they intend to track Golarion time to real time.) The remainder of the chapter consists of short essays, tables of information, and random other things that didn't fit anywhere else, arranged (as always) alphabetically by section header.

Note that "random things that didn't fit anywhere else" includes very nearly all the rule-text in this book. The ten pages detailing the five prestige classes (found between Lost Kingdoms and Psionics) are probably the most rules-dense pages herein; throw in the two pages' worth of feats, and that's the lion's share of the actual OGL information. (Yes, all the non-rules are Product Identity, copyrighted and trademarked.)

There's a small smattering of random equipment; notably, the fuuma shuriken has been incarnated as the starknife, and given a completely non-Asian flavor. (No, there is no Buster Sword. Not even a fullblade.) There are also a few spells, but the spell section (Domain Spells) is padded out with preëxisting OGL spells (genesis and true creation, at least). The feats section is more creative — Veiled Vileness is one of those that you would think someone would have come up with before now, although it should probably have 'may only be taken at 1st level' attached.

Harrow cards (a vaguely Tarot-ish phenomenon) are also available in the equipment section; they have their own prestige class, the Harrower, who uses them to augment her existing spellcasting effects. (Insert your choice of Card Captor Sakura, Yu-Gi-Oh!, or Escaflowne reference here.)

(continued next post)

Pathfinder Chronicles (6/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Chapter 4 of the PCCS is entitled Organizations; it takes up a scant 12 pages, of which one is mostly art. It could probably have been folded into Chapter 2 relatively easily: of the six major organizations depicted, only the single-page Aspis Consortium is not closely associated with a single nation. It's mostly notable for presenting the Pathfinder Society, which may be quickly summed up as "Adventurer's Guild" — there's a reason their name is on the cover of the book. While the remaining major organizations are generally more useful to a GM, being mostly the fantasy equivalent of Nazis (read: instant antagonists), the entries in the section entitled Lesser Groups are generally more interesting. (Especially the Darklight Sisterhood, Chelaxian mirrors of the Pathfinder Society, whom I find hilarious on several levels... although nowhere else in the book does there seem to be any antipathy noted towards the PS by Cheliax.)

Amusing fact: there are at least three instances where a secretive group of masked and encloaked individuals of unknown identity whose faces are never seen nor identities disclosed run a large nation- or region-spanning organization: the Pactmasters of the nation of Katapesh, the Patrons of the Aspis Consortium, and the Decemvirate of the Pathfinder Society. ... why?

Pathfinder Chronicles (5/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

The cosmology is strongly echoic of the Great Wheel: in lieu of the Inner and Outer Planes, there are the Inner Sphere (composed of the material, paramaterial, and elemental planes) and the Outer Sphere (composed of the afterlives). The latter has no fixed overall geography, but Hell still has nine layers, and Heaven seven.

The cosmology subchapter's arrangement is horrible, however. Everything within a given subsection is alphabetized, rather than being laid out in some natural internal order as the subsections themselves are. There are several points in the text where it becomes almost impossible to follow due to the collected weight of unresolved forward references. (Putting the Maelstrom before all the other Outer Sphere planes would have helped immensely in clarifying the Sphere's structure.) Worse, on the intro to the Inner Sphere on page 178, the elemental planes are named in order, "exterior to interior" — but the order given is alphabetical! (The correct order is, from the Astral inward: Fire, Earth, Water, Air. This can be inferred from the main text, and is properly depicted in the image on page 180.)

... and I'd still like to know how they're allowed to use Orcus (yes, that Orcus) and Kostchchie (note: not "Koshchei"). Of course, Orcus has been in use by NetHack for decades now, so I suppose any trademark they may have had has been let lapse. Still, I may have been a bit hasty last time: other than those two, most of the archdemons and archdevils are either new, new to me, or have always been public domain (e.g. Asmodeus, Baalzebul, Pazuzu).

Short version: the cosmology appears to have been based on "let's get as close as we can to the Great Wheel" rather than "let's make something inherently nifty". It's certainly more Wheellike than, e.g., Eberron's cosmology. Or D&D 4e's.

Pathfinder Chronicles (4/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Chapter 3 is entitled Religion, which as in any D&D Quasigeneric Fantasy setting is really only cursorily about religious practices, and more about the worshipped deities themselves. (A widely-worshipped false deity gets no mention in this chapter, for example.) A discussion of the cosmology of the world is also included, as is de rigeur.

The deities are also the usual eclectic lot, with a few notable divergences from the norm. In reading Chapter 2, I originally believed there was no deity of knowledge; as it happens, that's listed under Irori's portfolio. It's not a large part of his character, though, and I suspect gnosis would be a better description: kudos for avoiding the Boccob/Gilean/Ioun-style blandness which has no parallel in RL myths. (Admittedly I doubt that "knowledge deity" is really a coherent cross-cultural concept the same way "war deity," "thunder god," and "psychopomp" are. But I digress.)

Asmodeus also deserves special mention. (Yes, the named devils and demons dating back to 1e are present.) He's depicted as the god of contracts, which means you can imagine sane (if unwise) people praying for his active favor on occasion, which isn't really true of most evil deities.

Pathfinder Chronicles (3/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

(continued from last post)

The chapter is mostly divided up into subsections, one per nation-state or region, of two pages each (four for the major ones). The chapter title of The Inner Sea somewhat misleading, as many of the nations described do not border the Sea: it could as well be titled Avistan and Garund, for the two continents that do border it (clearly heavily based, as has been mentioned, on Europe and Africa). Six pages are also reserved for a whirlwind tour of the other four continents of Golarion.

Many of the nation-states of Avistan — notably Varisia, the River Kingdoms, and Molthune — I am hard-pressed to describe as other than "generic fantasy backdrops," and most of the rest (especially Ustalav and the Realm of the Mammoth Lords) could be fairly accurately described as "specific fantasy backdrops." Taldor barely escapes this fate by virtue of a history that embeds it firmly in the world of Golarion, rather than potentially sliding about on top of it like a penguin on a wet marble floor. (If you moved Numeria to Garund or Casmaron or an Arcadian island, who would even notice?)

Each locale also comes with at least one feat, often having "X affinity" (where X is the locale name) as a prerequisite. (The nature of "affinity" has not yet been disclosed, but I assume at present that it's roughly similar to FR's requirements for "regional feats"). Some are bland; some are flavorful; some are just asking to be exploited (especially Druma's).

Errata: Strike the place name Thuvia; replace with MacGuffinland.

Pathfinder Chronicles (2/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Chapter 2 of the PCCS, somewhat misleadingly titled The Inner Sea, is the largest single chapter, accounting for 100 of the 256 pages of the book.

First, the short, short version: Inner Sea = Mediterranean; Avistan = Europe; Garund = Africa; the Suez is open.

This glosses over a lot, of course. The PCCS is a kitchen-sink setting, and after a bit of thought one might realize that it has to be, for compelling real-world reasons: it's Paizo's only setting, so everything they do has to fit into it. (An amusing practical effect of this is that, if you find yourself stranded on Golarion, there are at least three different ways in-setting to potentially get back to Earth. Your safest bet is probably Baba Yaga, though, which should tell you something.)

(continued in next post)

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Today's anime references: in the Mwangi Expanse is located a ruin by the name of Nagisa, near the Fountain of Tabris. Near the city of Jaha are the Ruins of Seele. Also, to the south, in the Bandu Hills, is an undescribed place by the name of Eraclea Dio (presumably after Dio Eraclea).

The ruins labeled Spiro Spero are unrelated.

Pathfinder Chronicles (1/?)

(This is part of a series of posts reviewing the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting.)

Chapter 1 of the PCCS is devoted to the usual: races and classes. Moreover, since the races and classes in question are exactly those found in the SRD, there are almost no rules in this chapter. (In fact, all the rules in the book could fit on about three sheets of notebook paper, so while the book is OGLed, very little of it is OGC. But I digress.)

While the history of the world of Golarion is covered in more detail later, it's clear that humans dominate the setting: there are two pages describing each nonhuman race, then two pages describing each human nationality. The nonhumans are mostly unsurprising: the dwarves mine and craft, while the elves are mildly otherworldly and mostly live in the woods, and both have fallen from their respective once-heights; the halflings stand in humans' shadows; the half-orcs and half-elves have the same torn-between-two-heritages stories most 3.5 settings have associated with them.

As for the gnomes, though, Paizo has taken their cliché happy-go-lucky and cavalier outlook and behavior and calmly cranked it up past 'eleven' and well into 'mad'. And then broken off the knob. Players of Changeling: The Dreaming will perhaps see echoes thereof.

The human nationalities are almost all Expys of various real-world groups: Arabs, Celts, Indian, Norse, Romany — the Mwangi and Tian are explicitly collections of nationalities improperly lumped together by the more European groups: the former corresponding to the various African and Australian aboriginal tribes, and the latter to various East Asian cultures. (What, no Native Americans?)

The millennia-sunken city of Azlant corresponds to Atlantis (with bits of R'lyeh), though perhaps more accurately to Rome: many humans and human nations claim Azlanti genetic or cultural descent (with varying accuracy and veracity). The Taldane are decidedly English, but not of any particular era — they're a curious mix of Victorian-era and postcolonial England. Only they, the Chelaxians, and the Garundi do not directly map onto a real-world Terran culture, or at least not one that comes to mind.

There's a very clear reason implied for this: those three are the major cultures at the focus of the campaign setting. GMs can thus bring in exotic NPCs from exotic lands without having to have those exotica detailed in an actual Pathfinder sourcebook — Wikipedia will suffice.

The class descriptions are short, containing almost nothing surprising to a veteran of D&D 3.x; since the rules are in the SRD, they're not included here — there's only a page of flavor text each for the unlikely, but not entirely impossible, case that someone has purchased the book without knowing what rôle a ‘rogue’ typically fills in society and adventure. However, each class description is accompanied by an optional tweak — a class-ability substitution, typically limited to certain origin-locales.

An extra-special note: under the Tian-Shu male names, amongst several other perfectly normal Chinese names transliterated in the ubiquitous tone-stripped hanyu pinyin, the impossible name "Syaoran" is given. There is only one feasible source for this error, and it is corroborated by the presence of the name "Meilin" in the female names. Oh, hi, I see what you did there. Errata: strike "Syaoran" and replace with "Xiaolang".

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Edit 2009-03-18: trimmed.

Pathfinder Chronicles (0/?)

The Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting is a v.3.5 d20 SRD-based OGL-licensed work compatible with D&D™ 3.5e and other 3.5e-compatible OGL content, released by Paizo Publishing in August 2008.

The above sentence is far more interesting than it probably looks.

To understand why, the first thing you'd probably need to know is that the core rulebooks for D&D 4th edition were released in June 2008, with nearly a year-long buildup and hype beforehand. Plenty of time to learn a new ruleset and convert to it, if one were so inclined.

The second thing is that, while it is legally impossible for WotC to actually revoke the wide-open rights to make 3.5e-compatible books — the 3.5 SRD's both gratis and libre forever — they wrote their 4e license to contain a poison pill clause whereby publishers were not allowed to publish both 4e and 3.xe material, as well as several other clauses granting them the ability to pull the rug out from publishers at any time.

(The poison-pill clause has recently been removed, but too little, too late: and the other relevant clauses are almost all untouched. Paizo has confirmed that they have no intent to publish for 4e within the foreseeable future, and for all the same reasons they gave a year ago.)

So, after a great deal of hubbub and fuss, 4e went along its merry way without much of 3.5e's trailing flotilla of third-party publishers — some changing course, some still following, and a few just going under. And it's not like the d20 3.5 rules have expired; they're still as usable as they have been for the past several years, and Paizo's even publishing a sort of v3.75 update to sand off a few of the remaining rough edges.

Well. We'll see where it goes, won't we?

... things I almost remember...

The amazing thing about the dancing bear, the old quotation ran, was not how well it could dance, but that it could dance at all.

Sadly for the pride of the other attendees, the saying didn't hold true: Oberon and Ursula dominated the dance floor, and clearly not in the way one might expect of just under a quarter-ton of quick-moving bear — the common image of a bear as “lumbering” clearly failed to apply to either of the couple.

Yuliy muttered into his martini. "Must apologize. Have taken after students in calling Slava 'great bear of a man'."

I snerked, just quietly enough for Yuliy to hear. Vyacheslav Safronov, known for his imposing size and almost utter lack of grace, was currently towering over everyone in the far corner of the ballroom, tugging uncomfortably at his collar and watching the couple-of-the-moment with the most hangdog expression I have ever seen on the man — which was saying quite a bit, as I'd seen him frequently shortly after Ekaterina died.

"I should ask Oberon to recommend his tailor to Vyacheslav," I said, my Singapore Sling hovering vaguely near my lips as I looked over the glass's rim. "He doesn't look nearly as uncomfortable."

It was Yuliy's turn to snort at that. "Also does not look as cold as superfluid helium. Not difficult to be less uncomfortable," he said, mimicking my intonation, "than Slava in public."

"Mm," I said noncommitally. He was right, of course, but I wasn't going to give him the pleasure, not halfway through his third martini.

---

Edited 2009-03-17: Minor redescription.

Submitted...

... without comment.

(...)

A Study In Emerald

"A Study in Emerald" is a short story by Neil Gaiman, first published in the anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, a collection of short stories crossing the Canon with the Mythos. It received the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, placing it next to more famous works such as "Flowers for Algernon" and "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream", and is available from the author's own website, quite legally, here.

The crossover elements themselves, consisting mostly of a historical-fantastical divergence, are somewhat muted: with only minor changes in motive and murderer, the detective-mystery of the story could almost have been set in the Canon itself — despite the frequent allusions to "A Study in Scarlet", it reminds me as much of "A Scandal in Bohemia". (On the other hand, the all-too-common allusion to the OTL as an ATL's ATL, inserted later on, is clichéd and disappointing, feeling (as it always does) as though the author is attempting to be clever and subtle with a sledgehammer.)

Another minor nit — and a common mistake in non-Canonical works — is that Holmes appears to undergo perhaps more changes than the story itself warrants: in the Canon, Holmes is stated outright to have no astronomical knowledge whatsoever, whereas in "Emerald" he is alluded to have suggested the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity, following up on a certain paper concerning the Dynamics of an Asteroid. (But then, perhaps he would consider knowledge of astronomy more important to his work in a universe where the stars have been right.)

My gripes aside (those who can, do; those who can't, criticize), it's an excellent story, easily 1 out of 1, and certainly didn't win a Hugo for being cute. ...well, okay, maybe it did, but it still deserved it.

A followup on Novikov

So the upside to the earlier theorem — if you can call it an upside — is that time travel is unlikely to be invented in the first place. Macroscale time travel involves significantly more paradox-possibilities; the butterfly effect leads to almost inconceivably many paradoxical (inconsistent) event-sequences that the Novikov principle disallows. So time travel "causing"`{::}^1` global thermonuclear war is no more likely than global thermonuclear war occurring anyway: if one interprets probability distributions as possible universes, there are very, very few possible universes in which time travel is invented, and in most of those it doesn't stay invented for very long. Thus it's more likely that we're living down a branch of the Trousers of Time that involves time travel simply not being invented.

The downside to the upside follows from the fact that FTL + GR = time travel. If we ever get warp drives, we probably need to start building them immediately. (And then destroy them once we get wherever we're going.)

There are a couple of loopholes for us to fit through here: first, we could make relativistic causality irrelevant by, e.g., only opening wormholes to locations that are otherwise causally disconnected from us (not in our future light-cone, nor us in its); the universe is expanding quickly enough for such locations to exist. The second is merely potential, via the anthropic principle: if FTL and/or time travel are relatively easy to discover, enough so that any sufficiently advanced civilization eventually would, we can take comfort in the thought that the universe has already tried and failed to kill us all off. (Or, to be less anthropomorphic, if intelligent life is sufficiently easily formed, it might actually be more improbable that all the species that would invent time travel happen to die off before doing so than it would be to swallow the NSP-induced improbability of nonparadoxical time travel; thus our continued existence would imply that we're the trillion-sigma outliers, just because somebody has to be.)

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`{::}^1` Whether this really is causative, from a philosophical standpoint, is not terribly relevant.

-- elevator eyes --

The walls of the elevator were made of rusted, bloody barbed wire. Tied to the outside of the left wall with more barbed wire, facing inward, was the mutilated corpse of a brown-haired man, dressed in the remnants of a business suit and its own blood — more of the latter than the former. Curiously, its eyelids were carefully stitched open, to reveal a pair of empty sockets; part of a slip of paper dangled motionlessly from the left one.

Heather didn't even flinch at the stench anymore, and the mutilations performed on the body seemed almost banal at this point. She calmly reached up and pulled the slip of paper out of the dead man's eye (if it had actually ever been alive, or a man), and glanced at the typewritten sentence.

"Peek-a-boo," (she read aloud), "I see you. Yeah. Sure you do."

She turned away from the corpse, heading over to the elevator panel to press the button for the first floor — only to discover that the buttons for floors 1 and 5 had been removed, and replaced with a pair of brown eyeballs.

Her hand hovered over the unmoving, slightly glossy lower eye for a moment, before moving up to press the intact button labeled '2'.

---

  

Sairento Hiiru no uta		minna de utaou
minna de, minna de		u-ta-i-ma-shooooou~~

Novikovian Computation (2/2)

(continued from previous post)

Let's simplify and generalize: if the communications channel c has `b` bits, and there are `a` non-paradoxical answers, then (absent NSP) the probability of receiving a valid answer, `P(A_v)`, is `(1-epsilon) a/2^b`; the probability of an invalid answer, `P(A_{stackrel ~ v})`, is `(1-epsilon) {:(2^b - a):}/2^b`, and the probability of external failure, `P(_|_)`, is still `epsilon`. Note that, as required, `P(A_v) + P(A_{stackrel ~ v}) + P(_|_) = 1`, as these three exclusive possibilities make up the entirety of the event space.

In the presence of the NSP, however, the probability function `P_N(*)` is different: `P_N(A_{stackrel ~ v}) = 0`. For convenience, let `bar{:A_{stackrel ~ v}:} = A_v uu _|_` be denoted by `C` (for consistent).

The NSP essentially gives us that, for any event-set `E sube C`, `P_N(E) = P(E|C)`. We can therefore compute `P_N(E)` by Bayes' theorem: `P_N(E) = P(E|C) = {:P(C|E)P(E):}/{:P(C):}`. Of course, `P(C|E) = 1`; so after some mild algebra, we have`P_N(A_v) = {:a (1-epsilon):}/{:a (1-epsilon) + 2^b epsilon:}`, `P_N(_|_) = {:2^b epsilon:}/{:a (1-epsilon) + 2^b epsilon:}`.
If we have a reasonably reliable system, such that `epsilon ≪ 1`, these will basically be `{:a:}/{:a + 2^b epsilon:}` and `{:2^b epsilon:}/{:a + 2^b epsilon:}` respectively. Note that the probability of failure goes up exponentially with the number of bits being communicated and tested (assuming `a` remains constant as `b` increases). For Novikovian computation to be useful, we must have `a > 2^b epsilon`. (Recall that `a` is a small integer, probably on the order of 1 or 2, and definitely bounded above by `2^b`.)

Now suppose multiple time-loop-logic computational apparatuses exist (say, `n` of them), and are all executing problems concurrently. These are not discrete systems, because the probability that two apparatuses `c_1` and `c_2` will fail is not quite independent: for example, a relatively nearby star could suddenly go Type Ia supernova, flooding the solar system with ionizing radiation and thereby destroying all the apparatuses (and quite incidentally all life on Earth).

For the single-system case, divide `_|_` into `_|_ _ L` (local failure, independent) and `_|_ _ G` (global failure), with NSP-less probabilities `epsilon_L` and `epsilon_G` respectively (`epsilon_L + epsilon_G > epsilon`, since there is some overlap). Then, our consistent set `C` is `_|_ _ G + prod_{:i=0:}^n(_|_ _ {:L_i:} + A_{:v_i:})`, so we have`{:(P(C),=,epsilon _ G + (1-epsilon_G)prod_{:i=0:}^n(epsilon_{:L_i:} + (1-epsilon_{:L_i:})a/2^b)),(,=,epsilon _ G + (1-epsilon_G)1/2^{:bn:}prod_{:i=0:}^n(2^b epsilon_{:L_i:} + (1-epsilon_{:L_i:})a)):}`and therefore`P_N(_|_ _ G) = P(_|_ _ G|C) = epsilon _ G / {: epsilon _ G + (1-epsilon_G)1/2^{:bn:}prod_{:i=0:}^n(2^b epsilon_{:L_i:} + (1-epsilon_{:L_i:})a) :}`.The term on the right of the numerator is bounded above by `1/2^{:bn:}prod_{:i=0:}^n(2^b epsilon_{:L_i:} + a)`, which in the case of useful computation is itself bounded above by `1/2^{:bn:}prod_{:i=0:}^n(a + a) = 2a^n/2^{:bn:} = 2(a/2^b)^n`. This clearly goes to zero in the limit as `n` increases.

Therefore we have `lim_{:n rarr infty:} P_N(_|_ _ G) = epsilon _ G / epsilon _ G = 1`, or, in plain English:

Theorem. As the number of useful Novikovian computers in the world increases, the probability of apocalypse nears certainty.

See also the Fermi paradox, and excuse me while I go make an eschaton tag.

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Edit 2009-03-13: Fixed typo in Bayesian restatement; adjusted formatting; eliminated references to `F`.

Novikovian computation (1/2)

... or, "why time loop logic will almost surely not be developed". (This is not quite correct: see the end result.)

The Novikov self-consistency principle states that the probability of a paradoxical event is zero. This is generally only relevant when closed timelike curves come into play.

For a concrete example, let's suppose I have a time machine, and that I intend to go back in time to shoot my own grandfather. Or Hitler, if you prefer. Now obviously, even in the absence of the NSP, I have a certain chance of failing to do so, for any of several reasons:

• my time-machine may fail to operate correctly;
• my gun may fail to operate correctly;
• I may have a sudden attack of conscience or sanity or heart;
• I could be caught by the police (in either time period);
• I could be intercepted by the Hounds of Tindalos;
  
• I might successfully shoot my grandfather but fail to kill him, explaining the shortness of breath that had always plagued him;
• I might shoot and kill someone that happened to look like my grandfather, and return to the future incorrectly believing myself successful; or
  
• something else.

In a universe in which the Novikov self-consistency principle holds, the chances of the above are effectively increased significantly: I cannot succeed in the attempt any more than I can fly by flapping my arms. If all predictable sources of failure have been ruled out, an unpredicted one will emerge.

So let's consider that briefly in the context of time loop logic:

Note that if N is itself prime, i.e., there is no such prime F ≠ N, then some event will prevent the execution of step 3 that receives the value F from the future.

Assume for the sake of concreteness that the endochronic communications channel c mentioned in the article carries 32 bits of information, and that the base probability of failure due to an external event is `epsilon`. Note also that N has `omega(N)``-2` prime factors. Then, in the absence of the NSP, the probability of receiving a valid `F` is `{:(omega(N)-2)*(1-epsilon):} / 2^32`; the probability of receiving an invalid `F` is `{:(2^32 - (omega(N)-2))*(1-epsilon):} / 2^32`; and the probability of external failure is of course `epsilon`.

(continued in next post)

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Edit 2009-02-12: corrected count of prime factors.

On Yu-Gi-Oh!

At one point, in college, I was waiting outside a classroom for a class to let out (having come early), and an acquaintance of mine (who was also waiting) had brought a curious silver attaché case.

The case in question, he was more than happy to show me, contained his collection of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. He had just gotten a couple of new uncommons or rares, I seem to recall, and was assembling a new deck; and, since we had quite some time to kill, offered to explain the rules of the game, and play a quick one.

So he finished assembling his deck, choosing his cards by various arcane criteria presumably derived from his own experience with the game; and, as he did so, explained to me their various properties (all of which now elude me these long years later). Once he had done this, I assembled (with some small assistance) a deck from his collection of leftovers. I did not employ, in so doing, my meager understanding of their statistics, abilities, and properties (though I did ensure, via further questions, that I understood those well enough to play): given, firstly, that he had presumably already selected from his collection the most puissant cards and combinations, and secondly, that I had historically been at best a mediocre player of Magic: The Gathering, I understood that it was unlikely that I would win, and there was no real pretense otherwise on either of our parts. Instead, my sole criterion for selection of the cards in my deck was my untrained and uncritical opinion of the artwork thereupon.

I basically trounced him.

And this is why I have no respect for, quite specifically, the Yu-Gi-Oh! CCG — because ultimately it is a child's game, as is Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders: despite bearing many of the trappings of a game of skill and strategy, it is ultimately a game of chance.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies

So I — doubtless like many others — have a habit of trawling the clearance bins for discounted games. It's not a very fulfilling act, but every so very rarely, one can find a gem among the dust, debris, and detritus.

Today, for instance, I have found a copy of Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the Nintendo DS, for the princely sum of \$9.99. I'm not usually terribly fond of shmups — my predilection for mixing nostalgia and video games like some ill-concocted pharmacological cocktail notwithstanding — but Geometry Wars has been recommended to me by too many disparate sources that I've bowed to pressure and opportunity and picked up a copy.

It's not as pure, so to speak, as I'm told the original Geometry Wars is; there is a two-player mode, and something like levels in the single-player mode, and purchasable upgrades which themselves must be "leveled up" by gaining "XP". I can't say this affects my opinion of GW:G one way or another, although it'll probably affect my actual play: at some hypothetical future point I will have won the game, a thing not possible for the original — a verb not relevant to the original — so there will eventually be a sense of finality, and a day when it will be returned to its case knowing it to be the last time.

In the here and now, though: for the short time I put into playing it (as, while improved, I'm still not feeling up to focusing on a small screen for hours on end), it was in fact nifty. Notably, it's the first game I've played in several years without first reading the manual. To be as succinct and informative as possible: 1 out of 1.

De Regnacordibus

So the Kingdom Hearts series has an interesting setting concept where the heart and the soul are two separate components of a sapient being. (Possibly ‘of a sentient being’, although I don't think we've seen any evidence that nonsapients generate Nobodies.)

This is actually taken almost directly from Chinese mythology, in which people have two souls: the "lower" or yin soul, called the p'o, and the "upper" or yang soul, called the hun. The p'o is the animal nature; hopping vampires and hungry ghosts are the manifestation of loose, unplacated p'o. The upper soul is the intelligent nature; it proceeds on to heaven. (Players of Exalted will be familiar with this, as it was taken wholesale into the Exalted setting.)`{::}^1`

Curiously, I can't find anyone else in the English-speaking portion of the Internet who's noticed the parallel. I'm not just seeing things here, am I?

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`{::}^1`You could probably run a decent KH game in Exalted, in fact: hungry ghosts as Heartless, regular ghosts as Nobodies, the Deathlords as Organization XIII (there are already thirteen of them!)... Gummispace is the Wyld, the worlds are stabilized pockets of Creation, and Keyblade manifestation is Glorious Solar Saber. Hmm.

FF IV...

Once upon a time, a video game company by the mildly unhip name of Square Co., Ltd. released the much-awaited fourth installment in its flagship Final Fantasy series, the first native (non-ported) RPG for the Super Famicom. Attempting again to reach out to the North American market, they also had it translated into English, and published it in North America under the name Final Fantasy II — locally accurate, if somewhat inherently oxymoronic.

Most RPGs and adventure games of the time either had tabulae rasae (or nearly so) for protagonists (Zork, Ultima, Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Faxanadu) or cookie-cutter "party members" (Final Fantasy I & III, Dragon Quest III, Bard's Tale). While Japan was already starting to break this mold with such games as Sega's Phantasy Star, Falcom's Ys I & II, and Squaresoft's own earlier Final Fantasy II, the Super Famicom directly enabled Square to shatter this mold to pieces: while the SNES afforded significant advances in graphics equally to all game genres, the simple increase in memory had a far greater effect on an RPG: text (and, in their still-customary tile-based milieu, accompanying character-movement sequences) were suddenly almost cheap, allowing for far deeper storylines and more involved cutscenes than had previously been seen on a console (or on most still-floppy-driven PC titles, for that matter). FFII did not quite redefine the term "RPG" — as noted above, the redefinition had already begun — but it did fulfill that new definition's promise.

That was seventeen years ago: and seventeen years have passed.

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Pleading illness today.

Bubbles

One of the bubbles explodes, starting a chain reaction, and I reflexively jerk back —

“Dad?” Kell puts her hand on my shoulder, worried. “Are you okay?”

I grip the railing to reassure myself. I’m still on the porch, on solid ground. There’s no one around but the children, and the sky is quiet and empty blue. “No. No, it's alright,” I hurry to add. I smile at her weakly, and wince at the next string of pops — “It’s just a little loud, is all. Startled me a bit.”

Kell, quite rightly, doesn't believe a word of it. (Good girl, I think.) “Should I have them put up the bubbles?”

A particularly loud one (Boom) sounds — I try to ignore it, but I can tell by Kell’s expression I haven’t done a very good job. “No, no. Let ’em play. Besides,” I say, “maybe it'll do an old fraidy-cat good to see ’em used as kids’ toys, instead of weapons.” I pat her hand reassuringly.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see John (or possibly Jack) blow a stream of them at Jack (or possibly John). Fortunately for the blower, the bubbles all scatter and “popsplode” well before they reach their target, and their mother was looking at me besides. (They supposedly wouldn’t do more than sting if they hit, but Kell would probably ground the poor kid for life anyway. Boys.)

---

... yeah, I have no real idea what PTSD is like, and should probably do research before trying again.

I'm going to Hel for this one.

The last of the jötnar stepped off of Bifröst, and Surtr nodded.

Sinmöra drew Hævateinn, heavens-hater, shining not with Alfrödull's light; held it high, and let it fall, to chime softly against the bridge's surface. Louder that chime grew, to shake the nine worlds, and all fell to their knees and cried unheard in that impossible din; and when they stood, silence having come, naught remained of Bifröst's arch, save for a rain of colored sand.

And the Valkyrior came riding, and with them their Einheriar.

To each Valkyria, helmed and horned, there was a wingèd steed — but to each Einheri, one of a thousand conveyances from their legends and tales: dragon-steeds and giant eagles and butterflies-of-war; wingèd sandals, feathered capes, broomsticks and magic carpets; bicycles and jetpacks and great glass elevators; biplanes and fighter jets and flying saucers; mehve and ornithopters and VF-1 Valkyries.

And soon they came to the plain of Vigridr; and from above there came the sound of twice ten thousand candles burning out, and with it darkness fell; and the terrible howl of a distant wolf followed soon thereafter.

---

(Promise kept, although the prose / is kind of awkward, I suppose.)

(not quite a dream)

The Road of the Stars was longer than the apocalypse, so at some point we stopped hearing crescendos behind us. We didn't look back for a while — not that we would have turned to salt, I think, nor been trapped in the world of the dead; we just didn't want to see it until it was all over, and there was nothing left to see. What was a little more cowardice, after all?

As the silence settled, the stars began to go out beneath our feet. One by one, then in sections and splotches and swaths, shining light and warmth faded into a dull grey that seemed to drain the heat from our soles (and from our souls, if we still had them). We clutched at our jackets and ourselves and each other for warmth.

There would be nothing for us at the end of the road, we knew. But the walk — taken slowly — was nonetheless a little longer in the world than we would have had. We spent the time not talking about the all-too-recent past, not thinking about the all-too-absent future, exchanging idle inanities while the sun, too, slipped into slumber and silence behind us.

We knew the gates awaited us — or, rather, we awaited them, in unspoken dread and disacknowledgement; the gates cared not for us, metaphorically or otherwise — but we never reached them: one of us woke up.

I think... it might have been me.

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(... three of the last four posts are, in one sense or another, about the end of everything. Right, next one involves rainbows and butterflies. Promise.)

It was locked,

It was locked, of course.

I mean, it's not like we needed to go through the door to get in, or anything. For sake, there was a hole big enough to walk through not five steps away...

Bran caught my glance as he kneeled in front of the door, and followed it to the hole. "Yeah, no. For one thing," he said distractedly, peering into the keyhole with one eye, "there's a method to the madness of the mythic. You've got to go about things in a certain way —" he pulled out various lockpick-looking things — "to get anything done. It's all story and ritual," he said, leaving off the capital letters.

I shifted my grip on Clarent nervously, eyeing the vein we'd come down. "... more of this crap. God, can't we just do something directly for once?"

"And for another," he said, continuing as if I hadn't spoken, "we'll want the door open as we leave, 'cause whether things go either well or poorly, those holes aren't going to be there on our way —" click "— out." He smiled, and stood up. "After you, milady."

I gave the door a rough shove, since I couldn't really get away with doing it to Bran. It creaked noisily in protest.