Review: Dear Esther (PC)

So, I finally got around to playing Dear Esther, a game that I've been asked about a number of times during paper presentations on Minecraft but never actually experienced myself. And it was better than I expected. Of course, saying I "played" it is sort of misleading, as it doesn't really let you "play" anything in any substantive sense of the word. It is, however, a master class in how to create a virtual place, to make a player curious enough about the fictional world in front of them that they'll gladly trade time in the physical world to explore it. That doesn't happen nearly enough with video games, and even when it does, it usually isn't done this well.

When I first started up the game and realized that all you really did was walk around and look at things, and that you had to walk around really slowly, I almost gave up. But, I imagined it much the same way that I think of all the "real-life" walks I go on: typically, whether I'm going on a walk around the neighborhood, or a twenty-mile hike, the first little bit is boring. It's hard to instantly remember why I enjoy the slow-down of just walking, of just soaking in my surroundings, of not trying to "accomplish" anything other than to just be moving through space for awhile. Eventually, I settle in, and walking for the sake of walking seems as natural as breathing. Which it sort of is.

The same thing happened with Dear Esther. After the brief rough patch at the beginning, I began to sense that I wasn't always going to walking through washed-out grasslands, and that I was probably eventually going to get to find out what was at the top of that Barad-Dur-like tower in the distance. I accepted that the "game" wanted me to approach it as a sort of meditative space instead of an accomplishment-powered challenge. And, intrigued, I went for it.

It's like walking in central Idaho, only not real.

I wasn't disappointed. If my description of the "gameplay" in the previous two paragraphs sounds intriguing to you, then Dear Esther is worth your while. If it sounds like a load of horseshit, then you should probably stay away. It's another experiment in (sort of) gaming, and the results were fascinating to me.

Regarding the poetry, voiceovers, etc. that make up the story, I thought that it was great. Sure, it's a little bit of a stretch stylistically, and might seem a little overly serious, but hell, considering the way Dear Esther ends, it's not exactly supposed to be a comedy. I saw the narrative as trying to do some really interesting things with time, perspective, and the perils of having an unreliable narrator as he descends into madness during the story. Seeing as how I was studying Poe while I was playing this game, maybe it was just a happy bit of synchronicity. But I think there are a lot of clever little nuances to this story that you could, if you wanted to, try to interpret, discuss, and find more meaning in. And that's also rare for a video game. Much like Psychonauts, the narrative treats you like an adult. If you're one of those people who find games like this "pretentious," then you should probably steer clear.

If this screenshot makes you incredibly sad, then we are grief-brothers.

But, combine the game's wonderful visual setpieces, consistent sense of place, and dense, psychologically disturbing exploration of grief and illness, and...wow. This thing was really, really good.

Review: Shelter (PC)

So, as I do with most games nowadays, I got Shelter marked down on Steam on the strength of its RPS review. While I didn't quite experience John Walker's level of enthusiasm about the game, I definitely enjoyed it and found it to be more than worth the few bucks I played.

Basically, Shelter is a game in which you play as a mother badger tasked with leading her cubs to safety through the wilderness. The aesthetic is really unique, and manages to successfully bypass that whole "typical indie game quirky art style" trend by sheer force of originality.

This is badgers in the woods. Neat, huh?

The different, fairly obviously differentiated "levels" of the game range from the forest-like space you see above, to a slightly greener forest-type space, to [SPOILERS] the middle of a forest fire, to a flash flood, and a night under a full moon [END SPOILERS]. So, I found the settings to be pretty varied and the aesthetic able to translate to different levels in interesting ways rather than being a one trick pony.

The core of the game, as I said above, is your quest to lead your babies to safety. There is immediately feedback for your failure, as if a baby dies, he/she is dead, and gone, and the suddenness with which this can happen and the odd poignancy of it really surprised me. It's a point for the argument that long exposition isn't really necessary for a player to be able to build emotional attachments to characters. By the time they were carried away by a hungry eagle or washed away in a flood, I cared more about these baby badgers than I did for some characters in Baldur's Gate.

While the game is really effective at creating a feeling of futility and attrition as you march through its deceivingly beautiful locales, it's also a bit annoying in the lack of agency it gives you to protect your young. For being given such an effective mission, there's really little you can actually do to effect its outcome. You can run fast, you can hunker down and walk slow, you can dig up food and leap onto small prey to kill it...and that's about it. The babies just follow you in a chain and there's literally no other way you can interact with them besides moving and hoping that they follow. The threats to your young are clearly built around this limited model of interaction, and the ways you are expected to avoid those threats are thus surprisingly clever in some instances, but ultimately it all boils down to either a) running, b) walking slowly or c) hiding in place.

With such a beautifully realized environment and a survival-style mission, I sort of expected the game to be a bit more open. It's not. It's basically an on-rails survival simulation, which was also a little frustrating to me. When there's a fire to avoid, there's one way around it. When an eagle is hunting you, you find yourself artificially closed in to a small meadow. It heightens the terror, sure, but it also makes everything feel a little more game-y than maybe it could have had it given the player a few more choices.

"If there's a fire, stop, drop, and roll five paces to the left, then up six paces, then right fifteen paces, and then straight through that conveniently hollowed-out log!"

All that said, the experience was short, (bitter)sweet, and absolutely worth the money. In this case, my complaints about the game are more in the category of "I wish it had been this instead!" than the category of "I didn't like what it was!" For what it is, it's quite good. And its approach to emotional storytelling, such as it is, is effective enough that it's worth buying and playing just to appreciate that the devs managed to do so much with so little. But you'll also likely wish that they'd done more.

SHELTER 2: BADGER'S REVENGE

Review: Rogue Legacy (PC)

At this point, I think I've complained ad nauseum about my feelings regarding the use of "roguelike elements" in games where they don't necessarily improve the game or make it more interesting or engaging. Like throwing "RPG elements" like stat points and leveling up into AAA shoot 'em up games in the mistaken belief that somehow it makes the gameplay deeper, lots of indie devs seem obsessed with the idea that procedural generation and/or permadeath just magically make a game more enticing. According to most of the "roguelike-like" games I've played lately, that's just not true.

However, Rogue Legacy does it right. It does it so right, that about two attempts into the game I literally slapped myself on the forehead with exasperation over how obvious Rogue Legacy's approach to the genre is and how nobody (including me) had thought of it earlier.

It goes like this: 

1. Fun, Castlevania-y platforming and fighting
2. The expectation of eventual death
3. The ability to carry your loot out of the castle upon your death
4. The ability to regenerate as another hero with slightly different skills and disadvantages (the next "generation" of your adventurer family, hence the title Rogue Legacy)
5. The ability to spend your saved loot on boosting your skills/weapons/stats before your next playthough
6. The required forfeiture of all (or nearly all, later on in the game) of your loot before you try playing again (you literally pay a toll to Charon to enter the castle

What the hell does he do with all of that money, anyway?

It's bloody brilliant. It captures the essence of what's great about procedural generation (the thrill of learning the layout of a map so that you can survive better and then the challenge of having that advantage wiped away in an instant) and about sudden, frequent death (you're always working your way through the castle a little bit on tenterhooks) while allowing you to have the satisfaction of knowing that every playthrough is going to be worth something. Unless, I guess, you get whacked within seconds of entering the castle and exit with 20 gold pieces. I had playthroughs where I absolutely ripped through two entire zones of the castle and came out ready to buy ten new upgrades for my character, but those were few and far between. Yet, most playthroughs I gathered at least enough gold to buy one upgrade after my sudden and violent death, and that was enough of a sense of moving forward to keep me motivated to keep playing for the occasionally big reward of those longer runs. And that's the beauty of the game. Though you play through the same four dungeon "levels" over and over again, they're always different enough that you're forced to pay attention, and they're always going to give you some sort of reward, provided you don't absolutely biff it. 

In one fell swoop, the game does away with basically all my complaints about the roguelike genre.

But there's more. Each of your character's iterations has some randomly-assigned quirks that seem sort of goofy at first but prove to be important as you get more and more used to the game.* For example, dwarfism seems to just make your character funny-looking and small, but eventually you might realize that [SPOILER] your size allows you to access many secret rooms you couldn't otherwise reach, but that your weapon's attack range is much smaller, forcing you to get closer to enemies to attack [END SPOILER]. Each of your character is also assigned a class randomly, and the pool of available classes expands as you buy more upgrades.

Oh, and most of the in-game text is hilarious.

Each time you die, you get to choose from one of three possible successors. Oftentimes this choice allows you to choose a hero that best suits your needs for the next playthrough, but sometimes this choice gives you three terrible options and forces you to face the castle with whomever you deem the least bad option. This can make for some really interesting playthroughs. For instance, once I got stuck with a Spelunker and assumed his weak ass was going to get splattered all some spike traps by the second room of the castle. I gave it my best shot, though, and about a half hour later I died with an absurd amount of money in my wallet (?). Later on, as you unlock more classes, equipment, and things like the Architect, you can put a lot more forethought into your runs, not just choosing a character with the best abilities for what you want to accomplish, but also outfitting them with the best equipment and abilities. 

I ran into a few small annoyances later on in the game in the sense that at times it seemed like I was expected to grind for gold a bit longer than I would have liked. The castle itself is small enough and the enemies predictable enough that you can run through most of it after playing and upgrading for a few hours. But you have to beat a boss in each of the four interconnected "levels" before you can progress to the endgame, and this you cannot do without some serious leveling up. So there's a point at which the game's greatest strength becomes a sort of weakness as well, as you spend hour after hour running through nearly identical halls, slaying identical monsters for gold and slowly building stats from, say, level 2 to level 15 (out of a possible 75, for the truly masochistic). I managed to beat a few of the bosses on a lower level than I apparently should have been able to, just due to still having old-school Contra reflexes, and it was nice in a way to occasionally overcome the grind through what felt like sheer playing skill, but then there was one boss in particular that I had to spend 2-3 hours leveling before I could defeat it, so there's going to be a bit of grinding mid-game regardless of how good you are. 

It was him. This motherfucker.

And it's a little annoying once you realize that many of the rooms and traps are identical and the enemies in the harder levels are just bigger, stronger, faster versions of the enemies in the early levels. One of the early thrills in the game was learning enemy types, their patterns, and their weaknesses, so this bummed me out a little.

This wizard is just like the others, but the sprite it bigger and it's more killy!

That said, Rogue Legacy was awesome, and if I didn't have so many games in my queue right now, I'd be going back for New Game+ right away. The platforming and fighting itself feels almost perfect (moving horizontally always feels a little slidey to me for some reason), and so even when you're grinding at length the basic gameplay always stays fun in that repetitive-mindless-but-good way. And strategizing your character's build in the later game really adds a surprisingly deep layer of planning that I didn't expect from the game at first. Good times! 

The end!

* This isn't true of all the traits; for example, the one that makes you constantly fart loudly really has no point aside from FARTS which are FUNNY.

(Cold) Walking

I had to get up extra early this morning to get to work before a breakfast with the Provost that started at 7am. Since September, I've been riding my bike to work, but this has been getting harder and harder because of the weather. Leaving the house today at 630 instead of my usual 800, coupled with the fact that it was three degrees outside made the decision to walk instead of riding justifiable.

Living in the Pacific Northwest for almost nine years now, one of the things I've come to really love is the dry, clear cold that accompanies most winter days. Unlike back in the Midwest, where winter involves a cloudy, grey sky and general soddenness 80% of the time, here the desert climate keeps the sky clear the majority of the time and gives you a strikingly crystalline view of the stars at night if you're anywhere that's not a Walmart parking lot.

So despite my initial griping about not being able to get a ride to work with Lindsey, I was actually really excited about freezing my ass off on a walk when I realized it was going to still be dark outside while I was walking. Our neighborhood couldn't be described as "busy" at the busiest of times, let alone at 625 in the morning, and though the sun hadn't yet risen up from behind the hills to the east, it was high enough that the newly snow-encrusted mountains to the west and across the lake were barely visible, while the stars were still out in a sky just a little more blue than black.

Though I'm typically loathe to get up this early on purpose, the half hour or so before sunrise is one of my favorite times of day, especially in the winter. Where, on good days at least, sunset often instills me with a sense of "job well done" at the end of the day (whether that job be my actual job, or just hiking or watching TV), sunrise makes me feel like I'm getting to see the world before anything's really started. It's sort of like the time I was on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride as a kid and the ride broke down, and we had to exit by going back behind the scenery and through the employees' area. In terms of the coming day, nothing's happened yet, but nothing can happen yet. It's a weird sort of liminal space, made more so by the cold: nobody wants to be out in the world because there's nothing to do yet, and it's cold, but the world's still there. In 30 minutes or so it'll be business as usual. But not yet.

Usually, I leave for work about 90 minutes later, and when I do, the day's already in full swing. But not today. Not yet.

Review: Don't Starve, and Some Other Stuff

I've played a number of games recently that I just haven't been able to get into, despite their scads of glowing reviews and my relative dearth of meaningful hobbies to get up to between the hours of 11pm and 2am. I didn't actually play most of these (Antichamber, Knock-knock, Monaco) long enough to have a real opinion on them other than "I don't like this." Or, perhaps more correctly, I didn't play long enough to have an informed dislike. My dislike was mostly gut-level dislike:

Antichamber: Bends the rules of 3D games and (virtual) reality in interesting ways, but bends them so far that figuring out what the hell means what seems more like an exercise in trial-and-error than anything that rewards player diligence, intelligence, etc. Frustrating but pretty to look at. A lot like your mom.

YOUR MOM IS SEX

Knock-knock: Similar to Antichamber in the sense that I "get it," but don't really care for it. I get that Ice Pick Lodge is fucking with me, and trying to do it in an artsy and interesting way, but when I make the same mistake seventeen times and receive no useful input any of those times to help me better understand how to succeed in the future, I get frustrated. My real life is already exactly like this. I want to play a game to come to understand a system and master it, typically. Even if that system is sometimes loathe to give up its inner workings, there's an understanding that it eventually will. In the case of Knock-knock, it could care less if I figure it out. And that makes me just want to move on to another game.

No, in this case it really doesn't.

Monaco: Probably missing the real point of this game by not playing in co-op, but in single player it's either just a 2D version of one of the more boring Splinter Cell iterations or Stealth Bastard without the jumping or the neat aesthetic. Bleh.

What's mine is bored.

BUT ANYWAY...I was writing about Don't Starve at some point. Or at least I will be at some point in the future.

This is what my dog looks like in the dark.

So, Don't Starve is a thing. One of those things everyone likes. I get it. I like the aesthetic. I like the idea of the point of a game being just to not starve. Like Minecraft, but more immediate. I like the idea of a survival simulator, especially one as cleverly made and as darkly funny as this one. However, it loses me when it tosses roguelike-ness into the mix.

As I've ranted about at length before, not every single game is actually improved by adding "roguelike elements." In the case of Don't Starve, for instance, the game is really compelling and surprisingly tense and creepy as a survival simulation. The feeling of night encroaching is just as effective, if not more so than it was in Minecraft the first time the creepers came out, and just thinking about the way the light slowly dies as your fire burns down makes me want to go back and play the game more because it captures the feeling of actually being out in the wilderness at night so well it's uncanny.

But I will not go back and play Don't Starve any more because for some reason the developers deemed it necessary to include permadeath, and that, for me, runs absolutely counter to what makes a survival simulation good in the first place.

Permadeath also happens to take the fun out of actual survival.

One of my favorite things about Minecraft when I started playing it, and about Terraria when I started playing that, and so on, was the fact that the game didn't bother to tell you how to survive. It gave you no goals other than to not die, but it didn't even bother to explain to you how to stay alive. And that, at the time, was a new thing in gaming for me. It was exciting to run around in a panic, trying to figure out how to build a shelter, or a stove, or how to make armor, or a better weapon. Sure, you could look these things up online if you wanted, but for me at least, figuring them out on my own was a major part of the game itself, so spoiling crafting recipes would have been breaking the game, in a sense.

The thing that separates those other games from Don't Starve for me is the fact that once you learn how to do something in those games, once you've climbed to a new rung on the survival ladder, as it were, the game mirrors your new knowledge by allowing you to preserve your accomplishments. Don't Starve, on the other hand, forces you to artificially "forget" everything you've learned about survival by starting you at square one after every death. Have a fire pit? Not anymore, you don't! Have a farm? Now it's gone! Know the layout of the land around you? Fuck you, now things are totally different (but really just a slight rearrangement of various trees and stones)!

This is annoying in the sense that you don't have your cool things anymore after you die, but it becomes really goddamn infuriating when you realize the other side of that equation: remember the first time you played and you spent a half hour or two hours or five hours building up to the level you were at just before you died? Yeah, you have to do that again before  you can experience anything new. And you have to do it again by doing the exact same things you did the first time. It's like running out of lives in Super Mario Bros.

Why the game makes you do this is beyond me. I don't see how Don't Starve would be any less challenging, interesting, enjoyable, or creepy if you were allowed to save your progress and reload if you died. Instead, no matter how good, careful, or lucky you are, 80% of your time with this game will be spent doing the exact same few things over and over again, just so you can (maybe) discover a new trick or a different resource five hours into your latest playthrough before getting killed again.

And to me, that's silly. I'm glad there are a lot of people out there who like this game, because in a lot of ways it's extremely clever and at times it was absolutely gripping in its portrayal of bare, desperate survival. But ultimately it was too frustratingly stupid in terms of the permadeath system for me to continue with it.

Review: Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers (PC)

I loved pretty much everything about this game. First of all, while a lot of the games I've played lately (Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Shelter, Don't Starve, 140) have had a really interesting aesthetic dimension, there hasn't been one that I've flat-out enjoyed as much as Tiny and Big's. Most of the abovementioned games, while being (mostly) good games that I've (mostly) enjoyed playing, have a look that, to me, elicits a response like "Oh neat! That's clever!" Tiny and Big, on the other hand, has a look that elicits a response like "Wow, this is the coolest fucking thing ajdklajeiopaj."

That video gives you a little sense of what the game's about and what it looks like. For some reason, the style just absolutely jives with me in a way that makes me feel not just like I'm playing a fun game, but also a cool game. It seems like the sort of game you would have gone to a 50s-era sci-fi themed speakeasy to play. Or something.

Anyway, the video also shows you pretty much the entirety of the gameplay: you move through huge, open levels, using your laser to cut things, your rope to drag things, and your rocket to push things. It's really satisfying and kinetic, especially when you slice through the base of an obelisk, then pull it over with your rope and scramble out from underneath it as it tips over and crashes to the ground. The game actually mostly succeeds in creating the sense that you can do anything to the world using these three mechanisms (slice, pull, push), though of course you can't. But making you feel like you can is quite an achievement. This hit me especially hard when I was playing one of the later levels, trying to climb a tall structure, and I realized that I was allowed to stop thinking in terms of what to jump up to next because I could literally carve a huge staircase in the side of the rock wall if I wanted to. And I wanted to. It succeeds in making you feel powerful in a way a lot of games try and fail at.

No mean feat when you consider the objective of the game is to get your underwear back.

In a way, actually, this is sort of the game's greatest weakness as well. Because at times it feels like anything is possible, it becomes disappointing that the game is really about doing the same three or four things over and over again. Most of the levels involve, primarily, making bridges by cutting down towers, or making bridges by cutting down conveniently-placed ceiling beams. There's some excellent variation, though, in the form of one sort-of free climbing level that gave me the strongest sense of vertigo I can remember ever having gotten playing a game since Mario 64, and an epic boss battle (the first one) that plays with the game's physics system in really interesting and pulse-pounding ways.

Unless you're one of those people who must explore absolutely every nook an cranny in a virtual world, though, the majority of the game is going to involve slicing and dragging things, and eventually the feeling of being a god is going to fade and be replaced by the feeling of being a...bricklayer, I guess? Something bad as compared to a god, for sure.

Pictured: Not Iron Man.

Tiny and Big is a short game, and by the end I couldn't decide if I should be happy it ended when it did because it was running out of Cool New Ideas, or if I should be disappointed that it didn't find more to do with its slice, pull, and push mechanics. It seems like there could have been so much more to this game, but yet it's also nearly perfect as it is. I suppose this isn't a bad conundrum to have to face after playing a game. I think it means that the game was pretty awesome.

Oh, and you know what else is fucking awesome?! The soundtrack! Not only is it a totally badass, weird mishmash of electronica and accordion music (klezmer?), the tracks are also doled out in-game for intrepid explorers who seek out hidden rooms and such. Now that's a neat idea that also takes some serious confidence in the awesomeness of your soundtrack from a developer's perspective. But in this case, that confidence is well-founded. I definitely found myself exploring the game's levels more hoping to find more tracks, and when I finished the game and was still missing a few tracks, I immediately bought the soundtrack just so I could hear them.

And that's the icing on the cell-shaded cake for Tiny and Big. A great game that might leave you wishing there was more, but mostly because what's there is phenomenally well-presented, cool-looking (and sounding), and, most importantly, fun to play.

Review: Psychonauts (PC)

In another case of my being the last one to the party, I just played Psychonauts for the first time recently, after hearing for years how it was the Best Thing Ever and how I was going to love it to death. Well, I didn't love it. But I didn't hate it, either. Actually, it's most accurate to say that I loved some parts of it but not all of it, maybe sort of like how I'd feel about a version of Basia Bulat with reindeer legs for arms.

Google Image Search failed me spectacularly on that one.

What the hell am I writing about? After I pasted that image I got up to put on a sweater and talk to a colleague and the only obvious prompt I had when I came back to my desk was Indian Gramaphone Live!: The Album staring me right the fuck in the face.

Oh, right. Psychonauts.

So, I had a really similar problem with this game as I had with Anachronox awhile back: namely, everything around the gameplay is just peachy-keen wonderful, but the game itself is so frustrating to play through that it casts a pall on the good stuff. As you may have heard from others, Psychonauts's story is fantastic. It's sense of place, world construction, voice acting, character building, plot, background music, and lots of other things (up to and including Mr. Pokeylope) are amazing. It's the rare game that truly succeeds in making you feel like you've stepped into another world, while simultaneously managing to work on a symbolic level. It's quite an achievement.

See, the levels you explore (mostly through platforming) are supposed to be the interiors of different people's psyches. And this is pulled off with the utmost cleverness. There's a lot of symbolism to be had, while the coming-of-age story at the heart of things is charming enough that if you don't want to think too hard about things like the Censors or the Emotional Baggage, then that's just fine. But there's a lot more here than we've come to expect from a video game. And that's great.

Emotional Baggage SCREAMS FOR YOUR WRINKLY CLOTHES

I'm a huge fan of emergent storytelling, and am currently in the midst of drafting a fancy blog post about it at the moment. It's difficult for me to understand, in most cases, the appeal of a game where there's a "story" and then "gameplay," each treated as two separate things. Usually at least one of them don't work. Serious Sam is really fucking fun to play, but who cares about the story? Sam doesn't even care about the story. On the other hand, the story of the Call of Duty series has become so central that gameplay arguably doesn't really exist in those games anymore, at least not in the way I traditionally understand it. But Psychonauts marries the two quite well. Or, it would, if the gameplay wasn't so boring and repetitive.

In most parts of the game, you just around and punch things. It's a 3D platformer in the vein of Super Mario 64. All this action takes place in the wonderfully realized world I was raving about earlier.

"This land is my land / this land is your land / this land is replete with / giant fish-women!"

But it just goes on and on and on. Sure, you can get new powers throughout the game, but these are typically used in a very Zelda-esque fashion: you use a power to unlock a new area or defeat a boss, but never use it again otherwise. The core gameplay almost never changes from jumping and punching, jumping and punching.

Until it does, and then it does something crazy that makes you want to tear everything's hair out. At points, this game started to remind me of Rebel Assault, which is a game that summons the dark warg-riders of the underworld through the mere mention of its title 50% of the time (I rolled my saving throw, so we're safe) because it is just...so...fucking...terrible. But why is it terrible? Because it's one of those "jack of all trades"-style games: every ten minutes you're doing something completely different, and none of the modes of gameplay have received enough attention and quality control to be compelling on its own, let alone as part of a smorgasbord of half-baked interfaces, steering controls, and the like.

Though the game's in-psyche conceit is brilliantly realized story-wise, it leads to a lot of confusing gameplay moments. For example, in one level you explore the mind of a failed descendant of Napoleon by facing off with Napoleon himself on a hex-style war game board (in the descendant's mind). You move from place to place on the board, while shrinking down to visit the inhabitants of different buildings, winning them over to your friend's cause, all before causing them to manifest into pieces on the board that you can move around to win the game. Sounds really clever and awesome, right? Well, it is.

Above: Awesome.

Until you actually try to play it, that is. Figuring out how to get to the gameplay board in the first place requires a sequence a bit like the more frustrating parts of Myst, with nothing in the way of hints. Once you've reached the board, getting from building to building is a similarly difficult problem to solve. Getting out of the shrunk-down, mini-city and back to the board proper is also completely nonintuitive and the game doesn't hold your hand at all. Instead, it expects you to move from what it essentially a platforming game to something much more complicated, assuming that just because the story is complex, the game must be to follow along with it. It's frustrating, because you spend as much time trying to figure out where to push each button and how as you do enjoying the many, many parts of the game that are well done.

In the end, I blasted through the final four or so hours in one go because I was so bored at the repetitive nature of the platforming (occasionally broken up by a totally nonintuitive spatial puzzle of some sort) that I just wanted to see the end of the game. And yeah, the end is totally perfect from a story perspective, and ties a lot of the earlier themes and symbolism together in a satisfying way. And the fact that I can even write that about a video game is awesome. But also, the last boss battle requires you to die a great many times before you realize the bizarrely unobvious combination of techniques that will allow you to win, so it's a final kick in the nuts while at the same time being a satisfying resolution of the story. Like if Lord of the Rings fired a potato gun into your crotch at the exact moment that Frodo destroyed the One Ring.

God DAMMIT.

Review: Waking Mars (PC)

Waking Mars is one of those games that started out as a really interesting premise and matured into an exercise in tedium. I hate, hate saying that about it, because when I first started playing, I was comparing to The Dig fondly in my mind and I really wanted it to keep being that awesome. The Dig was one of the first games I ever played as a young PC gamer, and it fascinated me not so much because it was a great game, but because it did such a great job of letting you play in a world that was actually believably, strangely alien.

Except the orange astronaut suits, which are totally Earth 90s.

On second thought, maybe the two games are more alike than I thought.

Spacesuits are much snazzier in the future.

Anyway, I loved the game's visual presentation, the conceit of connecting your character with other characters only through radio contact, the [SPOILERS] crushing loneliness and disorientation that results when that radio contact is cut off [END SPOILERS], and especially the gameplay. The gameplay gets you to actively observe and directly interact with the planet's creatures in a way that convincingly simulates discovery: you don't know how all the creatures and plants interact, but you need to find out because it's the only way for you to survive. And for once, survival doesn't involve blasting bad aliens with a screen that's 25% gun barrel.

What it does involve, though, is a decent amount of simplistic-y puzzle-solving and the Waking Mars equivalent of grinding. Early on in the game, when I was still all charmed by the atmosphere and presentation and story, and the ludic tasks were kept simple enough that I could breeze through them, I hardly noticed whether I was collecting enough seeds and creating enough life on the planet's surface. By the midway point or so, I had finished exploring much of the Mars underground, and the Fun Discovery Portion of the game had ended. The frontier was closed, and the Gather And "Puzzle" portion of the game began. I put "Puzzle" in quotation marks here because none of the systems you have to figure out are ever complicated enough that I felt sufficiently puzzled. Maybe if they had been a bit more complex, I would have actually enjoyed the second half of the game more. Maybe not. All I know is that once I figured out that Seed A goes in Hole B and Seed C goes into Animal F's mouth, and so on, I was then expected to spend about 3-4 hours of gameplay (roughly equivalent to what I'd played in the first place exploring the caves) collecting seeds and moving them from cavern to cavern, arranging them just so and not caring at all about a bit of it before the end of the game was accessible.

It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with the game's planting system; like I said above, it actually fit the setting and the presentation really well. It's just that you're expected to do so much of it that a game that's surprisingly, exceptionally beautiful in a lot of other ways eventually gets subsumed by the minutiae of moving seeds from place to place over and over again. There's apparently one ending to the game that you get if you play through normally, and a better ending that you get if you collect a massive amount of seeds and bring lots and lots of things to life with them. Guess what ending I got? It makes me wonder, though, if they already have alternate endings built into the game, why not also have a slightly shittier, but still satisfying ending for people who just want to enjoy the game, plant a few seeds, and then discover the conclusion of the story?

Especially if you can get it on sale, Waking Mars is a unique, at-times-fascinating game for its approaches to setting and narrative, and for finding a way to weld actual gameplay so seamlessly to its fiction. But it's not really a good game, in the sense that I can promise that you'll enjoy it for the entire time that it'll take you to get to the end of its engaging story.

Low-Attendance Classes Are Awesome. I Think.

Note: This was posted on Recomposing the Pines on 11/18.

This is something I think about and talk about face-to-face, in meatspace, with friends and colleagues a lot. But I've always been hesitant to post about it on the internet in fear that it will get a lot of those knee-jerk, judgmental responses the internet is so famous for. I've had a few good discussion arise from my blog posts lately, though, and very few heads have been bitten off. So I thought I'd try.

I take attendance when it's required that I do so by the school. Insofar as I'm allowed to formulate my own attendance policy, I have none. I make it clear to my students up front that a big portion of my class is discussion, participating and "meaning-making" in the classroom, on a day-to-day basis. If they choose not to show up for this, I don't directly penalize them, because I believe (and have seen after teaching over 1,000 students) that they are indirectly penalized and almost entirely across the board perform worse than students who have perfect or near-perfect attendance and participation.

Pudding, meat, etc.

For better or worse, this is generally my approach to teaching at a university: you, the student, are (nominally, at least) an adult, and you're free to make your decisions about attending class, about doing the work, about putting in the time, etc. I make my expectations clear up front, I make myself readily available to you if you want to do the work but don't maybe know how to do the work. Even if you don't know how to correctly want to do the work, I'm willing to help. But I'm hesitant to force students to put in a good effort because then it won't be a good effort...at least that's how it seems to me. This has been my approach for a long time, and I'm mostly happy with it, though sometimes I feel bad about not being more prescriptive, as in "Student A wouldn't have failed if I'd have forced him to turn in more drafts of his essay!" But that brings it's own set of problems, I suppose.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at is that I find myself frequently happy when I have a low-attendance day or week in class rather than frustrated (which seems to be the "normal" faculty reaction to such things). I think it's because it reinforces the implicit assumptions I'm making in my attendance policy as I've described it above: if the students who show up are choosing to show up, and their motivation for showing up is interest, if not in the subject matter then at least in GPA-based success, then a low-attendance day actually raises the percentage of interested students in the classroom.

As someone whose courses are dialogically-based 95% of the time, I'm all in favor of smaller class sizes as a rule, but even courses with a twenty-student cap are typically going to have around ten students who would just barely not rather be dead than be in my classroom. On the other hand, every single class session I've had where there were 30-40 students enrolled and only 3-4 showed up (something that happens depressingly frequently) have been absolutely brilliant class sessions.

There's a part of my brain that feels like I should feel guilty for thinking this, but I can't tell if it's a logical part, or the part that occasionally insists that we should give a trophy to every child, even if they come in last place, because trophies make people feel good and sad people are sad.

So, Why Run?

This is an unabashedly obvious sequel to my previous post on running, in which I made it sound like running is directly responsible for making a hateful, competitive person. That's not really what I meant, but I feel like maybe it's worth explaining briefly why I bother doing something that is obviously so fucking torturous.

Well, all of this first popped into my head while I was on my run earlier, because as I finished my first 3.2 mile lap and started up the hill at the beginning of my second, I was quite literally thinking "Why in the fuck am I doing this to myself?" In part, I think that question answers itself: I like running precisely because it creates a thinking space for me, a place and time within which I cannot do anything else but face my own thoughts, confront my own fears, grudgingly celebrate my own victories, etc., etc. It's like being on a road trip by myself, but even better because I come out in the end in much better shape instead of much worse shape. And this is good in turn because I've found over the last few years that being in shape just makes me a happier person.

This is hard to talk about. It's hard to talk about putting a lot of effort and interest into exercising and eating right without:
a) People assuming that you inherently judge them for not doing the same.

b) People assuming that your motivation for exercising is to Do Impressive Things and/or your motivation for eating right is to Not Be A Fat (Bad) Person.

c) People getting angry because they are also put a lot of effort into exercising and eating right, but they do it differently and, apparently, better.

Physical fitness and/or healthy eating (or lack thereof) suddenly seem to be foundational to a lot of people's conceptions of themselves. So they're hard things to talk about without bumping up against someone else's sense of self, and thus indirectly insulting them. I don't really identify as a Runner or a Healthy Eater, so this is a little incomprehensible to me. But I do try to stay in good, healthy shape because I don't really think there's much of a distinction between body and mind (and soul, if you're into that). If one's happier, the other will be happier. I wouldn't sleep four hours a night for an entire week and expect to be completely emotionally and mentally stable at the end. Why would I eat Cheetos for dinner and watch TV four hours a day and expect to be emotionally and mentally stable at the end?

I started running originally because Lindsey, who had been a triathlete before I met her, was trying to lose weight and wanted to get back into running. I was actually really lukewarm about it at first, as I thought it was much more fun to sit on my ass all day and not expend yet more energy on exercise in addition to all the energy I expended on work, socializing, etc. Then I started mountain climbing with my friend John and I realized that that was something I wanted to be able to not only do, but do with relative ease so I could focus more on how fucking beautiful everything around me was while I was climbing instead of on how badly my back, lungs, legs, and shoulders hurt. It was hard to regularly access good climbing territory in the flatlands of the Palouse, so I started running instead, figuring that at the very least I'd get a cardiovascular boost from it. Later that year, Lindsey decided she wanted to run a half marathon, and I agreed to try to run it with her. The rest is (unimportant, personal) history.

Suffice to say, the harder I worked at running, the better I got at it, and the better I felt as a result. I've rarely felt better in life than I did last summer essentially cruising through a half marathon, paying attention to the passing sights, having conversations with other runners, and just enjoying the fact that I had trained myself up to such a point of physical ability that I could more or less toss off a 13 mile run on a weekend.

Certainly, this is fun in part because it makes me feel like a badass, and who doesn't like feeling like a badass. But it's always been less about Getting Awesome and more about Getting To Have Awesome Experiences. No matter what speed I train up to, there are always going to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of runners who are better than me. I personally know at least five people, off the top of my head, who will be better runners than me for the rest of our respective lives, by an unbelievably long shot. When I think about how good they are at running, it's like comparing a dog and a shark in an ocean-swimming competition.*

Competition doesn't interest me. I get down on myself sometimes when it comes to running because it's so quantitative, and there's a tendency to compare Current Me to Old, Better Me from time to time, but the totality of life as something that I go through with a much healthier, responsive, resilient, and more comfortable body as a result of running is absolutely qualitative. I can't look at an experience like climbing the Oregon Matterhorn solo or hiking 30 miles in two days through Hell's Canyon or even just walking up my office at sunrise for work and think "Well, that was worth 10 five-mile jogs!" It just doesn't work that way. Ultimately, when I'm out there running, I'm not thinking about how fast I'm going to finish, or how exciting it's going to be to tell everyone on Facebook how fast I ran. Because, for me at least, that's not what it's about. Instead, I'm thinking about how everything is going to be a little more enjoyable and easier later (even more running!) because I'm doing something difficult now. And, as long as that Something Difficult isn't a run further than, say, 15 or so miles, I'm absolutely okay with that.

* Not my best metaphor.

Running Is A Cruel Mistress

For one, she does not take well to be ignored. I'm sitting here typing a few hours after my first six mile run in...oh, probably two or three months, and it feels like my entire skeletal structure has been replaced with firecrackers. Tomorrow it won't hurt at all though, and the next time I do a long run (within the week), it'll be a little easier, and the next time it'll be easier still, and so on. This is how you get better at most things, but with running it's easier to quantify that improvement than with, say, writing journal articles or giving presentations: you run farther than you did before, or you run faster than you did before (or both), and that means you're doing better.

The problem with this easy quantifiability is that it works on the impractical assumption that you're always going to keep running, and thus always going to keep getting better, even if progress is slow. For example, I'll often run the same route five times in a row, and sometimes, say, the third run will be slower than the first run. But overall, there's a tendency toward improvement. But if I do three of those runs, and then Other Life gets in the way for a few weeks, and then I come back, I'm lucky if I can even finish that run the fourth time, let alone at the same speed I'd worked up to before.

My run today was 6.5 miles, and I was having a bit of trouble, physically and mentally, by the time I finished. Maybe for some of you reading, that sounds like an amazing achievement. Objectively, I suppose it is. But this past summer I was running 13 miles with fair regularity, at a faster pace throughout that I turned in today on my 6.5 mile run. So to me it feels like stepping backward.

I guess this is what bugs me about running, then: that precisely because it's so easy to quantify your ability level and your progress, it's equally easy to quantify your slips backward. It's maybe a silly thing to worry about: I haven't ran much for the last few months because we moved across the country, settled in to a new city, started new jobs, bought a dog...oh, and I've been hiking about 20-30 miles a week and summiting a peak or two or three every weekend for the last two months. So it's not necessarily that I've gotten lazy (and who cares if I had, anyway?), but more just that I'm not running.

However, knowing that I'm objectively worse at it than I once was, and that the only way to get better is to do the same training I've already done a few times is always a little disheartening. There are a lot of other things in life I can pick back up after a month or so off and at least delude myself into thinking I haven't gotten any worse at them. Like, for example, guitar. I'm certainly better at guitar if I play for an hour every day for a month, but if I play once a week, I can still play one of 30 or so songs well at the drop of hat, and I'm okay with that level of proficiency. Running is always taunting me with the knowledge that I used to be faster, or able to run further. It's hard to be happy about creaking through 6.5 miles when you know you've done an easy 13 miles, and not that long ago. And that's an attitude that I don't naturally have about most things. I'm not obsessive about improvement, perfection, etc. in most aspects of my life, but it feels sometimes like that's the only type of relationship running will allow me to have with it. Nonetheless, I'll be out there doing my 2.6 mile sprint tomorrow, snowy skies willing.

My Time-Traveling Spaceship Dream

So, as you may or may not know, I regularly have really weird dreams.

Yeah, I know, everybody has really weird dreams. Big deal. But, I'm convinced that mine are a little weird in their own way because frequently my dreams consist most prominently of emotional textures, with images, plot, characters, etc. playing secondary roles. Mostly I just feel lots of things really intensely in dreams, and then I wake up (insert obligatory Midwesterner-feelings-repression joke here).

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, which is my slightly shitty memory of a dream I had last night:

I don't remember how we got there, because my dreams frequently start in medias res, and this one was no different. "We" were, at least as far as we knew, the very last remaining humans. We were inside of a spaceship, it was cold, we were tired, and somehow the dream captured precisely the feeling of knowing that you and a few others were all that remained of your kind in the entirety of existence. Despite the fact, of course, that I've never felt this way in real life. It was a panicked, but oddly empty feeling, but the panic didn't go away after a few minutes. It persisted for hours, days, months. I think a lot of this time passed quickly during the dream (this happens to me a lot, too).

Then, suddenly, there was hope, after a fashion. A few of the remaining, science-educated geniuses, who we had brought along on our spaceship-ark in the tradition of these things, had a plan. This plan was to send us ten years into the future. I think, though I can't remember for sure, the idea behind this plan is that it would bring a lot of the children on the ship up to childbearing age before too many of the rest of us died off and were unable to help reproduce. This was talked about in an immensely logical, detached way, while we all watched with empty eyes. I remember being hungry, and having no better ideas.

Soon enough, then, time-travel day came. At this point, I was oddly fixated on two things. One, I was really concerned that time-travel was going to hurt, physically. It felt like the first time you go to the doctor with the simultaneous awareness that it is going to hurt a lot immediately but ultimately be better for you overall. Two, I was desperately obsessed with trying to impress one of the women on the spaceship, in hopes that somehow that would convince her to fall in love with me.

In this dream, darkly enough, Lindsey had already died a long time ago (fulfilling her own dream, I suppose, of dying off at the beginning of any dystopian scenario), but there was this woman on the spaceship who was oddly similar to her, and I was absolutely sure that, somehow, being with her would make sad, starving space-life bearable. In my mind, this wasn't going to be a "hook up and make babies to save the world" scenario. No, we were going to live together in a house, have a family, and do all of the things that we absolutely could in no way ever actually do again. It was hopelessly saccharine and I knew that, somehow, while still also fully needing to believe it was possible anyway (another weirdly intense dream-emotion). To her, I basically didn't exist, because the only thing that really mattered was staying warm and not failing humanity by succumbing to death. Throughout the course of the dream, her ignorance of me somehow became more depressing than the extermination of the human race. I guess 20 year old me was making a comeback subconsciously.

Eventually, we all sat on the floor in the main bay of the spaceship, cross-legged, like a huge, spacesuited yoga class, while the scientists activated the time machine. The last two things I did before we fast-forwarded ten years was pet my dog (who was the exact, eleven-week-old puppy I own currently in real life) and then put my head on the shoulder of an elderly woman I'd never spoken to before and fall asleep. I found this oddly warm and comforting. There was no pain, after all.

When I woke up, the first thing I saw was my puppy again, fully intact, but still puppy-sized. This is when things took a turn for the horror-movie-esque. Despite being the same size as he'd been before, my dog was frail, shaky, and looked back at me with the rheumy eyes of a much older dog. It was then I realized what everyone else around me was simultaneously realizing: that we had aged in a cellular sense, but not actually changed at all in a physical sense. We had children in ten-year-old-sized bodies with twenty years of wear and tear, and people who had been sixty before the time-travel who were now just laying there dead.

It hadn't really gone as planned, but in the end it felt like one in a long litany of disappointments and failed contingency plans, deus ex machinas who neglected to show up when scheduled. The dream ended with me and the Mystery Woman exchanging pained, uncertain looks. It was the first time that it felt to me that we had something in common, in an odd way. It felt hopeful in the way the littlest things provide a disproportionate amount of solace in the face of a huge disappointment. Then I woke up.

What stuck with me wasn't so much the plot, but the clarity of the feelings that accompanied the things that happened. Generally speaking, I've never actually felt any of these specific feelings (or at least these feelings with these specific motivators) in my actual life, yet I did in the dream. Sort of like how some people dream about flying or being a fish...I guess I just dream about having really bizarre and extreme emotions. I think I'd rather be a fish.

An Ode To Instagram

Note: This was cross-posted on Recomposing the Pines today.

So, thus far on my new work-related blog, I've had three posts. One is arguably work-related and the other two not so much.

But I realized something awesome about Instagram the other day and wanted to share, and since I at least nominally research and write on new media for a living, I don't think it's too far off the mark to post it here as well as my Super-Secret Blog of Feelings and Secrets.

As if it wasn't clear from my original post on this blog, I have a pretty ambivalent relationship with social media. I used MySpace for awhile, but I was never quite sure what it was for besides streaming other people's music. I started using Facebook because my friend Toria signed me up using my laptop while I was in the bathroom one day at work. I started using Twitter because it was required for a class. I started using Foursquare because I needed another example of digital storytelling to talk about in my dissertation. I started using Google+ because I was just curious if it was actually better than Facebook.*

In short, I didn't really start using any of these services for what they were meant for; namely, for socializing. Like a dog with a type of food he's never encountered before, I've always been content to just take a lick here and there and then spit the thing back out, because, frankly, the food I usually eat has always been good enough.** I started researching and writing on Americans' use of social media not because I was a huge fan, but because it was so fascinating to me that we could collectively become obsessed with a form of expression that was simultaneously so full of promise and yet so empty in execution.

I post a lot on Facebook, but it feels fairly pointless, unless I'm sharing news that I know will interest or entertain someone specific. I post a lot on Twitter, but it's the internet equivalent of having "conversations" with the colleagues that speed past my open door en route to their class: it's nice for a quip or shout-out here or there, but ultimately not much beyond that. I still use Foursquare from time to time, but only because it's fun from a gaming perspective: I like earning new badges and mayorships in that shallow Unlock Steam Achievement way. If each Foursquare interaction took about a second longer, I'd probably stop using it entirely.

Instagram, though...Instagram is cool. I realized this the other day as I was waiting for one of those things you occasionally find yourself waiting for, like someone to call you back or your girlfriend to use the restaurant bathroom. During those little spaces nowadays, when you know you don't have enough time to Accomplish Something but there's also not enough time to Fall Into A Deep Reverie And Reflect On The Meaning Of Life, I usually pull out my phone and tool around. In this case, I went to my Instagram feed and started looking at the pictures posted recently by the people I follow. And I realized after about four pictures that it was just really awesome, interesting, and creative in a way that all those other social networks rarely are.

Part of it, of course, is the requirement that one uses visuality to express themselves on Instagram. There's a huge gap between posting "I ate veal tonight" on Facebook or Twitter and turning that written expression of mundane fact into poetry.*** However, even if you take the most soulless, robotlike photograph of your food and post it to Instagram, you're still making decisions about how to frame the photo, what light you're taking it in, the angle you're taking it at, etc., etc. You are forced, at the options screen, to make choices about the frame that goes around your picture, if you want a caption, if you want to apply a filter, and so on. Even if you opt out of all of these choices, that itself is a choice. It's a social media app that requires you to express yourself artistically and creatively, even if only in the smallest of ways, and for that I love it.

Of course, this also democratizes interesting content creation in the sense that you don't need to be able to describe your plate of veal like Whitman or Keats to make it interesting: visually, to me at least, it's really exciting to be able to actually see what other people I know find important in their lives. Written language is a fun tool to play with, but not everybody likes to play with it. Not everybody is comfortable enough using it to play with it. A neat photo on Instagram is just a click away (a few more if you want to apply the Amaro filter first, which you should probably do).

There hasn't been a single time over the last year or so that I've checked my Instagram feed that I haven't found something that struck me as a legitimate piece of point-and-click art. I'm lucky if that happens once a week or three on Facebook or Twitter. Other social media networks feel a bit like I'm living on a street with everyone I know and we all leave our curtains open and our windows open and talk really loudly, even when we're just talking to ourselves. Instagram, instead, feels a little bit like those times in my undergrad Creative Writing classes when we'd all write some super-sloppy, semi-outrageous, but totally earnest poem and read it out loud to the rest of the class. There was always something a little bit silly about everyone's poem (including your own), but the fact that everyone was sharing made it so everyone deserved to be taken seriously.

I think this happens with Instagram at least in part because the platform forces you to share in this way if you choose to use it at all, but I think I'm okay with that.

* It is, but nobody uses it, so it's sort of a hollow victory.
** This is a strained metaphor, but it's also happening on the carpet in front of me right now, so it's what came to mind.
***And here I mean lowercase-"p" poetry, not uppercase-"P" Poetry.

Linux Mint Wants To Be Your (Work) Friend

Note: This was cross-posted on Recomposing the Pines today.

It's true. I won't go into depth on why it's true, I'd rather leave you to figure that out yourself if you're so inclined. But I wanted to do a little mini-post here simply to say that I've been using Linux Mint (first version 13 and then version 15) for all of my work-related tasks since mid-summer, and it's been absolutely fine.

A lot of people seem to have the perception that Linux = Difficult, or that you have to be some sort of crazy computer whiz to be able to use it. I say this because that was exactly my perception until I tried out Mint.

There are, it turns out, a lot of different distributions of Linux. Many are obviously built to serve particular purposes (for example, Puppy Linux is built to work well on old computers and netbooks, but has less flash and functionality than something like Ubuntu). Many are unique in ways that would be basically unnoticeable to the non-guru, but are, I'm told, mightily significant to The People Who Know Computer Things.*

But, generally speaking, Linux is appealing to a certain kind of person (read: "not just a computer person") because it is the early-90s, manual-transmission car of the operating system world. At a time when it's getting harder and harder to look under our "car"'s hood and find the radiator, to learn to change the oil by ourselves, or to diagnose a fluid leak without hooking everything up to a computer, Linux still has an easily navigable, wide-open space under the hood, easily identifiable and removable (and installable) parts, and so on.

Obviously, in this metaphor, a lot of people are going to prefer to have a car that "just works." Of course, that is, until it doesn't work, in which case you either have to take it in to the mechanic (Windows) or just buy an entirely new car (Mac). But if you have a modicum of interest in at least slightly understanding the machine in front of you that likely contains your entire professional (and maybe personal) life and on which your ability to discharge your workday responsibilities relies, Linux gives you a foot in the door.

Mint, specifically, is built to mimic the Windows UI (pre Win7) in a lot of ways. It comes prepackaged with a lot of software and drivers, to the point that if you're one of those weirdos who can happily sit at a work-provided computer for years and never think about installing new software, or changing your desktop background, or changing the arrangement of the taskbar icons.

Mint 15 UI with the taskbar and an image preview open.

I've never really had any trouble with Mint on install before, and I've installed it on five different computers now, from three different manufacturers. The only times I've had issues that required some serious troubleshooting was when I started trying to install new programs, change system settings, etc., and most of those "errors" and system failures were more a result of my own clueless flailing around than any inherent instability in Mint.

Fortunately, basic functions work well "out of the box," as it were, and pretty much all the software you'll need to perform typical work-related tasks are already installed, and your sound, graphics, etc. should work right away, to a surprising degree. I installed Mint recently on a two-monitor setup in my new office, and both monitors came online immediately -- something that didn't happen even when I installed Windows 7 on the same computer.

Different is terrifying!

I guess the big catch for using Linux for typical work tasks would be that you'll need to learn how to navigate some programs that are going to be a little different than what you're used to. For example, there is no Microsoft Office. There is, however, LibreOffice, which for my money is faster, more reliable, and nicer-looking than MS Office anyway.
Plus, it can save documents, slide shows, spreadsheets, etc. in all the typical Microsoft formats, so you can pull the same documents up later on a computer in the meeting room and have them run just fine. Admittedly, sometimes there's some formatting, etc. lost in the process of moving from LibreOffice to MS Office or vice versa, but honestly I've never had as much trouble as I've had moving from, say, MS Office 97 to 2003 and back or 2003 to 2010 and back, and so on.

If you want to try Linux Mint, but not totally commit, the site I linked to above will explain how to make a LiveCD and boot your computer from it. In this state, you'll be able to play around with Mint "on" the CD, so there are no changes made to your computer while you test it out and see how you like it. If you want to install Mint alongside Windows 7 (or lower), so you're not making One Big Choice as much as letting yourself make the choice every single time you boot up the computer, you can do this. In fact, this is how all my computers are set up: they start up to a simple menu at which I choose either Linux (for 95% of my day-to-day tasks) or Windows (for the occasional movie-editing or sound-editing task that it does better than Linux, plus video games). There's a really easy-to-follow tutorial for this, which is right here.

Anyway, once I got everything installed, I found Mint to generally be more reliable, faster, and better-looking than Windows, at least as far as doing the typical word-processing, emailing, and messaging tasks that I do at work every day. I boots up way faster, too.

If you want to explore the system a little bit more, it actually lets you, too, and as long as you don't jump into doing things like editing system kernels right off the bat, the learning curve is pretty shallow and there's a number of great communities online that are willing to help you figure things out and answer newbie questions.

Oh, plus everything's free. I suppose I should have mentioned that before. Mint itself is free, and all the software that comes with it is free. All the programs you might want to install are free. Don't like the default music player? There are literally hundreds more to choose from, and none of them cost a cent. The Adobe Photoshop analogue? Free. High-end music editing programs used by real DJs? Free.

You get the idea.

Anyway, just something to think about. Switching to Mint will likely stretch your brain just a little bit, but in a good way. Plus, over the last few months I've come to find that it's not just a good alternative for work than your typical paid operating system, it's actually better in a lot of significant ways.

* I finished my undergrad a measly nine credits short of a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and do not consider myself smart enough to be counted among these people.

I Have a Puppy Now

I have a puppy now. He looks like this:

He is very cute and almost shockingly smart, but it's also a very strange new experience getting used to living with something that literally needs you to keep it from becoming dead.

I'm sure this won't be news to anyone who has children or who has raised a dog before from the puppy-state, but to me it's a pretty steep learning curve, existentially if not necessarily practically. My family had dogs while I was growing up, and I've always wanted a dog of my own. I've been prepared for a long time for the whole daily cycle of taking the dog out, walking the dog, feeding and watering the dog, etc. But there's a lot more to it than just those things when they're puppies, it seems. Or, at the very least, the amount of times you have to do each of those things are much higher than when you're dealing with a full-grown dog.

So, a whole lot of my day now (to the point that I'm frequently finishing lesson plans at the last minute and bursting into department meetings five minutes late and slathered in dog hair) is paying attention to the dog, and remembering constantly to do so in such a way that teaches him to behave toward me in a certain way that'll breed good habits in him as he gets older. How much I need to teach him is not necessarily surprising; it's how much I need to learn myself in terms of my habits in responding to him, playing with him, etc. that takes lots more time than I expected. Remembering to respond a certain way when he nips at my heels (which he does A LOT) is hard. Remembering not to rough house or play tug-of-war with him is hard. The hardest thing is remembering to take him straight out back to "go potty" as soon as I come home from work and not praise him before, because as soon as I walk in the door he's wagging his tail and jumping around from being so  happy to see me. Ignoring that affection until it's appropriate to acknowledge it is difficult. Especially when he's so absurdly cute.

When we're both "good boys," though, it's pretty wonderful having a dog. Luckily, we're both pretty smart and we both learn quickly, so I think it's just going to continue to get better.

It's still difficult to accept on some fundamental level that my life isn't just about me anymore. I'm responsible for another living thing in a way that's much more basic and unrelenting than, say, with a family member, friend, or significant other. But I'm getting used to it. It's hard not to when he's so cute. I think, in my head, owning a dog was going to be 50% Taking Care Of The Dog and 50% The Dog Making Your Life Awesome. I think, in reality, that's still true...for a dog. For a puppy, it's more like 80%/20% or maybe 85%/15%. But, like I said, it's getting better.

I was thinking the other day that a lot of my twenties was taken up by my grappling with and eventually accepting the idea that it's not "selfish" to take care of yourself and your own needs before trying to be a functioning member of society. I had a hard time for a long time understanding that life wasn't just about giving of yourself irrespective of your own needs. In reality, it turns out that nobody really likes you if you make yourself miserable trying to make other people happy, because, at the core of things, you're a miserable person. So, I've spent a lot of time and effort over the last few years improving my own life under the assumption that I'm ultimately able to give back others more and better when I'm coming from a happy, content place.

While this approach to life isn't "selfish" in the negative sense of the word, it's still ultimately self-focused: I better my own life so I can better others' in return. I'm wondering if my thirties will be the time when I move on to what seems like the next logical step in this thought progression: applying a lot of my resulting, positive energy and happiness to another living thing that actually needs that from me, rather than just wanting it because we're friends, or family, or roommates. Bettering my own life so I can actually support something (or someone) else's. It's weird, but as I get older it also seems like something I should do, lest life continue on as if I'm 29 for the rest of my life.

We'll see how the dog goes, I guess. He's already peed on the floor once while I've been writing this.

Review: 140 (PC)

Holy wow, 140 is pretty neat, you guys.

This'll be a short review because it's such a short game. But it's a very good game. It is, to paraphrase another review that I read, a rare example of gaming minimalism done right.

The premise is made pretty clear in the surprisingly functional game trailer:

It's a platformer with an abstract, shape-y aesthetic. Already you're groaning. Stop groaning.

What makes it interesting is that all of the platforming moves and tricks are dictated by the beat of the background music (reflected cleverly in the thumping equalizer that makes up the game's background): platforms move, walls shift, and solutions emerge and disappear in time with the music, and as you make your way through the level, more elements are added to the background track to reflect the increasing complexity of the gameplay.

There are three levels in the game (and clever transitions from one to the next), and each level culminates in a "boss fight" of sorts, that changes the gameplay a bit (for example, one is sort of a top-down bullet-hell-style shooting game) but doesn't deviate from the game's rhythm-based challenges. These boss battles were jarring at first for the sudden fact that I wasn't playing a platformer anymore, but the new play modes are really just more riddles based on the rhythm of the background music. Once you figure out the beat, these "battles" are a lot easier.

If I have one gripe (and I always do), it's that at $4.99 the game seemed a little overpriced. I finished it in under and hour, it was awesome, and I went back and played it a few more times just for fun. It ends at right about the time it seems like it should, but yet the concept is really great and executed so flawlessly you can't sort of help but want more variations on the jumping puzzles, more clever bosses, more music. The fact that you don't get more doesn't leave a sour taste in my mouth as much as it just makes me hope that there's a sequel or something someday, but if you're pinching pennies, for the length of gameplay you get, you might want to wait for a sale. That said, if you're at all interested in music and/or platformer games, wait a month or so for the sale, and then buy it whether there's a sale or not.