“To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and the psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.” ~ Anais Nin

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ~ Ayn Rand

Anyone who’s clocked time playing Civ will enjoy this:

I haven’t yet been able to get and play Civ 5 although some of the changes look cool. I have mixed feelings about it, mostly stemming from the fact that Civ was the game JTL and I played most.

One of my favorite playing with JTL memories involves Civ 4. I was always chugging for cultural victory while he was bombing everything that dared look twice at his border. Although we generally played as a team, we had a sort of competition to see if I could win with culture faster than he could win by military means. Once, I convinced him to play a game based on culture wins only (no war) and was explaining all the little tricks I employed to edge up culture gains. As anyone knows, this involves lots and lots of spreading religions. He became exasperated with the fail rate on missionaries and began to growl about how if RL missionaries had been so incompetent the world would be a much better place. Then he began loudly berating his computer with exclamations like: “Damn you, Christianity, how can you not spread in Atlanta!” and “I’m telling Buddha on you” and “Get your Hindu ass over there and convert already!” By the time it was all over, I was in giggling fits.

The next day, I got this email, with an attachment:

1. go to http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/downloads.htm and download the v1.61 patch
2. install the patch.
3. start civ, fix all your options (for me at least, it reset my sound and graphics options). you may also want to turn on the new (?) “show city radius” graphics option. it makes it easier to tell what tiles are already used by cities, when you have a settler selected. If you get a flash of a screen which says something like “Your mods are not correctly installed”, don’t panic — I think that’s complaining about the files we modified by replacing rather than using this new override mechanism. we can and should fix that sometime, but it seems to work just fine as-is
4. exit civ
5. go to your “My Documents” folder and make sure you have a “My Games” directory, and inside of that a “Sid Meier’s Civilizcation 4″ directory, and inside of that a “CustomAssets” directory. If not, stop here and call me
6. save the attached file CvGameCoreDLL.dll in that CustomAssets directory
7. optional, but I think you’ll like the small changes: save the attached file CvReligionScreen.py in the CustomAssets\python\screens directory
8. restart civ; marvel at your hopefully all-powerful missionaries and the only slightly-different but oh-so-much-better f7 screen
9. marvel at my awesomeness

After that, missionaries had a 100% conversion rate — a change which I squeed over, but which he said made him feel “dirty in the bad way.” This is a frequent saying that started between he and I and has been part of my personal vernacular ever since.

The f7 screen shows all your civilization’s cities and which religions are at play in each. It mostly lines up so you can peg what a city might be missing at a glance, except that when a city founds a religion, it puts that religion out of order. This was unacceptable. Things have to laid out properly or OCD brains go haywire, as anyone who reads XKCD knows. If I told you the number of things he coded around just to make margins line up…

He never did get around to the Flying Spaghetti Monster patch.

I miss you, still, dear friend.

“Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents” ~ Peter Mere Latham

For the last week or so, I’ve been struggling against a late-Summer bug. It started as a minor cold, but then picked up steam and has been knocking me out with fevers and chills for the last few days. One of the odd things about running fevers for me is the fever dreams I get grow wickedly intense. Sometimes they are even so vivid that I have trouble distinguishing if they are memories or simply the work of my dreamspace masquerading as memory. A couple days ago, I had a fever dream snippet that was so clear it felt like it just had to be a memory. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it sparked the following conversation:

Salome: I need to ask you about something, just to make sure my dreaming mind isn’t faking a memory.
SFSHS: k
Salome: Do you remember when we used to stay up to all hours at your house playing MULE?
SFSHS: yeah
Salome: Do you remember another game, sort of like operating?
SFSHS: like where you have to remove the funny bone without touching the bzzz
Salome: No. This was like a screen and tools to click on and you had to apply anesthetic and make an incision and remove an appendix.
SFSHS: not ringing any bells…was I baked
Salome: I don’t think so.
SFSHS: there’s your first indication it may have been just a dream
Salome: This was back in high school
SFSHS: oh…so we weren’t baked…but it’s not familiar
Salome: This was very vivid and felt totally nostalgic. It was you and me and Jon, and we were pissed because we couldn’t find the manual and the patient kept dying. One of the first times Jon cut without applying anesthetic and the computer let out this blood-curdling scream becase we tried to cut into the patient while he was still awake. The scream woke up your Dad who came out to yell at us to keep it down.
SFSHS: oh shit
Salome: What?
SFSHS: I totally remember that
Salome: SEE!
SFSHS: yeah, I remember that now
Salome: WHAT was the name of the game?
SFSHS: you’ve got to be fucking kidding…I didn’t even remember any of this until twenty seconds ago…and I’m baked
Salome: This is going to make me nuts. I can’t find it. How many late 80s operating games could there have been?
SFSHS: man, I loved mule…did they ever update that? why isn’t there like mule 2010?
Salome: Don’t get me started, I can’t even find a halfway decent emulator for it. I barely remember how to play it, I just remember loving it.
SFSHS: now I REALLY want to play mule…I so hate you
Salome: I REALLY want to know the name of the operation game
SFSHS: hold on
Salome: You can’t Google it — operation and game returns so much crap it’s unbearable, you might as well try and Google the lyrics to Free songs.
SFSHS: fuck that…Jon remembers everything
SFSHS: he says try life and leath
Salome: You called him?
SFSHS: yeah
Salome: WENCH! It’s like 2am!
SFSHS: whatever… google life n death
Salome: Holy hell
SFSHS: find it?
Salome: YES!
SFSHS: he totally remembers us waking up my Dad with the computer screaming too…also he says your crazy and hi
Salome: Tell him I’m sorry you woke him up but now my brain is happy
SFSHS: he is happy your brain is happy
Salome: That dream was so real but I couldn’t find the game and it was making me crazy
SFSHS: fuck that, go find me a way to kick your ass at mule…I WANT IT
Salome: You’re baked, you’ll forget this conversation in half an hour
SFSHS: mule and doritos…I need them…go fetch
Salome: Logging out now and crawling back to bed
SFSHS: noooooooooooooooooooooooo get me mule!!!!
Salome: lurves you

If anyone cares:
SFSHS = Salome’s Friend Since High School
Jon = her cousin (who often played video games and AD&D with us)
MULE’s Wiki Page
Life and Death’s Wiki Page

“I was raised to be charming, not sincere.” ~ Cinderella’s Prince’s in Into the Woods (via Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine)

Last night, while updating my virus definitions and doing whatever else it is that virus protection programs do, Avast popped up to remind me that September 19th will be International Talk Like a Pirate Day and cheekily suggested I allow it to install an app that will change my standard “your virus definitions have been updated” voice-over to something a bit more creative. I haven’t really ever had a strong feeling one way or another about virus protection — I go with whatever is recommended to me by geeks I trust to know more than I do. I can say, however, that unless Avast does something pretty stupid or fails in quality, they’ve turned the dial up on my customer loyalty.

There is something about a company exhibiting a sense of charm and whimsy that appeals to me. Something that sends the signal that even though there’s work to be done, we also have to remember to just not take it all so seriously.

I couldn’t help but think of how this relates to the post Grace made yesterday about Solazyme’s President and CTO, Harrison Dillon and the challenges his company faces trying to woo human beings (specifically us American-type meat puppets, but others, too) out of their complacency habits and into a state of enthusiasm for energy solutions to our looming global crisis. Grace’s final comment on the subject is:

What Harrison Dillon, Farmer D, Team HyPower and everyone else trying to make a dent in the sustainability tragedy of the commons is not more untimely and unmanageable legislation – they need help finding ways to make us smile, just like Prius owners.

The video Grace includes focuses more on the ego-feed side of being a Prius driver, but I think ego appeal might take a backseat to the charm factor.

When I think of the brands I’ve viewed positively over the course of my consumerism, I have to say that elements of whimsy and charm play into them in a much bigger way. For example, I started out an Apple girl and stayed one through most of college until a PC was forced on me for financial reasons. For a long time after, even though I worked and owned PCs, I still had a more positive view of Apple. There are many reasons for it, but the truth is that probably the biggest factor was the now-famous 1984 Mac advert. At 12 years old, I had read 1984. I got the commercial and I liked getting it. It was clever and mischievous and an unconscious part of me identified with the type of minds that would put that sort of an ad forth to represent their product. True, it might have feed a small ego thing (and years of Mac vs PC flame wars certainly were ego-intensive), but I don’t think the ego feed was the real factor, especially when you consider it lingered beyond ownership. Years later, despite the fact that Steve Jobs is a micromanaging fruit loop who flirts with Big Brother instincts, I still have a quirky affection for Apple and irrationally fond memories of my old Mac and IIe.

It wasn’t about status. So what was it?

As cars go, although I never owned a Saturn or a PT Cruiser, I’ve had friends who absolutely loved theirs to the point where it became like a pet. That insane kind of “how can you feel this way about an inanimate object” type love. As Grace pointed out, Pruis owners form their own subcultures and cult behaviors around their vehicles. The object becomes imbued with the characteristics we assign to the brand.

Google won people like me hard and early with their colorful logo and their clean page, but what I remember most about that introductory period was the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. I probably haven’t pressed that button in ten years but I still like that it’s there. I don’t think I’ve used another search engine, other than to compare results since I found Google (in what my memory swears is the end of 1997, but others have insisted to me had to be 1998). It’s silly, when I think about how personally I take it when the Google company does something I disapprove of — but there’s a camaraderie rooted in that “I Feel Lucky” button that lingers.

Someone recently recalled (I’m sorry to admit I don’t remember who or where) the early quirk of humor Linden Lab displayed by putting up the Grid Monkey graphic when the grid would go down unexpectedly. It reminded me of just how amused I was the first time I found that. Unlike now where I’m frustrated and annoyed by every slow grid day and horrific SIM performance day (mostly those that end in Y lately), I used to see that graphic and feel an odd fondness and fellowship. I’m not sure if it was the humor alone, or simply the “yeah, we’re we know, we’re working on it” smirk it conveyed, but something about that graphic inspired a spark in me similar to the one I felt last night when Avast piped up to ask permission to talk like a pirate.

I think companies often forget that we want to like them. We want to approve of them. We want to feel some kindred little sense of whimsy and humor that shows us their products and services are not just grist or machine-work. True, we want to have faith in the products and we want them to work, but we also give a lot more leeway to the brands that charm us. We want to connect via the products to that human factor which assures us someone is at the helm even if we can’t see them — that we’re not just wandering denizens on a ghost ship set to automatic pilot.

I think some of the most lasting ways internet companies build customer loyalty probably start from an idea that springs out of too much caffeine and not enough sleep when one code monkey looks at another code monkey and murmurs “hey, you know what might be fun…?”

More companies need to learn to talk like pirates in the Avast way instead of just the “how do we rob them without them noticing” way. And, if they can get Johnny Depp to talk like a pirate on my computer, so much the better.

Just throwin’ it out there.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

As part of my new-found desire to try new things, I finally decided to try out the FRAPS program I purchased over two years ago. I’ve always wanted a better way to show movement and some of the other details of virtual goods for consumer reviews and this seems like a good next step. The catch, of course, is that I’m a person who doesn’t like doing things outside my skillset, and I don’t want to pester one of the talented folk who put up with me to capture video for my little squee entries. So, I’m going to *try* and learn how to do this. To make the ensuing hi-jinks really entertaining, I’ve never used hotkeys for my camera controls, so I’ll be learning that, too. This is *not* a professional endeavor — this is the ugly process of an uncoordinated babbling little geek with pixel vanity learning new skills.

Yes, it’s as bad as you’re thinking. Only worse.

For my first video review, I chose the Nyna Bikini from Artilleri and the only hair style from the 2010 Hair Fair I could bring myself to buy — the Del Mar from Surf. Co. If you want to slog through my babble, the video review is here:

I know, I’m sorry, but I warned you it was bad.

In the future I will hopefully be improving on the camera controls and I’ll keep my mouth shut to wheedle the time down to just a snippet as opposed to eight full minuets of agony. I’m counting on my sense of dignity and wanting to not look like a total moron to motivate my skills to improve. However, the stark white backdrop is by choice. My reviews aren’t about splash. I just want to show products so that shoppers can know what to expect from a purchase and then make a choice about whether or not to buy. Clever edits, flashy backgrounds and other effects might look nicer, but my concern is that they’re really just vanity improvements that would interfere with the substance I’m trying to offer. The presentation will, hopefully, get better, but the rest will remain dry as toast.

At any rate, if the video quality didn’t give you what you needed, here’s a few close-up shots for detail. I especially think the shading and fabric textures on the Nyna are worth another long peek:

Nyna Bikini From Artilleri

And the hair:

Surf Co.'s "Del Mar" Hairstyle

That wasn’t so bad. Now where’s my lolly?

Where Does She Get Those Wonderful Toys:

Nyna Retro Bikini – L$150
Artilleri

http://slurl.com/secondlife/artilleri/93/123/26

Del Mar Hairstyle – L$200 (three color shade pack)
Surf Co.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/artilleri/131/175/24

(Currently Only on Display at the Hair Fair)