Online Game Review: Fallen Race

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There's quite a number of "browser-based" multiplayer games out there on the Web, with varying levels of complexity. At one extreme, there are the massively multiplayer online games that require software installation or download; at the other extreme, there are text games that require nothing more than your browser, clicking on selections in order to complete your "turn". Several years ago, I gave some of these a try. There are many varieties, some based on the old "Kingdom" strategy games, where you assign food, workers, and resources in order to grow your citadel from year to year, with a natural extension to multiple players. Other games take a science-fiction plot, or Dungeons and Dragons, or other such similar themes. In most cases, the game action is essentially the same. A turn count recharges in real time; for instance, you may be allowed a certain number of clicks every 24 hours. You may use those clicks each time when you log on, and other incentives (such as referring other users or in some cases pay-to-play) may increase the number of clicks you have available and thus give you an advantage in the game. What keeps you coming back to visit the site is the thought that, if you don't use those clicks your character collects while you're gone, your character will fall astray from its possible maximum potential. To many, this might not sound particularly absorbing, but there is something notoriously addictive about attempting to work out how best to plot and play your moves with considerable patience. Add a social element, and things can get dangerously absorbing.

Fallen Race is a browser-based multiplayer game that grabbed my attention on Twitter this weekend; with a mention that it can be played on any browser or mobile device anywhere. That is a significant advantage of text-based or click-based games; they are playable on browsers on devices such as phones, and checking in to enter the moves can be done at any convenient time such as when queueing or waiting for a bus. Fallen Race is set in the late 21st century, after an alien invasion has forced the human race underground. It is up to you to arm your character and take part in a rebellion to fight back the aliens, or to fight any other factions of humans competing for resources and money in the world. That's the plot description; to see how this translates into game dynamics, a sysop gifted me with some in-game money and a "donator pack", an item that signifies a player has made a contribution to the upkeep of the game and unlocks access to some donator-only features, including accelerated recharging of energy and studying skills, and the ability to maintain lists of friends and enemies within the game itself. I am quite pleased to say that, unlike many games of its type, the game does not feature advertising, not even a single banner ad; or reward clicks to links to external sites, a common promotional gimmick for this kind of game.

In the game, you buy equipment to arm your player and defend yourself from attacks, while training your character's statistics of accuracy, strength, defense, and agility. Your character has values of mood, energy, courage, and focus, which change up and down constantly as you play your turns. The stats and attributes interact, which is where the strategy comes in; for example, it costs energy to train up your statistics, and how successful your training is depends on your mood. Focus enables you to study, while courage enables you to perform missions which let you level up. Of course, you have a number of life points, which, should you get attacked either by the in-game enemies or by other players online, will put you in the hospital to heal. The statistics regenerate over time; for example, you regain a courage point every five minutes which means you can re-attempt a mission that costs one courage point. As well as the missions, you may also choose to search the environment around you, and you are awarded a certain number of searches every day. The outcome or searches and missions may be increased experience or discovering new objects; but there may be negative outcomes, such as a wound that puts you in the hospital or time in jail. By logging back into the game regularly and spending the available points wisely, your character can increase in strength and levels and open up more and more possibilities. If you're obsessive compulsive, you can check every five minutes for something to click, but this is a game for the extremely patient! Fortunately, there seems to be sufficient protection against automation - getting computer bots to enter the moves for you - and hopefully the human element is more important to players than the game's internal number-crunching.

Evolving your character by periodically logging onto the web site and clicking available options is, of course, only the non-social part of the game. Building your character is there to enable access to the community options, backed by an in-game message board where you can interact with currently around 7000 other players. By getting to know other players, you can join teams known as "squadrons" who fight for reputation points. Fighting other players in this way is part of the game - the game runs the fight whether or not both players are online, so it is quite possible to log on to the game to discover you have been put into the hospital. In addition, there's a Battle League where organized, competitive fights are held between characters to move up through the ranks and win prizes. By meeting other people within the game, you can send them objects, attempt to rescue them from the jail, and thus build on the social elements of the game. It is the social aspects where there is considerable development currently ongoing; recent additions for example include a lottery and the "Fallen Theatre" where players can submit and share videos. You can buy and sell objects on the black market to other players, buy a bigger "facility" to live in, and even find an in-game spouse. The social aspects of the game work very well. Within a matter of minutes you will meet other players by breaking them out of jail, being gifted with supplies, weapons, armor, and the grapes - handy to throw at prisoners.

There were a few issues I did run into while exploring the site. While the Twitter account promoting the game describes it as playable on mobile devices, the site is in no way optimal for use on a smartphone - there is not an "optimised for mobile" version of the pages. The pages load very slowly on a phone and are cumbersome to scroll around, This seems a shame - the game seems ideal to be played on the move, and most games of this btype really should address this in this day and age. There are some situations as well where the page display is not precisely in-sync with game events. For example, if you have one courage point left and undertake a mission, the display of the mission results still shows that one remaining courage point on the left panel, and only updates on the next screen. The game is under active development, though, and changes big and small are in the works. In fact, while writing this review, I came across a bug of little consequence, which the sysop immediately looked into, even though it was 5.30am his local time. The community seems thriving and there is definitely a sentiment among the players that they are in no small way helping to shape the future of the game. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you enjoy click-based browser games, Fallen Race might be worth checking out.

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Standing up for what I believe in - I Am The Walrus

J, a dear musician friend of mine, wrote to me a couple of days ago with his ambition for the week. "I am going to do a remake of I Am The Walrus," he bragged. "It'll be quite a challenge, I'm going to be using all sorts of sound effects, I'll see how it goes." I wished him luck, told him he was exceptionally brave, and wondered what would become of it.

Last night, he mailed me an MP3 file attachment, and I was so intrigued I had to go over immediately to the computer and see what he had done. Admittedly, it was a bit rough around the edges. An amateur musician, with basic home studio equipment and a keyboard... but nevertheless J had done exactly what he had set out to do. And, more than that, he had created something that had never been created before. He had entitled his e-mail "You have never heard it like this" - and he was absolutely right. His sound effects included other Beatles songs, a sample of Rod Serling giving one of his Twilight Zone introductions, and even the great Don Knotts as Barney Fife saying "you've gotta nip it in the bud". It was indeed something I had never heard before. Something old and familiar, but delivered with a fresh spin so that it became something new.

For countless centuries, that has been the way culture has been done. Every generation takes the existing culture, and builds on it, modifies it, refreshes it, and gives us an increasing return on investment. Culture is a wonderful thing. Like intelligence, sharing it doesn't deplete it; it all comes from a commons. The more we have of it, the more it enriches us all. With the technology and capabilities that we now have, things that were radical and only accessible to producers like George Martin in studios like Abbey Road are now available to more of us than ever. Most of us have easy access to sufficient technology just by using our computers. Yet, somehow, our abilities to do so are being stunted. J can never perform his recording. He can only share it privately with friends in an e-mail. He can, of course, never afford to deal with copyright law.

The irony of it all is that copyright law calls what J has done stealing. There's some implied philosophy there that because the song of another was used as part of his work, because he "took" something, that there's less of it remaining for the original author. J had only done this as a tribute, paying homage to his heroes, as a labor of love. There was never anything remotely vindictive about what he did. Any concept of theft could not be further from the truth. Yet, that's not the way the law works. It's not just music, and it's not just the Beatles, of course. Once upon a time, the Walt Disney company took the works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Things that were old, and turned them into something fresh, something different, something new, and something that suited the times. Of course, were any of us ever to do the same to Disney as Disney had previously done to the Grimms or Andersen, the outcome would be very different.

Josie over at Sleep is for the Weak posed, as one of her prompts for this week's Writing Workshop, to write about a time when I stood up for something I believe in, and what were the consequences. (I must admit, this is my second attempt at a post; I tried the "taking stock" prompt first and wasn't pleased with the results). I guess like most kids of my generation, I was falling foul of copyright law as soon as I had any appreciation of music at all. I can remember every Sunday evening, listening to the Charts countdown (during that rare spell where Radio 1 would get a hold of the FM waveband from Radio 2 for the evening - I find it humorous now that I'm definitely in the 'Radio 2" demographic now), perched on a chair in the corner of the room, hovering expectantly over the stereo with three buttons pressed in on the cassette player; play, record, and pause, waiting, just waiting, for a favorite song to come up and release the pause button with a flourish; then hoping at the other end the DJ wouldn't punch in too early before a chance to get a clean pause at the other end. (Simon Bates was terrible for that sort of thing). It occurred to me back then that yes, what I was doing was technically breaking the law; it also occurred to me that why on earth did they sell blank cassettes, then. Now all you kids these days with your digital copies and your MP3's are missing how difficult it was to 'rip' music thirty years ago. You had to plan ahead with blank cassettes and all sorts. It actually took a great deal of work, and, quite frankly, the resulting quality was awful. Perhaps that was why nobody cared too much about it; the copyright police knocking on the door seemed about as far-fetched as the other bogeyman of The UK in the 70's - the TV detector van.

It takes quite a bit more than trying to badly record a few things off the radio to really make this much of a tale about standing up for what I believed in; let's go forward quite a few years later, to my last year at college. The college alternated between lavish May Balls and somewhat more subdued June Events; and, as luck would have it, I was in one of the years that would have a June event in their first and last years there. The committee for the 1992 Event had chosen an Olympic theme; and was looking for volunteers to assist, entertain. I'm a passable keyboard player. What that means, in actuality, is I can't play to save my life, but I can program a sequencer. There was an entertainment slot available; a "chill-out room" where movies would be projected up on the wall with some accompanying music. This sounded like just the thing, and I set to work composing the music. On the night, I'd sit behind the screen with the projectionist, and as the images appeared in front of me, I'd mouse-click and punch-in and out different music and sound effects. It had the potential of being an unmitigated disaster.

Indeed, for the first pass, it was. The music was bland and generic; the odds of actually being able to synchronize anything with the experimental art-school movies and claymation reels we had seemed hopeless. By the time I made the second pass, however, things started to look considerably better. This may, perhaps have been related to the consumption of alcohol; you know, just the right amount to loosen things up a bit. The more relaxed and laid-back things became, the more smoothly everything fit together. As the evening progressed, things seemed better and better - both the performer and the crowd evidently were getting drunker and drunker. After a while, things got to the point where I thought, why not, I can play live if I want to, maybe I can spice things up a little. What I did was unquestionably a violation of copyright law. All those keyboard riffs that I'd practised over and over again in my room, in an effort to learn how to play, ended up appearing in the performance. That unmistakable horn from Pure by the Lightning Seeds; Stevie Wonder's Superstition; those artsy-fartsy pseudo-Mozart riffs that the scruffy guy with the beard from Abba would do in S.O.S and Gimme Gimme Gimme. The crowd loved it. There were howls of recognition, and a room full of people who had a WTF expression (long before the Internet had seen that expression take off) turned into a rather raucous bunch who were quite happy to make more return trips to the bar to buy more beer. The copyright police didn't show up that day, either; I'm quite sure if I hadn't have decided to do something that was technically illegal, that night would not have been a success. A few people came up that night and wanted recordings of the music; I can remember giving one of the cassettes to Crazy Alice, who caught up with me a couple of days later. "It's not the same," she bleated. "Where's all the cool bits of stuff I know?"

Tonight, I wish I could share J's creativity and expression with you; I really do. I know however that copyright law won't allow that, and that's something I will have to begrudgingly agree to. But I do worry about the state of the law, about how it stifles creativity and expression, and I'm sure art will suffer as a result. What I worry most about the law is it does not change the behavior of those who believe, in their heart of hearts, that the restrictions are wrong. Law doesn't make people behave; it makes outlaws out of common, good folks. I am going to enjoy a performance of I am the Walrus now, and one thing is certain.

You have never heard it like this. And perhaps you never will.

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Review: How to Write a Blockbuster Novel With Storybook #nanowrimo

Why Novel Planning Software?

November is just around the corner, which means National Novel Writing Month is fast approaching. Whether you're planning to take part in NaNoWriMo, or whether you are perhaps entertaining the idea of writing a novel for any other reason, it might be a good idea to take a look at what tools are available. Even though NaNoWriMo is supposed to be blitz writing without editing, you would be well advised to plan your novel ahead of time. There are some software packages on offer out there that allow that, and Storybook is one of them. One of the most appealing factors about Storybook is its price; it is open source and available for free. 

Storybook is novel planning software; specifically, it allows you to put characters in locations and scenes and arrange them into chapters. This is all done using a visual representation of all the scenes in your masterpiece, almost like moving index cards around on the table. The scenes can be ordered and placed into chapters, and progress on the actual writing can be done within the Storybook program. 

However, it's important to note that Storybook is not a text editor or a word processor. The text entered into Storybook should be of the form of short notes, not your actual text itself. You will still need a text editor or word processor to do the actual work!

Installing and Using Storybook

Storybook is available for both Windows and Linux, and requires that you have Java 6 already installed. (If necessary, visit the Sun Java web site to download the latest version of Java appropriate for your computer). The installation process is relatively painless, with a one-click install available for Windows platforms and a single file to unpack for Linux. By far the most common reason for an installation failure is not already having the correct version of Java. 

Once the program is started, you will see the main Storybook screen. A demo project is available, illustrating Storybook's main concepts. Storybook is all about the arrangement of individual scenes; a scene typically takes place in a single location and is occupied by various characters in the novel. The characters and locations can have some background information, and the scene can be outlined. Scenes typically take place on a line of narrative called a strand; while there is obviously a minimum of one strand, more complex stories can intertwine multiple strands, for example to present multiple viewpoints or sub-plots. Scenes are then assigned to chapters, and, in effect, the planning is done. 

A novelist planning their novel with Storybook will typically create their characters and locations upfront, and then write a brief synopsis of each scene that is required to tell the story. Once all the scenes are planned, correctly ordering them and locating them into chapters to ensure the novel is correctly paced can be quite a challenge. Storybook allows this to be done in a reasonably visual and intuitive manner. It can also be used as a repository for notes, and is a good place to record details which need to be referred to several times during the writing process, such as the description of a character or a location.

What's Good, What's Not So Good

Storybook reasonably impressed me with the way it attempts to focus the novelist's mind on those important details that it is very common to lose track of when writing. For example, when defining a character, it is an option to specify that character's date of birth; it is all too easy when time passes within a novel that the character's age gets forgotten about. Similarly, it ensures that the author puts some thought into other important plot devices such as locations; no matter what the novel, it is all too obvious (and annoying to the reader) when there are inaccuracies that illustrate the novelist did not bother to do any research. 

However, Storybook did also seem to have some considerable failings. As far as I could tell, scenes in the book could only be assigned a date, not a time. This made several scenes that took part on the same day very cumbersome, and in situations where attention to time might be important (such as writing a murder mystery) it would appear more granularity was required. Similarly, there is no easy mechanism to ensure scenes on a strand appear in the correct order when assembled; although it occurred to me that may not necessarily be a desirable feature depending on an author's preferred narrative style. It was not entirely clear whether some of the interface elements were clickable or not; there were many places I wanted to be able to click and drag, or right-click, but it seems that wasn't always intuitive. Above all though, my biggest concern with Storybook was that the planning file becomes another artifact that the novelist would have to keep in sync with their external edits. Once writing starts, and presumably even more once a novel is edited, chapters and scenes could be rearranged, and it seems like it would be difficult to keep the Storybook file up-to-date. It seems it outlives its usefulness once writing actually begins. 

There may be some of Storybook's advanced features that writers might find particularly useful. Several reports are available, such as on the occurrence of characters and locations within the novel plan. This may be a means to eliminate potential conflicts at the planning stage, and also denote whether or not each of the characters gets a sufficient amount of "air time" in the completed work. There are export facilities that allow you to print your completed plan and use it as a guide when it comes to writing your masterpiece.

Conclusion

Storybook certainly serves a role; it might well be a valuable tool for you to use when planning your next novel. One thing is for certain, there is no right or wrong way to write, or even to plan to write, and so you might want to give Storybook a try, and see what it has to offer. 

Visit the Storybook website at http://storybook.intertec.ch, where you can download it, read about features, view tutorials, and see if Storybook is right for you. It may just be the tool you need to plan your next blockbuster. It is just up to you to provide the time, motivation, talent, and the hundreds of other character traits you'll need to be a successful novelist!

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Don't upsell me - DVD and Blu-ray Combos

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"Would you like to turn that into a meal?" "Would you like to add cheese or bacon? Would you like to upsize that to a medium for just 69 cents more?"

No, I wouldn't. If I did, I would have ordered it that way, wouldn't I? These days though it seems I can't go anywhere without the threat of being upsold. I walk into a 7-11 to buy a Gatorade, and I cringe when I see the "Buy 2 for $3" stickers on the shelves in the refrigerator. I know the conversation that's going to come as I try to pay. "For a dollar more, you can have two." "But I only want one!" "You'll be saving a buck!" "No I won't, I'll be spending a dollar more for something I don't want! I only want one!"

The DVD and Blu-ray "combo packs" in the title are just the latest example of this upselling, and they're seeming to be more and more common. The prime offender at the moment appears to be Disney, who, if you have ever thought that their business practices were entirely fair, you probably have never been through the experience of explaining to a four-year old girl why her copy of The Little Mermaid that she has played every day on the VCR not only no longer works, but cannot be replaced until, well, some new video technology gets invented. Apparently, there's this theory out there that the world is full of DVD player owners who are going to be purchasing a Blu-Ray player in the near future, and so don't want the media they've purchased to be obsolete? (Oh wait, hang on a minute. Let's not forget that what they've actually published is the right to play that media; much of this article applies equally to the notion of giving away "free digital copies" of the movie as well). It surprises me that there doesn't seem to be a bit more of a furore about this. Surely the streets should be filled with rioting crowds, brandishing torches and pitchforks, and demanding that they should be able to purchase just what they want, and nothing else?

It seems not; in fact, it seems more likely that we've gotten quite immune to this kind of upselling. Since we see it everywhere, we apparently no longer protest. We see laundry detergent boxes emblazoned with a yellow stripe at the top, proclaiming they're loaded with "33% more free", and everything about the packaging draws us in. The stripe dominates the entire new box design, and, once we get it home, would it be cynical to suggest the contents have, well, settled a bit more than usual during transit? Of course, this new packaging is preparing for a price hike next week, the quiet disappearance of the promotional packaging, and presumably someone figured out they were going to get more advertising space on the shelves. DVD's and video games themselves arrive in cases whose profile seems apparently to be a certain size to match VHS cases. That reminds me of that apocryphal tale about how the size of the Space Shuttle's booster rockets was determined by the width of a horse's ass.

But I digress. Back to those combo packs; the things which I'm quite sure the majority of purchasers might only want one of the two discs, and, more importantly, would probably appreciate being given the choice. They're promised it as if it were a free gift, but an individual option would have been cheaper to produce and saved on packaging; they might have preferred a discount. Sadly, though, we accept this kind of marketing as the way business is done, and just let it happen. Enough is enough. Next time you find yourself out shopping for that home release of a movie that's out in a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack, do something first. Contact your friends. Put an ad up on Craigslist. Get a purchasing buddy who'll take the other disc off your hands. Reduce these mean and nasty studios' profit margins!

And, perhaps then, they'll stop doing it.

Nerdy Number Corner: Recurring, recurring...

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If you've messed with a calculator for any length of time, you'll have noticed that when division isn't exact, the calculator has this nasty habit of responding with a decimal answer that fills the entire display. For instance, if you ask your calculator to evaluate that common approximation to pi, 22/7. The calculator will respond with something like 3.1428571; if you have a slightly more sophisticated calculator, you'll see the next two digits are 42; and, as you might correctly guess, the sequence 142857 goes on 'forever'. (Yes, I'll admit it. I'm being a bit careful with my choice of words here. The idea of a sequence of digits that goes on 'forever' is actually something abstract. Decimal expansions, streams of digits, exist so we can write numbers down. If a stream of digits really did go on 'forever' - well, we'd never finish writing it out). It turns out that's actually the norm when it comes to the decimal expansion for fractions. If (once we've reduced to lowest terms) the only factors that appear in the denominator are 2 and/or 5, then the decimal expansion comes to an end (because 2 and 5 are the factors of 10, the base of our number system). Otherwise, the decimal expansion of a fraction eventually repeats.

There's some immediate questions that might spring to mind, such as, how many digits long is the repeating cycle? 1/3 is 0.3333333... the pattern is one digit long. Likewise 1/6 is 0.1666666... - after that initial 1, the pattern is again one digit long. 1/7 is 0.142857... and that pattern is six digits long. What's happening? It turns out the length of the pattern can be at most one less than the denominator. A simple explanation would be to consider how you would work out the decimal expansion using pencil and paper. it would be a long division problem into n.0000... (where n is the numerator) - the string of zeroes on the right of the decimal point going on 'forever'. At each digit, the remainder carried to the next digit takes one of the values 1, 2, ... d-1, where d is the denominator. There are no other possibilities; the remainder at each step has to be less than d, and the remainder can't be zero, because the calculation doesn't terminate. Once a remainder repeats, the sequence forever thereafter also repeats. The enterprising of you might want to start Googling for things like the "order of 10, modulo d". The actual length of the repeating cycle can be determined.

The process works the other way around as well. Any repeating sequence of digits represents a fraction. For instance, the decimal 0.153439153439..., those six digits repeating over and over again, represents 153439/999999, or, in it's simplest form, 29/189. Similarly, even if the sequence doesn't immediately repeat, it still represents a fraction. For example, given the number X = 0.123153439153439...., that's also a fraction. To prove it, note that 1000X = 123 + 29/189 and then solve for X.

The recurring decimal pattern, occurring for sequences of digits that represent fractions, is so common that even if we try to construct some particularly unusual decimals, we'll get fractional answers and recurring patterns all over again. For instance, what if we start writing down the number 0.1234567... - the pattern continuing 8, 9, 10, 11.... Things start to get a bit tricky if we want to put numbers greater than 9 in a single digit position, so we have to worry about carries. What is this value? We can calculate it by writing

X = 0/1 + 1/10 + 2/100 + 3/1000 + 4/10000 + ....

and thus

10X = 0/10 + 1/1 + 2/10 + 3/100 + 4/1000 + ....

and subtracting one from the other

9X = 1/1 + 1/10 + 1/100 + 1/1000 + = 10/9

giving X = 10/81. It turns out that number X is 0.123456790123456790... - remarkably, the digits line up, repeating every nine positions, even with all the carries from digit to digit, and not a single digit 8 survives.

We can even make some even more difficult calculations. Consider the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... where each term is the sum of the two preceding ones. For clarity, write this out with each entry taking two digits (and, as before, we'll get carries occurring once numbers get larger). What is the value of X = 0.01010203050813213455....? Believe it or not, the answer is 101/9899. Can you prove it?

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You looked over my shoulder #searchenginesunday

A quick look at Google Analytics a couple of days ago found a strange phrase that someone had typed into a search engine, that somehow had brought them to this page. You looked over my shoulder. Perhaps they were disappointed when they found this blog, but no more. Here's a post written to precisely that title.

"You looked over my shoulder!" I spun around in the office chair, expecting to see Russ pranking again. Instead, I found myself looking into my manager's eyes, and smelling his breath. Shit. If it wasn't enough that he knew nothing about the industry, he was now here to micro-manage? It was going to be a long day.

He was a Navy man, apparently, all neatly starched shirts and a jacket with very, very shiny buttons. He'd stand up, stretch his arms out in front of him, make some indescribable noise through his lips and then demand to know if everything was "shipshape". He'd been brought in to bring some order to the chaos; to somehow get a bunch of twentysomethings to produce video game software. And so far, his best suggestion had been for us all to turn up clean-shaven and "get your bloody 'air cut!" He had impeccable credentials for the job; he'd been buddies with the new part owner of the company, who had recently bought his share to bail us out of some serious trouble.

And now he was about to tell me how to write code. This could be fun. "So, what are you doing, then? You haven't typed anything for the last five minutes. That's all this job is, right, typing?"

As soon as I heard that, part of me died inside. "It's not as easy as that, sure, I know you'd like to think it is," I grimaced. "I currently have what we in the 'business' call a 'bug'. You might have heard that term before. You know, named after that story about how insects had actually crawled into the first computers and frazzled up the valves. You know, those clever fellers up in Manchester, or down at Bletchley Park." I wasn't sure whether I'd been sufficiently patronizing for that to be a justified response to the mortal sin my new boss had just committed.

"Of course I know what a bug is, young man," the boss responded, craning his neck in a manner which would, within a couple of days, be impersonated by every wag in the company. "But, it's a completely logical process, isn't it? I mean, there's only so many lines right there in front of you. You go through them, one at a time, until you find the incorrect one. Then you fix it." I hit the right control key, and the text editor scrolled to the beginning of the file. I spun around in my chair, while holding "page down". Page after page of assembler blurred across the screen and reflected in the old boy's eyes.

"Harumph," he retorted. "Don't try to bedazzle me with bullshit - no matter what you say, it's still a linear process. Be systematic, and you'll find it. I have every confidence in you." He pulled up another chair and perched on the edge of it, intent that something was about to happen in the next few seconds. When nothing did, he became restless again. "So, what is it, precisely, that you're doing here?".

"It's display code," I explained, intent on showing that if sarcasm didn't work, straight-out honesty would at least bore him to tears. "What you see in front of you, on the screen, that's what's called memory-mapped. Every one of those pixels - yep, pixels, you can call them 'little dots' if you want - is represented by an address in memory. But, when I write to the display, I can only see 65,536 of those memory addresses at one." I saw him raise his eyebrows and begin to ask a question, but I continued. "The display, well, this one at least, is 640 pixels wide. Which, since that doesn't go into 65,536 exactly, means I have to do some clever fidgeting about to write some of the lines. Actually, I ask the display driver for what the screen geometry is and build myself some nice tables upfront, then, when I have to do anything with the screen, I just look everything up in the tables. It's very quick, on this machine, it takes something of the order of sixteen nanoseconds."

The question that had been eating him alive for the last couple of sentences of this explanation finally got to the surface. "Why 65,536? And how can you possibly remember that number?" "That, sir, is why I'm a code monkey, and you joined the Navy," I gleefully replied.

At that, he left my desk.

Feel like joining me? Have a go at writing either to this title, or one of your own, and list your entry in the comments. Have fun!

Internet, I have sinned. It's been eight days since my last blog post.

Image via Wikipedia

Internet, I have sinned. It's been eight days since my last blog post. Oh, believe me, I've got excuses aplenty. Real Life intervened, of course. Quite a slice of Real Life; everything from absolute bliss, wonderfully soaking up every moment of my time, to the not-so-nice. Neither extreme seemed particularly receptive to saying "Hey, you know, I've committed myself to posting, put life on TiVo pause, please, I need to go and write." I'm reading; actually, I'm more than reading. I've been given an opportunity to try my hand at editing, and so far, I'm enjoying it. As a matter of fact, I'm probably enjoying the novel a little bit too much, and I have to keep checking myself to decide whether I'm enjoying this latest scene too much to notice whether that word should be hyphenated or not.

Depending on what dictionary you dig out, the doldrums will be defined something along the lines of "a period of stagnation or slump". Interestingly, do you know where the word comes from? It's actually a maritime term for the winds (or sometimes, the lack thereof) close to the equator, between the tropics. Without getting too fancy, since there's more heat at the equator, the pressure is low, and the winds from the northern and southern hemispheres meet. As a result, it was not unusual for ships to be stuck there for days or even weeks before there'd be wind to fill their sails.

However, it seems that this biorhythmic behavior, oscillations in our ability to blog, disturbances in the Force, whatever you want to call them, seem to happen to us all. I've seen blogging buddies write sensational posts that go viral, get overwhelmed with comments, and then proceed with 23 follow-up posts the same day, Conversely, I see a lot of people pick some days where, quite simply, they go out of their way to do something different. It's usually a Friday. You know the ones, the #fictionfriday or the #fridayflash or the photo post invitations. They're a wonderful way of getting around the problem of having nothing to write, or a more impressive engagement with a pint of Boddington's. Make somebody else do all the work instead. Yes, I know, I'm being facetious. These are precisely the sort of blogging quests that build communities and help us all get to know each other, and that's a lot of what blogging is about. None of us can possibly do this in a vacuum.

So, anyway, I decided to have a look around to find a theme, a topic, something that I could do regularly, periodically, to guarantee I had a regular source of posting topics. I was mooching around Google Analytics and found, believe it or not, that somebody had managed to find their way to my blog by searching for the exact phrase "you looked over my shoulder". How thoroughly curious - not only that they had this exact phrase in mind, but also that their search led them here? I don't even know or remember if I've ever written those words in a blog. Well, I'm sure the searcher ended up disappointed, and didn't find what they were looking for. I felt a little bit sorry for them. Ah ha! Perhaps this is an opportunity! It could be search engine optimization in reverse. Instead of trying to get buzzwords into blog posts, why not see what brings people to visit, and write articles for them? It could be #searchenginesunday, perhaps. So, kind visitor, I want to thank you for the day that "you looked over my shoulder". That's the title I'm going to try for my next post. Likewise, there's been an irregular feature I've gone round here which, for want of a better name, I entitled Nerdy Number Corner. I'm a mathematician, after all, and I suffer from some geeky fascination with the magic of numbers. Maybe that's something I should also do on a particular day of the week. Maybe that will become #mathematicalmonday... hey, there's an idea. I think, now, I'm beginning to see a pattern. This is what I've been lacking - an established routine.

I saw this coming. This time last week, I opened up a new file in a text editor and began writing me a browser home page. Nothing too sophisticated, just a simple "todo" list; things like a list of links to the message boards, the online communities, and so on, that I should be visiting, should be promoting, and above all should be interacting with. It's a routine, yes, but, given enough time, it will become a habit. That's my daily schedule sorted out. Maybe I have to do the same with my weekly schedule, too. The word routine always has such negative connotations, and make things sound like a rut, but it looks like some discipline is necessary. Let's start with a good habit.

Here's a far more entertaining confessional.

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Murder Plans at the Wild Notes Karaoke Bar #fictionfriday

Annie at Write Anything put up this challenge for Fiction Friday #171. Given her first draft piece from a previous week, featuring an exceptionally loathsome character, kill him off in a sequel story. Here's my effort.

"You know?" Marco coughed. "It would probably count as a mercy killing. Or that he just needed killing. A bit like in Murder On The Orient Express. I figure you could get enough people to volunteer for it." Linda craned across the bar table, trying as hard as she could to glean as many as Marco's words over the noise of some large blonde girl in the middle of the room doing her best to yell out I Will Always Love You. "I thought they'd outlawed wailing," she quipped, and laughed for the first time in a week, the first time since she was here last Friday night with Marco. They couldn't hear a single word each other was saying while the music played, and that suited her just fine. She was just glad to be out of the house. Albert wouldn't have noticed.

"Or it could be like Strangers on a Train," Marco carried on. "You know, perfect murders. You and I swap; you get rid of Ang, and I'll off your Albert. Perfect." He took a good slug on his beer and began to giggle uncontrollably as the sympathy applause for the Whitney Houston wannabe died down. That last line had rang out across the table, clear as a bell. Angela Torrisi leaned over the table and told her husband to quit being such an ass, laughed, kissed him tenderly on the forehead like he was a guilty little boy, and reached out for Linda's hand. "Seriously, love, we need to do something. Come with me in the morning, OK? We'll get your hair done, you'll feel like a new woman,"

"I know that feeling, doll," Marco interrupted. "I feel like a new woman too. A nice big round one. With a bottom. You're too skinny, Ang. You look like Joan Rivers." Angela gave him the middle finger as a middle-aged couple with a Kenny Rogers beard and a Dolly Parton wig started murdering Islands In the Stream. Apparently, the resemblance stopped at the beard and the wig. Linda suddenly felt self-conscious of her own hair; she realized she hadn't even run a brush through it all day, let alone washed it. She'd ran across to Marco's while she was out running errands earlier, decided on the spur of the moment that yes, she'd come out to the club again with the young couple, and she'd barely had a chance to stop to put a change of clothes on before sneaking out the back door. Of course, "sneaking" was pretty much figurative. The surveillance cameras had seen her every move, seen her leave the house. Once, Albert would have checked the home surveillance tapes when she didn't respond to his request for another beer, but somehow she had a feeling he was past caring any more. Something else would catch the equipment's unwavering attention, like the dog barking at number five, or possibly half of some toy boy's backside bobbing up and down through the blinds across Mrs Forster's window. Linda leaving by the back door was just another transient image that would be backed up for posterity.

"Here's what we do," Marco continued, oblivious to the fact that some of his words might be overheard in the quieter passages in the song. "You go down the garden center, OK? Get yourself some bug killer, I honestly don't know how toxic it is, so you might have to take a while, slip a bit of it every day in his dinner, just a little bit. It'll get him eventually. And, I know what you're saying, that'll show up in a post-mortem." Marco belched. "That's why you have to burn his ass. That's OK, easy enough, you just turn the gas on and leave it running for a while. It'll blow up eventually. Usually when there's an electric spark when the thermostat kicks over. They do that a lot in the detective shows on TV, you know. Pilot lights, they're good too. But here's the trick, before you do that, get yourself a dead dog. Some roadkill, OK? Put it in the house before you torch the place, otherwise they'll know it's arson. They find a burnt dead dog, they'll assume it's your pet, and so must be an accident." The country couple finished up. "Nobody burns their own pet dog. I'd kill him for you, given half the chance." Once again, those last words floated across the crowded bar. "Marco, you pissed bastard," Angela scolded. "You've had enough, it's bad enough I have to prop you up and walk you home, but if I've got to clean your sick up and put you in your pyjamas again..." The next singer was getting ready to belt out Material Girl, and the opening bars were deafening. Angela shrugged once more, extended the middle finger towards Marco for the second time in five minutes, grabbed Linda by the hand, and pulled her out of the chair. "Come with me, love. I need a smoke," as they stepped out of the bar's back door onto the patio.

"Ignore Marco, he can be such an idiot," Angela started, as she took a cigarette and lit it, extending the packet towards Linda who absent-mindedly took one, although she hadn't smoked in the thirty-odd years she'd been married to Albert. He wouldn't have tolerated it. Linda took a deep draw as Angela continued. "Seriously, Lin, you've got to do something. Look at you. No offense, babe, but you look like shit. It's one thing that he doesn't care for you, you've known that for years, but you've given up caring about yourself. Marco's uncomfortable; that's why he cracks those lousy jokes about putting Albert out of everybody's misery. One of these days someone is going to overhear what he says, and fortunately, everybody thinks he's just yet another drunk prick. Linda, look at me. What are you going to do about him?". Another non-committal shrug of the shoulders. "You've got to do something."

"I already have," Linda murmured. "Albert is dead. Since last week, actually." Angela coughed and retched as she inhaled far too much cigarette smoke. "What the hell are you talking about? He gave my old man some aggro this morning when he tried to dump some trash in his bin. Ours was too full. Marco came in mad as you-know-what."

"No, Angela," Linda slowly and deliberately shaped each of the words. "He just thinks he saw Albert today. Just like the police think they got a complaint about that effing dog from him today, or a bunch of schoolkids think they got yelled at by him for throwing stuff in the yard this afternoon, or any one of the several hundred exceptionally predictable and well-documented pieces of Albert behavior that everyone sees, day in, day out, that's been repeated day in, day out, for the past week, even though he's been stiff as a board the whole time. It was an accident, if you must know. I'd had a few too many last week down here, and he started his bullshit no sooner did I get in the house. He swung at me, the uncoordinated fat bastard missed by a mile. I reached out and grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on and brought it down on his head. It was that anniversary clock we'd got for twenty-five. Twenty-five, Ang. I'd have got out in half that if I'd killed the bastard in the first place."

"You're joking, You're friggin' joking, Lin. You need help."

"No joke, no joke. It's relatively easy to make it look and sound like someone's still alive when they record absolutely everything, you know. It's all there, every belch and fart, every flush of the pot. Every one of the neighbors on the street thinks Albert's still in the house, still alive. Even your old man, sadly, yes, even your old man, who I'm pretty sure has got quite some Dutch Courage queued up this evening. He might go ahead and do something about it. I hope he does. Because that's the bit I was trying to figure out; how do I dispose of someone whose meds I've been poisoning for the past several months? Leaving the gas on was the easy part. The finishing touch though was the dead dog; Marco had that bit right. They'll never believe I set fire to my own house with the dog in it. Even the folks at number five will assume that's Albert calling the pound again. All I need is your old man to take a dive for me. And he will. Nobody would ever dream it was me, because, after all, I love Albert so much."

Angela Torrisi pulled away from Linda in absolute shock, aghast. She looked at the shell of a woman in front of her, her eye sockets black and lifeless, her face gaunt, her hair straggly. The woman had already died inside, a long time ago. Suddenly, it didn't seem so unreasonable that she might have killed the abominable man she was married to. The noise abated from inside the bar, and people began to come out of the door, squeezing between Linda and Angela as they made their way out. In Angela's purse, her 'phone rang. She shuffled through her possessions to get it, placed it next to her ear, and looked up. Linda seemed to have evaporated into the crowd. "Doll?" Marco's voice sounded on the other end of the 'phone. "You'll never believe where I am. Gawd, it smells in here."

Angela sighed. "I believe I would, Marco. I believe I would. Get the hell out of there, before..."

The line went dead.

Review (and Six Tips For Writing) A Six Minute Story

I've become quite a fan of the Twitter hashtag #fridayflash, signifying a smorgasbord of wonderful short story creations every Friday, and easily showcasing the great writing talent that abounds on Twitter. A couple of weeks ago, I was giving the usually enthusiastic @inshin a little bit of grief, because his #fridayflash story hadn't appeared this week. Busy weeks creep up on all of us, it seems; but it seemed unusual not to see his latest contribution to what has become an ever-growing collection and wide variety of short stories on his blog. While he told me he missed doing his #fridayflash for the week, he did shortly share a link to something different he'd tried. A six-minute story.

I can almost hear the gasps in the background. A story, in six minutes? It shouldn't be unusual, perhaps. In a previous era, ad libbing tales around the fire was perhaps a little more common than it is today. The art of making up fiction on the spot seems to be perhaps something from a bygone age; but there is something to be said for the skills that are needed to do this; they're skills that would certainly help in more conventional writing. It is certainly an invigorating exercise for the mind - and for the fingers. Such is the intent of Six Minute Story - a "microfiction experiment". It's quite a simple concept. As soon as you opt to submit a story, a prompt appears (perhaps a word, a phrase, or a picture) to suggest a story to write, and a timer starts ticking down from six minutes. Once the timer gets to zero, you can't write another word. It turns out attempting to do this is quite an adrenaline rush, and, I must admit, I failed to write anything remotely submittable at the first few attempts. Nothing ventured, nothing gained - and no need to submit if you don't quite manage it.

I was drawn to write a review of the Six Minute Story site immediately on seeing it, and reading the delightful FAQ - without a doubt, even if this seems an unusual concept, the site distinguishes itself immediately by having one of the most crisp, clean, bold, elegant and above all readable designs I have seen in a long time. All too often these days sites manage to fill themselves with so much annoying clutter to make them look hideous and unusable, particularly sites that have a "social" angle - which Six Minute Story does. You can follow other members of the site, look out for their submissions, upvote contributions and leave comments; and the site has managed to include all that functionality very, very cleanly. What may not be immediately apparent is that the design of the site - bright colors, large, legible text - actually appears to achieve a lot towards improving the writing environment. This is something you can only experience if you give it a try. If you find the Six Minute Story environment inviting, and you are at all a serious writer, you might wonder why on earth you're trying your craft in an over-featured, over-grown word processor with microscopic fonts.

The experience of crafting a submission is certainly worth trying; it will, after all, only take you six minutes to discover if this is for you or not. The very clean and uncluttered writing window appears, with a panel on the right which will, once you start, contain the "prompt". Prompts come in several forms, and the site developer is looking to increase even further on the variety and selection. Most of the prompts I have seen have been intriguing still photographs, with just the right amount of ambiguity to lead to quite a variety of interpretations. Another type is the definition of hero, villain, and goal. On Fridays (quite convenient for #fridayflash, methinks) the prompt is freeform, allowing you to write about anything. Of course, as the FAQ points out, nothing is forcing you to write to the prompt, but writing to that constraint makes it a challenge. Below the text area are a few other entry fiends for a title and selection of a license. Creative Commons is the order of the day here; and, quite rightly, the site makes it clear that if that's not for you, then by all means post your stories elsewhere. Hopefully most of us can be reasonable about this, and contribute to an ever-growing, shareable collection of spontaneous stories. All these entry fields below the text can be left until after the story is complete; so be warned, as soon as you click in the text field, the prompt will appear and the clock will begin ticking.

How on earth do you write a story in six minutes? It turns out to be remarkably challenging, particularly if your typing skills, like mine, are two-finger hunt-and-peck and your ability to think on your feet is, well, never been tasked like this before. After a few failed attempts, I thought I might share the following six tips on how you actually get a story written in six minutes. If I can do it, I'm sure others can:

1. Are you sitting comfortably? Believe it or not, this seemed to make an enormous difference. Lounging on the bed or with the laptop where its name suggests actually doesn't work. Sit up, in a good chair, at a good table, with a good keyboard, a good distance from the screen. It matters. And, as I hinted before, if this matters for this experiment, then it matters for your daily writing, too.
2. Don't worry about how "good" it is. Probably the easiest way to completely lock up while attempting this exercise is worrying about whether or not what you're writing is any good. Don't. Just completely, utterly, ignore it. It appears worrying about whether your work is any good is probably one of the main things that might make it awful. Seriously, just eliminate this from your mind; you might actually be surprised how good what comes out actually is.
3. Don't even think about editing. This is pretty much an extension to what's above. You won't have time to go back and edit; in fact, I somewhat doubt you'll have time to move the cursor at all. The editing gets in the way; just let the words pour out, stream-of-consciousness style. Again, you might be surprised about how coherent you become, and your work is freed from death by revision, as the FAQ gleefully states.
4. Think three-act play. Act I needs to be finished in two minutes. If you're going to have time for a story, with at least some plot development and resolution, you're going to have to have all your characters brought in within the first third of your time. Yep, two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds. My advice would be to try to avoid being artsy-fartsy here and give them names pretty quickly. The first sentence would be ideal, wouldn't it?
5. You should know where you're going after those two minutes, too. After those first two minutes, that gives you four minutes for the plot and the conclusion. Do yourself a favor here and at least have some idea of where you're going by here. Don't try to write that conclusion and then join the two ends up; that's not writing stream-of-consciousness. Just have an idea of how deep a situation you can dig; and exactly how you're going to dig your characters out in the closing act. Oh, and don't even think of finishing with And then I woke up. It was all a dream. You haven't done that since fifth grade, right? That's the sort of excuse for running out of time you don't need. Just because you're short on time, doesn't mean you can't plan.
6. Save yourself a few last seconds. You'll need them. This is just wise use of your time. Keep that concluding sentence in the back of your mind, as soon as it comes to you (hopefully somewhere around two minutes) and know you'll have to rattle that out in the closing seconds. Much better to have a story that ends, than one that doesn't.

Once it's done, fill out your title, keywords, choose your license, and submit it. Here's mine. No, I don't consider it a great work of literature, but it was certainly an experience, and an exciting one at that. Considering the time pressure element, I thought the result was surprisingly good - or is it because of the time pressure element? Quite possibly, this method of extricating fiction from the most difficult type of human on the planet - a would-be writer - may actually have something going for it. I'd very strongly recommend anyone with any level of writing expertise or ambition should give this a try; after all, it'll take no more than six minutes of your time. You might just discover something very much to your liking.

Visit Six Minute Story, and while you're there, check out darlingman1970. You can also follow @6minutestory on Twitter, and suggestions are always welcomed.

Losing Momentum in Fitness and Blogging

Image via Wikipedia

It was exceptionally tough this morning, pedaling that stationary bike. I'd watch the display in front of me, the terrain scrolling towards me like some slow-motion version of Scramble. Random hills proceed across the screen, every once in a while, one reaches right to the top of the display, an absolute skyscraper to pedal over. Getting over these is a question of mind over matter, because the display scrolls every ten seconds anyway; it doesn't matter if I pedal harder or faster; it doesn't matter if I stop pedaling completely; I'll get over this hill. However, if I don't keep my momentum going, it won't do me any good. Why are things so tough for me this morning?

Because I didn't go to the gym yesterday. We took our first day off yesterday morning; we had lots of reasons, lots of justifications. We deserved it. We needed snuggles. J had a hairdresser's appointment. We had a couple of errands to run. We had to go see a friend in the hospital later that evening. We quite simply didn't feel like going, and we paid the penalty for it today. There's a discipline involved, particularly at this early stage. It doesn't matter how often I weigh myself, or measure my waist. At the moment the biggest difference I'm going to see is whether I get on the scales before or after I visit the toilet. I've got to keep focused, keep going, because if I don't keep going, then C won't keep going, and if C doesn't keep going, I won't end up going, either.

But I've got to get through today, get through this thirty minutes. I'm visualizing what's going on inside this machine, a machine full of flywheels and magnetic resistance and belts and pulleys and all sorts of other junk. I just have to keep it moving. I have to keep going. If I can do that, then I'll make it; and I have to make it, I owe it to myself to do so. Another skyscraper left behind; there's another on the distant horizon, approaching. Let's cross that one when I get to it. Let's keep this exercise routine going. There's no sense for one day to derail the whole thing. And I'll know about it; I'll ache all day today, I'll feel the strain just like I did the first day I came to the gym after all those days off before.

OK, now the evening comes, and the blogging rituals. I created me a page over the weekend, listing my routine, the order I should do things in, how best to stay focused, how to keep up with my reading lists, comment on friends' pages, get some views, check out some stats. I haven't written a post since Sunday; the difficult one, the anniversary post. It seems like I've lost subscribers. It seems like I've only had about three page views today. What's happening? I've lost momentum here, too. I haven't been keeping up with my posts. I wrote an opinion piece; those are always good for traffic; and then a personal piece; those are always very satisfying. But then, nothing at all. I took some time off over the last couple of days; I had lots of reasons, lots of justifications. Appointments and errands and lack of computer time and I quite simply didn't feel like it. There's a discipline involved, particularly at this early stage, and it doesn't matter how many times I look at my traffic stats they are not going to radically change unless I keep producing content. I've got to keep focused, keep going, because if I don't keep going, then the chances of C and I actually settling down to write our novel will be pretty slim.

So I've got to put up a post today, get through this case of not knowing what to write about. I just have to keep it moving. And I'll know about it; I'll ache for quite a while over this post, and I'll feel the strain just like I did when I first began these pages. Let's get moving again.