A man in Panama found a tube of toothpaste which listed a dangerous chemical in its ingredients, which he brought to the attention of authorities there. This innocuous action led to subsequent international recalls of the toothpaste and the beginning of the current fervor over the safety of Chinese-manufactured items. So much for one person being inconsequential.
San Diego’s Republican mayor switches his stance from civil-unions-only to gay marriage in a remarkable and emotional statement to the press.
“Word Salad” is a term used to describe the confused, usually repetitious language symptomatic of some types of mental illness (like schizophrenia). Examples: BEWARE THE MARK or internet classic TIME CUBE.
Notice something that all this guy’s Flickr favorites have in common? Yep, he’s serious, and the internet finds another way to out-weird my wildest expectations.
Book Trailer for Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine, which postulates that culturally-traumatic events have been used to push extreme forms of capitalism upon foreign nations.
“We have invented libraries because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we try to do our best to imitate them.”
Umberto Eco
A decade in the making, Team Fortress 2 finally came out early this morning. And while I’ve played only a few hours so far (still a staggering amount given that’s usually how much I usually play games over a month or two), it’s totally worth the wait. For those unfamiliar with the story, the original Team Fortress was developed for Quake, one of the first fully-3D games ever. Designed as a “modification,” it meshed Quake’s art and technology with new models, weapons, and game-rules that turned it from a one-size-fits-all shoot-em-up to a more complex system of complementing classes. Players could choose to take the role of a Spy or an Engineer or a Demolitions Expert, with mostly-different weapons and abilities available to each role.
The team set about developing the sequel as another mod for Quake but were hired by Valve shortly afterwards and redirected to developing it as a mod for Half-Life, Valve’s slickly-scripted game featuring a rogue physicist (yeah) fighting against aliens and other staple enemies. The concept they were working with then included a commander class and a distinctly realistic and military styling. Screenshots were released, and they look pretty impressive for the day (which isn’t saying much given today’s vastly-higher expectations). If they look familiar, it’s because a little mod called Counter-Strike aped the look of that level and the faux-realistic attitude and went on to become the most played online game ever. It was so popular that it spawned an entire genre of realistic-military stuff, and remains the most played game today.
But development slowed, as the “commander class” and other new features proved hard to both balance and raise the fun level from the previous installment. The growing complexity led to Valve splitting the game off to sell as a separate product, releasing an updated port of the original as an apology to the fans (and a demonstration of their modding tools that were an order of magnitude easier than previous generations).
This peace offering freed the developers to further inculcate themselves into the Valve culture, where complete reboots and redesigns of games aren’t unheard of and are actually encouraged if necessary. Half-Life was completely redone in such a manner less than a year before its eventual release, and Team Fortress Two would go through two such revisions. The first was a move to Valve’s new generation of technology called the Source engine and born and bred for Half-Life 2, Valve’s followup to their spectacular first game. With this switch, the developers moved to using the art style and models developed for that game with the idea of placing players within an epic war only hinted at in Half-Life 2’s backstory. But that idea didn’t pan out, with the only indication of its existence in a 2003 leak of Half-Life 2’s source code.
Instead, the developers had an idea for an experiment: what would a multiplayer shooter look like that was specifically designed for every aspect to be as easy as possible for players? Their answer is the final form of Team Fortress 2, revealed to the public about a year ago.
First, each player would be plastered with their team color, allowing others at a glance to determine whether they were a friend or a foe. As seen in the picture that opens this post and the silhouettes immediately above, each class in this new version would take the form of a distinct, easily-recognizable character. Each main weapon would also be distinct from the other choices, allowing the player to tell whether he or she faced a short-range or long-range weapon. With the goal of minimizing visual clutter, a stylized shading system was chosen similar to the ones used in The Incredibles. For a prettier and more technically-wordy version of that, just watch the art and technology showcase video Valve put out this summer.
Valve adapted their successful iterative design techniques they used on their Half-Life games, distilling it to a science, making all their choices towards the end of refining gameplay and goals. For example, take this excerpt from the in-game developer commentary:
When designing areas for high levels of combat, we try to avoid complexity and chaos. Complex geometry confuses players, making it hard for them to track enemies, and interfering with their movement and aiming during combat. The most chaotic combat tends to occur when the size of the room fails to support the number of players fighting in it. In this final area of the map, we wanted a freeform battle to rage for some time before anyone could achieve a decisive victory. To achieve this, we built a wide open area with several entrances, and gave players a variety of attack and defense options at various heights. Rather than depend on elevators and ladders, we relied on ramps, since these allow freedom of movement at all times instead of confining players. Through playtesting we made many changes to the dimensions of the room, the size of cover elements, and the size of the entrances, thus ensuring the area could accommodate a battle of many players.
Like all the best work, the amazing innovations Valve has packaged with Team Fortress 2 are unobtrusive, so elegant in their function that they don’t even exhibit any characteristic disadvantages that have to be explained away and papered-over. And on the player’s side, they all pay off to make the best multiplayer experience in years. Sometimes hagiographies are warranted; this is one of those cases.
Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers, creating documentaries like The Fog of War that try to get at the truth of a matter through oral interviews with subjects. Morris does a bunch of research behind the scenes, but he rarely appears in his documentaries, even eschewing the usual narration that accompanies documentaries. In its place is deftly-edited responses from the interview subjects, making for films that are unlike anything else out there.
But it isn’t just the methodology that makes Morris’ movies good; there’s also a really incisive way of viewing the world that informs those interviews and the subsequent editing. Every once in a while, Morris will write an essay or something that finally lets him speak directly to the reader, and those occasions are a treat. What luck, then, to get Morris’s new monthly-ish series of essays on the New York Times website. They serve as a sort of preview to his upcoming film Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P. for short), an investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses and the iconic phographs that made them known all around the world. As usual, Morris does the big-picture thing better than anyone else, asking what constitutes “truth” in photography and how we can get at it. (more…)
From FonnyJez’s Flickr collection
For the last two years or so, Godspeed You Black Emperor has been my favorite band. It’s actually starting to creep me out, if only because I don’t have favorites in any other areas that have remained favorites for so long. But still they remain, probably because they offer some distinctive mix of something that’s hard enough to put your finger on, much less recreate under any other setting. That may have been why the band was put on semi-permanent hiatus in 2003, and why the efforts of that group since through the band A Silver Mt. Zion have been quite different (featuring lyrics, amongst other differences).
Either way, something special happened during that time of less than a decade where GYBE counted itself as whole. Here’s one of their studio recordings, consisting of material that eventually debuted in a somewhat different form on their album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven.
[audio:godspeed_you_black_emperor-hungover.mp3]