A Life Uncensored

So here’s the idea: A split screen view of two different people, both of them alone in their little split screen rooms. They’re both feeling a little sick and decide to pop a couple dayquil or whatever. They both swallow wrong and start choking. They both pull out smart phones, one’s 4G the other is 3G. The 4G guy finds directions on how to self-Heimlich and laughs in the face of death. The 3G guy is dead. Smash cut to carrier logo.

Google Plus has been, so far, quite a triumph for Google. It’s gotten a fair bit of media attention, there’s a visible clamor for invites on other social networks, and, most importantly, it’s a great product. A lot of people are still trying to it figure out. Google included, I imagine. What’s perfect as is? What’s lacking? And where? how are the masses going to use it? There are a number of features that the current batch of Google Plus beta testers have talked about in depth, but a few I feel have been ignored. Chiefly, Sparks.

To understand what I want from Sparks, I think I need to clarify a bit of my personal history with online news consumption in the last couple of years. I was a Digg user for some time, but stopped using it not long after version 4 was released. Originally, for my purposes, Digg was just a news aggregator. Other users posted news, other users voted on if it was good or not, and it’d end up on the front page where I’d read it.  I voted, too, but rarely in the Upcoming sections. I could go to digg.com at 2pm, see one batch of news, and come back at 6pm and see all new stuff that had been shared since. Digg 4 took it all in a more “social” direction, focusing too heavily on some abstract community. Also, they tried to cater to news outlets by including some archaic system for users to follow Cracked or The Wall Street Journal, but it was some sort fo all or nothing game. The way I was using Digg was virtually impossible now. So, I went to reddit. Reddit is built from the ground up for it’s community, but community references itself ad nauseum. Although I’m still using it, it falls far short of how I want to consume my news, but does hit a few key points.

My ideal system is that I follow certain key interests I have. Video games, MMO’s, Formula 1, sports cars, world news, national politics, books, movies, television, etc. Users submit stories from around the internet to these topics, and other users vote it up or down based on how “good” the story is. Very reddit “subreddit” inspired, I know. The difference to me is that I’d don’t ever want to see comments, user names, anything that identifies the user that submits it, the users voting on it, anything. Just a headline, a blurp, and the score it’s gotten. I just want the bits and pieces from around the web. For instance, I don’t care about what some guy says about what a girl did after she heard about what her mom said the president was going to do. I care about what the president is going to do, and MAYBE what someone’s reaction is if it’s poignant (or funny). To me, if you’re opinion on the matter is valuable to the internet, then you should take the time and write something in depth. People will submit it and vote it up if it’s good. If it’s not, then shut the hell up.

Now, to get back to Google Plus. Sparks has been, at least from my point of view, widely ignored. I see SO MUCH potential for Sparks to fill this void in “just the news.” As Sparks works right now, I search for the topic I want to see a Spark about, Formula 1 for instance, and hit “Add Interest.” Now I have a nice little news feed of F1 news. The current problem is there aren’t enough news sources parsed, which can be fixed easily enough for the automated side of things. However, half of the point of Google Plus has been the +1 button. There’s a voting system already built into the thing, why aren’t they using it in Sparks? They could easily hit on every point I’m looking for with some (I imagine) subtle changes. Have the Sparks pull in more news sources, probably using Google News’ as a starting bed. Then allow user submitted material. As the system sees certain sites being submitted regularly, it gets parsed if it wasn’t already. Users can then vote for all the news with +1’s. Each Spark has two tabs, Top News and Upcoming. Freshly submitted pieces go in upcoming, and things that are getting a lot of +1’s or shares goes in top. You could even create another one of those annoying “share it!” buttons for webpages to include, a “Spark it” button. The user can go to a Cheezburger network site, hit Spark it, pick the Spark for it to go it, and they submit and +1 it at the same time.

I see a lot of potential in Google Plus as a whole. I can treat it like a Twitter/Facebook cross over, potentially dropping a service or two in time. If Sparks grows and develops in the right ways, I can replace a lot of news sources I hit multiple times a day, too. I don’t remember the last time I was actually excited to see where one of these projects goes, there’s so much potential and I think everyone knows it.

why does it take 3-4 days to process a credit card payment? You ask the bank if I have it, they say yes, you do it. SYN/ACK my money, dudes.

So on Tuesday night I got bored and was dicking around in the settings for my Seagate NAS. It has a DLNA feature I thought I turned on but seemed to never work because I never saw anything showing up where it should. I’m stumbling thru settings until I find a button “Sort Media.” “Oh, I see. I guess the drive needs to parse my data, find file extensions, and build a database of the locations of the files. Of course, that makes perfect sense.” So I hit the button. Half an hour later I’m trying to play a song and it’s throwing errors about not being in the known location. Sure enough, it’s not. Turns out all of the 17,000-ish songs aren’t where they belong. Where are they? Why, the folder My Music, which I found out early on you can’t even delete. Now I know why.

Upon further inspection I find that every video, audio, and image file has been moved to My Videos, My Pictures, and My Music. Not neatly, either. They were all dumped into the folders haphazardly, seeming to only rely on metadata for organization. I’ve spent years saying, “no no no, a proper file and directory structure is more important than 100% accurate metadata. I’ll keep good ID3 tags in the music, but why waste the time on photos?” Well, that fucking backfired in my face. I’m still at a loss for who in their right mind relies ENTIRELY on metadata for organizing. It’s putting all your faith in whatever manages your metadata (iTunes, for example) to be your one and only method of using the files. I’m sure that’s possible for some people, and I know with an Apple lifestyle choice it’s probably not hard assuming you also keep good backups, but it’s ridiculous none the less.

After a night of stewing in an angry, red mist directed at Seagate, I started formulating a plan of recovery. I, being the lazy shit I am, refuse to do this one by one. I needed to find an automated method for the brunt of the work. I was debating using a long series of Linux tools, which would also require a ton of hand coded scripting. Or, I could make life a bit easier with a few tools and a wise methodology for my attack if I go with two Windows apps. One is for the ID3 tags themselves, and the other is to automate the creation of a better file tree structure.

I already know of and have used one of my tools, MusicBrainz Picard. It’s a smart ID3 tagger based on an international database, MusicBrainz. I used it about a year ago to try fixing up a large portion of my collection’s tags which were out of order. It either auto-fills or auto-corrects missing tag data. When I used it originally it messed up a hand full of my albums, but it also corrected a lot more. I relied too much on it’s automation last time, which is what caused most of the problems I had. This time I’ll be more involved.

The other tool is MediaMonkey. Although I could do this with EasyTag on Windows or Linux, MediaMonkey is far more widely used and well documented, so I’ve been able to find some scripts to help further automation of the tagging, as well as it’s ability to parse the library to find things that require editing. Easier automation is my goal this time around, and it makes more sense.

The plan is pretty straight forward:

1. Clear out anything that is obviously not where it’s supposed to be. Since Seagate’s little automated data-fucker task moved every last audio file on my NAS into the same folder, there’s not just a lot of misplaced music, but also a lot of random crap from years ago I’ve been meaning to delete but never get around to. I need to move these else where for now. This was done by hand, just reordering the file listings until I knew what was an wasn’t from an album directory and moving them in large enough chunks to scrub folders.

2. Separate the easy albums from the hard ones. Quite a lot of the music is well tagged since my last go around with MusicBrainz, so most of it should be able to be cleaned up very quickly. MediaMonkey did this with it’s Auto-Organize Files tool, but it took me a while to plan it out right so that when I hit go it wouldn’t make a bigger mess, but also get as much as possible in the right places. So I spent a lot of time going thru the entire library it made to make sure album artist tags were right. Right before I was ready a nice Tornado Watch/Warning was thrown up, too. Had to hold on hitting OK for a while, because if it started and crashed part of the way thru it’d be even harder to start it over. Once it was done I breezed thru it once more to clear out some oddities that shouldn’t have happened, like 2pac and 2Pac folders being made and track numbering not leading with 0 on single digits.

3. Get ALL the easy stuff out of the way first. With all the easy fix albums organized into a nice file structure, I moved any fragments left over to another garbage/scrub folder. I’m currently going thru what’s here (lost somewhere between 500 to 1000 tracks) and trying to clean up further inconsistencies in the tagging. Making sure disc numbers are set right, proper years and genres, etc, etc. Going to throw MusicBrainz at what’s here again, to see if I try and spend more time on it instead of letting it’s do it’s thing how much better the tagging will be.

4. Redownload what I have to. If some of the hard stuff is simply bad tagging I can get around with an hour or so of work, no big deal. But I already know a lot of it is going to be complex figuring out what album it came from out of an entire discography, or why this Weezer album has Orbital tags (thanks MusicBrainz/assholes all naming their album “Blue Album”). So, if there isn’t too much of it, I’ll just spend an hour or so making a list of what I need to re-obtain.

I already cleaned up my videos. They were pretty easy considering anything besides movies or tv shows I have could be deleted because I forget they even existed. What scares me is the My Pictures folders. There are thousands of pictures, many of which have incredibly cryptic file names like IMG0002.jpg or DSC14003.JPG. All the pictures from all the cameras I’ve had, as well as archives of wallpapers, screenshots, and other crap. Not including the image files from old web sites and designs I’ve done. All of it dumped in one folder, which zero metadata. I have nothing to go on by file sizes and modification dates if I want to automate any of it. There’s a good chance I won’t ever touch it. It’ll be my elephant grave yard, a reminder to not trust anything that lacks documentation.

All in all this is a clusterfuck Seagate’s put me in. I put in the following support ticket:

I recently hit the “sort media” button on one of my shares by accident. The NAS proceeded to take my roughly 17,000 track MP3 collection, that was organized quite neatly into folders dictated by artist name and album name, and put each individual track into one “My Music” folder. The folders I had created are now simply empty. Anything resembling organization is gone.

Please, for the love of whatever invisible man in the sky you pray to, tell me that I don’t have to spend some ungodly number of hours reorganizing these files one by one? I see in my future filtering thru a thousand albums trying to place each track in the correct folder. I seriously doubt it, but is there anything resembling a undo button for this action, or a data log of the file moves so I can at least write a script or something to reverse it?

and received this reply:

Thank you for contacting Seagate.

I am sorry that you are having an issue with your Seagate product. I understand that you selected the media sort option and then moved the files into that share. Unfortunately the only solution to this would be to recopy the data after updating the firmware.

The latest firmware revision removes the sort media option box. I am sorry to say this but you will have to manually arrange the files back to their original structure.

Below is a link with information on how to upgrade the firmware on your Nas.

<cutting out a link and a further Thank You>

The reason I can never recommend a single Seagate product ever again is simply that I can’t believe how bad this situation is. There is no explanation of what the sort button does, the help files on the NAS don’t even reference that the button is there. The feature is apparently so bad that they removed it from the latest firmware. That means I’m not alone in this problem. The logic of what it did is non-existent. It’s simply DUMB. Every time anyone asks me, “Western Digital or Seagate?” I’ll say something along the lines of, “I can go on if you want, but the short of it: Seagate and I have badblood between us.”

Today I rung a guy out for an iPad 2. Afterward, his friend tried to hand me a couple pages that looked torn out from a book. He asked me if I was a believer, and I realized what he was doing. I handed it back to him, saying simply, “Hey man, it’s cool. I’m an atheist. You might want to hold these for someone else?” and handed it back. He started questioning me about it, trying to get me to listen to whatever … stuff he was talking about. I had to drop the, “I don’t want to get in an argument with a customer about this stuff, so… yeah.” and continued to just nod at him for a bit. He left, but the whole thing’s been on my mind since.

What I WANTED to do was drop something simple: I’ve spent a very long portion of my life as a nonbeliever. I’ve discussed it with my Catholic parents, I’ve talked to priests, reverends, imams, rabbis, and others, including family and friends. I’ve spent at least 10 years, more like 12 or 13, considering myself an atheist, and longer then that just not knowing what to call it. What could one random stranger POSSIBLY say that would suddenly change my mind? If he honestly thinks he could, that is a level of self pride that clearly falls in the seven deadly sins definition of pride, which is kind of ironic to me.

So, anyways, if you ever think atheists seem depressed and you think it’s because they don’t have God in their lives, realize it has more to do with having to put up with crap like this all the time.

Just watched Sucker Punch. For free, thanks to an HP event.

In short: Google for “Vanessa Hudgens naked” and you’ll be happier with what you see. Synder basically wrote a bunch of fun scenes and attempted to connect them, and failed miserably.

In detail (attempting to avoid spoilers): The movie’s based around one very cute girl losing her shit. She develops an intensely surreal fantasy world(s) in order to cope. The individual fantasy scenes are neat, beautiful, and interesting. The (not so) subtle connections between them, both the connections to the real world that’s developed and the fantasy in between each, are poorly contrived. Foreshadowing is too obvious, the twist is nearly impossible to not see coming, and the story arch is broken. Synder took a lot of archetypes and smashed them together. If I were 14 I’d hate myself for saying any of this, because it’s got Nazi zombies, guns, hot chicks, swords, dragons, robots, bombs, etc, and that OBVIOUSLY makes it an Oscar worthy movie.

If they were able to lock a few higher profile (better) actors, which would be hard because no one worth it would agree to what it is, it might of been more enjoyable. If Synder developed a few story boards and gave it to someone to write, it would have been a lot better. However, all he did was prove “I can make movies based on comics that are fucking awesome, but I can’t write for shit.” I really think getting a higher profile secondary writer in, besides this guy that hasn’t done anything (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0793122/), would have done this movie a world of credit in the direction of not sucking.

With AT&T buying T-Mobile, there are three national carriers left in the USA. Sprint’s the odd man out now. As a current Sprint user, I think they need to do 3 things in order to stay competitive:

1. Switch from WiMax to LTE yesterday. They need to get themselves onto the same data network as the other providers. Verizon learned from the mistake that is CDMA, and now Sprint needs to as well. When the entire world uses one standard using anything else hurts you. AT&T’s spent a long time being a favorite with travelers. Although they’re not a huge market share, they’re out there. LTE is going to be the new GSM, and although WiMax has it’s advantages, LTE will win.

2. Become the “anything but iPhone” provider. With AT&T and Verizon both having the iPhone, there’s already people calling Sprint a dead man walking. If Sprint can’t get the iPhone, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to become the niche for people that don’t want an iPhone. Get the latest and greatest Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, and Nokia smartphones, and they have a chance of being what AT&T was before the iPhone existed: Maybe not the best, but definitely had the best selection of phones. Just having the phones isn’t enough, though…

3. Become the nerd’s paradise. With AT&T and Verizon both becoming more and more restrictive on their data plans, Sprint needs to go in the opposite direction if they want to stay afloat. They always promise there won’t be data caps, soft caps, throttling, etc, and that’s good. Next is including tethering for free on smartphones that support it, either USB or wireless. Tethering is a growing demand, and if they can shout from the roof tops that theirs is free and the other guys charge an EXTRA $30 on top of the data plan, they’ll turn enough heads. Grow this out to being more open and friendly to the jailbreaking/rooting/”I want full control of my phone” community, and they’re a bastion for nerds and geeks. We already have seen that where we go is where the public eventually ends up with gadgetry, and grassroots effort can work wonders if done right.

So there’s this game out called Game Dev Story. It’s from a Japanese developer, out for iOS, Android, and PC. The idea of the game is you start out as an up and coming game developer and you pump out games. Hire staff, put out more games, move to bigger offices, put out more games, etc, etc. It’s one of those “this won’t be fun…” games and then all the sudden it’s an hour later and you’re like “GAH! Stupid coder just got a hot streak of bugs! dick!”

My favorite part of the game is naming games. For instance, I made a War Shooter called simply X of Y. Or my series of RPG Dating games, “+1 to Love.” The sequels were +2 to Love, etc. The fact that dating games are real in Japan seriously depresses me.

Anyways, so there’s a point in the game where you can start making sequels to your hit games, and later you can put out your own console(s). So I’m on my second console and I named it “Sell your Soul.” As in, you have to sell your soul to get one because it’s god damned expensive. I’m trying to level up as many game types as I can so I’m on the third installment of my Table Harbor game (no, I have NO earthly idea what the hell kind of game that actually is but apparently it sells SUPER well). So the game’s finished, the little pop up comes up to let me rename the game or just go ahead and publish it. Current Title: Sell Your Soul - On A Boat 3.

THIS is the reason I’m playing this game. It’s cheap, stupid, total time waster, and funny.

Your welcome.

I picked it up on 360 because that’ll be the only way to play with the majority of my friends, but quick review of multiplayer:

plays exactly like CoD:MW2 multiplayer. Only real difference I’ve “felt” so far is that it SEEMS like there aren’t any really “true” sniper perches. I definitely haven’t played all the maps yet, but of the ones I have I only found 2 perches I felt comfortable sniping in. It bugs me a lot because MW2’s maps were often played out in the tight spots, submachine guns, spray and pray, which is the opposite of how I like to play. However, in those maps, there were at least 2 sniping perches that let you see a large portion of the map that was moderately well defended. In Black Ops it feels like most of the perches give you a far more narrow point of view of the map. It’s probably that i haven’t had a chance to play enough yet, but who knows.

The only other difference is that in MW2 you leveled up and unlocked access to guns, kill streaks, etc. Now you unlock access to guns, but also have to use credits to buy them. So levels give you access, credits let you actually use it. The thing I like is all the gun attachments and crap are just available to you, you just have to buy them, instead of the whole “get 150 kills with FMJ to unlock this other thing” bullshit.

I haven’t done zombie mode yet, waiting for some of my friends to be online.

edit: oh yeah, single player. I only played for… maybe half an hour, probably less than that. I’m tempted to actually finish it though, the story looks really interesting. The first level is Cuba ‘61, you’re part of the Bay of Pigs strike team. What I did felt awesome, I just wanted to hop in the multiplayer because I know that’s where i’m gonna spend most my time.

Weekend Confirmed’s Garnett Lee agrees with me, Fable 1 is the best of the series. I dunno if we come to the conclusion in the same way, but we agree on that much.

I felt that the change from F1 to F2 was far too big. The combat system was completely reworked. Melee/ranged combat is better with F2’s system, but F1’s magic system was far, far better. F3 adjusted the magic system from F2 to be more enjoyable. Feature wise, I prefer most of F1’s mechanics over F2 or 3 otherwise. I enjoyed F2 a lot, but the HUGE shift in the story bugged me. The idea is that it takes place 200 years later. My problem? it’s far, far more than 200 years later. More like 1500 years later, minimum. F1 is more like a Author/Merlin era story, and F2 is more Robin Hood, maybe even past that. There’s so little to do with the first game.

So, I had an idea. A series of thoughts. To understand this, you have to have played Fable 1, at least. Fable: The Lost Chapters would be better considering the longer story arc. I’ll also be referencing mechanics from the second and third games, so … really, if you haven’t played all of them, you probably won’t get this.

I want a Fable prequel MMO on the console.

The basic story:

In Fable 1 we learn that the Guildmaster took over the Hero’s guild, allowing for heroes to do as they wish. No forced goodness. You’re a “Hero-classed” person, but you can be a hero or a villain. I want the prequel to take place around this time, of the guild being “refreshed.” Maybe the “starting zone” is the actual fight to take over, you’re helping the Guildmaster. Then the Guildmaster goes “kk, we won. Go out in the world, do stuff, help the Guild rebuild a name with the people… or whatever.” Then you’re out, leveling, doing stuff. Evil or Good, your choice.

One of the problems I had with F2 and 3 was that the new environments/maps/zones/levels or whatever you want to call it, at best, have little “nods” to a zone in the previous game. Example: In Fable 2, when you’re running around Wraithmarsh, you run over a bridge… The bridge from Oakvale in the first game. Otherwise, Oakvale doesn’t exist, at all, whatsoever. In Fable 3 Bowerstone has been COMPLETELY reordered, the only thing that looks familiar is the “center” of Bowerstone Market, the clock tower, the bridge, the stupid pig statue thing even got moved to another area. Brightwood’s lake is now Mourningwood, but developed with housing and whatnot.

Obviously, places like Bowerstone will grow/expand over time. That’s fine. The MMO could include “ancient” versions of all of the zones from each of the three games, interweaving them bit by bit so if you’ve played them you can go “OOOHHH, so Darkwood is east of Brightwood…” Part of the problem with each game is certain zones have names VERY similar to previous games, but they’re very different zones. I’d like to see some sort of thing along the lines of “It’s not that these zones changed so much in 50 years, it’s just you weren’t going thru them.” Why am I, as the gamer, stuck trying to figure out “ok… so Bowerstone’s here, but this new zone… where the hell was this in the last game? It looks COMPLETELY different, there wasn’t a lake here…” I understand it’s a new game, you can’t just rehash old maps with new textures because people will be pissed… but it still bugs me.

Mechanics:

Four person parties. A tank, healer, and two damage. Four people so that you can use the d-pad to target your party members to heal or buff.

Use the targeting system for melee/ranged combat of the first game, but for magic use the system from the third game. Bring back gear that effects your stats, not just how handsome/pretty you are. Plate is for tanks, +health stuff. Mail increases ranged attack stats, leather for melee stats, and cloth for “caster” stats.

The magic system from F2, where they merged spells into “don’t target it for AoE, or target it and it hits one guy” was a great idea. I like that a lot. the problem is it’s too hard to change spells on the fly. Bring back Fable 1’s use of a modifier button (pull a trigger, your A B X Y buttons now cast spells instead of … whatever else) for more spells for casters/healers. Add in some more spells that are some kinds of buffs, or change them so they’re in some way specific to filling a roll. Like, ghost swords do crap damage but do loads of threat. Multi-arrow for ranged damage, double swing for melee. Then things like lightning/fire/etc are for caster dps.

I wouldn’t want to see WoW style talent trees in a Fable MMO, but you could get the same effect with something like Global Agenda’s method of talents. I’m thinking for Fable, being x level means you have y number of spells to get. Besides gear, the only thing that “defines” you as a class is the spells you can cast. You can have 4 spells (effectively 8 if you can tinker some for balanced “target a mob for direct damage or no targeting for AoE”), that’s it. So, caster’s and healers wear the same gear, but they’ll use very different spells.

Otherwise, it’s all a matter of blending in standard MMO tropes (read: rip off WoW) and blending in your Fable-ness. You already have zones, you can pretty easily do a sort of “instancing” like WoW does. You have a rich story with lots of background to build off in many different directions. You can do things in a sort of Global Agenda method of “generic bosses at end of dungeon” or you can do a sort of Fable/WoW blend of bandit dungeons, hobb dungeons, balverine dungeons, etc, etc with specific bosses at each end. You can keep the strong Good vs. Evil vibe of all Fables pretty easily. Everyone’s a member of the Guild but the Guild is factioned. Continuing on WoW references, the Guild is your Shattrath/Dalaran type places, and Temple of Skorm/Temple of Avo are your Orgimmar or Stormwind.

Anyways, for me part of why I think Fable 1 is the best of the series is it’s story. It’s not the best gaming story ever, but it was perfect for what it was. It hit every point it was trying to, weaved wonderfully with the game mechanics, and really made for a fun game. I think a Fable MMO, blending together mechanics from each of the three games, could be amazing. I really think that the story would have to a prequel to the first game, though, because 2 and 3 have gone in such a far direction it’ll be leaving the realm of “classic fantasy.”