Atheist Bus Campaign

I got to thinking about the success of the Atheist Bus Campaign prompted by this article.
Now the only thing I have against the plan is that the word "probably" in the advert isn't a strong enough word to convey the meaning, and "almost certainly" doesn't quite flow right. However unless you're going to do a parody with something like the Invisible Pink Unicorn I don't see how you can make the improbability of a god more clear. I do think that the original author knocked the nail on the head though when she said:

"It tells you that, [...] a man with a beardy face is going to be upset with you, for ever, because you've refused to acknowledge his existence, despite the fact that he's too antisocial to come down here and say hi."

Unfortunately that's a little long for an advertising campaign.
It's clear to me that if god did exist as part of our society he would be locked up immediately. If one needs more confirmation of how antisocial, criminal and dangerous god would be in modern society, a quick read of The Skeptic's Annotated Bible should do the trick. God is clearly racist, homophobic, sexist, pretty much every ist there is. He seems to approve of incest, infanticide and ritual sacrifice.
But that's surely the problem with modern day values, social reality and ethics; people are trying to apply the values of 4000 years ago to the current day and it just doesn't work.

Which brings me back to an old thought of mine; to me you become an adult when you arrive at decisions based upon a set of choices you yourself have made rather than because someone else has told you to do it. Children have to be told what to do often with the explanation of "because i say so" and this is fine when the child doesn't have the life experience to make fully informed decisions. Likewise there are times when adults have to follow similar orders be it in following bureaucracy rules that make no sense (unless you see the big picture which possibly no-one can), or in a military hierarchy where orders must be followed blindly for a multitude of reasons. However I see the ability to think for yourself as that quality that defines humanity and I see religion as acting against this.
Fundamentally I think that is it, an atheist wonders how anyone can think for themselves and not see that god is a fantasy, and a theist wonders how anyone can have the presumption and arrogance to presume how they want the world to behave.

Dungeons and Dragons

Ok so I'm a geek, I know this, I embrace this, I wouldn't want to be anything else.
But people who play D&D were looked down on even by me. However in the traditions of "Try everything once except incest and Morris dancing", when my flatmate invited me to join in one of his campaigns I decided to give it a try so that I could at least scorn it with justice.

I was quite surprised how much I enjoyed it.
I'd best describe it as a mix of boardgames, story telling, and that most important piece - roleplaying. I think it's this last characteristic that attracts the scorn because the other elements seem to be things that most people will gladly admit to enjoying; after all, lots of people enjoy a good game of Monopoly, many people enjoy reading a good book, and people who attempt to write fiction are often admired even if they aren't successful or good at it.

But let's not worry why it has such a poor image let's get onto the game itself:
The DM had a basic story that he had in mind that extracted from the game environment itself was the sort of thing you might have found as the opening to any cheesy fantasy novel. Villagers in danger, goblin raiding parties, heroes have to go and save the day, heroes go off and after a number of confrontations and puzzles return to the town and find that a greater force has come and destroyed the town while they were away.
Not the finest or most thrilling piece of fiction ever, but as a framework it served the purpose of getting people into the swing of things.
Then you had the battles: Your character was created with a number of weapons/spells you could choose from and during battle you could use these at various times to win the day. The success of any attack chosen by rolling dice. This part in itself was quite tactical and fun and if it was a board game that wasn't fantasy based (with the stigma that has attached) I think many people would enjoy it.
Then there was the role playing - well many actors do this as part of their training. I found this getting into character to be a very useful exercise and quite an interesting experience and certainly helped me in my other fiction writing efforts. So again this was all useful
Overall a great experience, so when that campaign ended and our DM wanted a break he asked if I wanted to take over; in the interests of trying it out I went ahead and did.

Being a DM I would say was a very different experience. I went and read up online as much as I could and all the advice I could find emphasised preparation and a willingness to be flexible with your players. So I did. I had multiple plot lines ready to explore, side quests ready if needed. Lists of spare character names, spare battles ready to throw at them, puzzles if needed, the whole shebang.
Good job too because the players never did anything I expected them too. It was enough to drive me insane - but it was great fun too to try and second guess them, even moreso when you were trying to think how to motivate them into shooting themselves in the foot and they did. I found myself enjoying pulling their strings a little too much as for example you had one of the character's playing a religious zelot who you could get to do some things the player himself wasn't keen on, but his character would do this thing, so he had to do it.

With the previous plot having been a bit of a cliche, I tried to make mine a bit more intricate; choosing to have my players in a conflict between chaotic good and lawful good (an elven Lord who wanted to protect the forest against a human Lord who wanted to advance civilisation) . The point was at any point the players were having to work out which side their heroes would support, occasionally coming into conflict with each other.

So all in all, lots of fun, but a huge consumer of time. I would like to do it again, but not sure how I will get the chance - there are other things that are more important. I can certainly see how it gets the bad image it has but I also believe that the image is pretty much the bad thing about it. Well it also encourages you to sit indoors, eat snacks and drink beer as opposed to getting out into the world. However it also encourages you to socialise with your friends and gives you a reason to meet up and explore parts of your character you might not otherwise do.
As with all things, just don't let it get an obsession/your life and it has a lot of potential; give it a go and you might enjoy it, what is there to lose?

Vauxhall Automatic Gearboxes

Sometime last year I had the opportunity to borrow my parent's car whilst mine was being worked on. It was/is an automatic Vauxhall Corsa. This being a computer controlled manual gearbox rather than a traditional automatic gearbox. It was also a small engined car for having an automatic gearbox so it's problems showed even more. For the record though I have a Honda Jazz with a similar sized engine so I believe I was comparing like with like.


Why did I hate it? Let me give you an example. Suppose you wish to overtake someone on the motorway. My normal move would go something like:
* Realise you want to overtake
* check you can/plan your move
* indicate /double check planning
* Start to move lanes, change gear, accelerate to pass
* finish off the move

However doing anything above a minor acceleration means that the automatic gear box takes about 3 seconds to change down a gear and sort itself out ready for acceleration. This changes the overtake sequence to:
* Realise you want to overtake
* Floor the throttle
* Check you can/plan your move
* indicate /double check planning
* Abort the Throttle if needed otherwise:
* Start to move lanes, Finally the car starts to accelerate to pass
* finish off the move

Don't get me wrong, once its started to accelerate it goes fine, it just somehow takes an age to get itself in the right gear and then get the drive train engaged.

The other gem it has is when you pull up at traffic lights it has a habit of putting itself into neutral and not telling you. This would be fine if it took itself out again - it doesn't it just sits there in neutral with you revving the engine wondering why you aren't going anywhere. The fix I've found is to always stick it into neutral and then only put it back into drive as you wish to pull off.

The point being that to drive it i found two strategies where the gearbox system worked as you'd expect:
1) Drive very sedately
2) Drive very very aggressively.

Anything inbetween and it found itself in the wrong gear and you'd be bricking yourself while the car twiddled its thumbs and woke up.
Not recommended.

Nokia E90 Review

So after having had a number of mobile phones over the last decade a few months ago I got a Nokia E90. In an executive summary I'd say it's certainly not the smallest phone I've ever had (nore the largest - since I first got a mobile back in 1998) but it is certainly the best as a central point to run my life.

When I chose this phone I had the following constraints:

• Not a Windows Mobile device - friends who have had those proved to me it was too slow and unstable.
• Not an Iphone (No I won't use Apple's bastardisation of the English language) - Too trendy
• Needed to be good for web browsing
• Needed to have a full keyboard
• Needed wifi

Which pretty much said I had to have this phone or a Blackberry, and the Blackberry was too corporate for me to have it for my personal phone.
So decision made, what are its good points and bad points:

Good Stuff:

• Between the supplied tool to sync with outlook, goosync and google calender I can synchronize my private life calender and working life calender allowing me to always know when I am available and friends/family to check my busy status without needing to ask me.
  
• Built in SIP client is damn handy
• The notes application + keyboard is brilliant to suppliment my aweful memory for everything from Birthday present ideas to things to write a novel about.
• Always having a web browser, GPS, WiFi capable device with you is a godsend.
  

Bad Stuff

• Camera shutter button doesn't start camera application- which is annoying when you just want to take a quick picture.
  
• During a phone call going into tools/active keys crashes the phone
  
• Birthday detail in contacts does not show up in calender.
• Pictures (flickr etc) don't scale properly, you can't zoom in either which with the aspect ratio of the internal screen makes them unviewable.
  
• Web browser doesn't remember logins/passwords
• Search in contacts only searches first and last names, other details are ignored.
  
• Cannot change default calender or contact settings; e.g. Alarm on, sync type etc
• No timer application
• Deleting all note content deletes the note - I'm sure this is an intentional feature, but for things like my shopping list note it's bloody annoying.
  
• Phone number or text in txt messages cannot be copied into the clipboard, same for web pages. This means that if someomne sends you a text with a phone number in it, you cannot dial that number. Likewise if you get a web page with a postcode on it you cannot feed this into the mapping application without remembering the postcode yourself.
  
• Wifi cannot be simply turned off. Once it is connected it is neigh on impossible to shut it down.
• No spell checker for anything
• Any applications you have installed are uninstalled on a software upgrade
• No indication of where the infra red port is in any manual or webpage I could find - had to find it out by experiment.
  
• Would be nice to have multiple web browser windows open in a similar manner to tabbed browsing.
  
• Being disconnected from a wifi point doesn't give you a handover option to an alternative connection - you have to re-start everything you're doing.
  
• Calculator has no advanced functions e.g. Sine pi square

To summarise it is the most functional phone I have every had and I wouldn't want to be without it and know of no phone/solution that would do a better job. However it really is suffering from traditional Symbian problems and the integration between applications is so poor as to be a joke; sharing data between applications is clearly something that was added on at the last minute rather than a clear design objective.
It occurs to me that this is where the Iphone is strong, they have got the integration working and so seens much stronger than it might otherwise be.
I fear that most of the problems though mostly aren't a question of polish, but of a fundamental design flaw in the Symbian architecture so we won't see a fix anytime soon, even the replacement model I would expect to be equally inconsistent.

Suzuki sv650s

So a month or two ago while my normal bike was broken I ended up with a hire bike; a Suzuki SV650 S. Suffice to say for my purposes it's rubbish and for almost any purpose I can think of, it's rubbish. I wanted a bike for long motorway trips with panniers that I could fit on - you know a replacement for my bike that was being fixed. What the SV650 is is very much a toy, and a broken one at that.
Well I'll rephrase using an analogy. Imagine a Golf GTI with the bottom of the range diesel engine in it. The engine in the bike is a twin so very torque-y, which would be great for touring or town work were it not for the riding position which feels like something off WSB - totally uncomfortable. The riding position has you leaning over in a sport bike position and for someone of my height this means a lot of my body weight is on the handlebars, which is a recipe for pain. Out around country lanes it's certainly very responsive, but runs out of power just where you need a sporty bike to have it. For example trying to overtake someone on it, it just doesn't have the power to accellerate once you get to 50+.
In summary for blasting around empty country lanes by yourself it's brilliant. For overtaking a car in front of you doing 50 it's rubbish. For taking a passenger it's rubbish. For having luggage on it's rubbish. For motorway riding, it's rubbish.

The Force Unleashed Review

So I got the Force Unleashed a few weeks ago when it was released and have been slowly playing it. How on earth people are raving about this game is beyond me, it commits all the cardinal sins of gaming!

• Jumping puzzles
• Quicktime events
• Rubbish Level design that requires you to complete puzzles IN A CERTAIN ORDER - it's not enough that you have to kill all monster A , then use force lightning to activate Item B then Kill uber-monster C then use force grip on item D, you have to do it in that order or you are trapped. If you choose to kill uber monster C first, then try and move item D then forget it. You must restart the level and kill things in the order the designer intended. Even if you manage to figure all that out (in my case in exasperation by going to a cheat website) they finish it off with a bloody Jumping Puzzle
• Quicktime events
• Rubbish level design that makes it blatantly obvious that you have to destroy item A but no hint that you have to use force grip on item B to set you up for another bloody Jumping puzzle to jump through destroyed item A
• Endlessly re-spawning enemies
• Storyline Cliches that a fan-fic writer would be ashamed to use. Yes I knwo some people have raved about the story and yes I knwo I haven't finished the game yet, however I stand by what I said so far.
  
• Quicktime events for every kill more troublesome than a small mouse
• Scenery that's impossible to tell the difference between a ledge you're supposed to jump onto in order to progress and a pretty backdrop that you can't leap onto and any attempt to do so will plummet you to a quick death
• Buggy Buggy levels/engine. I'm hitting about 3 glitches per session. Be it going to a part of the map that leves you endlessly falling, or the entire screen turning white and all that happens is your character re-draws leaving a trail of you behind it as you move around or getting a monster into a place where you can trap them and attack them to your hearts content, but they never feel any hurt from the attacks you do.
• Suspension of disbelief problems. I mean seriously, I know it would ruin the game play if every single time I used a lighsabre it instantly killed the oponent, but it is seriously hard to suspend disbelief when I have hit this guy with a lightsabre literally 20 times and he still is runniing around looking like I've merely insulted him with a mildly naughty word.
• Further to the lighsabre problem I think they'd be better off if they embraced this problem that the lightsabre is too deadly. You could have foes who knew this and therefore tried to keep you at arms length or used some tactics other than stand as close to me as possible and try to hit me with their blaster. Embracing this problem and comming up with ways around it would make the game interesting and fun. As it is it's more just a case of trying to memorise as many combos as possible and follow a linear path.
• Some of the combos are ludicrous - how on earth is a lightsabre infused with a little bit of force lightening anymore deadly than the lightsabre itself???
• Bloody Quicktime events!!
• The block system is ok for a computer game, but does not tie in with the films at all. While you are blocking blaster shots you are totally vulnerable to all other attacks, you are also incapable of launching a new attack without making youself totally open to new blaster attacks. This means that you can with great ease be pinned down by a bunch of stormtroopers and the only way to escape is to take the odd hit or two while you start dispensing with the stormtroopers. Luke never had this problem!
• And back to the lightsabre - from reading other online reviews I know I'm not the only person who has pretty much given up on the lightsabre and just stuck to a combination of force lightening and force push to get most things done. If the lightsabre is supposed to be the jedi/sith's main weapon then why make it so feable compared to the other powers?
• Object Throw problems - One of the best ways to deal damage seems to be the ability to grab items from the scenery and throw them at your opponents. While I'm sure this works fine on a PC where you have a mouse to control it with finness, on joypad on a console (as I play it) you've more chance of hitting yourself than your enemies, especially of you're having to use an item not directly in line with the enemy.
• Poor Auto-Targetting. For things like force lightening you need to rely on the auto targetting which frequenty sees a nearby flower as more of a threat than the Giant 40 foot high Rancor that is 2 inches behind it.
• Camera with a mind of its own. In front of me I have a horde of stomtroopers, to the left of them there is a a random beast i forget the name of; I am running towards them. So what does the camera choose to look at? You've got it, it swings around to concentrate on a stormtrroper I just dispatched and is now fading away into nothing behind me.
• Inconsistent difficulty. last night I was working through this planet of mushrooms (inventive level design or what?!) And was cutting through the enemies like a lightsabre through a jedi's arm. A blast of lighting or two, or a lightsabre slash, or a force throw would be enough to dispatch any of them. Very easy but still quite fun. Then you get to the end of level boss and he kills me in about 5 seconds and it takes me about an hour of practice to string together a sequence of combos that work to kill him. Now I have no issue with really easy games, or really hard games. If it's genuinly that I'm bad at the game i can accept that and try an improve my technique, but this was just so inconsistent that it was infuriating and felt like the game was suddenly lauging at me.
• Baddies that die when they're damn well ready for it! After the previous end of level baddie I must have got my combo skills up to the mark because I took 95% of the health of this guy in about 10 seconds worth of combos. Clearly the game wasn't happy with this because suddenly any further hits didn't do any harm. Then a new lot of monsters spawned. Killed them quickly. Still can't cause damage to the maion dude. More Monsters spawn. Dispatch them quickly, no harm possible to main dude (even though by their health meter they must have been at about 5% health) And now another monster. Kill That. Finally a last attack of the main dude and my favourite thing - quicktime events to finish him off. Disbelief doesn't just have to be suspended, it's turning blue from a force choke.
• Unskippable cut scenes. I'm fine to make them unskippable the first time, but after the aforementioned sudden encountered difficulty wall, listening to the same cutscene 50 times doesn't do much for your mental state.

At it's heart there's a really good game here if you look hard enough. The new physics engine is very cool, I like the RPG style levelling up system they have in place, and despite all it's flaws I do enjoy playing it, but it could have been so much more. It really is buggier than an autum holiday by a scottish loch - as I say 3 times per session is the average for restarting a level due to a bug in the game. maybe I just explore the maps more than their testers did, but I find that hard to believe since I'm rubbish at finding all those holocrons you get bonuses for finding so I don't think it's that.
There really is a lot to be had out of this game and it does have so much potential that if they'd lost their obsession with jumping puzzles, quicktime events and remembered that a lightsabre is a Jedi's/Sith's main weapon, oh and perhaps tested it! If I can find this many problems without trying then their testing department should be wither sacked, or listened to my senor management. If all that was done you really would have had a great game. I wonder if many of these problems come from the designers both being too close to their own game to see the flaws and from testing it on a PC rather than on the Xbox. It really does have that feel as if how I'm playing it isn't how it's supposed to be played. I feel that like Spore this works better as a technology demonstration than as a full game in its own right.
All of that I could cope with if there was feedback to tell me where I'm going wrong, but for all the work they've clearly put into the physics engine, they seem to have put next to sod all emphasis on the actual gameplay itself and what makes pretending to be a sith warrior fun.

Oh and will someone please tell Lucasarts to lose their obsession with the Star Wars franchise. There are plenty of stories that would allow you to have warrior wizards combined with cool technology - especially if you wrote one for yourself. I can see why they are trying to milk more money out of star wars, I just wish that with this game that doesn't sit well with the rest of the Star Wars canon they'd have shown some inventiveness. Thus follows my commandments to Lucas Arts:

• Do something other than Star Wars
• Test your game on all the platforms you release it for - ideally with people who are rubbish at the game
• Learn that quicktime events aren't fun - I have Rock Band/guitar hero for pattern matching games and they do it much better than you ever could
• Realise that jumping puzzles don't work for console gamers; at best they're a distraction from the main game, at worst they make me long for a dictionary of swear words so I can learn some new ones to hurl at the computer.
• Fix the auto-target algorithm to prioritise based upon enemy threat/HP level
• If you're going to have a camera algorithm that will happily re-orient itself mid battle, try and make it re-orient itself onto enemies that are alive and a threat to you and more of a threat than the one you're currently attacking.
• When writing your storyline, get a 5 year old to read it. If he thinks it's corny and has poor dialogue, then give serious thought to re-working it. Either that or embrace the fact that is a corny story and therefore not the strongest part of the game so don't make such a big deal of it.
• I will admit the Imperial March is one of the coolest bits of music ever written, however this isn't a reason to use it for 1/2 of the soundtrack. Write something new!

Under Construction

So when all this is working I'll have somewhere to put my rants, raves and reviews that keep popping through my head. My occasional such posts on Livejournal seem out of place - that seems to be a place for being emo, so here we are, the next experiment.
But first I have to get the technology working first so you'll have to bear with me...

EDIT:
Seems like Fasthosts who I have always used for my domain hosting cannot set the CNAME entry for a domain they provide the nameservice for. So until I can come up with a better solution, i.e. find someone else to run the nameserver http://doubleudoubleudoubleu.co.uk/ will simply re-direct to the blog address.