Harry Potter is dead - that is, the series is dead. It’s over. Finito. What started with a silly children’s book (Philosopher’s Stone) actually ended with a relatively gripping piece of literature. The Deathly Hallows is by no means a great work of art, but it provided much-needed entertainment on my trip to Taiwan. I finished the book on the flight home, and I would much have preferred to read more about the illustrious Harry Potter than continuing to delve through Gödel, Escher, Bach. I think that’s a good sign that the book was rather interesting.
Anyway, the ‘net is full of reviews and opinions and critique and whatnot, so I won’t even bother offering my own view. (Harry Potter is a dumb whiny bitch, but I loved the fairy-tale escapism of the books! *Cough*) Instead I’m going to ramble about some more esoteric areas.
I have a tendency to want to know more about the media I experience; I constantly surf IMDB to read trivia about films and directors and actors, and I always read about authors and all kinds of things on Wikipedia. So of course I recently searched for information on Harry Potter and Rowling. Did you know that Joanne Rowling was asked by the publisher to adopt a gender-neutral name in order to not scare away the little boyos who might want to read the Potter books? She decided to just use the initials J and K…but the interesting thing is that she has no middle name, so she used her grandmother’s name for the middle initial. I’m a sucker for useless trivia.
This is a slippery slope, and I soon ended up spending a lot of time reading about Harry Potter parodies, legal disputes, blood purity, and all kinds of other things. After a while I became bored with Wikipedia and looked up some other sites, such as MuggleNet.com. That’s where I found this list of anagrams in the books. Although…it wasn’t really a list of intended anagrams. It was a list of strange and weird coincidences. Here are some good examples:
- Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson is an anagram of Cue fine new film drama starring Potter lad
- Mike Newell’s ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ is an anagram of Enthralling film, yet we prefer to read the books
- Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is an anagram of Halt! Interbred arch-foe lord not happy
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is an anagram of Treachery rests on Transported Hero
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an anagram of Portrayed Orphaned Hero for the Next Hit
- Tom Marvolo Riddle is an anagram of Immortal, Odd Lover
- Harry Potter is an anagram of Try Hero Part
- Ollivander is an anagram of An Evil Lord
- Dolores Jane Umbridge is an anagram of Dumbledore goes in jar
- Peter Pettigrew is an anagram of Tip: Pet We Regret
I suggest that you follow the link above and check out more of these - they’re quite amusing! I’m not very good at finding anagrams myself, but I have this urge to make a webpage with lots of anagrams for various book titles. The twist is that not a single one of them would be a correct anagram - it would just be close enough to fool most people. I can just imagine the observant readers who notice an error and immediately send me complaining e-mails…without noticing that every single anagram is in fact wrong. Maybe it’s my warped sense of humour, but I find the thought of that site and the huffy complainers absolutely and completely hilarious.
And as a final note, what’s this about ars manga? Is Harry Potter coming as an artistic manga? Well, who knows. But you should be able to figure out what I really mean from the last few paragraphs.
That’s what the Americans tend to say at least. “Oh, I can stand the heat, but the humidity kills me.” I think one has to experience a sub-tropical climate to realize what’s meant by that; every time you leave the air conditioned office here in Taipei it’s like walking into a sauna when you get outside. A thick wall of wet heat meets your face and renders null and void your every hope of appearing calm and relaxed. If only I got to wear my usual black shorts and t-shirt I would have loved the weather. I’m not a shirt-wearing person. I’m an anti-shirt-man. I’m more like The Dude - not The Dude Who Wears White Shirts and Acts as Glue between Customer, Local Branch, Home Office, and Driver Manufacturer. For those who have no idea who The Dude is: watch The Big Lebowski.
Either way, Taiwan is an interesting place. As expected, people work incredibly hard…or rather, they work incredibly long hours. If you walk into a Swedish office you might see cluttered and messy desks, but you rarely see snacks placed on the desks. The Swedes eat their lunch and go to the lava-tree, and head home at 16:45 every day. Here, almost every desk is loaded with small snacks - just lunch simply won’t do when people are spending most of their hours at work. I was afraid that everyone had intensive 14 hour work days filled with naught but productive hours; but I suspect that not even the Taiwanese are superhuman, and thus the days seem to be filled with a mix of productivity and mental relaxation. I’m not so sure I’d like that way of working for an extended time - I like to have my bursts of productivity, and then have spare time to work on my hobby projects. On that note, I think that the concept of a talented amateur is rather uncommon here - I have a hard time imagining that people’d have enough time to spend on a hobby to become proficient hobbyists, considering the hours they put into work.
Before travelling down here I was planning on spending some time investigating a few bars and restaurants - maybe go to a KTV (karaoke) place to sip a nice lager and relax. For two nights now I’ve been too tired to bother with anything of the sort. I hope I can blame the jetlag and change in climate - there’s simply been too much noise outside to feel comfortable after a day at work. Instead I’ve relaxed with a cold one at the hotel, quietly reading the new Harry Potter and enjoying the sounds of a silent and calm hotel. A big Asian (if I can generalize like that) city really is very noisy. All the time. People are everywhere, and if the traffic isn’t thundering, music from various stores is thundering instead. According to Lonely Planet the Taiwanese apparently approve of noise and liveliness; they dislike solitude and calm, and even think that the city is a better place for children to grow up than the countryside. I wonder if this really is true for everyone, though. I spoke with a Taiwanese person who mentioned that people simply prefer to live close to work - a sensible and practical approach rather than one rooted in a radically different cultural upbringing.
What’s this “43″…? Years? Shoe size? Eels in a plastic bag? No, I’m talking about The Weather Network’s forecast for Taipei City. It’s 2 AM and in five hours I need to get up to start my long journey to the East. Of course, that’s when I realized that I’ve forgotten to check the weather forecast.
30 degrees Celsius, and it feels like 43. (86 / 109 F).
I love hot weather, but I just might perish under this onslaught of scalding heat. And to make things worse, the only presentable clothing I have are…guess what colour…yes, black. Oh well, never mind - it’ll be worth it since I’ll get to travel to Asia for the first time. Sometimes I love my job.
I really don’t get one kind of coding mentality. Which one? I’ll tell you which one. The one where people insist that code should be written correctly from the start so that there’s no need for safeguards.
“What?”
Okay, I’ll elaborate a bit further with a theoretical example. Imagine that you have an embedded system of some sort, and a task needs to be kept running. The first thing to do is, of course, to ensure that the application is written properly, doesn’t crash, and handles errors in a proper way. Of course. I’m not against that in any way. But some people are of the opinion that this ought to be enough - that with enough unit testing and good programmers, this will result in an application that will not crash and will always run. In a perfect world I agree that this should suffice…but the fact is that people are stupid now and then and make mistakes.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that if a task is critical you need to write it securely and have a monitoring system that tries to jump start it again in case something happens. One of the most common questions I get when I propose things like that is: “What do you need that for? What could cause the application to crash?” I grind my teeth every time I’m asked that - if I knew what errors people might have made I would look for those potential errors instead! This is to ensure that the unknown factors are taken care of. Of course, a monitoring system can fail as well. But it increases the chance that things won’t crash and burn horribly - it just might work in some cases.
I know, I know: this is technically a bad approach to writing good software. If you have a safety net you might get sloppy in your implementation. Also, the point of not having a safety net might be that you want to find the errors, and the best way of finding them is to have the system crash. You’ll definitely know that something’s wrong then, and you can make a proper solution. But let me tell you a little story; a story about a couple of device drivers.
First there was device driver A. He was a strange beast, written by a team of Americans and then moved to India for further development. Not that that has anything to do with the issue - the Indian people are good developers and the same thing would have happened if another American team had taken over the driver development. The point is that I suspect that there was a distinct lack of understanding in regards to the driver’s internal logic, due to the new team’s relative inexperience with the code. This became very apparently when the driver received new functionality. The new functions were built on top of the old ones, and everything seemed hunky-dory until one day when a customer experienced serious problems.
“The device driver crashes,” said the customer to the friendly people in the middle who used device driver A in their products. “You suck! We will sue your asses and knit little sweaters out of your pubic hair.” This was a very strange threat, but it didn’t sound like fun at all. So the friendly people spent weeks trying to reproduce the problem. After many weeks of hard labour they finally reproduced it, and gave enough information to the device driver developers to fix the problem. Apparently it was caused by some internal states that were introduced; the driver could get locked up in one of these states, since there was no age timer that cleaned up those new states. But all was well, for a solution was found! Yayness!
But then there was device driver B, developed by a completely different team for a different set of products. Some time after the adventure with driver A, driver B started showing strange behaviours as well… Lo and behold - it appears that driver B has a problem that’s not completely dissimilar from driver A’s! The details differ, but the main concept of the problem (new functionality built on top of the old, but no safeguards were added) seems to be the same. If only there had been a general safeguard inside the driver, that examined the internal states and cleaned up strange states; maybe both driver beasts could have lived happily ever after, then! Sure, there would have been an error and this error would have had to be corrected. But the whole product would not have become useless in the meantime, risking potential deals with the customers who experience these errors.
Disclaimer: a safeguard mechanism might not have improved anything in these cases. It might have been completely useless, and provided nothing at all. But I’m firmly convinced that the damage could have been lessened immensely by a functioning safeguard, had it been in place…and that the mere chance of minimizing damage is worth the extra effort.
I wanted to create a new blog category for this post; a category for my new game project. The problem is that I can’t do that just yet since I have no name for the game. This affects more than just my blogging - I’d say that the name of a game affects most aspects of the development: PR, design, art style, music, etc etc. For example, Sheeplings was a haphazard collection of ideas until I registered the domain sheeplings.com and decided that the game would focus on a few aspects: cute, silly and easily accessible. The name had a lot to do with defining those aspects of the game.
Now I have a framework for a humorous superhero game with an insane mix of action/RPG/puzzle gameplay, and the project is constantly shifting gears between puzzle gameplay and a story-driven adventure. If I had a name I could decide which areas I really want to focus on; for example, a name with the word “quest” in the title would instantly be placed in the puzzle department and I would know that I have to focus on those bits.
“You silly sod,” someone exclaims now. “You don’t have to match the name with the gameplay.” Well, yes, I do. If you see a game called Inca Quest these days, you know that it will feature a match-3 (or somesuch) placed in an Inca surrounding; and it’s very very likely that the people who decide to try the game are expecting a game of that kind. Your game’s name will attract a certain audience, and if the game doesn’t fit their expectations it’s more likely to annoy/disappoint/be mistargeted than otherwise.
(Note: all above is pure speculation, but try to prove me otherwise. And I don’t accept evidence along the lines of “game XXX performed well despite having a misleading name;” that’s irrelevant since it might have performed much better if the name had been appropriate. The only way it could become valid is if there are two identical games with different names released at the same time. Preferably in two different markets that feature an identical demographic and economy. And identical psychology and social structure. Okay, you get the point.)
Some other important aspects of naming a game:
- People will search for your name, so naming a game “Superhero City” would result in millions of hits when searching…and try to guess how many of those will point at your game’s webpage.
- The flip side is that if your game name is too obscure, no one will ever be able to remember it. “Hmm.. One or two ks in Grakkthor the Miffomaker?”
- The name has to be interesting. People always mention graphics when they talk about first impressions…but if the name is too generic, chances are that people won’t even get that far.
One error I made late one night when I tried to come up with potential game names was to narrow down my search too much. I listed superhero-related adjectives and tried to construct a name from that; I ended up with bland and uninteresting suggestions along the lines of Cavalier City, Vigilance Valley and so on. Thankfully the people at the Indiegamer forums rebuked me out of that notion. I have to think outside the little shoebox. Incidentally, just a couple of days after my post, another blogger raised the issue of the importance of names. See, this really is important stuff!
Anyway, to finish this off, here’s a picture of the game in all its non-existing glory (click for a bigger pic):
Unnamed game with hideous placeholder art and moronic dialogue. But I assure you that it will look better as soon as I find an artist! Oh, and this is just the city screen - not a screen of the puzzle gameplay. There’s not much puzzling going on here, except puzzling out what that gigantic phallic building obscured by the speech bubble is supposed to be.
Time really flies! Three months ago I made a decently comprehensive list of the books I’d read this year, along with recommendations and comments. A respectable 12 books were mentioned then, but I ended with a suspicion that the following three months wouldn’t be as prolific. And what a fine fortune teller I am: this time I only have six and a half books to mention. (I’ll let you guess which one is the half one.)
This list includes audio books; it’s technically not reading, but since I spend so much time getting to and from work I need to do something in the meanwhile, and why not spend it following a story or learning something new? I really recommend that you try some audio books yourself - travels get much more bearable.
Only You Can Save Mankind - Terry Pratchett
Description: Johnny Maxwell is a normal kid whom no one seems to notice; he’s not exceptional or noteworthy in any way. Still he gets chosen by a computer game’s alien invaders to try to save their race. Witty writing and believable characters make this an enjoyable tale, and the anti-war message doesn’t come through as too heavy handed. The story is good; the concepts are good; the writing is pretty good; but this really feels like a children’s book to a much greater extent than Pratchett’s later young reader series (Wee Free Men, and so on). I think I would’ve gotten irritated at the slightly dumbed down conversations even as a kid.
Rating: 3 flogistone canisters out of 5.
Recommended for: Young people in search of witty and innovative fantasy. (No, despite the sci-fi setting I wouldn’t class this sci-fi. It definitely fits more into the fantasy genre; or fantastic fiction, rather.)
Particle Physics for Non-Physicists - The Teaching Company
Description: Have you ever wondered what a sub-quark really is? Or how many elementary particles we know of? Or have you ever been interested in the personal background of physicists? Or curious about what a particle accelerator is intended to do, more specifically? Or felt the urge to know enough about particle physics to scoffle indignantly at Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons? If so, listen to this audio book: you won’t regret it. There’s not much more to say about it; this series of lectures is just great for curious non-physicists.
Rating: 4.5 weevils out of 5.
Recommended for: Everyone with an interest in particle physics. It’s not particularly hard to follow, but some elementary physics knowledge might be necessary.
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Description: I know the story well enough, but this was still an enlightening read. Crusoe’s background story is lesser known than his exploits after the shipwreck, but it’s infinitely important in order to notice the character development that occurs. Crusoe isn’t just a stereotypical Brit who dominates nature and other men, and makes the island his domain: he’s a flawed human filled with doubt and angst, and it’s pure bliss to note how he develops (in some ways at least). The novel is an old one, and at times quite dull to get through, but it’s still surprisingly solidly written. Although, to be honest, the foreword about Defoe himself is probably even more interesting than the book.
Rating: 3.5 geologists out of 5.
Recommended for: The literary geek interested in expanding his repertoire. I wouldn’t really recommend it as a casual adventure novel - the style is a bit too aged for that.
The Sea and Little Fishes - Terry Pratchett
Description: I know that I’m a Pratchett fanboy, but he does produce excellent material. This is a very good read if you like the witches in the Discworld series: Esme’s character especially is presented wonderfully in this little piece. Note little: this is not a book or novel, but make sure you read it anyway.
Rating: 4 ankhs out of 5.
Recommended for: Just about everyone, as long as you’ve read some of the Discworld novels.
Contemporary Economic Issues - The Teaching Company
Description: Timothy Taylor is back with more information about Economics. This time he brings up contemporary issues like unemployment, the work force, liquid capital, the stock market and other crucial concepts. I like Taylor; he’s a good lecturer, and the material he presents is easy to follow and not too convoluted. Thumbs up, yet again!
Rating: 4 raving Wikipedia editors out of 5.
Recommended for: Pretentious geeks with an urge to learn some current Economics.
Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman
Description: Go go Gaiman! Wai wai! If he was as prolific (wow, I’ve used that word twice in this blog entry) as Pratchett it’d show that I’m as much a Gaiman fanboy as a Pratchett fanboy. I just love the style he writes in: it’s dark and weird and poetic and pretentious and emotional and witty. This is a collection of short stories, and - as always with anthologies like this - there are a few hits and misses. Some are right out bland, while some are absolutely exceptional. If I were to pick out my favourite stories from Smoke and Mirrors and this one and combine them into a single book, it’d get a 6 out of 5. But since I can’t do that, make sure you read both.
Rating: 4 out of 5 on the Richter scale.
Recommended for: I honestly can’t think of anyone whom I couldn’t recommend this to.
How to Listen to and Understand Great Music - The Teaching Company
Description: Time to end on a high note. Pun most definitely intended. This is a magnificent series of lectures covering early Greek and Roman music, Medieval music, Renaissance music, Catholic and secular music, the Baroque and Classical era, up to and including contemporary works. Not stuff like Green Day and Johnny Cash, of course: these lectures mostly concern Western orchestra music. (Speaking of which, the lecturer had a great anecdote about one of his pupils who, after the course was ended, mentioned that he found the course great…but there was no Western music mentioned at all - just this orchestra stuff.) Anyway, this is a great crash course in general music knowledge: you’ll learn what harmophonic music is; how a fugue is constructed; how polyphonic renaissance music sounds; what sonata allegro form is; and much much more.
Rating: 4.5 sneaky weasles out of 5.
Recommended for: Either budding musicians or people who want to know more about music. (The lecturer even makes fun of the pretentiousness of listening to the course: “Now you’ll know what an Opus means, so you can sniff indignantly at his barbaric lack of knowledge, and say that you prefer Opus 67, Symphony nr 5, movement 2!”)
There you have it! I didn’t have time to read much these three months, but I blame that on my Sheeplings release. Speaking of which: buy Sheeplings today or I’ll send the black sheep to nibble your toes at night!
