Some days, you get a bunch of productive stuff done, you feel good about yourself, and you’ve made your world a better place to be. Some days, things go wrong, stuff gets broken, or you find out that things are maybe worse than you thought they were.

The Mini’s exhaust disconnected from the manifold. This had happened before, but wasn’t all that big a deal. This time, it’s because the flange on one of the pipes broke, rather than because the clamp had come loose. That’s bad news.

The last of the south facing windows now has a confirmed leak. I know it hasn’t rained in ages, but this is the first time I’ve seen clear evidence that the window was leaking. It’s hard to spot, and you need just the right lighting conditions, which is why it took so long to see, but it’s definitely leaking.

My grandparents’ credenza, which has a *lot* of sentimental value to me, on top of being a very nice credenza, now has a big, black water stain on it from a plant that one of my housemates had been watering, whose pot was cracked, letting water leak out onto the top surface.

I’m thinking that perhaps today’s a day to touch or interact with as little as possible, lest other weird crap happen that would either break, or illustrate that something’s been broken. Just doesn’t look like it’s as good a day as it ought to be.

I was considering going under the house to see if I could hook up the electricity into this room (we’re currently still running this room off the old circuit), but holy shit I’m staying as far away from THAT as possible. Yatz.

Picked up some shoes. Ei-Nyung & I decided to go check out the mini-outlet mall that’s a little south on 880 from us, and we ended up at the Nordstroms Rack. I’d been looking for a pair of Puma Mostros for a while – two of my coworkers have variants of them, and both say they’re the most comfortable shoes they’ve had.

Of course, since it’s an outlet store, they don’t have a lot of variety, and for the most part, the varieties they have are the least favored ones. The only ones I could find for a good while were the laceup ones in white, and the velcro ones in a weird reddish color. The laceup ones were fine, but I was looking for the velcro variety. On my last run through the section, while Ei-Nyung was grabbing some shoes for herself, I happened across the white and blue ones, which weren’t say, pretty, but also weren’t explicitly ugly. The ones pictured are ripstop, but the ones I got were leather. Indeed, they’re quite comfortable, and instantly feel “broken in” due to some open bits on the sole that are designed to flex with your foot. Very comfortable, very light, and a little weird looking, but not entirely unattractive.

Also picked up a canvas jacket at the Old Navy outlet, and some drab painter’s jeans. Oh, and an orange shirt. Not bad, all told, for a total of… $88. Given the shoes retail for $110.

Other than that, today consisted of going to the farmer’s market, finding our neighbors have a BBQ stand there (which was fantastic, incidentally), having some samosas, picking up some greens and some corn, and walking around a bit. Had a little ghetto picnic with the samosas under 580. Gotta love it.

I wonder if I’m having some sort of lame self-image crisis. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s an ego thing, I dunno. I used to think I was smart. Moreover, I used to know that other people thought I was smart. I think that’s the important one for today’s topic of discussion.

These days, at work, I’ve got a lot to do – and by that, I mean a large number of relatively smallish tasks to accomplish. It was, over the course of the project, split between design work, and object engineering. The design work was interesting, and challenging, and the object engineering (OE) work that was involved in realizing the section of the design I was responsible for was again, challenging and interesting. It put me in a relatively unique position of actually being able to iterate very quickly, and redesign things on the fly. Not only was it interesting, it was fun, and I’m pleased with the results.

But the other part of my work has been relatively simplistic, and with the exception of some weird bugs I’m having trouble finding, incredibly … uninteresting. Partially because I kept getting my responsibilities towards that side of things shifted around – I inherited the design work from a guy that quit, then it got transferred to someone else after I’d finished most of it, then I got it back, then I got the OE side of it as well, and blah blah blah. I’m now not really fully responsible for it, but also am. It’s a weird combination of responsibility for someone else’s decisions, fixing mistakes I’d made previously, and just trying to figure out how it all fits together. Because responsibility for it essentially changed so many times, and in such an indistinct manner, it became really hard to “own” the thing. Probably suffered somewhat as a result, even if the current incarnation is pretty close to the original concept.

But I digress. The problem is, I don’t really get a chance to really put my mind to anything in a coherent, novel way anymore, and instead, I find myself chasing little fires, making small decisions, and fixing numerous mistakes. In some sense, that’s what design *is*, and in another sense, I want a sort of grand intellectual/conceptual *challenge*, and I feel like that’s at least in part missing from my day to day experience.

I dunno though – that’s not quite the entirity of it. And though I wrote the above sort of searching for something that would make the concept click, I think the fundamental problem is that I’m not really consistently in the 99th+ percentile at *whatever* anymore. Time was, I could pick up anything and very quickly be better than most people at it. Maybe not 99th percentile, but certainly 80th+ very, very quickly. Now, I’m not sure whether I’m simply not presented with the challenge, or whether I’ve simply become mentally complacent, but I guess in some sense, I simply don’t feel like I’m impressing anyone anymore.

I’m proud of the design work I did for the game this year – I think it’s really quite cool, and if we’d had a little more time to implement some features, I think it could have been even quite a bit *better*. But it is what it is, and I think it’s uniquely *mine*. But I guess in some sense, I’m not sure anyone cares. And part of me’s not sure why I give a shit whether people care or not, except that I remember when people used to, and though I feel like a completely egotistical jackass for saying so, I miss that feeling.

Hm.

So, this year, the game schedule hasn’t been too bad. Aside from some weird milestone scheduling, the hours have been reasonable, the schedule’s been manageable, and I’ve been able to maintain some semblance of normalcy for the better part of the year. All this has been a marked improvement from last year in every way.

The last few days, though… wow. Hectic. Alpha submission was last night, so there was a mad dash to finish off all the alpha bugs, and get the whole thing submitted for verification. At about 4:20, I got two bugs back “fix failed,” which I had to get fixed and submitted by 5. That was one of the most intense and stressful 40 minute spans I’ve had in some time, and if that 40 minutes had been the entire day (which ended up being about 15 hours, including waiting to make sure the build was clear), I’d *still* be exhausted.

It’s been strange – though the schedule’s much more sane this year, the punctuated bursts of insanity are as intense as ever. It’s often quite exciting, and gratifying – but holy shit, it does a number on my nerves. Whoo. Still, compared to last year, this year’s product is *so* much better, there’s really no way to compare.

Other than that, almost everything else has fallen by the wayside. So… yeah. Gonna try again to start exercising on some sort of marginally regular basis, but we’ll see.

Just out of curiosity, if Bush, say, *wasn’t* going to fire Rove, what would happen? Would we have a top presidential advisor working from prison? I mean, I’d like to think that the person responsible for the leak would at least be spending *some* jail time, no? Which raises another question – given that Robert Novak wrote the column that publicly outed Plame, why isn’t he *already* in jail? I mean, he has no defense – the column’s a clear violation of the law by *any* interpretation that I can understand. What’s the deal?

So… what did it take for the Plame/Rove thing to finally blow up in the media? The White House Press Corps finally had irrefutible proof that the White House was lying to them. They had it, because Time handed over Matt Cooper’s notes to the Federal Prosecutor.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I remember a time when journalists actually did *work*, and weren’t just stenographers for the Man. And to me, I see this and I think, well, shit – what it took for this story to “stick” was to get it to the point where journalists, with a couple exceptions, didn’t have to do a goddamn thing except take notes about shit that was already happening – that people had already found – that took no work on their part to uncover, or understand. Hell, even after all this, the Republican machine is able to peddle bullshit like “Rove didn’t leak her *name*,” because some journalists are *so god damned lazy* that they’re not even willing to read the text of the law, which says unequivocably that it’s “identity” and not “name.”

I think sometimes about what the news media said in the wake of 9/11 – that the Condit bullshit, and the celebrity gossip they’d been peddling was garbage – and that from now on, they’d be “serious,” and get back to real, hard journalism. But instead, we have the Michael Jackson trial, we have missing white middle class women, and again, becoming stenographers for the right wing government and conservative media influence peddlers.

Not that this is a particularly novel or interesting observation – but I think it should be noted that the Rove story stuck only because the White House Press Corps’ feelings were hurt, which is mostly due to the fact that they were so goddamned stupid that they took Scott McClellan’s word, when it was obviously bullshit, as gospel, because they were too goddamn lazy to do a lick of actual work.

“Journalism” like that… call it what it is. Call it propaganda. Don’t let the “journalists” wield their titles with pride, or a sense of history – the White House PressCorps is merely a propaganda outlet, and aside from a select few who actually *do* something, they should all be ashamed.

So, it’s not that the internet started this – obviously, you’ve got critical spoilers for widespread, mainstream media as far back as who knows when. But there’s a difference between having your friend tell you what/who Rosebud is/was, and having CNN.com or some schmoe on some messageboard spoil a plot point of a major media event for you.

On a messageboard I frequent, apparently one of the new users spoiled the new Harry Potter book, which is sort of the cause in the cause-and-effect of this post. But I’ve had other things spoiled for me via the ‘net – Survivor, Alias, part of Batman Begins, etc. And basically, what it comes down to is that I consume so much information from such a widespread variety of sources in a given day, it’s almost impossible to insulate myself from spoilers for something like Harry Potter, or a major movie. Hell, even for something like Halo 2.

What this means is that essentially, in order to guarantee a spoiler-free experience, I have to essentially consume that media experience as fast as possible, and so does everyone else. This means that essentially, we have a setup where anyone who wants to maintain the integrity of the experience *has* to partake in these things as soon as they’re released, and as fast as possible, or sequester themselves quite thoroughly from any potential spoilers – things that can appear anywhere, from discussion about politics, to … whatever.

I wonder if there was anything that forces such synchronized media consumption – well, I suppose TiVo/Replayless broadcast TV did that at one point – but frankly, having gotten used to being able to control when I watch anything, the notion that I must adhere to a societally imposed schedule or have that experience ruined for me is a bit… irritating.

So, there’s this whole sex minigame scandal going on, with GTA:SA including a risque minigame that can be unlocked via an Action Replay. Hillary Clinton’s having some sort of inquiry, Leland Yee is causing a ruckus, and predictably, Jack Thompson’s talking crap about the industry again.

So… what?

Here’s a minigame that is maybe at *worst* R-rated content, that was locked away by Rockstar, in such a way that you have to purchase another product that is used to modify variables during the execution of the game code to get it to work.

Who’s responsible? Why?

IMO, Rockstar made a mistake – they should have scrubbed the minigame from the disc. However, personally, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the minigame was originally intended to ship on the disc, not locked out, as the reward for finishing the “girlfriend” quests. I’d suspect at some point, the producers got cold feet, and decided to submit the game to the ESRB with that content removed, as for a videogame, that sort of thing would probably garner it an AO, which is about as commercially suicidal as an X.

Given that that probably happened, if the scenario I imagine played out, sometime after Alpha, actually *stripping* the code from the game would likely have been riskier than simply locking it out, and removing access to it. Less chance of introducing bugs, and by alpha/beta, most game companies start putting on the “risk-averse” hats, and the smaller a change can be made to accomodate the design, the better.

As a result, I suspect that the sex minigame was simply bypassed in the script that controlled the girlfriend quests, and Rockstar simply left it at that. If you couldn’t access it in the released build, what did it matter whether it was physically on the disc or not?

So… basically Rockstar created something, removed it from the game, but left it on the disc, inaccessible, because they didn’t think they’d get a suitable rating from the ESRB had they included it. That’s my take on the situation from Rockstar’s view – the most likely scenario, IMO.

I don’t believe it was a publicity stunt – I genuinely don’t. I think they’ve *very* savvy about marketing over there, but I don’t think this was done as a stunt – I think it was simply their original intention that they didn’t follow through on because they thought it was too much.

So, is the hacker to blame? Not really, I think, though I couldn’t say for sure whether legally, he was in the right – I suspect according to the EULA, he violated that – but not in a way that would make him say, culpable for the controversy.

I think the people to blame, genuinely, are the people who felt this required publicizing. Had no national outlet picked it up, it would have been a weird footnote on an otherwise truly astonishing game. But instead, you’ve got opportunists like Hillary Clinton and Jack Thompson jumping on the wagon of, “Won’t Someone Please Think of the Children!??!!?(tm),” and as a result, this has gotten an extreme amount of publicity, a black eye for the industry, and has raised questions about federal regulation of the industry, and some notion that the ESRB should be responsible for rating *inaccessible* content on a game disc. Should Action Replay be held responsible? As much as Rockstar, IMO. I hate that company’s existance – a bunch of worthless fuckers promoting a worthless fucking product, but since someone’s buying it, I’m apparently not quite right on that count.

But I think that the fundamental problem is the game-illiteracy and inane opportunism among the people in power – the notion that a Senator could hold an inquiry on something like this, while the Downing Street memo goes without press, or the Plame investigation is going on is patently stupid – the minigame isn’t accessible in the game’s commercially released form. That’s it.

If anything, I’d suspect this will really hurt Action Replay, and PC gaming in the long run, as to prevent something like this from occuring in the future, one of the easiest things to do is going to be to put that company out of business, and not release on an open platform like the PC.

Holy cow. If you get the chance to watch the Daily Show from tonight, watch it. Jon Stewart completely goes to town on Bernard Goldberg, and it’s a joy to behold. Awesome, awesome stuff.

What’s the best way to fight terrorism?
Promoting democracy
Military action
Tighter security

Lovely. The three options you have are Republican party-line options. Nowhere is “better foreign policy,” which is fundamentally part of the root of why terrorism happens. “Promoting democracy” is basically nation building, military action won’t do jack shit against decentralized terrorists, and tighter security will never be tight enough to protect everyone from everything. Nice. So our only options are to bow to our Republican masters, and accept their worldview, as CNN has, as the only option.

Assholes.