Kara no Kyoukai

Pink Supervisor

I stood in front of a small kebab place (that used to be another kebab place [that, in turn, used to be a florist’s shop]) and stared across the street while waiting for my order to be fulfilled. There was an ice cream parlor, and although we’re not even two weeks into March, enough people had gathered in and in front of it to make it look like it was already high Summer.

She was leaning against the store’s windowfront, looking desinterested. “People certainly wish for a swift return of Spring.” I closed my eyes and turned away from the sight of the crowd. “People don’t realise the troubles Spring brings along.” “Such as?”

“Like …

• The Spring cleaning you’ve been putting off for years!
• Pollen in the air, triggering your allergies!
• Having to buy an entirely new garderobe, according to the new fashion!
• People driving past your house while blasting music you don’t like at 120 decibel!
• Easter, and the egg hunts that come with it!

People foolishly rush towards spring, but disregard its many dangers. It’s a hopelessly naive way to live.”

Her clothes flutter in the wind as she propels herself forward. “You’re overthinking things again. What’s most important is that people are much more annoying when it’s warm than when it’s cold.”

A great point. Indeed, not only are there more people in the streets in March than there are in October, but the increased exposure to the sun makes them feel like they’re invincible, as well …

“A great German philosopher once remarked that you can read the stupidity of people in a place off the matching climograph.”

“… you’re talking about yourself again, aren’t you.”

“Moving on. People tend to think of Spring as a new beginning, as rebirth, right?”

“So?”

“Not all new beginnings are pleasant. In a way, getting fired from a job is a new beginning for you, yet, few people would consider it a blessing. We call it ‘second spring’ when the love of old people is reborn, but nobody likes to think about something like that! In politics, too, new beginnings are often even more dark than whatever they succeeded …”

• French Monarchy and Napoleon
• Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union
• Second and Third Reich
• Second Chinese Civil War and Communist China
• Green and Left party becoming more popular than the ‘original’ Social Democrats, ensuring those never win another election …

“New beginnings can be scary!”

But like a blade to the heart, she cuts straight to the central point. “Isn’t this a new beginning as well?” “Eh?” “You haven’t written anything in here since three months. Doesn’t this constitute a new beginning?”

“Ahh, new beginnings have left me in despair …”

Posted 2 months ago

The SC2 community is actually retarded.

When a new guy hits up r/starcraft or TeamLiquid or any other SC2-related discussion platform and asks a question about builds, unit compositions or strategy, he’s immediately shut down by a bunch of raving lunatics telling him to stop worrying about those things and just macro better. They love to make people’s experience with SC2 a benchmark of their Spending Quotient. Just keep making SCVs, supply depots and Marines and you’re gonna be Platinum in no time, brah. Nobody takes the time to consider the implications, but hey.

When the same guy then wants to discuss what happened during a major event or discuss a certain matchup, the same lunatics will will cry about how people are clueless about the game. They’ll say that only Master-level players and above should be allowed to talk. Those account for 1% of the community. (I keep wondering if I can get Occupy Wall Street to get on this case.)

Well, whoop-dee-fucking-doo, what a surprise. Where is the knowledge supposed to come from? People on boards don’t provide it, Day[9] is more committed to the creation of his own personal cult to watch him play Amnesia or Skyrim than the teaching of Starcraft, Tastosis and other casters have stopped catering to noobs roughly along the time Tasteless lost his passion: years ago.

Sending people to watch pro matches without prior knowledge and telling them they’re dumb afterwards is like taking your son to a soccer match and punching him in the face when he doesn’t get the offside rule. So, basically, it’s the most unhelpful community around. How is it going to reproduce?

Posted 6 months ago

Notes on Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The Good:

- The game looks great. On the technical side, they are behind the state of the art, but then again, I was under the impression graphics don’t matter much, and that people agreed a consequent design can save technically inferior games from looking bad.

- The soundtrack is amazing, both the ambient and the frantic pieces. I also thought the voice acting was convincing, and I don’t know how Elias Toufexis’ voice works, but I love it.

- It’s got a good length for a non-sandbox, linear singleplayer game. 20 hours at the least is very pleasing. Replayability is so-so. If you like to try out different playstyles, then go ahead, but I don’t think most people would go through the game more than twice.

- Controls are intuitive, responsive and satisfying. I’m also pleased with the hacking minigame, which looked like it could be an annoyance, but ended up being a fun little interludium every now and then.

- The gameplay is amazingly fluid, whether you’re going for stealth or combat, lethal or non-lethal. You never feel lost, limited or hand-held in any situation. It has to be played to be understood.

The Bad:

- Not enough hubs. Going around, exploring and using your newly-acquired augmentations was great, too bad there aren’t enough chances to do so.

- I agree with people who say that the world is static. I would have enjoyed it if people walked and cars drived around like in, say, GTA.

- Difficulty is a joke after the first playthrough. You can drown yourself in experience and credits and thus Praxis points, but also ammunition, computer virii and health items. Yet, a lot comes down to trail and error or savescumming, which would be fine, if it weren’t for … see further below.

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SPOILERS START HERE. DO NOT READ ON IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE GAME.

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- The game starts out extremely strong and then gets progressively weaker. My personal highlight was the visit to Tai Yong Medical, which actually felt huge, dangerous and challenging to get through. Later environments, such as Picus, Omega Ranch and especially Panacea are less creative, more empty and lifeless.

- It’s the same on the story side. My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t fork earlier than in the last goddamn room you’ll visit in the game. A gigantic improvement would have been to allow the player to switch sides earlier. Taggart is around all game, there is literally no reason for me to start cooperating with him in the very last moment since he’s spent the last 30 hours being a colossal dick to me, and I barely know who Darrow is when I confront him. Another issue is the pacing. At the beginning, you get sent to different locations in the first city hub, Detroit. A Sarif Industries factory, a police department, your own apartment, a slum held by a violent anti-augmentation gang … by the end of the game, you get ferried from China to France to Detroit back to China to Singapore to the Arctic in very short succession. I understand the escalation, but it progresses exponentially fast.

The Ugly:

- Endings. Three minute videos with stock footage that don’t tell me anything about how things actually panned out in the end, and a post-credits blurb that invalidates every last one of them so that Human Revolution can be a prequel to Deus Ex proper. NO.

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- Loadtimes, even on v1.1.622. Seeing how you can literally go from 200hp to dead in a millisecond because for one thing, Jensen’s feet may be made of carbon fiber and steel, but he can’t land on them from like five meters height and for another thing, even with thrice upgraded dermal armor you can be wasted in an instant by enemies, loadtimes of any length are a pain, but as I mentioned above, you’ll load an earlier save for lots and lots of reasons, so brace yourself for loading screens galore.

~

It’s a great game, no doubt about it. Its only problem is that it will envitably get overshadowed by upcoming blockbusters like Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Skyrim, the new Assassin’s Creed or Guild Wars 2 and thus will not recieve the attention it deserves in the shape of awards, and instead be slowly picked apart by the nostalgia crowd.

What a shame.

Posted 8 months ago

There be a shitstorm a-brewin’

The Starcraft 2 community is in a state of outrage - as if it ever wasn’t, balance discussions and all that - because SlayerS_Jessica, girlfriend of the ‘Emperor’, SlayerS_`BoxeR` himself, has decided to recruit a girl for the team, SlayerS_Eve.

This doesn’t sound like a problem, but as it turns out? It is. Eve is in Diamond League. Korean Diamond Leaguers are probably still pretty decent players, and by decent I mean probably easily capable of stomping foreign Masters and even some Grandmasters but the thing is that most if not all of her competitors are two leagues above her.

Starcraft 2 is serious business and thus, there have been some very strong reactions to that. As things go, some of them might have been sexual in nature. _Jessica has taken a lot of offense to that, going so far as to sue some individuals, and then has taken the time to address the community.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=246175

Obviously, this has done nothing but put even more fuel on what was already a pretty huge fire. And there are some pretty questionable sentences in that wall of text.

She was not selected through the pro-gamer casting system, but she is someone I selected for the team to help start having female competitors in Starcraft 2, after seeing that she had sufficient potential.

So this was an example of Affirmative Action or maybe a Quota. The problem is that this was entirely unnecessary, and here is why:

While it may be true that the Korean society is rather paternalistic, this doesn’t really come into effect in Starcraft or eSports in general. We generally keep women and men apart in all other sports because of their differing physical attributes, and for good reason.

But the thing is that Starcraft is 99% mental - builds, counters, timings, micro, macro, multitasking, decision-making - unless you literally have no hands or eyes, there is literally no way to be physically impaired in playing the game. Moreover, it’s entirely meritocratically arranged. There is no other parameter to gauge your position within the playerbase through than your skill. If you’re good, you’ll gravitate towards the top, if you’re bad, towards the bottom, and that’s all there is to it. The reason why there are no women sitting in the GSL booths is probably because there are no GSTL-level women around.

Why is that? There is probably a whole bunch of reasons. But the primary one seems to be that most women involving themselves with Starcraft do so by fangirling over Flash or Jaedong. There’s probably a lot less women playing, and as things are, only a tiny fraction of ANY population, be it male, female, black, yellow or white, is good enough to compete with professional players.

So, basically, all that _Jessica has done is elevate this to a pseudo-political issue, which is the last thing that the community needed, but even more so, the women of Starcraft needed.

Posted 10 months ago

The social, cultural and moral dimensions of filesharing

I’ve been meaning to write a piece like this for a long time but I hadn’t had the mania in me to do so until now. Hopefully, I can remember most of my original points because I didn’t keep notes.

It should be a golden age for the content industry. New distribution models deliver the ever-expanding catalogue of music, movies, books et alii to an ever-increasing number of devices owned by an ever-increasing number of people. The internet has made entirely new business models possible, waiting to be explored, exploited and conquered by curious corporations.

But as usual when progress marches ever onwards, all we got is heckling. While the people tried to put emphasis on the advantages of broadband penetration and rapidly accelerating connection speeds, the producers cried foul.

Usenet was and is a niche thing, then used by people who were and now used by people who think they are more tech-savvy and clever than the average chump (they aren’t). Napster, in 1998, was the first mass-compatible P2P platform, even though it was just as cumbersome, virus-ridden and slow as anything else was in the internet in the era of the .com bubble.

Napster was a ship, or rather, a fleet a new crew of buccaneers signed up on. Millions of people from all over the planet shared content, much like you’d loan a physical album, movie tape or book to someone who had not heard, seen or read it yet. Of course, the powers that be took offense to that, because it allegedly reduced their revenue and profits (fun fact: at the moment, out of the 10 entertainment companies on the FORTUNE 500, only one is running a significant loss: CBS).

Using their vast lobby in the United States and the European Union’s states, the content industry pushed to have filesharing criminalised all over the planet. The result is great pieces of legislation such as the American DMCA or the international ACTA, the latter of which is still up for negotiation.

Today, things are a little easier than then. One click hosters, “cloud computing” and torrents have made filesharing easier and faster than ever before. People compare their connections based on the fact how fast they can download a DVD movie. There is nothing ‘1337’ or ‘h4xx0r’ about having access to the newest ‘filez’ anymore.

We’ve come far, and it is time to reflect on what we did in the past 13 years. Or more importantly, what we did not. We did not run companies into the ground, bands, actors and authors out of business and condemn the world to endless indie everything. The great panic, the scary pre-movie advertisements, the propaganda, it has been for naught. There hasn’t been a crash. Apparently, there’s still money for flashy film festivals, double-digit million contracts and the continued existence of the yellow press. Things are looking pretty good.

Somebody needs to tell the robbed and mugged, the puppets of Time Warner et al., though. To this day, they are waging an endless war on the internet - spoiled kids and moneybags at the forefront - to tell people filesharing is morally reprehensible, wrong and indicative of an entitlement complex.

But is it? No.

Filesharing is a tool to lift the hordes of the disadvantaged out of their misery. The people who, due to the economic and social circumstances of the globalised world, do not have ready access to that content. There are three reasons why people “pirate”, as they say;

1) the target audience is too young.

Another trend has manifested simulteanously. Driven by enraged and uninvolved parents, governments have taken it on themselves to regulate, censor and ban content kids, in their opinion, shouldn’t be allowed to see. Age limitations have become more and more restrictive, even adults are caught in the crossfire. Germany’s censorship policies in regards to video games are infamous, as is Australia’s lack of a Mature rating, both rightfully so targets of ridicule across the globe. Filesharing trumps the nanny state and allows us to judge what we’re ripe for ourselves.

2) the target audience is too poor.

A by-effect of economic globalisation is the stagnation of wages in the Western world. Much of the scarce growth the organised worker can eke out for himself is eaten up by rampant inflation of food and gas prices, officially masked by the simulteanous deflation in prices of consumer electronics and other luxury goods. According to the ‘basket of commodities’, all is well, but the reality is people working three jobs, barely unable to pay rent. Germany still doesn’t have a minimum wage. Under these circumstances, often expensive content becomes unavailable to tens of millons. Filesharing trumps wage disparity and modern slavery.

3) the target audience is an asshole.

Truth be told, there are a couple of people on the planet that pirate despite being over the age of 21 and having large amounts of disposable income. Commonly, we call those people assholes, but a more scientific term is probably ‘homo economicus’, a peculiar breed of people that thinks that if something is profitable for them, its morally correct. It usually isn’t. What happens when people work only towards the own profit has been examined thoroughly in the wake of the financial crisis. Homo economicus should go on the list of extinct species.

In closing, filesharing is a good thing. It allows tens if not hundreds of millions of people to have access to entertainment, popular culture and content they’d otherwise not see in a million years. It bypasses shady licensing deals, bad localisations, censorship and overpricing. It allows the already disadvantaged to stay socially and culturally connected.

Keep seeding.

Posted 12 months ago

Interludium X - Ludi finis

You know what my problem is? I’m still expecting things. I’ve had enough obnoxiousness in every single day for the last 13 years to last some people a lifetime and I’ve complained less about it than other people complain about nothing in a day. I’ve dealt with things as silently and efficiently as I could in any given situation. So when I manage to focus my mind on something other than the unbearable misery all around me, I’d like that something to be something that I actually enjoy. And to expect to be able to do so is my problem.

It was something extremely minor, not even worth explaining. What is happening is that I’m being the kind of jerk that vents his frustration about the underlying issue on completely unrelated people or matters. And I’m not feeling like apologising, not one bit. I want to run away and leave it all to crash and burn. At the same time, I know my conscience will kill me if I do so, no matter how much I try and no matter what I do to silence it. Because I haven’t been able to refuse my family anything in a long, long time.

What do I get if I’m right? Internal happiness for a moment, but the prospect of this having been a training run for the real thing that will happen in a couple of years, if even so much. What do I get if I’m wrong? Internal unhappiness forever. A group that will never be recompensated for.

Posted 1 year ago

Interludium XIV - the sound of the sound of silence

I roam through the house at night, stopping at the door to my brother’s flat on my way downwards to check if he’s still chatting on Teamspeak - he is. As I turn the returned key in the lock of my parents’ and grandmother’s flat, the click seems to be only noise in the house.

As I’m taking a step in, I’m treated to absolutely nothing. The erratic, restless snores of my mother have vacated the premise, and along with them the moans of my father and the sobs of my grandma.

My mind is torn between opti- and realism. Things seem to be moving forward, but what looks like a shortcut might as well be detour. It has certainly satisfied Björn’s actionism, but …

The possible futures elude me. My ears register the other lack of stimulation as the loudest, most annoying beep noise in the universe. I decide to sneak into the kitchen and satisfy its and my cravings, one’s for noise and another one’s for nourishment by stealing some cookies.

For this night, I decide that the *crunch* *crunch* of crumbs between my flat-ground teeth is what keeps me sane.

Posted 1 year ago

Interludium VIII - That which cannot be changed

Another day, another hospital - or not. Because it seems like the Paracelsus Clinic in my hometown, Marl, and the Knappschaft Hospital in the neighbouring district town, Recklinghausen, have joined forces, at least administratively, under a banner by the name of “Klinikum Vest”, probably to torture their patients, or rather, customers, more efficiently.

And we had become quite regular customers. Brain strokes. Heart insufficiencies. Sleep apnoe. By now, it seemed like my brother and myself were the only ones who roamed the halls of these hospitals as concerned relatives, as visitors, and not as patients.

This time, a rather innocent incident has led me here. My mother fell on her arm. In itself, that is only a bruise. If you look at the big picture, it’s just the latest episode in the decline of a once proud, independent and strong woman.

I would be lying if I were to say that I’m getting sick of those hospitals. To tell the truth, I became sick of them a long time ago. The desire to burn those places to the ground, patients, nurses, doctors and all, had formed in my mind on the day my childhood ended, when my father was left to die on the cold, hard floor of a regular room in, ironically, the ‘Stroke Unit’ of the Knappschaft Hospital’s neurology.

Things will never be same. Although this idiom is widely used, it’s easier to find a day after which things will never be the same rather than to undertake the impossible task of finding a day after which they will. Even if it is for the worse, every time you wake up in the morning, things have changed.

Posted 1 year ago

Interludium VII.III/III - hollow shrine

The word June still reverbrates in my head. By now it has become a grotesque curse. I am not able to concentrate on too many things at this time, so I direct my attention to the distance between my and the car in front of mine, the sound of the air-conditioner, set to 26°C and nothing much else …

Walking across the doorstep, I bump into a peculiar looking basket on the floor. Maybe Grandmother has been cooking something after all? I lift a cloth in the basket and look inside.

It’s weird, in a way. I ate nothing but a KitKat all day long, so it’s natural that my first reaction to the dead animal before me is one of hunger, but at the same time … I leave the rabbit corpse alone and butter myself a bun in the kitchen. By the time I come out, Björn has already moved towards digging a hole in the garden.

Chewing away, I stand there and watch him dig. I remember thinking that I wanted this to happen so I could see Björn sad and humbled. As I hear him sniff, I can’t help but feel my face contort to a crumb-smeared smile.

Posted 1 year ago