Category: thoughts

An Early Birthday Present: the Amazon Kindle

the new "shiny"

I convinced my wife to get my birthday present two months early this year. Why? Because I couldn’t wait any longer for an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle had been on my wishlist for over half-a-year and we had already discussed getting it for my birthday. I didn’t see the point in waiting until then, though. To tell the truth the wait was slowly driving me crazy!

When we got our tax return I set aside some of it and in late February ordered a Kindle.  Three days later it arrived. They do this neat trick with the packaging where they put a protective sheet of plastic over the Kindle’s screen with text on it, except when you peel it off you discover that the text is on the actual screen of the Kindle.

Why do I need an ebook reader? I don’t really. Why did I want one? Several reasons, here are the big ones:

Space

I want to take books with me on vacation but am tired of how much room they take up in luggage. I know, you’re thinking one paper or hardback book isn’t that bulky. That is true. I don’t take one book, in general, I bring along four to six books ranging in size from 150 to 1,000+ pages. That many books take up a lot of space. Now those books take up less space than a single paperback.

I have three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my house and three more that go up half as high. All of them are overflowing with books. I have a box of books in my garage, two more at my parent’s house and I gave away five or six boxes of books last time I was visiting my parents. I get anywhere from three to ten books (free) each month. I no longer have the space (real or mental) for so many books. The Kindle can hold hundreds of books (thousands if the advertising is to be believed) on its hard drive and an infinite amount more on Amazon’s servers with out me ever having to wonder where I’m going to find room for all of them.

Portability

I’m reading the collected works of Josephus right now. This is a book that is 6″ x 10″ x 3,” weighs nearly three pounds,  has tiny text, and is printed in double column. It is not an easy book to read sitting down in a chair. It is impossible to read on the go, or in little snatches. The complete works of Josephus on the Kindle is single column, print as large as I want, and never weighs more than 8.7 ounces.

I can also put pdfs onto the Kindle which is a nice feature to have when I attend game nights or sessions with friends. I have all the rule books at my fingertips on the Kindle without carrying around numerous rule books, print-outs, and FAQs.

Free Wireless

D got me the more expensive version of the Kindle that comes with free wireless for life. The Kindle doesn’t have a full featured web browser or a touch interface but it’s UI works well enough when you need to connect to the Internet in a hurry. Not just for purchasing books but for checking or sending emails, reference work, or reading the news. I’ve found Instapaper to be a wonderful application for the Kindle. As I see stories on-line through out the day that interest me I click a single button on my browser and when I get home at night I have a nice digest of them waiting for me on the Kindle.

Price

This isn’t the most important point, I should be borrowing more books from my library as opposed to purchasing them. I can’t deny that the reduced price of ebooks makes justifying a purchase easier.  The two to five dollars off an ebook is the difference between an impulse purchase and a “maybe I’ll look into it later.” Compulsive and impulse buying isn’t a plus if it’s done merely to consume. But, it does make me willing to take a risk on unknown authors and books  and I see anything that exposes me to more writing as a good thing.

I don’t see the Kindle as a replacement for my books and I will certainly always love a nice worn hardback book with dog-eared pages and notes in the margins. Nor, will I tire of discovering these in used books. The written word will always be an important part of my life and I am too much of a Luddite to ever fully give up material objects.

But, it will be nice to sit in the hammock in the backyard with a 2,000+ page book without having to worry about throwing my back out.

I want to see more games like TWEWY

Silly name, good game

I finished The World Ends With You (TWEWY) last Friday. The game was an enjoyable romp. The story didn’t make a lot of sense and the character (and costume) design was atrocious but the gameplay was solid and more important scalable. Why is scalable bolded like that? Because it is the single greatest thing it has going for it and the single greatest thing I wish started showing up in more games!

TWEWY doesn’t punish a player for not learning the minutiae of its various game play mechanics. It doesn’t penalize you for not being able to sink in the hours and hours to master controlling characters on two screens simultaneously, or learning the intricacies of its mini games (like tin pin slammer and fashions.) TWEWY is only as difficult as you want it to be. You can set the difficulty level at any time, you can set how your secondary characters works at any time and you can safely ignore all the mini-games, sub-plots, and interesting game design elements if you want, and still see the ending of the game.

More difficult than it looks.

Why is this so important? Well, I’m not six or sixteen anymore. I have a fucking life now and I no longer have the luxury of six or seven spare hours in a day to immerse myself in my favorite pastime. If I did I’m sure I could master all the nuances of tin pin slammer, or figure out just what types of experience go into making my pins evolve. Seven-year-old-me loved that shit and ate it up. Seven-year-old-me had the free time to memorize enemy stats and talk endlessly about the differences in the magic systems in various JRPG gaming franchises and how that compared with said systems in western game franchises (oh, the misspent hours of my youth…) I do not.

I don’t want to hear anyone down in the comments say something like “Maybe you just suck at gaming,” or “If you can’t commit to a game don’t play it.” The answer to my lack of time isn’t to give up my most cherished pastime. And you should slam your head against a wall for thinking I, or anyone else, should. The average age of a gamer today is 34. In general 34 year-olds have full-time jobs, family commitments, social commitments, community commitments, etc. What they don’t have is a lot of free time to sink into games that demand they ‘master’ them in order to enjoy them.

God, these kids look stupid.

I just wish more designers did things like this. The difficulty in video games has been declining for years, but as implemented in TWEWY it allows the player to decide, on the fly, how difficult they want things to be. So, when the player is looking for something more challenging or has the time to sink into it they are rewarded for it. At the same time I can play and enjoy the game as well.

Here is a case where gamers can have their cake and eat it too. So why aren’t designers catching on?

Re-reading Camus: the Myth of Sisyphus Pt 3

No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution. They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing. They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.

Find the first two parts here and here.

Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus
Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus

I left you last at the beginning of Camus’ critique of other philosopher’s thoughts and rationalizations for suicide.  Camus doesn’t deal with every philosophy, ever -ism, he takes up the only existential philosopher’s and only those who have directly dealt with the issue of suicide.  This list includes: Chestov ( I haven’t read), Kierkegaard (I have), Jaspers (haven’t), and Husserl (have).  Camus states in the very beginning that each and every one of them fails, they abandon reason and escape the problem of suicide by a leap of faith, “a forced hope.” Jaspers’ is the most forthright of the philosophers in this regard.  After enumerating in how many ways Man fails to connect to the world around him, turns that failure is transcendence?!  Unable to find purpose or meaning Jasper inverts it all and says that this is meaning, “That existence which, through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ Thus the absurd becomes god, and the inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.”  How convenient for Jasper that when his reasoning got him in a tough spot, when it appeared he  might have to say that the only logical thing to do in an absurd world is to kill yourself, he declares that the complete absence from reality of meaning or purpose is a direct sign that there is!

Chestov simply states that when we reach the absurd we have found God, that “we must rely upon him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”  Faced with the absurd we must take the leap of faith and trust to God.  Chestov rejects reason and hopes that there is something beyond it.   Camus is quick to point out that reason and this world are all Humanity has to work with and that by making the absurd God and removing them from this world into a world beyond, they’ve both lost all meaning to mankind.  Logic and reason, which if you remember were all Camus was going to use when he began his inquiry into suicide, is not these philosopher’s strong point as Camus repeatedly points out.  They’ve abandoned it when they make the hopeful leap of faith, Kierkegaard does the same as Chestov if not more so turning the Christian God of his youth into a monster of a deity that requires a sacrifice of the intellect to satisfy it.

Camus rejects all of this, he wants to know if he can live with what he knows and with that alone.  Camus dismisses the failed attempts of his predecessors with these words:

If in order to elude the anxious question: “what would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.”  everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

So what do I think about all this?  I find that without me knowing it that my thoughts on life have been heavily influenced by Camus.  The first time I read this I know there were parts that I didn’t understand and simply continued reading in the hopes of finding some clarity…  I do not recall finding it, but rereading the essay it is clear I did.  I haven’t sat down and mapped out my logic or reasoning, but I don’t need any other reason to live than that I have a life.  In a conversation with a Mormon Bishop I was asked, “Without God why do you even bother getting up in the morning?”  I honestly do not understand this question.  I suspect that those who ask it don’t either.  No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution.  They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing.  They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.  I told him this and he seemed taken aback, and then asked “What about when you die?”  I laughed out loud at that point, though I quickly apologized.  I don’t remember my life before I came in to it and I don’t think I’ll remember it afterwards.  Is your life, right now, only worth continuing if a eternity of existence is promised after you die?  I doubt it.  Living is its own reward… Camus’ thoughts are quite a bit more stylized than that, demanding that Man live life constantly rebellion against the fact that the world is absurd and that life must end…

I’ll be discussing and commenting on that in the next edition, which covers Camus’ “absurd freedom” and then moving on to the “absurd man”

Tuesday Share: June 9, 2009

This week’s eclectic share of stories

From the best aggregator of random cool stuff on the Internet, Boing Boing comes non-toxic metals that are liquid at room temperature!  I’ve played with Mercury and it is a great deal of fun but we we all know the risks of mercury poisoning (or we should) so finding cool metals to play with that won’t kill you is a plus.

No one doubts the huge effect Ronald Reagan had on the United States… I don’t know if it was all positive though.  The Right has lionized the man, making him into some sort of superhuman, but there are many things that Reagan did that were illegal and did not benefit Americans.  It is important to not lose all the negatives that Reagan brought us when we write the history – 20 things You Don’t Know about Ronald Reagan.

We’ve all heard the story of how the personal computer was going to create the paperless office, and here we are 20+ years later awash in boring, old, analog paper.  Paper still has many uses and does several things better than its digital counterpart.  Learn/review some of them at Dumb Little Man.

Continuing their 30 days to a Better Man project the Art of Manliness recommends that you update your resume.  My resume is already up-to-date and I’m thankfully gainfully employed in a relatively safe sector, but not everyone is or will be so lucky.  Best to be prepared for the worst and have an updated resume ready if the need ever arises.

For those of you interested in the procedure of politics there’s the unfolding story of the coup happening in the New York Senate!  The original story is here and an update can be found here.  While it seems the Republicans do have a numerical advantage their gaining control of the Senate depends on the rules of the Senate and how well both Parties know them and can use them to their advantage…  Procedure matters in these kind of events and a canny knowledge and use of them can allow a minority to stay in control for an extended period of time, As Willie Brown did in the California Assembly  circa 1995-96.

Finally journalists have found the courage to take on Oprah! This woman with no specialized knowledge on anything, besides appealing emotionally to a broad spectrum of American women, has used her television show for years to “Educate” her audience and launch careers of numerous people, some who deserved the attention, but many who don’t.  Especially egregious is her airing of loons like Jenny McCarthy and Susanne Somers who advocate for medical treatments (or lack of them) that endanger all of us.

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