Tackling the Biggest Issue Our World Faces Today

What happens if a mute person needs to contact emergency services? If they’re being chased by muggers or their friend is having a heart attack, what do they do? In Northern Ireland they can SMS their distress signal to the relevant authorities. They have to be registered for it. I can’t find any similar services in Australia. I wonder why. If I were deaf or mute I’d be pretty scared and/or annoyed about it.

First Impressions of Weezer’s Red Album

The first eight tracks of their new album have leaked. I wouldn’t know, but rumour has it that a bit of torrent was involved. I’ve listened to the few of them. Or, rather, I started and then shook my head in disgusted disappointment and stopped. Initial thought: it’s just generic pop-rock with bland, meaningless lyrics. I haven’t really enjoyed any of their whole albums since Pinkerton, though there have been some good tracks. To spare you from reading the rest of the post, just look at the album cover below. Or to sum it up textually: the Red Album is a hodge-podge of anything the Weezer guys could come up with, thrown together with no coherence and apparently little passion. I like their new stuff maybe even less than I like anything since their sophomore.

“Giddy up, we’re going to ride our band-brand for every last, boring dollar!”

Make Believe, their latest LP, made me cringe - quite honestly. Rhyming hero with zero? After wanting to hang around with Rivers in his garage on the Blue Album, his apparent respect for Beverly Hills stars was an unwelcome shock. But, big deal, it’s about the music, right? Well, the music is as generic as the lyrics. Sure, the six minute The Greatest Man That Ever Lived is very weird, but it just splices EVERY STYLE of song they’ve ever touched upon into the timeframe with no coherence. What the fuck is that song even talking about? Maybe more about how Rivers is cool so screw you man I’m going to do my thing.

I’m pretty negative about all the tracks I’ve heard so far from the Red Album. The first song I heard, Pork and Beans, I was embarrassed to have coming out of my speakers. First line of the chorus: “I’ma do the things that I wanna do / I ain’t got a thing to prove to you”. You could prove that you know how to write non-cliched lyrics with maybe even a little bit of feeling and thought behind them. But, no, you don’t have to, Rivers, just like I don’t have to like your new album. Yuck.

“Hey Rivers, what you need is a stupid Handlebar moustache to start that “new image” you’ve been looking for.”

The start of the next one, Cold Dark World, sounds like “Friday on my Mind.” But I guess that isn’t a very reasonable criticism. I suppose the thing that bugs me about this song and the rest of them to an extent is that he’s gone from being a geek to singing like he’s trying to be a hip-hopper or rapper. Is he trying to be cool this way, or is he satirising the “cool”? I have no idea, but I wish they’d gone down a different path.

Their softer one, “Thought I Knew“, has Brian Bell on lead vocals. What? Well, his voice is fine, I suppose. But, god, it sounds nothing like Weezer. It’s like they’re an entirely new band with the same old name. Maybe I wouldn’t've liked Blue Album and Pinkerton if I hadn’t listened to it so many times years ago and just discovered it today. I hope it’s not just nostalgia. Regardless, I don’t want to listen to their new stuff because it makes depressed - not not from (the end of Pinkerton’s) wanting something beautiful and destroying it with your ugliness but because it’s the final nail in a musical coffin. There’s nothing wrong with changing and developing as a band, but there’s a gigantic and career-ending difference between that and scrapping everything, alienating your fans and looking like fucking tossers. Give me a re-release of their awesome b-sides anyday.

</rant>

Top Ten Sing-along Guitar Songs

When you’re at a house party or just with some friends, there is bound to be a guitar lying around somewhere. As everyone gets drunker they demand for someone, anyone, please, to play a song on the the little sister’s wildly out-of-tune Fisher & Paykel nylon-string guitar. It’s incredible the extent to which alcohol makes everyone think they’re Pavarotti (as in a good singer, not a fat Italian.)

Unless you want the crowd to lynch you or at least roll their eyes and walk away, you’ll have to ensure that the songs that you’re going to play are ones that everyone will want to sing along with. If you’re not in intimate settings, then no one wants to hear your beautiful, soulful rendition of Elliot Smith’s entire discography. Trust me. They want a radio hit from the 90s that they can shout along with - and if you don’t strum one out you’ll lose the potential crowd.

Learn these ten, and you’ll always be able to have at least one great sing-along. It’s worth it, even if it means sacrificing some of that indie credibility you’ve been building up for so long.

Oasis - Wonderwall

There’s a reason this is the favourite of buskers everywhere - it’s got so much radio playtime that it’s ingrained into the skull of everyone in Western society. Fortunately, this means that any man, woman or fetus present will be able to sing along for at least the chorus. It’s easy to play, but you’ll need to have a capo on you. This isn’t a song where changing the key around is going to work - people are to familiar with the recording’s melody.

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Smash Mouth - All Star

This is extremely simple to play and was a huge hit at the time - and it’s nice to have a fast, shouty song after all the popular love songs. Enough said.

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Goo Goo Dolls - Iris

Watch out, this song has crazy tuning. Your best bet is just to use the simplified slightly-different-key version which is all over the web. If you’re a guy you’re going to have a lot of trouble singing the very high chorus. This is a good one to sing late in the night when everyone’s a bit quieter - extra points for making a girl cry when you croon “When everything feels like the movies / Yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive…”

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Green Day - Good Riddance (Time of your life)

Like Wonderwall, this is a song that is overplayed to the point of ridiculousness - perfect for busking or a singalong. It’s kinda hard to play the finger-picking version and sing at the same time; chords will substitute nicely - but make sure you pick the intro so people recognise it straight away. Don’t be tempted to slow this one down, it’s a surprisingly fast song.

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Coldplay - Yellow

You may want to take this down a key or two if you’re a guy - Chris Martin’s voice is pretty hard to emulate. Easy to play, and if you forget the words the one you’ll make up will be better than Coldplay’s.

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Leonard Cohen/ Every musician ever - Hallelujah

Whether or not you prefer Buckley’s haunting cover, your best bet is the one from Shrek. It has simple chords, an easy melody and the build-up as you go from the soft early verses to the louder and emotional later ones is fantastic.

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Bryan Adams - Summer of 69

Being a crowd-pleaser isn’t all fun and games. Sometimes it means biting your lip, throwing away your dignity and playing a song by this ridiculous Canadian. His voice is high too, you might have to transpose it down a key - but that’s not hard, the chords are very basic. Sing as loudly as you can - it’ll help drown out the noise of a little part of you dying.

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Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge

There’s no denying the the RHCPs are hugely popular. Most of their big songs will go down well - but the intro Under The Bridge is what you should try if you’re looking for more kudos - the drunken fools will think you’re Jimi Hendrix’s older, cooler brother. You’re not - but it’s worth learning the intro to give that very false impression for fifteen seconds to people who don’t know any better.

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Ronan Keating - When You Say Nothing At All

See Summer of 69 - basically the same thing except the girls seem to like this one better. Bonus points if your playing can inspire someone to sing the instrumental part.

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Smashing Pumpkins - Today

There’s something about the Smashing Pumpkins that lets them get away with being outrageously angsty - they do it with style and catchy hooks. Plus, you can always say that you’re just singing along for 90’s-nostalgia’s sake. Right? Anyway, don’t bother tuning this to Eb - whether you play it like Billy Corgan or with barre chords won’t make a difference. Extend that outro for as long as you can.

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Mobile Applications I Use

My Nokia 6120 has HSDPA, which is one of the main reasons I bought it. I subscribe to 3’s X-Series Bronze package and get a 100MiB download limit for $10 a month. I use it on the train or tram, when I’m sitting waiting for something or when I need to find out a definition or something. I’m really glad I have it, though it doesn’t always seem to achieve the 3.5G speeds - it depends on where I am, even in inner-city Melbourne. If I hit my broadband download limit at home I use my Nokia as a modem instead - and get speeds around 100KiB/s.

The internet access would be pretty useless without the applications:

Opera Mini 4.1 Beta

It runs fast and combines an efficient interface with lots of little techniques to format the page appropriately for the handheld format - reducing the data transfer required significantly. It reduces image quality if you want it to, stores bookmarks and history and can even synch up to your desktop browser - a shame that I use Firefox on the desktop. Combined with the faster access speeds Opera’s interface makes using my phone to browse Wikipedia or read my feeds with Google Reader actually worth it. It handles file downloading surprisingly well and the latest version (4.1 beta) takes about 5 seconds to load up!

My criticisms of it are few. The way that the session management is handled seems to be sketchy - I’d prefer to be kept logged in - because entering the username and password is a real timewaster. Also, I want an option for storing as much history as I can on there - so I can browse sites in offline mode when I have poor reception. I have hundreds of megabytes of storage through the SD card and I want to use it! Also, why on earth doesn’t it remember the searches I’ve done?

GMail Mobile

I love this app so much. It takes about 10 seconds to boot up, and then I’ve got a reasonably fast, responsive interface to GMail that is laid out in a suitably minimalistic fashion. It does everything you’d need it to, except attach files to the messages you’re sending. I suppose it’d be hard for the team to get this working on the ridiculous variety of different phones. Still, it’s a shame. You also can’t save attachments, as far as I can work out - though it does convert and display PDFs and maybe MS Office documents.

Apart from the attachments, all I’d want would be speed improvements!

Google Maps Mobile

I almost never use this, it takes forever and I can’t seem to ever search for one location, I have to put in two and get the directions between them. I suppose Google can’t help it being slow on a budget phone like the 6120 Classic, but it’s still disappointing.

Doom RPG / Orcs&Elves

These games are extremely impressive - they give me hope for the future of mobile games - but a few days after I first got them I stopped playing and haven’t since. It gives me a headache navigating my way through the cavernous spaceship or dungeon. Not only this, but it takes a lot of button presses to do things (no more than needs be, it’s not Carmack’s fault but the medium’s.) Regardless, I always prefer just browsing the web.

I’d love to see a really well made non-first-person RPG on the phone. For some reason that perspective makes me feel sick when travelling. I would much prefer a SNES-era Final-Fantasy-esque view. In fact, I’d very happily pay money to get a copy of any of the other Final Fantasies on my phone - with a polished and well-adapted interface, of course. The distribution of mobile phone games really sucks arse, I bet even if Square-Enix had released a couple of their Final Fantasy Mobile games in English I wouldn’t be able to find them anyway.

Things I want

Google Reader Mobile: the mobile web interface is nice, but I’d love for a really speedy and efficient way to read my feeds. They’ve done a fantastic job with the GMail app, hopefully soon they can do it again for Google Reader.

Joanna Newsom Review: ‘Ys’

One of the editors at my uni magazine recommended I listen to Joanna Newsom’s latest album, Ys. Simon, the editor, told me what to expect: five epic, rambling, radically folky songs. Joanna plays the harp, mixing sparse, haunting plucks with breathless and spine-tingling runs. It’s hard to comprehend how anyone can do this at the same time as singing with such raw conviction. It’s very different to just about anything I’ve listened to lately, or maybe ever. Sometimes you get the feeling she’d be very much at home by the fire of some Olde English Lord’s castle - her lyrics are poetically illustrative and her wide-ranging voice literally drips with emotion (haha, got you, that was a metaphor!)

The second song, Monkey and Bear, starts off happy and carefree - Joanna cheerfully explains the wily animals’ escape from their indenture to a cruel farmer. Every time she moves from one free-flowing verse to the next, the mood changes oh-so-subtly. Slowly you start to suspect the monkey, to see the avarice and the lust for cruelty emerge. It’s painful, and at the end of it you’ll be amazed at the intense journey she packs into one song. The other ones follow suit, and there’s barely enough time for your ears to digest what’s thrown at them. The way the song weaves its way through different moods and keys is surprising and almost off-putting at first - when she changes the melody every couple of verses you’re left floating without a catchy hook to draw you back in.

This is part of the attraction and part of the problem I have with her music. I can’t relax and listen to it. It’s so dense and intricate that I have to concentrate for the music to mean anything to me. I can’t just sing along with a chorus because there never seems to be one. Her voice is unusual (in fact, all of her is), she pronounces words strangely and her voices jumps from low to high - sometimes actually cracking with feeling. Unless you listen hard or have looked up the lyrics you’ll miss what she’s saying - and the lyrics go so well with the music that you’d be crazy to be only getting part of “the experience”.

It’s beautiful music, but not in the relaxing way of something like Air. It’s inaccessible but rewarding in a way that I can’t remember ever experiencing. Lie in bed, close your eyes and turn it up loud. Let it fill your imagination with her clever rhymes and evocative poetry, and allow your heartbeat to undulate with its strange timing changes, and then make a judgement. Personally I think it’s worth the effort.

Iron Man thoughts

I saw Iron Man a few days ago, inbetween classes with some friends. I enjoyed it. It has fantastic reviews for a reason - mainly Robert Downey Jr. I’ve never read the comics (or any comics for that matter…), and I knew next to nothing about the Iron Man mythos. I was pleasantly surprised, I actually thought he would be some kind of robot (how embarrassing, I suppose.) Instead he was a funny, smart and above all cool character with very human flaws with which I could empathise.

Downey Jr. makes his larger-than-life personality believable, which is impressive given how fake it could so easily seem having someone as witty and magnetic (iron man? magnets?) as Tony Stark. I usually love origin stories, but Iron Man’s one took over half the movie, or so it felt. There was so much time introducing the character and so little of his doing-cool-shit-in-a-high-powered-suit that I would’ve been disappointed if he wasn’t such an awesome guy anyway. Besides, a sequel is assured and there’ll be plenty of time for his blowing stuff up. Having said that, the action scenes were fantastic - though the villain wasn’t much.

It’s very much worth seeing if you haven’t already - I can’t wait for the next one to come out (2010 I think?)

Spaceship!: A collaborative interactive fiction project

I’m always amazed at both the quantity and quality of interactive fiction that’s produced these days. I rarely play it, but I still read from time to time the blog of Emily Short, a developer and author who’s won lots of awards and is highly respected and all that stuff. Anyway, on her blog she links to British newspaper The Guardian’s just-launched attempt to create a collaborative IF game.

It’s called Spaceship! and there’s a good article explaining its premise: using a wiki they will allow wannabe (or highly experienced in Emily’s case) developers or writers to contribute to the creation of the game. Rooms, objects, characters, etc. will all have their own pages, and anyone can suggest new things for them to do or say. I think the only story guideline inherent in the game’s inception is: “Your spaceship is broken. Fix it or die.” From what I gather they’ve tried to do something similar before, but it petered out. This is a more coordinated and better planned attempt. If I get spare time I’m definitely going to add some descriptions and suggest something for the plot line. The most important factor in the game’s success, I think, is the people who are involved - and they already seem to be a good bunch.

With so many people being involved hopefully there’ll be a response for everything the player could think to type - I absolutely love games where they consider every possible thing you could try. Obviously there are very practical limits to the amount one person can think of and implement, but with all these people, I’m expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Look at what they’ve got already! Obviously, what makes interactive fiction enjoyable and engaging is not how funny its response to “have sex with crew member” is… but I’ll still play it just for that. Good luck to them.

Getting Started With Dwarf Fortess

If you’re anything like me, then you’ll have had repeated fantasies about leading a troop of seven dwarfs to the side of a remote, inhospitable mountain to carve out a living - armed with nothing but ale and a couple of pickaxes. The greatest tragedy of the modern age is that no one has ever implemented this common and (usually) unrealised fantasy in stunning 3D. They still haven’t, but that hardly detracts from Dwarf Fortress, the most detailed dwarf-based fortress-building simulation ever to have been rendered using the full ASCII character set.



If you’re reading this blog then you’ve probably heard tell of this mysterious and addictively complex game - burdened with a learning curve steeper than the mountain face into which your little dwarven miners will strike. Perhaps you’ve never had the time or could never be bothered, but there’s scarcely a better time to be bothered than NOW - mainly because I need something to write about on my blog. Nevertheless, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more detailed, thought out game - especially with this staggering level of longevity (oh really?)
Dwarf Fortress is a worthy distraction, and you don’t need to learn how to smelt Adamantium-and-Elephant-bone Crossbows (or whatever else it is that those freaks on the forums do) to be able to enjoy yourself. Even just farming your first mushroom crop to get through the winter is a surprisingly rewarding and enjoyable experience. This guide isn’t going to explain everything but rather point you to the best places to find out for yourself.



First things first: get the game. Go to Bay 12’s website and the download links for Windows and OS X are there in giant blue font. Dwarf Fortress works very well with Wine in Linux, as far as I can tell. Sorry to anyone using Windows 95, but if you’re that far behind the times then you’d never catch up with those forward-thinking dwarves anyway. Now, Dwarf Fortress uses some incredibly intricate algorithm for generating a unique, random world for everyone who plays it - which is cool, I guess. Except that it takes an 10 minutes to start playing the game and it doesn’t matter if the world you’re using is the same as the one I’m using because it’s big enough for hundreds of different fortresses. If you’re like me and are so busy reading Digg that you don’t have 10 minutes to spare, you should download one of the pre-generated worlds. Your CPU will thank you. The worlds are about $20 (used) on Amazon.com, or about 5MiB of bandwidth from Bay 12’s official site.

So now you have your game up and running. But you wouldn’t lead a fortress-building expedition in real life without reading the associated Wiki pages and forum threads, right? The best place to go to get started is the Dwarf Fortress wiki where they have a fantastic tutorial easy enough to follow for everyone except Windows 95 users - who will need it translated into their native Ancient Greek. This tutorial explains how to pick the right equipment and starting skills for the seven dwarves (if you don’t rename them Bashful, Dopey, Gimli etc. then you are probably in the minority) and how to survive your first winter. It points you on the way to more advanced topics when you’re exhausted this material - such as trading and smelting and brewing.



Check out the huge illustrated tutorial with its millions of screenshots too. If you’re the more impatient (and perhaps suicidal) type then you should have a quick glance at their Quick Launch FAQ or the Quickstart guide. “How do I get my Dwarves to do stuff?” seems like a trivial question now, but you just wait until you’re screaming at Smagmor the carpenter because the elephants are nearly at the gates and he’s gone for a casual drink at the river. It’s not as hard as I make it out to be - though even if your dwarves make it past the first winter they’ll probably be pretty fucked up with mental issues stemming from a lack of alcohol (quite seriously.) It takes a while to get the hang of it.

On the Something Awful Forums there was an epic “Let’s Play” thread where about twenty people took control of a (completely dangerous, resource-depleted and elephant ridden) fortress named Boatmurdered for a year each. I think some forum goon cycled through myriad fortresses until he found one with such a ridiculous name. It’s hilarious in parts, and it’s both interesting and helpful to see twenty different playing styles - it’s probably aimed a lot more at elephant defenses than you’ll be needing for a while, but some of the people playing are very hardcore and show off the amazing potential of the game mechanics. There are more of these “Let’s Play” threads at the official forums.

Make sure at some point you read the “Important Advice” section of the wiki because there are lots of little things that you might not think about - the roof caving in or your farms flooding. Dwarf Fortress has such a huge variety of possible outcomes that it’s hard to keep them in mind all the time while juggling your other tasks - but that’s part of the fun. The unexpectedness of one of your tradesmen going crazy and locking himself in his workshop, abstaining from food and water in the name of creating his turtle-shell magnum opus, is one of the things that really sets the game apart from just about any other - it’s refreshing.

I’ll probably upset any DF fan who’s still reading (and why would they: after all, they probably edited the wiki’s tutorial themselves), but I’d love it so much if a company came along and spent millions developing this into a title with a graphical interface that was easy on the eyes and the hands (the mouse barely factors into the interface, sadly.) I think the main reason I stop playing each time is that it’s so hard to keep your fortress in order when everything is represented with an ASCII character - especially now with the added Z-dimension (you never used to be able to build upwards or downwards.) It’s really a credit to the game that it can still hook you in while having a well-designed but understandably limited interface.



Good luck to anyone who’s trying Dwarf Fortress, don’t get frustrated with the initial learning curve because it really is a game that rewards planning, experimentation and clever solutions. The DF community likes to say that “losing is fun”, and it’s one of the only games where I’ve found this. It’s still early days for Dwarf Fortress and, with their sizable and dedicated fanbase, hopefully they’ll keep going for a long time. And maybe they’ll eventually sign a publishing deal for Dwarf Fortress: 3D. You never know, if Apple can make a two button mouse…

Mount&Blade .950 Impressions

(download link)

Mount and Blade is an indie sandbox third-person action-RPG. It’s the much-loved baby of a Turkish couple, and they’ve been working on it on their own for years. I bought it for about sixteen Australian dollars mid-2005 and I occasionally go back and have intense, all-night sessions of it for a few days, usually when a new version is released. I’ve been really glad that their project hasn’t fizzled for lack of funds - in fact, back in January this year Paradox Interactive (who make Europa Universalis and other epic, time-consuming historical strategy games) signed them up for publishing! Obviously I was excited when I read on The Independant Gaming Source that version .950 of Mount and Blade, their first release with all their new-found money and resources, had been pushed. I’ve played it for a few hours now and thought I’d just announce it’s existence along with some first impressions.

Firstly, more has changed than in any other release. The entire structure of the map is different: it’s now divided into five different kingdoms to whom you can pledge your allegiance and fight for in campaigns. The quests system has been given a huge overhaul, and there’s a database of people, places and factions that updates as you discover more about the world. Each town (as far as I can tell so far!) seems to be completely different in layout, though they aren’t populated with unique characters yet (except for the taverns of a few major cities.) It’s a huge jump in variety and world-detail from previous releases, though, and if they keep it up by release they might finally have some good story arcs.

Instead of choosing your stats and starting equipment, etc., you are given a series of choices. Not moral choices like in The Elder Scrolls series or in Ultima but basic things like “You were the son of : a) an impoverished nobleman, b) a merchant, etc.” I really don’t like this - it just means I’ll have to eventually learn what each of these background choices does when I want to create a character. It might make sense for beginners who don’t want to be overwhelmed by choice, but for people who’ve been playing a while it’s a bit of a hassle.

Speaking of hassles, the game consumes your time needlessly. There’s this one type of quest given to you by a small town (who only give, it seems, about three different types!) where you have to train their peasants to fight before bandits come again. It works like this: you stare at the screen for about 15 seconds waiting for the game-time hours to go past before fighting one peasant (which consists of 10 seconds of finding him and about three seconds of beating him to a pulp because he’s naked and armed with a stick). Surely this whole process can be bypassed? It seems like a real time sink. The penalty of losing those in-game hours is enough without having to sit their twiddling your thumbs. Not being able to speed up time when running long-distance errands also leads to boring thumb-twiddling. Very unnecessary.

The combat seems to have changed too, not that I’m so into the game that I can quantify it in any way. It just seems a lot harder to hit a target from horseback - which I suppose isn’t such a bad thing because it means you have to develop your actual skill and not just the characters. It also means I’ve spent a lot of time circling ’round my horse for 4 or 5 attempts at an enemy! Hardly the game’s fault, though.

I wish I had more time so that I could get to higher levels with M&B, but university is getting in the way. I imagine the fun really starts when you’re an experienced leader and a great fighter and waging war with giant battles and castle sieges. I’ll work my way up there and post some more of my impressions here.

The Age ignores Digsby

The Age, Melbourne’s broadsheet, had an article in their thursday tech section outlining the best muli-protocol IM clients for Windows. They showed Trillian, Pidgin and Miranda - but not Digsby. When I’m in windows this is what I use - it’s not open source, but it’s run by a cool group of people who update it and post on their blog regularly. The thing that has always bugged me about the three IM clients mentioned in the article is the interface. I love Pidgin in Linux because it fits in so well, but it’s always felt awkward in Windows. It’s hard to describe and I can’t be bothered downloading and installing trillian and miranda right now, but Digsby “feels” nicer. Plus, its integration with Facebook and GMail is superb.

Anyone who chats on Windows should check it out.