Month: August 2010

iceland, gaming, eve online

Last weekend at this time, I was in Iceland. My friend and housemate Matt spent the summer there interning with CCP Games, and I decided to take a long weekend and go visit him on his last full weekend there. (CCP are the people who make EVE Online, the second most popular MMO in the world, and the forthcoming World of Darkness MMO.) Our friend (and soon-to-be housemate) Kate was also there, stopping over on her way back from London.

There were a lot of reasons for me visiting, not least that, in my twenty-five years of existence, I hadn't yet left North America, and I was starting to feel a bit provincial and more importantly a bit bored. Also, I'm a terrible tourist, but surely one can learn these things, right? Besides, it would be fun. And indeed, I had a blast.

The trip was pretty much entirely comprised of me learning the practicalities of navigating a foreign country, more or less effectively, and hanging out with Matt, Kate, and Matt's coworkers at bars, cafes, restaurants, and apartments in Reykjavik. I had lots of good and sometimes unusual food (lamb hot dogs?), I went to the Laugar geothermal pools and soaked, I watched the fireworks on the harbor for Reykjavik Culture Night, and that was pretty much it. The scenery, even just on the bus from the airport to Reykjavik in the morning, was gorgeous, all ocean and mountains and low-angled light. It was a fascinating trip.

I'd read a lot about EVE, the game Matt's company makes, in computer gaming magazines, but being a student I was really scared of getting into anything that I might be more obsessed with than school. (Hear now the archetypal story of the guy or girl who got kicked out of school because they played too much EverQuestWorld of Warcraft.) I'm no longer a student but I'm of course working, and work is very unlikely to ever be replaced as the prime sink of my time, but I feel like I need be less pathologically risk-averse now, and so I've been considering lots of different ways to spend my free time — auditioning them, perhaps. So when Matt sat me down at his desk in Iceland and showed me around EVE a bit, I was paying attention. (Frankly I've been kind of looking for an excuse to give EVE a go.)

There are lots of reasons that EVE is interesting — it's all a single gigantic world, rather than a bunch of parallel worlds like other MMOs; the economy is entirely player-driven; it's set in space rather than some fantasy world; yadda yadda yadda. That's not the most interesting part of EVE for me. Some background — when I was in middle school, I was in the local equivalent of a Talented and Gifted program, because they didn't know what to do with me (a rant for another day). In eighth grade, as sort of a capstone project, we (well, I, mostly, I think) wrote a space computer game. It wasn't much better-specified than that — I had grand visions of hopping from planet to planet, trading commodities, and maybe some space battle, and I eventually got together an interface inspired by the Star Trek computers, some basic movement, and a "market" with random prices. (I was writing this in Visual Basic, if I recall correctly; I was just discovering C and Linux. Shh, we were all fourteen and living in the boonies at the end of a crappy dialup connection once. Well, okay, some of us were.) We had a group of four or five — a friend did some art, I don't remember if it ever got used or not; we theoretically divvied up tasks somehow, but I think I was the only one with significant programming experience. We tried to keep it going and improve it, after we'd met the (low) requirements for the TAG program, but it went the usual way of such projects. At any rate—

Friends, EVE is that game I was dreaming of. Trade, courier, mine, fight, loot — it's all there. EVE is that middle-school space game, made by professionals. I'm not sure quite why I'm primed for those narratives so hard, but I am, and EVE hits those narrative kinks like whoa.

I may be hooked.

Now, history suggests that I may like starting games more than continuing to play them (what can I say, I just really like tutorial missions ;-), so we'll see if I come back to EVE after a week at work. But this is really kind of exciting — perhaps the most excited I've ever been about a game after I finished the tutorial missions. It could be a wild ride. 🙂

another rant for another day: why I faileddropped microecon twice, or, how how we teach economics sucks (hint: students have never interacted with a real market as either a buyer or, particularly, as a seller)

also, I have no point here, I just like to say "New Game Excitement"

september 2010 asimov’s

Here’s my review of the September 2010 issue of Asimov’s, before I leave it on the plane in the hopes someone else will find it and enjoy it. (It’s a good issue.)

  • “Backlash”, by Nancy Fulda (novelette) — A cute time-traveling retired-spy-back-into-service story, which, unusually for the spy genre, features a reasonably accurate portrayal of said spy dealing with PTSD. (PTSD: It’s not just nicely-cinematic flashbacks.)
  • “The Palace in the Clouds”, by Eugene Mirabelli (short story) — Not to be confused with the cover story, Geoffrey Landis’s The Sultan of the Clouds. It posits an aging steampunk Venice-of-the-sky, which makes for some gorgeous imagery, and goes from there. It’s either inspired by Hayao Miyazaki, or he should totally make a movie of it, or both — the image of a slowly-failing flying city and the main characters, a young boy and his aviator uncle, are all tailor-made for his style. As with Miyazaki, you won’t find any deep philosophy here, more themes of family and growing up, but that’s not a bad thing.
  • “Wheat Rust”, by Benjamin Crowell (novelette) — Does a decent job at a story of a generation ship and the people who live there and their divergent cultures, and notably a story whose stakes are much smaller than The Destruction Of The Entire WorldWShip! (As you might gather from the name, the main characters are trying to prevent an agrigultural plague.)
  • “For Want of a Nail”, by Mary Robinette Kowal (short story) — Another generation ship story, with a bit of interesting generation ship morality, plus some AI morality. AIs used as the collective memory of families over generations.
  • “The Sultan of the Clouds”, by Geoffrey Landis (novella) — Geoffrey Landiss is a NASA scientist, so he obviously does a good job with the geophysics of a colony of floating cities on Mars. Thankfully he does it without letting it overwhelm the story, which has some nice bits of character development and some interesting speculation about alternative family structures a la Heinlein.
  • “The View from the Other Side: Science Fiction in Non-Western/Non-Anglophone Countries”, by Aliette de Bodard (nonfiction) — A follow-up to Norman Spinrad’s obnoxious book review column I complained about back in April. It can be summarized as “why the opinions and perspectives of anyone but white men matter ever 101”, and so pretty basic, but probably useful to start educating the clueless. (sigh)

Currently reading: the latest issue of Apex Magazine, Cat Valente’s first as fiction editor!

name that drink! also, carbonated coffee

I've decided to branch out into a new blog genre here at free dissociation — cocktail blogging. Because frankly I'm a bit tired of SF short fiction reviews, even though I still have New Genre #6 and the latest Ideomancer, whatever its number is, to blather about. (Pandemonium got the September Asimov's in finally! (And the October Analog?) In the meantime I read The Art of War on my phone on the T. Make of this what you will.)

Oh yes, cocktail blogging.

So last weekend we had an Iron Blogger Champagne Brunch, instead of getting together for beer. After we tired of the usual mimosas and so on, and having skinned a fresh pineapple, I concocted this rather interesting beverage:

In a wine glass combine:

  • 1 shot Hendrick's Gin
  • 1 shot St. Germain Elderflower Liquer
  • dry champagne

Finish by floating a wedge of fresh pineaple, and possibly garnish with another wedge stuck on the rim of the glass because it looks cool.

I was actually kind of surprised by how well it worked — the Hendrick's is a smoother gin, but it's still got a definite juniper kick, and the St. Germain was really important to blend that flavor into the fruitiness of the champagne. And of course fresh pineapple is always awesome. I think Liz, our hostess, made her own without the St. Germain, so your mileage may vary.

At any rate, it needs a name. The constituent liquors aren't uncommon, at least around here in the craft cocktail scene, and it's not hugely complicated, so it wouldn't surprise me if somebody else has come up with it independently, but whatever. (God, did I really just write "the craft cocktail scene" unironically? That's maybe taking the whole "cocktail blogging" thing a little too far.) What should I call it?

On the other end of the drink spectrum from alcohol, we made our first batch of carbonated iced coffee last night. A friend of mine got tired of paying for seltzer and so bought his own CO2 cylinder and fittings, and so of course the neighborhood has subsequently been trying to come up with interesting things to carbonate. Last night's experiment was:

  • 2/3 of a bag of old Dunkin' Decaf I had lying around (about 2 C dry), cold-brewed with 14 or so C water for 24 hours
  • 1/2 C sugar

Gas solubility in water goes up pretty much right until you hit freezing, so you want your liquid as cold as possible, and the coffee was pretty strong, so I put a couple dozen ice cubes in it and shook them around to equilibrate the temperature before pouring the coffee into a 2L soda bottle and giving it to my friend, who sealed it up, attached it to the CO2 cylinder, and shook it vigorously for about a minute. The coffee took the carbonation really well, the ratio of sugar to coffee was pretty exactly right to offset the acidity imparted by the carbonation, and everyone present was sufficiently weirded out by it that I don't think it will become an overnight commercial sensation. Oh well. I like it. It's really quite tasty!

So I have a liter of carbonated coffee which is coming with me to work tomorrow, because I've got a long week ahead of me and being up this late isn't a great start to it. (Yes it's decaf, but my caffeine tolerance is low, to say nothing of the other alkaloids present that decaffeination doesn't touch.) Plus a second brewing of the grounds sitting in the fridge which I haven't decided whether I'll ask Mark to carbonate or not. Isn't science great? 🙂

Speaking of being up too late, laundry's done! disappears