Late to the party: White Wolf Layoffs

November 6, 2011 in Roleplaying | 1 comment

Holy shit. I heard about the layoffs at White Wolf/CCP. However, when I heard the initial announcement, I didn’t hear much about specifics and I couldn’t find a list. Today I decided to look for one while looking or information about M20.

I found a list here, from the Unofficial White Wolf Wiki:

  • Russell Bailey
  • John Bridges
  • Chad Brown
  • John Chambers
  • Mike Chaney
  • Ken Cliffe
  • Shane DeFreest
  • Brian Glass
  • Craig S. Grant
  • Sara Luebke
  • Aileen E. Miles
  • Ethan Skemp
  • Michelle Webb

You can hit the list of layoffs to find links to each person’s White Wolf CV. There are a lot of names here that go way back before you even start talking about such as Ethan Skemp and Aileen Miles.

I reiterate, this time with emphasis: holy fucking shit. It breaks my heart.

Now, I don’t pretend that I would even recognize any of these people on the street, let alone that I have any sort of personal relationship with them. I only have a relationship with these people insofar as I’ve spent countless hours curled up with books they’ve written, typeset, and otherwise lovingly crafted. I couldn’t have bought and read a decade’s worth of White Wolf books without recognizing at least some of these names.

It’s tempting to opine about the whole White Wolf/CCP thing. Of course some part of me feels bitterness. But if the complaint is that CCP is killing White Wolf, I have to wonder whether White Wolf would’ve survived, alone, for this long.

No, I don’t really have any big pronouncements. Recessions suck. I’m sad about RPGs being on the decline. White Wolf was one of my favorites because I like creepy and/or modern shit.

Arguably this is what happens when times change; the old stuff, which has its own merits and trade-offs, falls by the wayside or is otherwise transformed. They are replaced by new things, which also have their own merits and trade-offs, and will themselves, at some subsequent time, be replaced or transformed. It’s not the end because it’s never the end; RPGs live in on multiple forms. Many of their concepts and mechanics are now more pervasive than they’ve ever been. And in a more concrete sense, White Wolf itself still lives, as does WotC and numerous indie developers.

That’s about all I’ve got.

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My latest apostasy: webmail vs. IMAP

September 18, 2011 in Technology | No comments

I am extremely biased. I’ve been involved with Gmail as a product for some time. And I’ve had a Gmail account since 2004, when Gmail first came out. And yet I’ve become conflicted lately.

When Lion came out, I decided to check out the state of the art in ostensibly user-friendly (read: GUI) email clients. I don’t pretend to know much about how Apple Mail It was purely curiosity. But a number of issues have cropped up in my mind.

  • Gmail can get really bloated, memory-wise. I was surprised when Mail took up less than 200MB; I assumed all mail clients routinely took up at least twice as much. Gmail often takes up something north of 500MB. (I suppose Chrome doesn’t help, if only because its multiprocess model necessarily involves a RAM tax.) Part of this is that I keep it open all the time, or rather I used to; now I feel obligated to close it now and then to keep my RAM clear. On balance, I don’t want to care about RAM, but in practice I feel I have to. I share a laptop with my -girlfriend- wife, which means Gmail effectively occupies 1GB or more. Running a Minecraft server on my desktop machine means I’m consistently down by 1GB, at least until I move it off.

  • The idea of having my mail on every machine is less of a concern now. Chiefly this is because I have a smartphone; if I don’t have a laptop with me, I always have my phone. IMAP means that changes on one client propagate elsewhere automatically, whether it’s on the phone, the iPad, or a full-fledged computer.

  • I can use an email client offline. This doesn’t happen that often, admittedly, and when I am completely offline I’m typically on vacation. Still, there were a couple of occasions recently where my connectivity was poor enough to make Gmail sluggish. A mail client simply had to download my messages once and I could read and search all of them without hitting the server via my flaky connection.

  • An email client is consistently faster when it comes to common UI operations. This is not to say that Gmail is slow, at last not most of the time. Most of the time, it’s fast enough. But when it’s not, it’s quite frustrating when a simple search takes longer than it really should! Contrariwise, once a client downloads my mail, I’m not subject to network delays. Yes, the client can be slow due to limitations of my machine, but those same constraints apply to the browser as well. Furthermore, the difference between searching my mail via Gmail and on my own machine continues to narrow, at least for me.

  • With Gmail + IMAP, I have the best of both worlds. I can check mail via a browser should I need to, but should I have the need, I can use the client. This is the strongest point in favor of retaining Gmail, modulo other logistical issues: it does’t have to be either/or.

That said, there are some significant drawbacks, at least to Apple Mail in particular as well as Gmail/IMAP.

  • Gmail/IMAP integration isn’t that great. Or maybe I should say that IMAP itself isn’t that great. It’s a folder-based paradigm, which treats emails like files. I think that’s ridiculous. IMHO, people only think about emails that way because it’s been thrust on them, and it’s not like most people understand the filesystem paradigm in the first place. Labeling/tagging a message is a “copy” operation, which is dumb. Archiving a message means “move to All Mail,” which is silly, too. Overall I’d say the mapping is somewhat leaky. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault in particular; I prefer Gmail’s model, but I wouldn’t expect Apple to sign on to that model wholesale.

  • Your -filters- Rules don’t sync across multiple machines. It seems that previously you’d have to pay for MobileMe to get this, which is/was ridiculous. Perhaps iCloud will fix this? It would be surprising if it didn’t, esp. considering they’re offering a full-fledged email service as far as I can tell.

  • The keyboard shortcuts aren’t nearly as good. Although there are hitches now and then, for the most part I can drive Gmail entirely through keyboard shortcuts. Mail’s keyboard shortcuts are merely OK.

All this really amounts to in terms of my behavior is that nowadays I often have Mail open on my personal machines. I don’t shy away from using Mail on iOS devices, either. Beyond that, I still use Gmail for chat and I use it for most email operations that aren’t simply reading or deleting. The thought remains that I could, if I really wanted to, make the switch. I’m just not sure what it would take for me to do it; certainly I have no reason to now or in the near future.

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Python, Python, Python

August 31, 2011 in Coding | No comments

Oh, god. I still have a bunch of rant left in me. So here we go, Internet: yet another angry rant to add to the pile.

Sometimes, in the course of one’s life, one is left with a one-off task. In this case, I needed to call a binary a whole lot of times, and do something with the output each time. The details aren’t important; I just needed to write a wrapper script for this binary, do a modest amount of processing on it, and then output the result to a file. This is a pretty common task, one to which the command line in general and *nix in particular is well-suited.

Now, for various reasons, I prefer not to do this via shell scripts. I don’t have a hard and fast rule for when or why. Unless you routinely write shell scripts (I don’t), you’ll inevitably spend a bunch of time looking stuff up that you looked up, oh, six months ago. Or at least I do. I don’t enjoy it, so if I can’t do it with a few commands, maybe one loop or so, then I prefer to use a scripting language. I have the advantage of better/clearer failure modes and simpler syntax and I feel like I’m learning something more powerful and more widely applicable in the process.

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White Wolf Release Schedule 2011-2012

August 9, 2011 in Roleplaying | No comments

A couple of things have put me in mind of White Wolf over the last few days.

One of them was unboxing my roleplaying books. They’d been boxed up as part of some home improvement and I never got around to unboxing them. This weekend, I did. It’s hard to describe how I felt. It was bittersweet, in that I felt nostalgic but also some sense that I might be done with roleplaying for good.

And then just now, I saw that White Wolf had put up their [publishing schedule for 2011 - 2012][sched]. Huh.

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Thoughts on Lion

July 27, 2011 in Technology | No comments

I don’t think I’ve documented my Mac apostasy by this point. I feel like I should, but maybe another time? The point is that for everything but video games, I prefer MacOS, which recently saw an upgrade, 10.7 aka Lion.

autocorrect

I didn’t realize this was going to be as big a deal to me as I thought. Actually, I’d forgotten about it entirely until I started writing a couple of blog posts. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the built-in autocorrect is actually pretty handy. The vast majority of the time it does the right thing! Were I using Vim to do most of my writing, it might not matter so much; Vim has so many handy motions that it’s easy to jump between words, sentences, and lines in order to fix mistakes quickly. For a standard (read: less arcane) input method like this one, though, I’ve only got the standard ctrl-a, ctrl-e, alt-left, alt-right, and so on. Having the OS correct the litany of stupid typos I make regularly helps.

I had sort of wondered why this wasn’t an OS feature in the first place. Input fields are common as mud and autocorrect has been a feature in word processors for a long, long time. So why isn’t it in the OS? Who knows? It is now.

Irrationally, I worry that a feature like this will erode my typing accuracy.

fullscreen apps

To some extent, I’m being conspicuous when I use them. There’s no real reason that I need to use Safari fullscreen while blogging. After all, Chrome is my main browser. But it does have a nice way of focusing my attention. I’m also trying out Apple Mail, and segregating it to its own space means I’m less likely to fidget with checking it.

mission control

I was a litte worried about Mission Control doing away with Snow Leopard’s way of laying out windows via Exposé. Leopard laid out windows sort of haphazardly and without obvious consistency. Snow Leopard made it into a grid layout, which made it a little harder to figure out which window was which but looked a lot neater and cleaner overall. Mission Control looks to restore it back to a semi-haphazard layout, grouped by application, which seemed like a loss of functionality.

What rescues it is the presence of a gesture for application-level Exposé. With that, I don’t have to Cmd-` my way through two or more Chrome windows. I’m not sure how useful Mission Control’s facility for selecting one or more of an app’s windows is, though.

launchpad

It’s pretty! I’ll give it that. But I am not sure how useful it is.

It looks like it finds all of your apps, which is a good thing overall. It’d be dumb if it didn’t.

However, putting them into iOS-style folders and whatnot is odd. For example, I’ve got a bunch of git clients (Tower, GitY, GitX, GitHub) sitting in my Applications folder. There’s also a Development folder in Launchpad. Except it actually corresponds to /Developer. When I moved my various Git.* apps around in Launchpad, it created /Applications/Developer which had only the Git.* apps in it.

Call it a leaky abstraction, I guess. Or a corner case, given that the majority of apps go under /Applications in any case.

scrolling, gestures

I’m fine with the new scrolling. I guess I’ve lived with it for a week, like I said I would, and I don’t feel like turning it off.

The gestures are kind of messed up out of the box, though. Two finger swipe for fwd/back is fine in theory but it doesn’t work at all in Chrome (expected; I presume they’d have to make a code change) or even System Preferences (!). It’s easy to switch it back to three finger swipe, and I did that.

I like the new scrollbars, although once again they’re hideous in Chrome. Chrome still has the old scrollbar gutter, and the gray scrollbar is always present. The Chrome team is working on it, or so I hear.

TTFN

That’s all I’ve got for now.

I sort of want to write something about Resume and whatnot, but I’m out of steam at the moment. Perhaps another time. John Siracusa’s excellent review of Lion covers this in more detail, and he probably says it better than I would anyway.

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Java & Me

July 25, 2011 in Coding | No comments

I’ve been coding lately, and fortunately or unfortunately, it’s Java. I hadn’t done much Java before I started working on this current project; my experience before this was with C++ in college, a bunch of Python, a splash of Ruby, a bunch of JavaScript, and a very small pinch of Objective-C/CocoaTouch.

It’s JavaScript and Ruby that’ve influenced me most lately. Functional patterns in particular have attracted my attention. I really dig stuff like this in Ruby:

open('somefile').readlines.each do |x|
  print x
end

And then I spent a whole boatload of time in JavaScript, where you get to do stuff like this:

var someArray = [1, 4, 2, 3, 5];
goog.array.forEach(arr, function (e, i, a) {
  console.log("Here's a number: " + e);
});

What I really dig about this pattern is passing in a function where I can do whatever I like. The factory pattern becomes much simpler. We can pass this around to whoever:

var url = "/foo";
var reqFactory = function() {
  var req = new Request();
  req.setUrl(url);
  req.addHeader("baz", "quux");
  return req;
};

The current conundrum involves implementing some kind of retry logic. In one case, I need to build a new request each time the request fails. In another case, I just want to retry for a certain subset of exceptions. In yet another case, if I make the request and it doesn’t have what I want, I want to re-issue it.

In Java, it’s— it’s messy. I don’t know what the Java-esque way of doing it is, quite frankly. I find myself wanting to create a Retrier interface which defines an onSuccess, onFailure, and a doRetry method.

I’m not sure what each method should return; what if I want to be able to return whatever it is that we got from the request? Do I create a wrapper class w/generics? I think this is how it works in the Kingdom of Nouns. The nouns just keep proliferating.

The one thing I think Java has going for it is anonymous inner classes. I feel like the way files and classes proliferate in Java is nuts, and being able to keep the implementation of such as a Retrier close to where it’s used seems like a win. It’s a one-off, right? A whole class & implementation & file devoted to it feels like it’s belaboring the point.

I’m sure at some point I’ll figure it out and/or get used to it. In the meantime, every time I want to add a layer of abstraction, it feels like massive overkill. I almost wrote up code samples for the above but it turned out to be too much effort. I can’t be as glib with it, at least not yet. Oh well.

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Essentials and the new Character Builder

November 5, 2010 in Roleplaying | 1 comment

Does anyone else find Essentials somewhat confusing? I don’t mean the rules. I mean which books you need for what. I thought I understood it. Assuming you’re not planning on using the non-Essentials 4e stuff, players would need the Heroes of (Fallen Lands|Forgotten Kingdoms) to create characters. A DM would need the Rules Compendium and the Monster Vault to build a campaign. Simple enough, right?

Then I started reading The Next Wave in Digital Offerings. I got really confused as to what was what until I looked at the catalog entry for Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell. It spells things out pretty clearly and I sort of feel like an idiot for not being able to figure it out. Oh well.

I’m not sure how I feel about this method of splitting up the books. I suppose there’s no inherent reason why someone unfamilar with D&D would find the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual triumvirate less confusing (aside from the bundle of three books you’d buy).

In any case, I still haven’t picked up any Essentials books. What can I say? I haven’t felt much enthusiasm about roleplaying lately. Maybe that sums up the reason for the decline in roleplaying overall. It’s effort to set up a game, to wrangle a playable group of characters, and so on. Oh, sure, my thoughts on Essentials as a game or a system is mostly unchanged: the move towards simplicity is probably a good idea, I like the price point for the books, the size is pretty adorable, and overall, I’m intrigued. The fancy hasn’t struck me. Admittedly I’m probably more likely to run a World of Darkness game of some sort. That’s still unlikely.

Character builder

I’ve still tried to follow the stuff about D&D lately, however, and another thing caught my notice. They’re finally doing a web-based version of the Character Builder! It’s been discussed before, but they mention it once again in the November news. This is quite a development. I own a Mac laptop and it was always a little silly that I could only do things on my Windows machine. I sort of get why. If they’re going to hire developers in the Seattle area, there’s a very high chance that any candidates will have worked for Microsoft at some point in their career. That biases things in favor of Windows and, to some extent, client technology. I’m trying not to make a value judgment here, because neither of those things are inherently awful— Windows is obviously the dominant OS, and you work with the talent you have available to you. So the original client was in .NET.

That’s done in Silverlight, apparently, is also understandable for those reasons. However, it seems like a pretty big mistake. Yes, I know: it’s easy to second-guess whoever’s in charge as I sit comfortably at home. There’s nothing riding on me successfully finishing this blog post. Hear me out.

Silverlight is a dead technology. I get that it uses .NET, so they wanted to be able to use that expertise. Although the writing was on the wall, arguably, the team couldn’t possibly have known that Microsoft was going to deprecate it when they started (link). That announcement was last week or so. But let’s be honest: it was never terribly popular outside of a few highly specific applications. I’ll grant you that Netflix streaming is a huge win. I can’t name much else, outside of Microsoft’s own stuff.

The other wrinkle is that there is no mobile story (as geeks call it these days). I could see not having figured out something for the iPad. If we assume a 12 – 24 month development cycle, they started well before the iPad was out, and although the iPad lived up to the hype in terms of sales, you can’t predicate your development cycle on that. Even so, the lack of any solution for Android or iOS is baffling. Mobile is enormous and it’ll continue to grow. And Silverlight runs on zero mobile devices. Not a single one! Yikes.

I think there’s some good news, though. As I understand it, Silverlight is just a frontend. The rest of the stack may be Microsoft tech, but that’s outside of Silverlight’s purview, modulo whatever interop stuff Microsoft has set up to make it easy to deveop apps. As part of that, Wizards has got tools in place for adding and editing game data. Writing a new client is somewhat “easier” than doing the whole thing from scratch, since “all you’d need to do” is write a new frontend to interpet the same data you were sending down to the Silverlight client. (Scare quotes highly intentional.) Here my ignorance about the Microsoft stack precludes me from informed commentary: it seems like ASP.NET is would be the right answer to this, to provide some relatively .NET-like way of writing a web client. I’ve no idea what the situation is with mobile devices.

There’s also this:

There are five things I really, really like about the new Character Builder.

  1. It’s ultimately portable. I can use it on any computer or computer-like device, wherever I am.

Hang on, there. Does this mean there is a web-based client after all? Otherwise I don’t get what a “computer-like device” would be— notebooks, netbooks, and laptops are all fancy words for small but “real” computers running desktop operating systems. iPods, smartphones, iPads, and the like are all small “computer-like” devices, running mobile operating systems. They don’t run Silverlight. Windows Phone 7 runs Silverlight, apparently, but once again, that came out only recently. An iDevice client wouldn’t be amiss, of course, so maybe that’s in the works. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Bill could just be referring to netbooks and their ilk.

Miscellany

When I did visit my FLGS a week or two ago, it was interesting to hear the local guy pass on the latest news about White Wolf. The Afterword in Mirrors indicates that the new World of Darkness isn’t over per se, just that it’s going digital only, right? This fellow indicated that it was over. Probably confusion, right? Probably. It’s easy to see why, though.

He also mentioned old World of Darkness books being available as print-on-demand. I have a policy that I like to summarize in terms of “I try to stay out of religious wars.” This includes PC vs. Mac, emacs vs. vi, 3e vs. 4e, and yes, old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. (Against my better judgment, I’m tempted to write up a sort of farewell post to the oWoD. Maybe someday.) I was already leaving at the moment, so I murmured something polite and stepped outside. Folks at that store appear highly sympathetic to the old World of Darkness, and that’s fair. No use is pissing on anybody’s parade.

It is a little sad as I think back. I bought most of my Mage: the Ascension books from his store. And when the new World of Darkness came out, I bought a ton of Vampire and Werewolf books used. (I owned them previously, but having moved from the east coast to the west coast, I left the majority of my WoD books at my parents’ house.) I’ve relegated all but M:tAsc‘s books to the other room.

Mostly they all gather dust. I don’t have the heart to read them. I strongly suspect that they won’t hold up for me. The way I figure, it’s better to stick with my hazy memories from about 10 years ago than to realize concretely just how dated the books, the setting, and the aesthetic will feel to me.

ttfn

Until next time, blog.

More on the Red Box, 4e, and Essentials

October 4, 2010 in Roleplaying | 2 comments

I was poking around for news about the Red Box and found this article in the Escapist, an interview with Mike Mearls. Among other things, there’s this quote:

"Look, no one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said 'Let's get rid of all of our fans and replace them.' That was never the intent," Mearls said.

Man. I know no reasonable person believes that. Even so, I feel pretty bad for the Wizards folks. No matter what they do, some subset of the RPG fans will hate it.

Call it the [narcissism of small differences][narc], if you like, or [Parkinson's Law of Triviality][triv]. The Internet offers gigabytes of evidence which suggests we’re all susceptible to those dynamics. They don’t call them Edition Wars without reason, whether the conflict in question is D&D 3e vs. 4e, or old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. If there’s a bright side, it’s that people care enough about the pastime to express strong opinions about it.

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Initial thoughts on the D&D Red Box

October 3, 2010 in Roleplaying | No comments

Today I ventured over to my FLGS. Ostensibly I wanted to take a look at the Red Box. I had heard good things about it and, if nothing else, I figured it would be nice rainy day activity for the lady and I. (And with the onset of Autumn, we’ve plenty of rainy days out here in the Pacific Northwest, let me tell you.)

Let me say something up front: the Red Box is priced to move. I assumed it would be somewhere around $30. That’s just how RPGs go these days. I assumed it’d be $35 and was not going to buy it. It’s $20. The same goes for the Heroes of the Fallen Lands book. Given that a nice hardcover RPG from White Wolf or Wizards goes for around $30, it’s hard to imagine not picking up one or the other if you think you’re ever going to play it.

At all events, I bought the Red Box, and I’ve had a chance to flip through it.

My first impression is that it’s quite adorable and delightful. It really makes me nostalgic. I can’t pretend I grew up with any of the $color boxen— I started with D&D 2nd Edition around the time that the black book came out. Before that, though, I was an avid fan of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks. The means of introduction in the Red Box just so happens to be a gamebook-style choose your own adventure. It’s as if they’re trying to warm the black chunk of ice that serves as my heart. I’m flashing back to when I flipped through AD&D 2e for the first time. Even when I acquired the PHB, I read the “what is roleplaying?” introduction over and over. If anyone’s trying to compel me to have children, the Red Box is the most persuasive argument I’ve heard by far.

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The new World of Darkness is digital

September 27, 2010 in Roleplaying | 2 comments

Before I get into anything else, I saw that Chuck Wendig had posted some goodness up on his blog about the World of Darkness MMO, specifically in relation to Masquerade and Requiem. Sorry I don’t have much to say about it, though; I largely agree with the sentiment. I do think that the new World of Darkness is a better roleplaying game. (Oh god please don’t shoot me. I don’t want to fight Edition Wars.) I had a big, long discussion about this with the girlfriend fiancee about why, and maybe I’ll find some way to write it up.

Now then: the second part.

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