I didn’t sleep as well during this LAN party because I stole the couch several hours before anybody else stopped playing games. While this ensured a comfortable sleeping place, it means that my impressions of the November LAN recorded here below are a bit fragmented. I’d recover in a few days, except that I’m going to visit my parents this Thanksgiving, meaning that I’ll wake up several hours *after* everybody else. The time difference is equivalent to the jet lag of visiting Germany. No, wait, they live in Tennessee. The jet lag of visiting Croatia.

ANYWAY.

This is the first LAN that I actually contributed to, outside providing upstairs entertainment between rounds. (And during the Guitar Game craze, even that was overridden) Before the LAN, I suggested Starcraft, since it’s the only multiplayer game my ancient PPC Powerbook can run. So We had a real Starcraft tournament. I was even going to give out prizes and everything. However, Worst Prize (Banjo-Kazooie 3) was never awarded due to irregularities in the contest scoring such as The Pizza Just Arrived, and The Wireless Crashed Again. Even if Worst Prize had been awarded, I surely would have won it, because my team lost every time, despite having Nate Reiter on it.

I also tried to give away Fable 2 a couple of times, not as a prize or anything, just because I don’t want it any more. But it’s a tough crowd at a LAN; the people lugging in 80-pound G5-ripoff cases haven’t even heard of the newest consoles. Seriously. They’re so tough, they only play Mario so they can beat their girlfriend and then complain about how console games are too short and cartoony. Not like the new PC game Dragon Age, which drenches characters in blood after every encounter, including 3 Normal Rats*. Serious realism right there.

But I digress. The other reason I couldn’t give Fable 2 away is that Butch’s nephew Jake played the wood-chopping minigame most of Friday, including straight through supper. Not only were people impressed with his dedication to grinding wood-chopper levels, they never wanted to play the game. There was widespread agreement that Molyneux was insane to make it ANY part of the game, let alone such an important part of a rapid playthrough.

Finally Jake switched back to Fable 1 until The Pizza Just Arrived, at which point his dedication failed. Fortunately, after the pizza (but before The Wireless Crashed Again), Rose took over and finished it on Sunday. I was pretty happy about that; I heard that Fable 1 and 2 are nearly the same game, and now I’ve seen both all the way through and can verify it myself, but without having to suffer through playing it twice!

In between all the Fable, Thomack played halfway through Braid while Kaleb and I watched. My reaction vacillated between annoyed and delighted. Annoyed, because Thomack breezed through several puzzles that I had to check GameFAQs for. How is he so good at puzzle games? Delighted, because both he and Kaleb had some very insightful comments about Jonathan Blow’s deft use of gameplay to convey a message.

On a related note, I also gave several times my spiel for my Theory of Game Classification on Two Axes, and was received with listening if not outright agreement. I will post it here when I finish writing it down.

Before you go, as a public service announcement, Braid is available on XBox Live Arcade and Steam. It also has a demo on Steam. I don’t know what the demo is like because I just bought the full thing as soon I got an XBox. On the Mac, Greenhouse, the Penny Arcade games distributor, sells Braid. There is no Linux version.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Butch has New Super Mario Bros Wii, more accurately called New New Mario, since it follows New Mario on the DS. It was kind of fun, but I don’t think Nintendo seriously expected people to get past level 1-3 in multiplayer mode. Tycho’s comments on this are entirely correct, except that I don’t live with any of the guys at the LAN party any more, so we were more forgiving about the whole thing. The basic problem is that Mario jumping on Luigi’s head is the platformer equivalent of friendly fire, and it happens all the time because precise platforming on a non-split screen basically requires all players to make the same jump at the same time. I play more platformers than Rose, so when we played together, I tried to hang back a little and make a slightly harder jump each time, but it didn’t really work.

On the other hand, like New Mario Bros (for the DS), the single player mode seems pretty cool if you like the Mario 3/Super Mario World 2D pinnacle of Mario.

*Normal Rats are miniature Giant Rats. Dragon Age is actually a 360/PS3 game.

I bet you thought I was going to explain how type systems are like newspapers. Instead, I’m going to do something I never do: just link to a couple of articles.

What to Know Before Debating Type Systems

http://www.pphsg.org/cdsmith/types.html

This article is not only comprehensive and correct, it starts off by dispelling the most common fallacies programmers have when debating type systems. It also has a good selection of links if you’re interested in learning about type systems.

Yes, journalists deserve subsidies too

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/22/AR2009102203960.html

I can’t say much about this article—it’s comprehensively incorrect and proposes fallacies common to the is-journalism-dying debate. It was posted on Slashdot.

OK OK. I can relate the two. In the journalism article, Norway is like Ruby’s type system, and America is like C#’s. Happy?

Day 4 : Spokane to Bellevue

Well, to be honest, I’m not sure this is really Bellevue. My address is Bellevue, but I’m right across the street from Microsoft, which is supposedly in Redmond. Also, I’m on the north side of Bellevue-Redmond Road. Unfortunately, I just looked at a map of Microsoft, and it looks like I may have to cross a highway to get to work, in which case driving may be a lot faster than walking, because there are only two places to cross that I can see.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Yesterday I left Spokane* to find that the stereotypical Washington greenery disappears like 20 miles out. The rest of Washington is pretty much like a flatter version of Montana until you reach Seattle—dry, rolling hills with scattered farms using irrigation. It’s pretty now, but I bet it’ll be cold when I drive back in November.

Speaking of cold, the first thing I did upon arriving was to buy a rain jacket. (They are surprisingly hard to find out-of-season in Indiana, where most people use umbrellas anyway, although I didn’t spend a lot of time looking either.) It was Seattle-normal** 20 (68) and rainy and I was wearing a light shirt and shorts. ALSO, my room wasn’t ready yet, so I had to waste time somewhere. I got directions from the front desk for a shopping centre. Said centre turned out to be a cross between a normal mall and a strip mall. The hotel clerk apologised for its small size, but it’s really about the same size as the Bloomington mall. The main difference is that the people there were all super-geeky looking, even the kids. Probably it was that I showed up at lunch time and most of the people in the food court were playing chess or WOW CCG***. Compared to a normal mall, I felt lot less likely to flip out and kill people, which is normally how malls make me feel.

When I got back, I spent a few minutes commiserating with another person waiting to check in, which wasted enough time to finally actually check in. I’m at a long-term stay hotel, so it looks like a hotel room except that it has a surprising amount of closet space, a two-burner electric range and a real refrigerator. Unpacking didn’t take long. In fact, my living quarters are now neater than than they have been for something like 6-7 years (right before I got that second monitor in undergrad and right after Chris’ Epic Open House).

So here I am. I’m going to find a grocery store today and get some food just in case I’ll have time this week to cook. Don’t expect very many posts for the next three months, although who knows? Working with C++ may make me angry enough to write the occasional misinformed tirade.

*What is it with American hotel breakfasts? “Continental breakfasts” are nothing of the sort—for fruit, they have two wrinkly bananas or apples and no granola or yogurt.
**Guess what the weather is like today? Well, actually, the sun comes out from time to time. After South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, though, I’m kind of tired of the sun.
***No, I will not link to anything WOW related. I want to help you learn to help yourself.

Day 3 : Gillette, WY to Spokane, WA

I’m tired, so I’ll make this short. I decided to drive all the way through Montana today, ending in Spokane. I was going to stop in Coeur d’Alene, an Idaho town about 30 miles east of Spokane, but something about the place gave me a tourist-trap vibe.

In fact, my first impression of Idaho was a sign beginning “1DAHO"—the author didn’t realise that some fonts make 1 and I look different. Next I hit the steepest downhill highway of the trip, after which it began to rain heavily. Finally, Coeur d’Alene (not pronounced the way it looks) turned out to be a Branson-esque Tourist Town on Lake. So I don’t like Idaho, at least not the very tip that I saw.

Montana was better. The first half was just like all the pioneer movies I’ve ever seen: big open spaces punctuated by hills. The second half was the Rocky Mountains. I guess they featured prominently in those pioneer movies too, but I never could stand to keep watching as the hardy pioneers got frozen in the pass, eaten by bears, attacked by Indians and parched in the desert. (in reverse order)

Oh, and the Mexican chain in Montana turns out to be “Taco John’s", which serves up “West-Mex". There was one in Bozeman where I stopped to eat lunch, but I decided to eat at a Panda Express instead. That was a bad idea too—they even managed to mess up kimbap (sushi rolls). I guess next time I’ll try the barbecue place; I avoided it because of a previous bad experience with barbecue on a van roadtrip.

Bonus! If you’ve read Homer Price or Centerburg Tales, you may be interested to hear that it is likely based on Centerville, Indiana, about 20 miles west of the Ohio border on I-70. I didn’t stop this time around, but I might next time.

Day 2 : Iowa to Wyoming

Well, I’m definitely out of the Midwest. I stumbled on an upscale Chinese restaurant tonight! They just don’t allow those in Indiana–every Chinese place has to be a buffet or a dirty-spoon place. (The Wyoming restaurant still does takeout, though*.)

The other reason I know? Sweat actually evaporates here. It was about 95 F (35 C) when I got here and still felt a lot cooler than Bloomington on Monday at 30 C (86 F). (Notice that my temperature intuitions have switched back to Fahrenheit, because the temperatures don’t feel Midwestern any more) It’s been about 10 years since I lived in Texas, so the sensation was an unexpected memory.

Oh, and there’s a third thing: grasshoppers everywhere. Actually, this might be a Midwestern thing too, but seriously: one got in to the restaurant tonight and another just jumped behind the nightstand here in my hotel room. Also at every stop for gas I had to scrub my windshield to get rid of grasshopper entrails.

In case you too have a mental blank when it comes to the Great Plains**, my impression of South Dakota is Texas crossed with Missouri. It’s like the farms and hills of Missouri got stretched out to Texas size, dried out to Texas aridity, and sprinkled with cows. Certified Texas Longhorn Cows. Oh, right. South Dakota also has the shady tourist-loving hick who lives in a trailer and puts up road signs every 20 feet. (That’s taken from Missouri, not Texas.) Seriously, I know about the Certified Texas Longhorn Cows because of Prairie Dog City, which had at least 100 signs along the road. I also could have stopped at Wall Drug, Rushmore Cave, a museum about the creation of Mount Rushmore, Badland’s Truck Stop or 1880’s Town (now with dinosaurs!). In fact the whole town of Wall, SD, seemed to be a tourist trap. It reminded me very strongly of Branson, if Branson didn’t have any trees, lakes or show business, and just a giant drug store instead (also with 80-foot dinosaur!).

As an aside, Badland’s Truck Stop also has Monster Taquito’s (they must be really big tiny tacos). I am definitely far enough north that nobody really knows Spanish here. The only Mexican restaurant I’ve seen today was called “Las Margaritas". I halfway expect to see “El Taquila” somewhere in Montana if the quality keeps going down.

My impression (so far) of Wyoming is Texas crossed with Tennessee. Even fewer people and farms, but more mining and trailer houses. Also there are mountains to the south, but I-90 avoids those. It has been a lot hillier since I crossed the Missouri River in South Dakota, though.

Come to think of it, maybe the real dividing line is the Missouri River. University of South Dakota is on the east side. Guess what their colours are? Yup, red and white. Just like every Midwest school except like Michigan. Another clue is that ethanol gas is subsidised at least twenty cents per gallon in Iowa and South Dakota, but not in Wyoming (it’s just plain cheaper here). I don’t think the government should prop up business models that don’t work yet/any more—it leads to “Irish solar panel salesmen"*** and “The New Deal"—but I went ahead and took the 10 cents off for Plus w/Ethanol over Normal w/o Ethanol. Yeah, I’m a hypocrite. A bad hypocrite, too, because I think Microsoft will reimburse me for gas.

You probably already know that I don’t like to drive. Part of the reason is that I am constantly envisioning the following hud on long trips:

• miles-per-hour : 73 (=116.8 kph)
• gas-left : 34%
• money-spent : 1.40
• time-wasted : 1h02m45s (=4.2 Ks metric)
• P(collision) : 0.012 (=4.42 logprob)
• P(mechanical-failure) : 0.0012 (=6.72 logprob)
• estimated-time-remaining : 20h34m15s (=84.5 Ks metric)

I turn the thing into a JRPG numbers-optimisation game with a distracting but deadly steering mini-game. And I don’t even like the numbers-optimisation part of JRPGs! I definitely don’t like the mini-games in JRPGs. Also it’s hard work imagining all those numbers when only the top two are provided by the car itself.

*If you wondered why that place next to Bloomington’s Kroger East—Sunny Palace I think—doesn’t do well, it’s because they don’t understand how to run a Chinese place in the Midwest. Also they’d rather be cooking their native Vietnamese (?) food, and their waiter took lessons from the French.
**Actually, I have a pretty good mental blank for New England, except for the pithy phrase “New England, better than Old England.” I guess it’s probably a lot like that.
***Much less efficient than the more common (and presumably still employed, unlike the Irish version) “German solar panel salesman".