Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 24 - Free to be Weird
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
I’m here to show you who I am
Throw off the veil, it’s finally time
There’s more to me than glitz and glam,
And now I feel my stars align.If it wasn’t already clear, I’m a pretty weird dude.
Spend enough time with me and you’ll discover I’m one of those people who are “from the Internet”. I’m a big Friendship is Magic fan, meaning I’ve read over two million words of fanfiction and have spent money buying comics from the Expanded Universe.
(Yes, MLP has an Expanded Universe. I know, it’s absurd.)
In high school, I got into the Touhou fandom. I only follow the music side, but it’s a thriving scene, and I find lots of it objectively good even without the Touhou context. The first music album I downloaded to my phone was BEGIERDE DES ZAUBERER, a metal album by Demetori. On reflection, they’re actually my favorite band, ever. I’ve yet to find anyone as consistently amazing.
Meanwhile, I read a decent number of webcomics, as my reviews page can attest to. I have a Dinosaur Comics T-shirt. I have a Homestuck T-shirt. I also have a Gunnerkrigg Court T-shirt, a Gunnerkrigg Court whiteboard, a metal Gunnerkrigg Court coin I received for backing the Legendary Showdown Kickstarter, and…look, Gunnerkrigg Court is really good, okay? You should check it out.
The point being, I’m part of a lot of subcultures, and I never felt like I had to hide that when growing up. I did for a while, until I realized I didn’t have to. I openly played Magic: the Gathering in middle school. I admitted to reading fanfiction in high school, and although my friends gave me shit for it, it was all in good fun. By the time I hit college I was well into the “from the Internet” niche.
This is completely at odds with the K-12 education people complain about, where everyone’s an asshole and it feels like hell. I’m not saying that my school didn’t have issues, but any issues it did have somehow never reached me. I had the freedom to reveal whatever I wanted about myself without having to worry about what people thought. It didn’t matter if there were people who did care, because there were enough people who didn’t to make my behavior socially viable.
In contrast, there are people who have to bottle up the weird things about themselves, not because they don’t want to share them, but because they can’t share them without ostracizing themselves. I find that really sad. It’s only in retrospect that I can see how fortunate my environment was. I’m not sure how I would turned out if I got bullied for things I liked.
In Season 5 of MLP, there’s an episode where an old friend comes back to Ponyville. She’s hit the big time, but over the course of the episode she realizes she’s drifted too far from who she was for the sake of fame. It eventually builds into this quote.
The real perk of friendship is gettin’ to see your friend bein’ true to their self. And Rara, when you’re simply yourself, you’re the brightest star I’ve ever seen shine.
And then, into one of my favorite songs from the show.
I don’t any reason to stop being weird, so I’m sticking to it. Until next time.
And now I see those colors
Right before my eyes
I hear my voice so clearly
And I know that it is rightThey thought I was weak, but I am strong
They sold me the world, but they were wrong
And now that I’m back, I still belong
‘Cause I knowThat I am just a pony
I make mistakes from time to time
But now I know the real me
And put my heart out on the lineAnd let the magic in my heart stay true
Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa
And let the magic in my heart stay true
Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa
Just like the magic inside of youJust like the magic inside of you…
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 23 - Why Do I Blog?
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
A while back, one of my friends asked why I started blogging. Amazingly, I’ve never explictly laid it out, so I figured it was worth writing about.
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First off, I’m blogging because I want to. This is obvious to the point of vacuousness - of course I wouldn’t write blog posts if I didn’t want to. Who would? Still, that doesn’t explain why I have this motivation to write. After thinking about it, I’ve ultimately decided I blog for mostly selfish reasons.
Everything comes back to my perspective on writing. Writing is the process of turning explicit thoughts into words. Thinking about writing, on the other hand, is the process of turning implicit thoughts into explicit thoughts.
This can take a very long time. I have a hard time explaining my points in person. It may just be my general social awkwardness, but often I feel like I want to say something and can’t because I don’t know how to explain it properly. If I try, it gets muddled into a ton of rambling that doesn’t go anywhere.
By blogging, I give myself an outlet for practicing turning vague notions into concrete words. It may not come out perfectly, but all I’m looking for is getting experience at explaining my thoughts.
With that in mind, let’s look at the posts I’ve written so far. I would broadly classify them into the following categories.
- Posts on topics I understand well. These are all technical posts, and are about problems with known solutions. The post is spent presenting and framing the solution the right way.
- Posts on topics I’ve been learning about recently. These are things I don’t understand very well yet, and trying to articulate them forces me to condense my understanding into simpler terms.
- For lack of a better word, discussion posts. These are posts where I try to present my point of view on a topic. They’re essentially life observations, things a person might post on Twitter or Facebook.
Writing posts on topics I understand well only helps train my framing, because I know the ideas well enough to have most of my feelings be explicit already. Accordingly, I’ve written very few of these posts, reserving them for ideas I find exceptionally cool. Yes, it feels good to teach something new, but writing a good teaching post takes forever, and I don’t have the motivation to sustain it.
Writing posts on topics I’ve been learning about, on the other hand, is good for raising awareness on ideas that I think should be more well known. At this point, I don’t know enough to make a judgment call on whether the idea is worth researching more, but I do know it’s interesting enough that someone else may want to research it more. It helps me organize the new information I’ve just received.
That leaves discussion posts. In these posts, I’m forcing myself to evaluate my own beliefs and become more aware of my implicit thoughts. Depending on how much I’ve reflected on my world views, these posts either come naturally or are a huge pain to write. In the worst case, organizing all the disparate threads of thought into a coherent narrative takes days to disentangle.
Now, note that these are all things I’m doing for me. I’m making blog posts to help organize my own thoughts, to help figure out my position on things. There’s very little I’m trying to do for anybody else.
I suspect the only reason I’m okay with writing a ton of blog posts is that I have very few inhibitions against sharing my thoughts on the Internet. I have friends who would never, absolutely never, share their life stories without careful consideration. Somehow, my barriers against this are much lower.
(Also, I’d be lying if I didn’t point out I was also writing this blog to try to make myself interesting. Come one, come all, sue me for my insecurities when I know awesome people! Get in line, I’ve got first dibs.)
Of course, pointing out your own selfish motivations doesn’t stop them from being selfish. It just makes you more honest. And besides, a lot of good things in the world happened for selfish reasons. If you like this blog, hopefully you consider it as one of them.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 22 - Super Meat Boy's Instructive Design
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
I play a lot of video games. They’re fun!
I’ve learned a bit of video game design, and it’s really interesting. Much like cinematography, there’s so much you don’t consciously recognize until someone points it out to you. Good design is invisible, and it’s much easier to notice its absence than its presence. That can make design infuriatingly difficult to understand, so today I decided to explain what I’ve learned so far.
Before I get into the meat of things, I should cite my sources. I’m cribbing from the Sequelitis video on Mega Man (warning: lots of swearing) and the TVTropes page for Instructive Level Design.
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As I’ve said before, video games take place in a constructed world. The first thing any video game does is teach you those rules. If you don’t know the mechanics, how are you supposed to play the game?
What makes video games unique is that they can teach you the rules while you’re playing the game, without ever explaining them to you outright. This is what makes well-crafted video games so fun to me. It feels like I’m genuinely learning something. I get guided through simple challenges, which are then composed into larger ones. When done properly, playing a game feels like solving a puzzle where your subconscious already has part of the solution. Everything flows.
Let’s talk about Super Meat Boy. It’s a really, really well designed platformer. It’s also hard as balls, but only in the later levels. The first world is easy, because it focuses on teaching the core mechanics.
Here’s the first level, 1-1.
Easy enough. To beat this level, you have to jump to the raised terrain on the right side, then jump left to the middle platform. You can’t jump directly to the middle platform, and failing to do so teaches you how high your jump is.
You touch Bandage Girl (the pink square) because there’s nothing else in the level, and after a few loading screens you move to 1-2.
Wow, Bandage Girl is really high and there’s no platforms to reach her! You might get curious and try jumping to the terrain on the left. If you do, you’ll learn you die if you go outside the level.
Once that happens, the only thing left is to jump towards the wall. You try pressing buttons, and learn you can walljump to cover vertical space. Walljumping up the corridor takes you to 1-3.
Also, note the decorative buzzsaw. It’ll come up later.
This gap is too big to cross unless you hold the run button before jumping. Also, more decorative buzzsaws.
So many buzzsaws! This level takes the walljump you learned in 1-2 and makes sure you know how to do it. So, you start jumping, and then you notice something - the screen scrolls.
This tells you that levels in Super Meat Boy may be bigger than one screen. Note we’re never worried about going out of bounds - by the time we reach the edge of the initial screen, we’ve seen the screen scroll. This primes the player to continue jumping to the top, even if they died by going out of bounds on 1-2.
The natural inclination is to go up. Why not left? Well, if you went left on 1-2, you died, but if you didn’t, note this part I’ve circled in red.
It’s incomplete. There must be more to the level off the top of the screen. We know the screen scrolls, so let’s go up. The only way to go up is to do walljumps off a single wall, so now you know how to do that too.
So to recap, here’s the game mechanics learned so far.
- You can jump.
- The goal is to get to Bandage Girl.
- You can walljump between two walls, or off the same wall.
- You die if you go out of bounds.
- You can run, and that gives you a larger jump.
- Some levels are larger than one screen, and the game will scroll if they are.
This is all taught in the first minute of gameplay, with no environmental hazards. This all builds into 1-6.
This is the first level where you can die by something other than going out of bounds. By this point, decorative sawblades have appeared in the past few levels, so seeing them as a stage hazard is no surprise.
At this point, the player will jump and walljump their way to Bandage Girl. They’ve been taught everything they need, even if they don’t recognize it, and if they hit a sawblade, it’ll be their fault.