Morrowind's Creation

Great read over at Polygon, "Morrowind: An oral history" by Alex Kane (and some great accompanying artwork by Ben Bauchau).

"I like to tell people that if you ever fell through the world in Morrowind, or got stuck on a piece of geometry, that was my fault." -Erik Parker
YES I HAVE DONE THAT - me. (Falling through the world is kind of cool, but you don't want it to happen too often.)

There are a lot of good quotes in there, a nice long piece that is probably best read over a few sessions.

"I’ve worked on games that I will never see again, and I spent years of my life on them. They will never be seen by another human ever again. And that sucks. They just go away, or you can’t play them because you don’t have the console anymore." -Mark Nelson

I haven't worked on any games, but this resonated with me (not because of academic papers) but because this is somewhat of a problem when it comes to video game canon, which is a longer story.

FDG 2019 SLO

FDG was a great conference! Small (I think 175 people?), great people and many great and diverse papers (from digital humanities topics to code and algorithmic efficiency).

One of the keynote speakers was Tarn Adams, of Dwarf Fortress fame, a game I have described as "I can never play it again because it would ruin my life", meaning, it's so great I would just get sucked into all of its amazingness and details. Actually, maybe I could just oh okay there you see? But maybe! Just be good about limits (it's difficult to limit with DF). But anyways, Adams gave a great and interesting and insightful talk about procedurally generated content and storytelling within the setting of DF.

Is that Tarn Adams back there in the blue shirt? It is! Selfie time!

One of the attendees also made this cool and beautiful card game with everyone's papers as a part of the game! I managed to find one of mine and may have kept it to put on my refrigerator.

Pedantic and Accurate Tyepsetting

For years I have wondered how to italicize and capitalize newspaper titles such as, and I will do it correctly here, the New York Times. I always wondered, should the initial "the" be capitalized, because it seems like part of the title? (No.) How much should be italicized, since isn't all of it the title, or not? (Not the location.)

I figured the exceedingly pedantic (but in the good way) New Yorker would, one day, give me guidance on that. They have! I thank them.

Summer Conference Listing

Busy summer.

May 24-28: ICA (International Communication Association)

June 11-14: ICWSM (International Conference on Web and Social Media)

June 16-19: Bled eConference

June 30-July 3: WebSci

August 6-10: DiGRA (Digital Games Research Conference) (This is the only one I am not going to, but it would be awesome, it's in Kyoto.)

August 26-30: FDG (Foundations of Digital Games)

Anime Boston Artists

Anime Boston 2019 was awesome, and there was a ton of cool cosplay, official merchandise dealers, and also the great "artists' alley".

Here are a very few artists and a few merch dealers I thought were cool, missing many of the artists who were also cool just I didn't note them. I am overlooking so many cool works by people, I love the creativity... the dice people and die-rolling mats, the old console sellers, the videodisc sellers (so old school)... In no particular order:

Tea Fox Illustrations had a really cool Okami print I want to get.

• Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TeaFoxIllustrations
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teakitsune/

Ruby Art had great red and black images, very striking, also some on metal. I really liked the Yin/Yang koi print.

• DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/ruby--art
• Storenvy: http://rubyart.storenvy.com/

Studio de Sade, incredible color palette and level of detail, and, Star Trek, Firefly/Serenity, and Dr. Who. I spoke with Nigel, very cool people there.

• https://www.studiodesade.com/

Nat Rodgers, who was awesome (we spoke, she of course has a great name) and I loved and was shocked by her chickadee print, with the chickadee saying, "I will end you." So innocent. Killer. I've bought a laptop sticker version of it from her online store.

• Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/NatRodgers/shop

Comiku, two awesome artists, from whom I bought a minimal print with poem in Japanese. I also liked their snow fox print, really lovely.

• http://comiku.com/sales.html

Alternate Universe Geeklectic, cool stuff (although I can't figure out their internet presence at the moment). Enjoyed talking with them.

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/augeeklectic/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/augeeklectic/

Skimlines have some very cool ceramics but they do more than that.

• Storenvy: http://skimlines.storenvy.com/
• Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/skimlines (the ceramics, here).

Merch, ok yes artsy (some of these are hand-made) but IIRC not the artists' alley.

• TeeTurtle, really cute designs.
• Tangerine Mountain, one of a few kimono shops at the con.
• Volante Design, I seem incapable of not buying their amazing jackets. 
• Great American Gothic, fun stuff!

Mourning in Skyrim

Skyrim, originally released over seven years ago (11/11/11), is still much-beloved and pretty incredible in many ways. Recently Bethesda re-released it for the Switch (2017) and released the Special Edition in 2016, remastered for the current consoles.

As a fan of Geertz (yes I had to do that), especially his piece Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example about a boy's funeral, how it did not go according to custom, and how ritual is important, I was rather fascinated by a scene in Skyrim I came across (although it is probably not mourning and it is probably slightly bugged, but hey these are games and we have to use our imagination to create the fiction, and we can imagine different things).

A dragon attack in the town of Falkreath earlier in the game-day had left Lod and another villager dead (as you can see in my slightly lousy photo of my TV screen since I play on the Xbox). Lod tends to die in dragon attacks, apparently. I came back later in the day (it was night), and although the dragon skeleton had unspawned, Lod and the other villager were still there at the base of his stairs, surrounded by two guards, the graveyard keeper and one other villager. They were all waving their hands over the bodies of their slain townfolk. For good measure, my horse decided to stand on them, it seems to like standing on dead bodies.

So this was kind of creepy, but it wasn't really clear what they were doing, although the presence of the graveyard cleric added some weight to the gathering. I spoke to each of them and as I did, they would stand up and walk away.

It seems like this is just a bugged corpse investigation animation event, where NPCs get looped/stuck, but it's not clear to me if that's the actual call in the code for NPC behavior or what. Other players have noted this, and the two I link here to both refer to it as mourning, so clearly it's easy to interpret it as such.

On Skyrim-related mourning, there is the epic story of the loss of a companion that is worth reading, or even re-reading if it's been a while, and the player's attempt and eventual success at a burial. (It's Lydia, of course.)

But players have cracked open the game on the PC (hooray, modders!) and found all sorts of awesome unfinished and unimplemented code and items, including some mourning behavior which is now available through a mod. Somewhat tangentially there is apparently a space for dead bodies, and there's a great page at the UESP with unused NPCs, some of which were meant to be in the game but others are just for testing, such as Do Not Delete Me - needed for export to work and also TestJeffBCarryWaterBucket. The unused NPC page also links to the Test Cell page, which is fascinating and you should go read it (there is also a page for unfinished quests).

Urban Data Marks

Really interesting talk at Boston CHI by Prof. Dietmar Offenhuber a few days ago, where one of the projects he detailed was "Dust Mark". So, in Stuttgart, Germany, some areas of the city suffer from air quality issues, as is true in many cities. One way to measure this over time is with reverse graffiti, which struck me as a really interesting concept and approach to urban marking. Instead of making a long-term mark or addition to measure something (say, with paint or a physical object like a meter of some sort), you can power-wash away accumulated air particulate from concrete surfaces. This can get around anti-graffiti laws, since you aren't adding anything (paint, chalk) to a surface, instead you're removing and actually cleaning the surface!

Anscombe's Quartet

I love Anscombe's Quartet. Four obviously different sets of X-Y data (so, like, on the XY plane, a graph), but with exactly the same basic statistics (descriptives). Yes, you have to know your data and graph your data. (So, from the numbers they "look" the same, but when you graph them you see they are actually quite different.)

Portal and Skyrim!

I don't play on PC so I missed this from seven years (seven!) ago when it came out, but they put Wheatley the AI from Portal into Skyrim. I love it.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Fall_of_the_Space_Core,_Vol_1

Zelda and Skyrim!

TL;DR: Three Zelda items in Skyrim on the Switch! (Official, not even a mod or anything.)

I love game cross-fertilization, and often it's official homage to some piece of sci-fi or fantasy in a game (lots of examples here in my blog, but really I only have a very small amount overall).

Recently I looked at the Easter Eggs page for Skyrim, which has Easter Eggs from a wonderfully wide selection of sources and lots of homage. More recently I was watching some Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch, and wondered if there was a use for the amiibos, and, indeed, there is!

What's super cool is that they give you a chance to get three Zelda items from the Switch's beautiful Zelda game (Breath of the Wild), the tunic, shield, and sword.

Here's the shield (with the tunic and sword) from an image on the wiki (linked to the wiki, not copied here, so maybe it will break one day), it's awesome!

Sorting Out Regressions

A great post over at R-Bloggers, [link broken as of 12/2020] "15 Types of Regression you should know." Also, how to choose which one is the right one? So many stats books (I have a few) are just terrible. They tend to throw stats language at people, and it's incredibly bizarre (p-hat? a hat? are you kidding me?) which is a problem because language is supposed to enlighten, not confuse. They also, at least for my English-language background, tend to throw Greek letters around and assume you know what the heck they are, which is an idiotic assumption. Again, language, especially in a textbook that is supposed to be explaining things, should be enlightening and clear, not obtuse. But, all the textbooks I have rarely cover anything but the most basic regression, and they always throw the regression equation at you, which is weird since never have I seen a paper with a regression equation in it, it's always a table.

Edit: Except now the post is no longer there and the URL redirects to R-Bloggers' best guess. Possibly this is the post, or something like it: https://www.listendata.com/2018/03/regression-analysis.html

Kondomari Damacy

#mariekondo #katamari
A little thing I made, seemed like a natural fit.