I recently got the 20th anniversary DVD of the movie Hobgoblins. Not the MST3K of it, mind you. Look as hard as you want, you won’t see Mike and the bots:

Granted, that’s not the best screenshot to show it. How about this:

What’s that, you say? You don’t recognize that from the MST3K episode? Indeed you don’t, and neither do I. I haven’t watched the movie yet, but I’ll be interested to see what it’s like as it was meant to be seen. In my previous experience watching the original movies (MST3K: Werewolf is the only one I wrote up so far), they didn’t cheat by editing the movie to make it more laughable, so I don’t expect that to here, either. But while I’ve only watched up to the title so far, the tone is quite different from the MST3K episode. The impression I got from the episode was that the movie was goofy; watching the original it feels more like mostly-incompetent horror. Certainly the beginning sequence is played entirely straight, even though the tension was so not-tense that you couldn’t cut it with a laser-chainsaw.

Once I watch the entire movie I’ll write up a review of it. I find this sort of dive into movie history to be very interesting.

I was recently looking up mills, and came across this fascinating picture of a Roman flour mill:

(Photo Credit: By Chris 73 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m so extremely used to the wheel type of mill that this almost shocked me. Just to be clear, I mean this kind of mill:

(Photo Credit: By Daniel Villafruela. (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

Interestingly, the wikipedia page called it an edge mill, and the wikipedia page for edge mills claims that edge mills were invented in China in the third century. Which, if true, means that the sort of mill stone I normally think of as a mill stone wouldn’t have existed at the time of Christ. Perhaps even more interesting, the sort of mill which quite possibly did exist then (the roman one in the first picture) looks to me far more complicated and advanced than the sort of flour mill which apparently superseded it. Very interesting.

The thing which led me to discover this was looking up Friedrich von Logau’s poem about the mills of God. The original poem is:

Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein,
ob aus Langmut er sich säumet, bringt mit Schärf ‘er alles ein.

Which was translated into English (according to Wikipedia, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) as:

Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.

It is widely recognized that centralization, such as one sees in most social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has strengths which bring concomitant dangers. Possibly the biggest danger, and certainly the most pressing on people’s minds, is censorship.

Distributed media, such as blogs, make censorship much harder. However, this has (so far) been at the cost of making discovery much more difficult. Finding new blogs is a very haphazard things, to a great degree relying on cross-promotion in blogs. By contrast YouTube is able to leverage its centralized information to provide a list of recommended videos to the user after each video. Given the massive data available to them of what people watched and how long they watched it for, this enables them to make recomendations for videos which are often good. Almost every YouTube channel I’m subscribed to I found through recommended videos.

It probably goes without saying, but unfortunately recomendation engines are extraordinarily succeptible to manipulation by hosts with an agenda. Moreover, it would be virtually impossible to discover such manipulation as it’s only relevant to people who are not aware of particular video makers anyway.

In order to make distributed media truly competitive with centralized media, what we really need is a system for making distributed recomendations. It’s not immediately obvious that this is doable, unfortunately. A system of distributed recomendations would be a spammer’s dream ifi they could figure out how to manipulate it. In fact, most parties would be deeply desirous of manipulating this system. This guarantees that a lot of effort would be put into trying to figure out how to game the system. Worse, the system would almost certainly need to be anonymous, so as not to track people’s reading habits, which makes fake recomendations all the harder to defend against.

The most obvious approach to avoiding spam would be to attach micro-payments to the recomendation system. That brings with it its own problems, but it also has benefits. There are probably other options, too. Especially if one were to somehow include negative reviews as well as positive reviews, the correlations required to spam people might need to be far too complex to allow for useful spamming.

Anyway, if you know anyone who likes to develop algorithms, try planting the seed of a distributed recomendations network. It may not be doable, but the internet would benefit tremendously from it if it is.

Over at Amatopia, Alex wrote a post titled On Boomer Hate. It’s a good post which I recommend reading. Here’s a sample:

t’s trendy to hate Boomers. Literally, everyone is doing it. I did as well. But when something is trendy, it’s usually garbage. But a funny thing happened on the way to critical thinking: I’ve changed my opinion.

The more I thought about generational struggles, the more I realized that generational warfare hurts us all: What I’m getting at is that I think generational warfare is stupid and counterproductive. And I’m not just talking about the young. Us older folks do it too and we should to stop it.

The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that the righteous Gen X indignation against Boomers is pretty hypocritical, especially since many of us express the same sentiments towards Millennials.

As they say, read the whole thing. What I find interesting about this is the way my mother—who is towards the end of the baby boom, but still solidly inside it—spoke about the demonization of her generation and the lionization of her parents generation. She objected to both.

The “greatest generation” were the people who endured the great depression then fought in World War II. It is certainly true that they went through a lot. However, they didn’t do it voluntarily. It was not an ascetic practice, nor (in the main) a job they volunteered for. It happened and there was nothing to do about it and they put up with it as best they could. The great depression, which overlapped Prohibition, was filled with crime, both organized and disorganized. If you look at divorce statistics they had been trending up since the 1860s and showed a dip during World War II followed by a much larger spike afterward:

That spike in divorces afterwards is somewhat typical of how much mother characterized the generation before her: finally done with deprivation, they finally wanted to get theirs. By the way, I added that trend line, and it brings us to another thing blamed on the boomers. People complain about the introduction of no-fault divorce, but if you look at the data, it really seems that no-fault divorce led to a spate of divorces on stocked-up divorces which then let off once the backlog had been processed. Granted, marriage is down and so one would expect divorce to be as well, but it’s very far from obvious that the boomers had any real causal relationship to the boom of divorces which happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Especially when you look up the history of no-fault divorce and find out it was done because people were lying about having cause for divorce so often that people feared that respect for the truth was going to disappear.

And so it goes with many of the problems of the boomers. To quote a famous boomer/songwriter, they didn’t start the fire. And they were handed quite a lot to deal with in the form of a deeply racist society, too.

Did the boomers do a lot wrong? Of course they did. Every generation does a lot wrong. We live in a fallen world. Which brings me to where it brought Alex: inter-generational warfare is stupid. There’s no way to judge the raw materials that any given generation was given to work with, and in any event it’s deeply ungrateful. The previous generation gave us life. Imperfect life, to be sure, but life that’s quite a lot better than nothing.

And thinking about it as a parent, it’s painfully obvious to me how imperfectly I’m raising my own children. I suspect something like this applied to every generation. Our children always suffer for our mistakes. It does no good to blame our parents. What we really should do is ask God to have mercy on us all.

The Rule of Cool is, I believe, actually a TV trope, it applies to video games as well. The variant I’m thinking of is when all inconsistencies between game play and the story are waved away as game play being more important than consistency with the story.

Now, in fairness, games must be unrealistic in order to be games. If a game was perfectly realistic, it would be a simulator, not a game. And people would mostly only do them to train for doing the real version. Thus wounds must heal in seconds or minutes, not weeks or months. Thus is should take minutes to build a hut, not days. And so on; there are a lot of things which need to be cheated in order to have a game and not a simulator. This I grant.

Having granted that, it’s important to point out that it does not follow that no thought should go into how one cheats reality in order to make a game. This is not true, of course, of pure games, such as tic-tac-toe or tetris. But in games that have a story, it is extremely important to consider how the gameplay fits in with the story. Recently I’ve been playing ARK: Survival Evolved, so I’ll draw my examples from there. The one thing that you need to know about ARK is that it’s a survival-type game (i.e. you gather resources and craft tools, structures, etc) with dinosaurs. An the dinosaur models are gorgeous.

Of course, the first problem is that ARK isn’t really a survival game. It’s a team assault game where the weapons are gathered in a semi-survivalist sort of way. I say semi-survivalist because after a certain point all of the resources are gathered by heavy machines. It just so happens that the heavy machines are dinosaurs, but aside from having a setting where they can aimlessly wander around and having a breeding mechanic, they are designed just like heavy machines would be. There are heavy trucks (brontosauri), light trucks (diplodocuses), tanks (rexes), armored assault vehicles (allosauruses), and so on. There are even spy helicopters (pteranodons), attack helicopters (tapejaras) and cargo helicopters (quetzals). You might think that flying reptiles would be more like planes, but they’re all slow, very maneuverable, and extremely good at hovering. The more heavily laden they are, the slower they move. It makes sense as a game mechanic but makes absolutely no physical sense. If a slow moving animal flapped very slowly, it would fall like a rock.

And the problem is that this takes you right out of the story. When flying reptiles are actually swimming through the air in entirely impossible ways, the beauty of the models loses most of its effect. The same is true of the walk-cycles which don’t adapt to the ground, but I think for different reasons.

Granted, walk cycles which don’t use physics to adjust the skeleton in natural ways for locomotion will never look entirely right, but I think that we’d forgive scripted walk cycles far more if the dinosaur which was walking imperfectly was actually moving with a purpose. But in ARK they aren’t. Or rather, they almost never are. On occasion a predator does run at another dinosaur to attack it. But under normal circumstances the dinosaurs simply wander around completely aimlessly. The herbivores do not eat, nor do the walk towards plants. They are simply on a random walk. And I think that the fact that their movements are completely pointless make you far more likely to notice that they’re not walking correctly.

And this problem carries over to appreciating the models for another reason. It’s great that the triceratops looks almost exactly how you’d picture it, but it’s hard to notice that when they’re not behaving at all like how you’d expect. They’re a herd animal. You should see them in groups and they should move around with some relationship to the others in the herd. That they don’t just breaks the illusion even more.

And of course everything has terrible eyesight in ARK. Predators don’t notice prey until they’re within about 50 yards. Prey doesn’t notice predators until the predators have  actually bitten them. No creature in ARK has a nose.

Of course, none of these are likely to be overly noticeable if you’re playing in team-versus-team since you have to be on constant lookout for other teams who will try to kill you if you’re alone.

I should note that the dinosaur taming also suffers from the idea of gameplay-over-story. With exceptions, dinosaur taming is accomplished by using tranquilizers to knock a dinosaur unconscious, then feed it its favorite foods while it’s unconscious. Once it’s eaten enough it then instantly forms a lifelong bond to you where it is willing to go on suicide missions on your command. Granted you have to cheat taming an animal somehow for this to be a game and not as simulator, but this is extremely stupid. Worse, as you are shooting the dinosaur with tranquilizer-soaked crossbow bolts in order to knock it out, once it’s torpor falls below a certain point it realizes that you are trying to tranquilize it and runs away at its top speed. This is very stupid because tranquilizers make animals slower, not faster, but it also makes taming dinosaurs frustrating. There’s also no way to vary the amount of tranquilizer being delivered per shot, so larger, higher level dinosaurs require very large numbers of shots to tranquilize. That’s tedious, not fun. (This is another case where the game is made for multi-player, because using one of the many multi-person dinosaur mounts makes chasing after dinosaurs much easier since one person drives the dinosaur while the other person shoots. It’s also the case that, for example, four people can deliver 4x as many tranquilizing shots so chasing may not even be necessary for teams.)

A mechanic where you feed the awake dinosaur until it likes you would have been much better. This does actually exist with a few dinosaurs, but even here this has been screwed up so that it isn’t too easy, by which I really mean, too fun. There’s a dolphin-like marine reptile which likes to come up to survivors (what the players are called) and nuzzle them. You can give them meat and this tames them, except that once they realize you’re trying to tame them, they run away. This makes no sense, and is no fun. Apparently the most important game mechanic is that the player must struggle for everything.

Ultimately, ARK is an absolutely beautiful games which isn’t very much fun to play in single player mode because its central theme is being a tribal warfare simulator where it takes hundreds of hours to build up assets that get destroyed in a few minutes during a raid. The later stages of the games are even fought with automatic weapons and heavy artillery; the dinosaur seem almost out of place among auto-turrets and C4 bombs.

But the upshot is that the game really doesn’t work as a single player game. It really looks like it should work as a single player game. There should be an enormous amount to do all on one’s own. But it’s mostly ruined by inattention to the story. It’s not possible to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to enjoy it. Which is a great pity because the dinosaur models are gorgeous.

At least, so says this biologist. Basically, the idea is that instead of being a splinter off of raptors (hawks and eagles) which specialized for speed, falcons are actually a splinter off of parrots who specialized for speed and meat eating.

The article goes on at length about how shocking this is, but having been very into studying falconry in my youth and having once had a pet parrot (well, a cockatiel, but it’s in the parrot family), I’m actually not very surprised. Eagles (mostly) look kind of like large hawks, but falcons just don’t look much like hawks at all. They actually look more like short-tailed parrots. This is especially true of their wing shape. Falcons have long, narrow wings where the flight feathers stick together forming a (mostly) solid surface. Hawk’s and eagle’s flight feathers stick out independently, looking almost like outstretched fingers. Parrot’s wings look extremely similar to falcon’s wings, with the flight feathers touching each other.

Granted, looks aren’t dispositive, which is the point of the original article. I just think it’s worth noting that it goes out of its way to emphasize the ways that falcons look like hawks but not how they look dissimilar.

And it should be noted that the results of convergent evolution are, in the end, convergence. That falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks means very little; you can train hawks and falcons for falconry (hunting), but you can’t train parrots to hunt. Falcons don’t talk like parrots do, and you interact with them much more like hawks than like parrots. Hawks, eagles, and falcons are all fairly solitary creatures.

So while it’s fascinating trivial that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks, it’s not actually useful information. You still shouldn’t name your gyrfalcon polly, or offer it a cracker.