There really isn’t anything sexy about death or old PC games Sunday, Jul 27 2008

Which is the entire point. I could say something mellifluous at this point about the impending death of human society as well but there isn’t any point, no one would read it anyway.

So I will instead give my observations on freecell, the older windows version of it. I have never in my life beaten “Klondike” solitaire without cheating {so saying I beat a game of it the next day without cheating}. With free cell as long as you don’t have a rare unsolvable pattern (which mostly have the face cards on the “top” and the aces and earlier cards buried on the bottom) it is not especially hard to eventually win through. I find that the key is always trying to keep at least one of your cells free, the more that are free or can quickly be freed the better. I have frequently been buried in muck with one cell free and managed to win through. Well frequently is relative I’m not over here spending all my time playing this thing.

No instead I’ve been playing chess against myself. I am actually so bad at chess that it took me something like 20 moves to bring checkmate against my own king when it was all by itself. I frequently lost track of whose turn it was too. I worry lately that I’m coming down with the alzheimer’s which back in the day was just going senile. I never thought my memory and concentration would desert me as those have typically been all I’ve had to rely on but it seems that things are heading that way. Perhaps they have simply been used up at this point. Maybe I’ll try drinking more caffeine, I read somewhere that a correlation has been found between caffeine consumption and memory. That probably won’t help my concentration though.

Well kids, next time you think about killing yourself or someone else just remember that there really isn’t anything that is sexy about dying. Really.

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Life for your run Saturday, Jul 26 2008

Something I was thinking about last time but forgot in the midst of melodrama was that there are certain exercises which might save your life if you are proficient in them.

The three that come to mind are swimming, running, and climbing. I think that swimming is pretty obvious, although it is less important in totally landlocked or frozen areas. I always thought swimming was really good exercise as well. As to running, it never hurts to be able to get  far the hell away from something as fast as possible. And with climbing the main idea is being able to lift your body up over a ledge that you are clinging to “for dear life”. I think that drowning and falling are still relatively common ways to die and perhaps if you are better at swimming and climbing you won’t die that way, or you will avoid more serious injuries perhaps.

Honestly I was initially thinking chin-ups which I am now unable to do rather than climbing (which I also am unlikely to be able to do anymore but it doesn’t come up much in the city), and there is some transfer as far as muscular training goes. And a fire escape is more similar to a chin-up bar than a mountain face but nonetheless. if you can go from clinging with your finger tips to hoisting yourself over something then you will be in ideal upper body condition. I bet guys who can do that can lift over 100 kilos, at least 50 for women.

If you want to be able to save someone else’s life then being able to carry weight equivalent to a person for a certain distance is probably the main thing, followed by being able to lift heavy mass off people. In theory with the right locations and levers and sleds you can make up for physical strength with physics but in reality you will often find yourself lacking for a good lever at the scene of a car crash or avalanche.

When did I become a survivalist? Who the hell knows but I’ve made it this far.

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when there isn’t anything good to say you might as well say something bad to fill up space Saturday, Jul 26 2008

I suppose that is how I’ve lived my life, and so in that spirit I will write about something that likely has only incidental effects on anything else in the world.

Today I found that I no longer possess the strength to do a “chin-up” exercise, I could barely even hold myself up, I think just hanging there I strained my abdomen of all places. Coupled with my other physical degradations (have you seen my mention cycling recently? how often do you see me mention doing anything physical? this is why) I can only view this as the beginning of the end. I am not surprised by this, ever since I lost my full range of motion I knew that things would never be good again for me physically. But I didn’t think this is how my life would play out.

I lived through quite a bit and it definitely took its toll on me. Now standing here facing my own mortality I can reflect on how lucky I was to make it this far, how much I really did see that can never be put into words or communicated to another person. My odyssey was my own and it must be fated to remain that way. There are a lot of things I wish I had done, that I doubt I’ll ever get around to at this point. Most of them are silly little things, of no consequence, and so I am left with only one regret. I won’t be leaving anything behind. In a way this is the ideal state to be in for death, to have nothing encumbering you. Oh certainly there will be people, and there are the things I’ve accumulated over the years, but only now do I appreciate how little that all means.

Maybe that is just me. I have always been a sort of absolutist, a perfectionist, and my curse was to be that way but remain incompetent and curious. Really it has been a miserable life. If only I had let myself be more easy going when I was a child perhaps life would have been more fun. Then again it is not as if I had anything to do with the beginning of the Holocaust. Perhaps after that a pall was just cast over the entire last century and I ended out bearing a large brunt of it. I can’t tell you. But it is a strange thing. I think if I would only change one thing about it all is that I’d have just died as a child instead of living this whole way. If I could have died while I was still innocent of the world…

But I did not. I lived until this point and in all likelihood there are two or three, perhaps even five if I would go see a doctor, years left for me to be a twisted person. I’ll never know if I was just born this way or if my experiences made me become what I am today. It probably doesn’t even matter that much.

As to how I plan to spend the rest of my life, at least for now I will continue making my way through math. I have already gotten quite sick of it since I will never be able to do anything of consequence with it at this point. But learning math is as good of a way to spend your time while dying slowly as any don’t you think? I suppose some might joke that to learn math is to die slowly. Or at that rate that the proper learning of math is dying out slowly. But perhaps that is just the way it is.

Until then.

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Grandiose titles usually just annoy people Thursday, Jul 24 2008

So I finished watching the Shion no Ou the flowers of hard blood (しおんの王) 22 episode tv anime series. On the whole the series had a certain charm and appealing character which captivated me in spite of the fact that the quality level for the work was extremely low.

As I stated previously the show is basically about a mute girl whose parents were murdered that plays the japanese board game Shougi (shogi)which has been referred to as “japanese chess”. Go is sometimes erroneously called that as well however those two games are extremely dissimilar. Well as far as I know about chess and shougi there are similarities between the goal (capture the opposing king while protecting your own) and movement patterns of some of the pieces but other than that the setup formation is different as are… maybe the number of pieces and the play strategy. The big difference between shogi and chess is that you can reuse captured pieces in shogi. Also promotion works a bit differently in that more pieces than just the pawns can be promoted (it is only the pawns that can be promoted in chess isn’t it?) and the promotion zone isn’t only the opposite side of the board as it is in chess. So between those two there are a lot more variables than there are in chess and game play differs accordingly.

So shogi aside, the majority of the show takes place during an unprecedented open tournament between male and female pro shogi players and amateur shogi players of all abilities for a large prize (50 million yen). And within that the majority of the focus is on Shion’s own matches. On at least one occasion a side character had their match relegated to the “cold” opening segment. The plot otherwise mostly revolves around Shion being harassed and people investigating the murder of her parents.

I can not state enough times how massively disappointed I was that this show wasn’t about Shion traveling around solving crimes in between her shogi matches. The show never tries to get you to think this, that was apparently just an observation I heard a long time ago from someone who had no familiarity with the work yet was predicting the course of the series. However if the show would have been like that I’d have enjoyed it more even though it probably would have just been worse.

Various things annoyed me about the show. The first was how blatant it was from the first episode who the killer was, the second was that you are explicitly told who it is before the last episode of the show so it peaks before the climax. The other thing was how stupid the plot involving Saito Ayumi was. You have a male character cross dressing who is actually voiced by a woman. Just having a female character would have been better in the first place. Then on top of it all his hair gets chopped off.

Aside from the plot the animation was horrid and the character designs, mostly the hair and clothing styles of the bland looking characters, weren’t any better. Being a show with absolutely no action and a number of still sequences there isn’t an excuse for how terrible the show looked. There is a scene near the end of the last episode in particular between the Hani brothers where the animation is so bad that Satoru looks like a paper bag that’s floating around. Being a mere 22 episodes makes this more inexcusable.

Now on the bright side of being only 22 episodes, it didn’t have two stupid recap episodes as many shows are apt to do and I’m pretty sure it ran over new years and golden week (basically the two major holiday periods in japan). Then again it would have likely only been in production during new years so golden week shouldn’t have been an issue, but it is common for shows in production during new years to just throw out a recap episode during that time period which is usually half way through one way or the other. You know Golden week delayed shipment of something I was waiting on and that really pissed me off. Things like that and “business days” really piss me off but that is another story.

Soooooo in the end I’m not sure what Shion no Ou was trying to accomplish. The odd background to the story was probably just an attempt at spicing up the typical “sports saga” (perhaps similar to how you had a ghost in Hikaru no Go) but since everything else about the series was typical of those types of works it just seemed out of place. I read something interesting about how Hikaru no Go had reinvigorated Go among youth but that there hasn’t really been a series to do that with Shogi. In this same report it was alleged that more youth play shogi in the first place. On the other hand Go is a game that is played widely enough around the world, Mahjong (which is really less a game of skill than chance) as well, certainly throughout asia, but Shogi is confined mostly to japan. It’s pretty easy to imagine shogi totally dying out eventually. That would be too bad since It really is a more interesting game than chess. Though in my case I’d be even worse at it than chess. That might be true of a lot of people.

Actually that reminds me of something I read about the stagnation of japanese companies and products. In particular even though something like the majority of people in japan use cell phones and their service is provided by japanese companies, japanese mobile phones are not much of a factor, certainly on the world market. Hmmm in fact the only electronics field I’m particularly aware of being dominated by japan (I have to wonder if they don’t dominate comics and animation as far as production goes) is console gaming but by the same token PC gaming is weak in japan and the consoles are mostly made with components from american companies anyway. In fact since the likes of Sony and Nintendo are diversified worldwide one can wonder how much anything that goes on R&D wise is still related to Japan. Though that is neither here nor there. And certainly the Iphone rapidly became the most popular cellphone in the world anyway so you can’t really blame japanese for that.  And it really has nothing to do with shion no ou but this is my blog so I can write crap if I want to. You might try it sometime.

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when injuries lie chronic Wednesday, Jul 23 2008

Since I beat Minesweeper the other day I had not played it seriously until now. I have already lost my touch. Similarly math that I had mastered a month ago has fled my mind. Anime I watched earlier in the day I could not name the characters from. Such is the color of my life, that which I do not hold fast to my breast disappears.

Oh well.

Over the past few days I’ve been watching the Shion no Ou anime series which is basically about a little mute girl playing shougi. Similarly the 81 diver live action drama series has now ended, it took a different route compared to the manga series… probably. Honestly I haven’t watched the whole thing it just seemed that way, I do not disapprove. 81 diver is also about shougi but it’s a lot whackier, I prefer it frankly.

It is unclear to me whether or not the Shion no Ou manga has ended or not. I’m pretty sure that it has indeed ended at 8 volumes but the last chapter of the manga in the 8th volume didn’t seem explicit to me. Then again I just glanced at so perhaps when I review it fully it will be clear. It seems like the manga and the anime have almost exactly the same plot but I am not positive about that.

Let me take this opportunity to restate that I do not know how to play Shougi. Both Shion no Ou and 81 Diver are probably poor introductory works to the game as you have protagonists that are supposed to be really good at it. As opposed to Hikaru no Go where you learn about Go with Hikaru and quite likely any number of other manga works out there about asian games including go, mahjong, and shogi. Umm I think there’s another game that japanese people play that starts with an R but I don’t recall it right now and it’s inconsequential.

Anyway I had been under the impression that Shion no Ou was a series more along the lines of “Ayatsuri Sakon” (can’t recall the full title, possibly “karakuri zoushi ayatsuri sakon) where you had a wonky protagonist who was a genius and solved murders. That is not it at all, there is a murder case at the heart of the story in Shion no Ou but it doesn’t seem like Shion solves it herself. If anything she is the main obstacle to solving the case. So that said the series has dark overtones but this is usually washed out by how insipidly sweet it is most of the time.

In the end I would say that most elements of the plot obsolete themselves as they end out being totally pointless in the end. The murderer is exactly who you thought it was in the first episode, having a male character cross dressing just to give shion a love interest that is in her day to day life was also pointless. I would have preferred if Ayumi would have just been a “bad bitch” character with a soft spot for Shion. Or what the hell why not shoujo ai? this is the 00s after all.

So, since I don’t know shougi it isn’t easy for me to follow along with the games but it often seems like they breeze through them as well. I am uncertain how many moves there are in a typical shougi game, I thought 1-200 and that would surely take longer than 20 minutes to show while interspersed with melodramatic inner dialogue so that’s understandable but… I just never have any idea how it’s going aside from the comments from the “gallery”. Which is a low point for this series as it is for any “sports” series but since I find it necessary it does not grate on me. Maybe I only understand go because all the pieces are the same and you just have 2 different colors, who the hell knows and that is neither here nor there.

Well I will give a review on the show after I finish watching it, I will check out the manga in more depth as well, at least the 8th volume. I might have heard the manga would get released in america but that seems unlikely.

Some other time I will speculate on the qualities one needs to possess in order to be a master of games like shougi and other such games which might give you an idea why you suck at chess so much. Actually I might have all but 2 of the qualities needed to be a chess master but I am so deficient in those 2 that I can’t seem to beat anybody at it. Playing a chess game on the lowest difficulty and always having to give up is pretty demoralizing too. Yeah I may have never beaten anyone at chess in my life. At least I’ve beaten a couple of people online at Go… though it has been a long time. Oh well.

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Reuche finally beats Minesweeper Sunday, Jul 20 2008

Yes. Well this is one load off of my mind as I’ve been playing Minesweeper on the Expert difficulty all week long and was not sure that I’d ever beat it. I can not tell you how much time I sunk into this effort or how many times I played it. I imagine that I played on expert mode upwards of a thousand times but the majority of those times were making “random” clicks at the start of games which often resulted in failure. I’m not sure what finally got me over the hump although yesterday I was probably on track to win a few times but I kept making mistakes due to fatigue (yes I played it that much, my hands are killing me from ambi-clumsy (I coined that term) play). Possibly it improved things when I stopped listening to old episodes of A State of Trance with Armin van Buuren and started listening to some of Hirano Aya’s various anime music. Why this should be I can not tell you but I’m pretty sure I was listening to Bouken de-sho de-sho from Haruhi when I won. {now that I think about it there is a better chance it was I’m Ice Cream or Breakthrough Perhaps this is the true nature of my Otaku Spirit オタク魂. It’s gotten me this far into trouble so I guess it will just keep on digging me into a hole until I either break through to the other side or it all collapses on me. Actually that reminds me of the shelving in my room which is by my bed and overloaded with volumes of manga (tankoubon　単行本). Sometimes I worry that it will crush me in my sleep. This is not outside the realm of possibility, and might be a fittingly ignominious end to my consistently ignominious life.

And so I now enter into the elite echelons of people who have wasted a lot of time by being one of the few to accomplish this feat. I honestly have never known anyone else personally in my life to have beaten Minesweeper on expert mode. That doesn’t mean that no one did, in particular I can think of a few people who might have, it just isn’t something that ever came up.

My embarrassing times are as follows Beginner: 37 seconds Intermediate: 163 seconds Expert: 815 seconds. that’s right, it took me almost 14 minutes to get through it. That is nothing compared to the hours I sat with laptop in place, navigating the board with the fucking touch pad. I think I could have shaved that time considerably with a normal mouse. A consideration.

Well as far as I know you don’t get anything when you win except the ability to put your name in if you get the fastest time score. The little smiley at the top of the board that lets you reset puts shades on but that’s the same for all modes. No, all you get for completing it is a dirty sense of accomplishment brought forth from hours of toil. Of course a lot of people who beat it probably “get lucky” and aren’t forced to make a guess with a 2 out of 3 chance of failing when they only have 7 mines left…

So for all those of you out there who have never beaten Minesweeper: don’t bother. The luckiest people are those who have never played it. But if you want some tips, now that I’ve finally beaten it I feel qualified to give a few.

First of all, making guesses is inevitable. The first click you make will never be a mine, the game is programmed this way. I’m playing the “old” version of Minesweeper by the way, not one of those fancy ones that only has patterns that don’t force guesses. So since you have to make guesses you might as well make a lot of wild guesses at the start. I tried playing numerous ways but the time I finally won was a result of that strategy. Click on tiles in all general areas of the board, you might as well open up at least one if not two clearings, it is extremely difficult to get far without openings in all quadrants of the board.

Following that strategy you are unlikely to last for 10 seconds. But what’s worse, wasting a minute trying to get good positioning, or being near completion and having it all blow up because you’re forced to make a weird guess. The latter at least is more frustrating for me.

As far as math goes, there is better than a 20% chance of clicking on a mine (99 mines divided by 480 tiles times 100 is 20.625%) in general which is 1 in 5. So when you open up a 1 tile your chances are a lot better at 1 in 8. This is something to keep in mind when you’re faced with 2/3 odds of clicking on a mine but there are a lot of unopened tiles around.

Other than that, starting games off with a lot of guesses and having no clear options, never make a guess unless you’ll have to make it eventually. What I mean by that is, if you get an isolated formation of say 20-30 blocks and you will have to make a guess in order to crack into it, you might as well do that as soon as it becomes apparent rather than spend 5 minutes clearing out the rest of the board only to click on a mine. If nothing is isolated and blocked off though, then wait until later to make a guess, usually things become apparent. Also make sure you can actually recognize when you don’t have to guess. Sometimes the layout of mines becomes apparent from 3 touching tiles. The best example I can think of, assuming none of these tiles are touching marked spots already, is a 121 layout near a side of the board, the mines will always be in front of the 1. It becomes harder to distinguish such things when you’re dealing with tiles between two rows (in other words, when more than 3 tiles touching it haven’t been opened) but if you consider it for a while the answer might become apparent. As you can tell from my times I spend plenty of time considering such things while playing Minesweeper.

Alright well, that was all I wanted to say. I guess this is bragging or gloating or something but let me assure you I am not proud of this accomplishment. Mostly I just felt like after dumping all those hours I might as well say something about it. I don’t think that beating Minesweeper is a requirement for mastering math, but beating Minesweeper even though the odds were always against me (I don’t know what the actual odds of completing a game are but considering that I’ve only done it once out of more than a thousand times playing it they certainly were poor for me) makes me think that if I persevere I can get through math too. Now whether or not I’ll ever do anything meaningful with math is still up in the air but that can probably wait a couple of years. Well hey now that I say that, is it really going to take me that long? I guess it will, maybe I could skip having to take certain classes if I did more math work on my own. Hmm at that rate is statistics really something relevant to me? Oh wait you don’t have to pass algebra to take calculus? hmm…. OK that just wasn’t true at all. But apparently after Algebra I could take other types of math at the same time. I do not know of any reason why I wouldn’t want to do that. Then again I don’t know much about math.

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You can only listen to Big Sky so much before getting totally fuckinng sick of it Friday, Jul 18 2008

Although I would have to say that in general you can only listen to trance and house and techno music so much before you want to smash whatever the sound of it is coming from. Ah 230 minutes of Armin van Buuren and Minesweeper is a dastardly combination.

Well I was thinking of something that I forgot about Dearly Devoted Dexter. I think this happened the other day with Darkly Dreaming Dexter as well. In any case during the course of this book when Dexter starts to ponder whether or not he will end out living a normal life without killing people anymore while he’s under surveillance and going over to Rita’s house almost every day I was reminded of Koroshiya Ichi. 殺し屋1 (ichi means 1 in japanese) Koroshiya approximately means assassin but “professional killer” is a bit closer to it, literally the kanji mean “killer store” if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen it used just to refer to killers, aside from the likes of “satsujinsha” and “satsujinki” and “hitogoroshi” hmm… Well that’s unimportant. But the plot of “Ichi” is pretty bizarre with the premise being that this crazy guy perverse guy who is retardedly strong gets hired to kill a bunch of yakuza. He accomplishes this mostly using karate kicks that make use of the blades he has built into special shoes he made himself. When fighting he gets an erection and if he doesn’t orgasm while killing someone he always masturbates and leaves semen at the scenes of his crimes. So yeah it’s pretty fucked up. Comparatively I’d say that Koroshiya Ichi is a lot more fucked up than Dexter because Dexter doesn’t really have the same sexual angle. Speaking of which it is relatively rare for a serial killer to not have some sort of sexual motivation, to get at least that kind of thrill from their acts.

The thing in Dexter that reminded me of Ichi was this aspect of immersion into normal life almost washing the killer out of someone. In the Ichi manga series (there was a film directed by Takashi Miike which might be more famous among non-otaku) that was pretty much the ending. Ichi got swallowed up by the city. There was a certain question as to whether the whole thing might not have been the delusion of an old man but that doesn’t matter. One can not see this kind of end for Dexter, instead one must see a violent end for him but whether or not Jeff Lindsay will have those kinds of guts is unknown.

Another similarity between Dexter and Ichi would be the vigilante angle. The difference is that Dexter “makes sure” that his victims are guilty where as Ichi is merely manipulated to believe that his targets are the same sort of people as the kids who bullied him (some of whom he killed anyway) growing up. Although almost all of the people Ichi was paid to kill (eventually he escalates and kills other people as well) were hardened Yakuza that had committed all sorts of crimes anyway, few of them had killed. Part of that I would say is the difference between Japan (Ichi) and Miami (Dexter). I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are killed in Miami every year than the entire country of japan. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Miami gets killed every day.

Also of note is that both Ichi and Dexter were made into the sort of killers they are. Dexter was probably encouraged and instructed more than actually made into a killer though, as a sociopath we are to believe he would have killed eventually even without encouragement, he just might not have been as successful. Ichi on the other hand was an incidental killer (I think he killed a kid with a chunk of concrete or something like that) that got molded into the type of killer he was by this older guy.

Hmm on the whole I thought Ichi was more interesting but Dexter is ongoing so who knows. As to which is actually better I can not say since it has been many years now since I read Ichi and as a manga series rather than a novel series like Dexter it has different strengths and weaknesses. It probably makes even less sense than Dexter though. Ichi as I already said is a lot more fucked up, however there isn’t a lot about the work that I would say is particularly frightening or cause for despair. You have strange people living in their own little strange world killing each other off. On the other hand you have Dexter out in our world among us making plans to create another of himself in Cody. Which is another thing that seemed extremely unlikely to me but that doesn’t really matter that much at all. At. All.

So in the end, if you like one would you like the other? Who the fuck knows? If you’re interested in one you’d probably be interested in the other though, that’s a safe bet. Which is just the kind of bet I like, though I am not a betting person of course. Maybe that’s why it takes me so fucking long when I play Minesweeper?

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At the moment my time would probably be better spent learning how to fish successfully than understand what NPC is Friday, Jul 18 2008

As promised I read the second Dexter novel Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay and it was a big pile of addictive crap just like the first book. On the whole there seemed to be less tension in this book, probably because of all the mundane (typical, regular, average, normal, Dexter not killing or stalking people, etc.) scenes involving Dexter and other people that seemed to fill the book. And of course like in any shitty book series there was recap information interspersed which is nice when you haven’t read the last book for two years but really annoying when it hasn’t even been a week since you read the previous book. So I was once again unable to suspend my disbelief but I found this book to be more amusing in many ways than the first. I suppose it was also more disturbing in some of its implications but books like this don’t really bother me. I am not a sociopath like Dexter, it has been certifiably checked that I am not in fact, but I am a similarly broken person from a combination of trauma, poisoning, and genetics. And so when Dexter laughs and his sister is losing it I find myself at least smirking. The most hilarious part to me was when Dexter was ready to move on from the case even though it wasn’t solved because as far as he was concerned his part was done and no one could believe that he thought this way. Really it was perfectly logical, which also means totally inhuman. It took me a long time to understand that logic and humanity go against each other but I did get it, which apparently is part of what makes me not a sociopath.

To touch on that for a moment, sociopaths that is, apparently the key is that sociopaths are egotistical and anti-social with an utter lack of empathy. You do not necessarily have to be a sociopath to be a serial killer nor does being a sociopath mean you are or will be a serial killer. But it is alleged that the two frequently coincide. I would posit that the reason that a lot of sociopaths give the impression of being more clever at least if not necessarily smarter or better problem solvers is that their brain doesn’t waste space on social understanding similar to people with autism (this is not to say that people with autism are sociopaths or serial killers either, as far as I know almost no autistic people end out as murderers in spite of being outsiders). A lot of sociopaths are good at blending in, charming, and charismatic, but this is because they do not feel shame and annoyance the same way that normal people do, if at all. hm mhm well I would say that in general from the sociopaths that I’ve known they generally aren’t good for anything in general although they usually are quite skilled at their jobs There’s a place for everybody you know.

Well back to the book, the big “there’s no fucking way” moment for me was when Dexter left his clothes sitting on the toilet seat at Rita’s house about halfway through. Although Dexter is not shown to be obsessive about germs in spite of his desire for neatness and distaste for blood, you would think that from his attention to detail and fastidiousness he would have set the clothes somewhere that they were unlikely to be disturbed. Even on top of the toilet tank would be a much more likely area for him to place them. This ended out being used as a plot device, and the method of that implementation was also a bit skewed, but I could easily imagine other more likely ways for the clothes to be disturbed thus triggering the plot device.

And for that matter I don’t think anyone named Rita who also has a son named Cody would have a daughter named Astor. Then again I’m not familiar with the US south east (lots of cubans and rednecks) so perhaps it is a more common name in that region.

So in the end the book was just a way to pass the time in between math and Minesweeper. I seem to have become obsessed with Minesweeper but I am unable to achieve victory on the largest board. So I finally resorted to reading about the game, which only offered one insight and a couple of ideas for me to try. However I did find out that Minesweeper is NP-complete which is sometimes written as NPC. The only NPC I’m familiar with is “non-player character” which is a term that I believe originated in role-playing games and should be familiar to anyone that’s played a console RPG (Final Fantasy XII) or MMORPG (Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, Maple Story, Ragnarok, etc.) which will usually feature a variety of NPCs. Anyway I’ve already forgotten what the NP stands for in NP-complete but the idea is that an NPC is something that you can’t create an efficient algorithm to solve. Or perhaps put another way, it is something that is harder to prove you can solve it than it is to solve it. I am not qualified to give an example of this in Minesweeper but if I understand correctly part of this has to do with the fact that you don’t know what the first tile in a game will be before you click on it. You can guess that it will be one of 9 things: a mineor a tile numbered 1-8, at least I assume there is an 8 tile though I have personally only seen 1-7, but until you click on it you do not know. And further in the game (versions that have patterns that make you guess, like the ones on most standard editions of windows) you will also reach points where you have to guess whether or not any number of tiles may or may not be mines, notably early and late in games. And there is just no apparent way to verify what these tiles are until you click on them. And at that rate when you click on a mine it shows you where all of the other mines are so the fastest way to find all the mines is to lose!

I wonder to myself at this moment whether it is Minesweeper or Tetris that is the most evil game of all time. In theory Minesweeper is solvable and Tetris is infinite so that should count for something. There must be a game of tetris that hasn’t stopped running for some time out there somewhere, people trading off and keeping the game alive. At least as far as I know Tetris blocks can only fall so fast… I don’t really want to think too deeply about that.

Anyway if you have any interest in Minesweeper and NP-complete you can check out this page by the guy who came up with the proof of Minesweeper being NPC over here. It is a bit illuminating, and put in a pretty simple manner which I think even people that are not familiar with the fields involved, but have played Minesweeper (which has got to be the majority of people in industrialized nations) will be able to understand. The most interesting thing he said was that if a person could solve P=NP then it might be more beneficial to them to keep the information to themselves than to collect the million dollar prize for doing so as they could break any code out there. Or perhaps that was if you could prove NP, I am not sure if there is a difference there or not. I can say that if anyone ever solves it, that person will not be me. My mind doesn’t work in the right way for that kind of thing. My mind is much better at picking out fault. Which does make me wonder, if I could learn enough advanced math properly I might be good at being a math critic. Who knows, maybe that’s what it would take. It has been said that at times the fool knows more than the wise man.

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Sweeping Up Glass Wednesday, Jul 16 2008

Something which occurred to me while reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter but which I forgot about when sharing my thoughts about the book was how stereotypical it was for Dexter to listen to/like/be implied as somewhat of a fan of Philip Glass. I remembered this while reading the second Dexter novel Dearly Devoted Dexter and he was mentioned listening to Glass again. If this was not apparently the only music that Dexter chooses to listen to on his own I could have let things slide but that is not the case at all. I will admit that I have never known anyone “normal” who listened to Philip Glass. I guess for the purposes of this argument I’m defining normal as someone who is boring, functions in society, and does not get in trouble or do particularly troublesome things. However precisely because no one who is normal listens to Philip Glass it is extremely unimaginative for Dexter to be a fan. This is my point. Oh well. The second novel is as engaging as the first if no less annoying. By the way I personally do not listen to Philip Glass but I will admit to playing Minesweeper other than to merely pass the time.

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You can count on creepy old men to write creepy books Monday, Jul 14 2008

And of course you can count on me to read said creepy old men’s creepy books. This time I read Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff LIndsay who I suppose is more of a middle aged man than an old man if you want to get into it. You might be familiar with it because it was turned into a TV series called simply Dexter in the United States starring Michael C. Hall, who is otherwise best known for another TV series Six Feet Under, in the title role. I myself have not seen the Dexter TV adaptation but I have seen some of Six Feet Under, which consistently seemed to decompose just like the corpses in the funeral home that the show revolved around. Hall’s acting was always spot on though.

I have been lead to understand by way of a massive plot spoiler that the first season of the show follows this first Dexter novel before branching off to an original story for the second season. This strikes me as a good move since the release pace is different between the show and the novels and of course the show can always adapt to the plot of the other novels at a later point. But mostly I like that just because I always complain about how boring it is for an adaptation to be merely a different media’s version of the same thing. So though I can not draw a conclusion until I see the show, reading the novel gives me the feeling that the presentation of the show would be better.

The thing is that there must be an unwritten rule stating that stories about people who are supposed to be deranged, perverted, or depraved must be in a semi-journal style first person narrative in which the main character refers to themselves in the third person. The first such book I recall reading like that was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and every book of this type I’ve read since then always reminds me of that. Now Lolita is a particularly rambling story and darkly dreaming dexter is a bit more to the point and quite a smooth read (I might have read it in under 5 hours) but Dexter always refers to himself in his thoughts as Dexter, often something dexter such as the titular “darkly dreaming dexter”, questions his sanity, reflects upon his strangeness and what he needs to do to go unnoticed while fulfilling his desires, and so on. It’s actually somewhat of a disaster. I don’t remember if I’ve said before that the best way to cover up being a bad writer is to have a bizarre story but it is certainly one way to try.

And Jeff Lindsay (which is a pen name) is not a good writer. He must have a certain amount of cleverness because a fair amount of people have been tricked into thinking that he is, but I assure you that he is not. First of all he is extremely out of touch. He disguises this by throwing out pointless lingo, occasional bits of spanish, and geographical locations without any explanation as to their meaning or significance in order to appear hip (I am using the word hip to be ironic although pointing that out is moronic). Other than that events and interactions in the book are terribly inconsistent. One would not pay much attention to them because of the pace of the book but eventually you get to the end and realize that it doesn’t all add up. Speaking of which {plot spoiler} you get a sort of vague ending right at the climax of the book which is also a really cheap technique to establish a novel series although I suspect that was incidental. It has been established that I am not much for literary subtlety, perhaps to the point of being thick, but even keeping my standards in mind the ending is frustrating. One chapter you don’t know who is going to make it out alive and the next chapter everything is over. {end of spoilers for now} Other than the ending though, it’s somewhat hard to believe that Dexter would have been able to get away with killing as many people as he apparently has considering how obvious the ways he goes after some of them are. In particular when the story of his first kill target was related, it seems to me like it would have at least been obvious to his foster sister that he had killed that person.

So in conclusion I have to say that this is a shitty book, it’s almost impossible to imagine that latter books are better, but it is pretty interesting even though it only has a couple of quirks that make it stand out from similar fiction. To summarize the plot you have a specialized crime scene investigator who is a vigilante serial killer, in particular he seems to kill other serial killers which seems like a bit of a stretch to me, and in the course of the story he is trying to track down another killer who intrigues him but he’s not sure why that is or what he wants to do when he finds the killer. All of which are things that have been done a fair amount but not before in that exact combination, a serial killer involved with law enforcement is a pretty common story though. Then again it makes sense that if you’re investigating your own murders they would be easier to get away with. The main quirk of the story is that he was actually encouraged to become a serial killing vigilante by his foster father who was a decorated police detective that had apparently become extremely cynical by the time Dexter’s nature was apparent. And so it was decided that if there was no way to get around Dexter wanting to kill people, he could at least kill people “who deserve it”. The line of thought is common among serial killers as far as I know, although more often killers consider others worthy of death on the basis of personal affront as opposed to actual crimes against society. Another thing that’s interesting is how petty the police officers in the story are portrayed as being. It is very likely that Dexter would have been exposed or killed had it not been for this quality. I mentioned what seemed to me like the accuracy of representation of process (that being that no one just figures shit out, that the crimes are solved by running everything down systematically, the alliance of society against criminals, and “getting lucky”) among police officers in the works of Mo Hayder being interesting to me and this has a similar feel to it. Although there is not a whole lot of policing in this story there is a lot of “not policing” like when a detective brings in reporters to a crime scene that hasn’t been processed yet in an attempt to cover her ass after it becomes obvious that she has botched things by arresting the wrong person and therein closing the case.

Well anyway, so saying that the book is shit I plan to read the others when I get the chance because the story intrigues me even if the method of its delivery is less than ideal. I must say though that after my recent rash of books about the worst parts of humanity I’m getting a bit tired of them though. I can only read so many shitty books where fucked up things happen you know? Well I’ve got a pile of light novels and anime sitting around so maybe I’ll go to that for a little while… after the 2nd Dexter book anyway. One unexpected thing about the story is that it has inspired me again to write (whether I will or not) and create some music. There was a particular beat that was running through my head when reading the story and though I seem to recognize it as being from an old video game it is persistent enough that if I had or knew how to use a synthesizer I would bang it out. Until that time.

By the way it occurs to me that I haven’t gone through a day in my life in quite some time in which I didn’t at least hear about death. Whether it be from the news, an acquaintance, an event, or a work of fiction. Perhaps there are in fact no such days when there are so many people in the world. But in particular I’m not sure that I’ve known a day without violence for a long time now. Perhaps the violence is not serious, but almost every day I seem to check out some crime procedural or another. And perhaps that isn’t a good thing. I would speculate that it was the things that happened in my youth that made me so accepting of death to the point of being numb to the concept but my hobby of murder mystery fiction can’t help anything. I probably won’t take a break from “a death a day” though, if only because I’ve gone this far with it.

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