Web Trickery

So I took a few minutes to learn how to use Dreamhost‘s built-in stats package to see who’s hitting my Web site where. (I’ve also been using StatCounter for this, but naturally my hosting service can provide a much more complete picture.)

Having done that, I noticed that several of my images are being hotlinked from other sites. While I’m not really anywhere close to using my bandwidth allocation (not within an order of magnitude – maybe two), hotlinking is just obnoxious on principle. So I took a few more minutes to learn how to block hotlinks.

Useful Web trickery, all learned in just a few minutes. (Dreamhost has a really useful Wiki for learning these things.)

I wonder what else I ought to learn in this space?

(I should probably see about blocking hotlinks to my old site, too.)

WMDs

A rundown of our day playing a Worst Magic Deck tournament.

That’s “WMDs” as in “Worst Magic Decks”. This is another geeky MTG post, so if you’re not interested in such things, move along. 🙂

Over the weekend Subrata and I went over to the house of our friends Ziggy and Laurie to participate in a little informal Worst Magic Deck tournament. The idea is to construct a 75-card Magic deck which is worse than all of the others at the tournament. The deck construction rules required a 75-card deck with exactly 30 lands, at least 20 creatures, a total power of all non-defender creatures of at least 40, and at least 10 direct-damage cards, as well as requirements about being able to play all the cards in the deck using basic lands, as well as a few other constraints. This still left a lot of wiggle room, however.

While putting together my deck, I ended up setting certain ground rules for myself: No creatures with evasion (flying, protection, shadow); no creatures with repeatable effects (especially direct-damage effects, but also tap/untap effects); creatures should be expensive, but since I expected games would go on a long time this shouldn’t be a primary requirement; be careful with effects which affect all players, since they might produce a win in certain circumstances, even if they’re generally not useful; and fill out the deck with completely useless cards. (Cards which involved snow-covered lands from Ice Age were particularly amusing.)

Despite applying some similar principles, Subrata and I ended up with rather different decks: His creature power was tied up in a few large-but-restricted creatures (Force of Savagery, Leviathan, Goblin Mutant, Orgg, etc.), filling out the balance of his creatures with walls. I also had a Force of Savagery, but I filled out my remaining creatures with weenies (1/1s, 2/1s, 3/1s) and a Norin the Wary. The more I think about it, the more I feel the two approaches are almost equal: My deck is more likely to get out useful attackers, but Subrata’s deck’s walls are also easy to get out, and are good blockers. I think over the long haul my deck is likely to be slightly worse, but only slightly.

Subrata and I both misunderstood that you only need 30 lands, not 30 basic lands; you only need as many basic lands as are needed to cast all your spells. So we could have downgraded our decks a bit that way.

The structure of the tournament is that each of us played with or against our own decks, only the other peoples’ decks. We would get a point whenever we personally won a game, or whenever our deck lost a game.

My first game lasted about an hour, as I played Ziggy’s deck against Subrata’s, and managed to take out both of the big threats in Subrata’s deck early, and then bided my time until I drew cards I could win with. Laurie, my opponent, eventually ran out of cards, although by that point I had two other tricks in the works that would have finished her off. (Subrata and I also both rigged our decks so they’d be more likely to run out of cards first, which is a losing condition in Magic. He was more aggressive about it then I was, but on the other hand you could choose not to use the spells in his deck which ripped through your library, whereas I took the subtle approach of using creatures with cantrips. I suspect my approach would be slightly more effective in the long run, but the difference is probably too small to be worth arguing about.

The best game I played was against Subrata, playing Laurie’s deck against Ziggy’s. Subrata’s initial draw included an Ankh of Misha, a Winter Orb, and a Sheltered Valley, with a Torture Chamber not far behind. Subrata said it felt like playing a standard control deck. (I had rejected both the Ankh and the Orb from my own deck for exactly this sort of reason.) This shut me down for a while, but eventually I was able to force Subrata to use the Chamber a few times to kill some of my creatures, and then I played a 4/4 flyer (with a significant but not insurmountable drawback) which managed to do just enough damage to finish him off – with me at 3 life. Subrata observed that his initial draw gave him too many options, and he played them all, and they interfered with each other just enough to let me squeak past for the win. But man, it was close!

I think both Subrata and I had weaker decks than either Laurie or Ziggy, although they were all pretty bad. When our decks faced off, my deck beat Subrata’s by one turn, because Laurie drew the right card at the right time to finish off Ziggy. That notwithstanding, I ended up winning the match, since I won 2 games and my deck lost 2 games. People also found my deck especially amusing, as I abused the format to render several cards (such as Extirpate, an otherwise really nifty card) entirely useless.

I thought the WMDs were an interesting novelty, but as I’d predicted, they made for a lot of long games without a lot of variation. I think if I were to run my own such tournament, I’d go with the standard 60 cards rather than 75, just to speed things up a little. I don’t know that I’ll feel the need to play this format again anytime soon, but it was an interesting mental exercise the one time. (And we had a good afternoon hanging out with friends and seeing their cool house.)

Heroes: Season One

Brief thoughts on the wrap-up of the first season of the TV series Heroes.

Heroes wrapped up its first season tonight. I still have basically the same criticisms that I had early in its run: It’s very slow, the writing is very inconsistent, and the characters are erratic.

I feel somewhat unhappy with the resolution of the “blowing up New York” storyline. It was never convincing to me that the culprit would be either Sylar (since he obviously had to be stopped somehow) or Peter (why would he lose control of his powers in the first place? And why would he stick around in New York rather than flying away?). But I think the writers backed themselves into a corner there.

The series’ protagonist has always been Hiro, I think, and his arc comes to a satisfying conclusion. His main challenger, Mohinder, spent just about the whole season with almost nothing to do, which is too bad since Sendhil Ramamurthy is one of the stronger actors on the show. But overall the season ended up being rather muddled from a storytelling standpoint, more soap opera than adventure.

So Heroes rates as “okay” television, which – to be honest – puts it ahead of most television. (At least it’s not Yet Another Police Procedural. Heck, even House is basically Yet Another Police Proecedural, in that it’s got exactly the same structure, just with medicine instead of law.) It doesn’t look like NBC will take long to stretch it too thin, as Heroes: Origins is already slated for the fall. Sheesh.

Anyway, now I can spend the summer catching up on Veronica Mars and/or Battlestar Galactica. Although what I really want is to just bludgeon my way through the whole series of Justice League Unlimited. Unfortunately, most of it isn’t available on DVD yet.

Andrew Sean Greer: The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Review of the novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer.

I knew by page three that I wasn’t going to like this book.

The tip-off was that the prose was just too purple for my tastes: It was difficult to slog through the raw verbiage, and there were too many digressions and embellishments. The story seemed too enamored of its narrative voice, and not enamored enough with, well, its story.

The story is a simple conceit: Max Tivoli was born in 1870 in San Francisco, but as an infant his body was 72 years old. Although born the size of an infant, he grew quickly, and as a teenager looked like a man of about 60, his body aging backwards as his mind aged forward. At age 6 he meets his lifelong friend, Hughie, and at age 17 he meets the love of his life, Alice. But while Hughie accepts Max for who he is, Alice cannot: He doesn’t tell her. Instead he hides his condition from almost everyone (save for Hughie and a select few who figure it out themselves), and attempts to woo Alice at three different points in their lives.

The story is narrated by Max when he’s 60 years old, in 1930, and appears to be a 12-year-old boy. He’s living with another boy, Sammy, and Sammy’s mother, and reminisces in detail. But, really, not enough detail: The book is really only about Max and his obsession with Alice, even though their only common feature is that they were both born to relatively high-class families which were brought low. But Max seems to have no interests, no hobbies, not really any ambitions beyond being with Alice.

The book’s conceit, Max aging backwards, seems almost superfluous: Other than the period in 1930, his earlier exploits could have been the adventures of any normal man dealing badly with unrequited love. For all his eloquence of tongue, Max is not introspective, he provides little true insight into such an unusual life as his condition must create. He’s a shallow thinker, of the worst sort, really: He spends great amounts of time and energy describing tedium.

And as for that purple prose: It seems especially inappropriate for its narrator, who’s not very well educated. It makes him seem like a poseur. And ultimately Max is just not a likeable figure, and he spends so much time in self-pity that it’s difficult to actually pity him. Alice is no better, although she’s slightly better rounded; but she’s no less self-absorbed and disagreeable.

Author Greer does have a couple of clever turns of plot, mainly when Max learns some hard truths about each Hughie and Alice near the end. But rather than tragic, it all just feels rather tiresome. It seems like Max Tivoli gets wrong everything The Time Traveler’s Wife gets right: It’s not romantic, its characters are hard to root for, Max’s condition isn’t especially interesting, and the tragedy of the story left me simply shrugging. I went back and re-read passages of Time Traveler several times after finishing it; I had no such compulsion for Max Tivoli.

Maybe Greer was going for something that simply eludes me. But there just wasn’t much here for me to enjoy, and consequently, not much for me to learn from. It was eloquent wordsmithing in the service of a slight story. A pity.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 16 May 2007.

  • Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis #52, by Tad Williams & Shawn McManus (DC)
  • Countdown #50 of 51 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, J. Calafiore & Mark McKenna (DC)
  • Ex Machina #28, by Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark (DC/Wildstorm)
  • Fables #61, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
  • Justice League of America #9, by Brad Meltzer & Ed Benes (DC)
  • World War Hulk: Prologue #1, by Peter David, Al Rio, Lee Weeks, Sean Phillips, and others (Marvel)
  • Artesia Afire HC vol 3, by Mark Smylie (ASP)
  • Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 HC vol 1, by David Petersen (ASP)
  • B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls #3 of 5, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis (Dark Horse)
  • Hero by Night #3 of 4, by D.J. Coffman & Jason Embury (Platinum)

Shawn McManus does his own inking in this month’s Aquaman, and the art is looking better. Still not quite the McManus style I know and love, but still. I think my biggest gripe about the book at this point is that Aquaman is getting lost in his own book amongst the large cast, and he’s being treated as a kid besides. Considering this Aquaman has been around for over a year now, and Kurt Busiek wrote him as a pretty strong character, I would like Williams to bring him to the fore and show that he can really carry the book.

Speaking of artists, I probably shouldn’t be as hard on guys like Ed Benes as I am, artists who seem to be strongly influenced by the Jim Lee/Rob Liefeld arm of the Image Comics style. While many details of his style are not to my taste, the guy does have some talent: In JLA #9, he not only draws a detailed panorama of gorillas riding giant lizards (and how can you not love a comic featuring such a scene?), but he can show some emotional range, as he does in a scene between Red Arrow and Power Girl.

The World War Hulk prologue is not really necessary, so I recommend you save your money for the real thing. Its main virtue is some nice artwork.

Mark Smylie’s Archaia Studios Press has become a nice little cottage industry over the last few years, and it releases two hardcover collections this week. ASP’s hardcovers are of very high quality (even the cover boards have illustrations, not just the dustjacket!), and they’re affordably priced at $24.95 – which for a comic book hardcover ain’t bad. I suspect ASP is targeting selling these in mainstream bookstores, and I have heard that bookstores refuse to stock fiction hardcovers priced about $25 (although I can’t find a link to support this). Consequently, I wonder whether ASP is making money on these hardcovers, or simply paving the way for the paperbacks?

Anyway. I got on-board with Artesia after its first volume had finished, and I was impressed with the sophisticated subject matter (which, I should stress, is not for children), and especially Smylie’s well-choreographed layouts and lovingly-drawn panels. Two more volumes have taken the shine off the series for me, as the cast of characters is huge and Smylie doesn’t make their faces sufficiently different for me to be able to keep track of them all. The story is also moving along at a fairly slow pace, and it’s not clear where it’s all going. Moreover, most of the characters – including the title character – are not really very likeable. These points make it difficult for me to stay engaged and to appreciate the series’ good points. Perhaps I need to go back and re-read all three volumes in a chunk and see if I’m missing something, or if the series really is just missing me. (A summary of Artesia here.)

On the flip side, Mouse Guard was a fun little series about the world of mice and their little medieval society. The art is simple yet effective, and it’s just good escapism. I hear a sequel series will start up soon.

Hero by Night #3 makes me wonder whether we should declare a moratorium on origin stories in superhero comics: Its first two issues concerned how its protagonist found the ring which gives him super powers, but the story only really gets moving in #3 when he starts using them and confronting the pros and cons of doing so. Maybe more comics just need to start in medias res and not from the very beginning. Let’s get straight to the excitement!

Tea

My damn whatever-this-illness-is is still lingering around. Other than making me really tired on Thursday-to-Sunday, it’s given my throat that thick, kind of clogged feeling. It doesn’t really hurt, but it’s uncomfortable. Fortunately it’s not obstructing my breathing or swallowing, it’s just annoying.

Fortunately, tea seems to help. Even more fortunately, I learned yesterday that tea at the coffee bar at work is free! Pretty nifty. It’s even Numi Tea, which is pretty yummy. So now I can try out all their various flavors for free!

The downside to drinking tea in the afternoon rather than my usual mocha is that I’m that much hungrier come dinnertime. Which I shouldn’t complain about, because I don’t really need the 400 calories (or however many) those mochas come with, anyway.

I’m hoping my throat is all better by tomorrow, though. It’s a little better every day, but I wish it would finish healing up.

My Theoretical Vacation to England

I wrote over in LiveJournal (since that’s where most of my friends relevant to the subject hang out) that I won’t be going to WisCon this year. And in addition to not seeing my Madison friends, I’m bummed that I won’t get to see my British friends, whom I don’t really have much hope of ever seeing aside from at WisCon, until and unless I go on my Theoretical Vacation to England.

Naturally, the TVtE seems like a good topic for a journal entry.

I’ve been to England twice before, once with each of my parents, back in the mid-1980s. I had a terrific time, I loved the Underground, loved the parks in London, loved the comic book stores in London, loved what I saw of the British Museum, and was mostly bored silly at the Tower of London and the couple of castles we went to. This was a peculiar time in my life (my mid-teens) to go travelling, as I was starting to become a little more interested in the world around me on its own terms, but I was still very much wrapped up in my own hobbies (I spent a bunch of time perusing rules books for the Champions role-playing game, for instance). In other words, as much as I enjoyed it, I surely didn’t get nearly as much out of it as I could have.

One of the biggest disappointments for me was Stonehenge, which was roped off so you couldn’t get within, oh, 50 feet (17 meters) of it. Actually I have no idea what the actual distance was, but it was far enough that I just found it an unrewarding experience. Of course, it’s roped off because tourists had been chipping little bits off the stones for years as souvenirs, thus the stones were gradually eroding. It makes sense, but I was still disappointed.

Some years later I learned that there are actually hundreds of stone circles throughout England, and many of them, although local landmarks, don’t have the celebrity of Stonehenge. But many of them are interesting and cool in their individual ways.

So for some years now I’ve had the notion of making a two-week trip to England, and spending the first week (or maybe slightly less) in London, seeing the sights there, and then renting a car and driving around the countryside seeing various stone circles, as well as the towns and landscape of England.

If this sounds like a half-baked plan, well, you’re exactly right: I’ve never done any research as to where the other circles are, which ones I should visit, how easy they are to reach, whether it’s easy to find sleeping space nearby, or for that matter how easy it would be to rent a car in England. Heck, 7 or 8 or 9 days might not be enough time to make such an expedition worthwhile. But I figure until I have even a half-formed idea of when I (and Debbi!) might go on this trip, it doesn’t make sense to spend a whole lot of time working out the details. I’m hoping it’s not a completely infeasible idea, though.

It’d be fun to see my British friends in their native habitat, too!

I’m not much of a traveller, though, so I don’t know when I might try to make this trip a reality. Debbi and I still haven’t gotten back to Hawaii in nearly four years since our first trip. I admit it: I’m a stay-at-home kind of guy. I worry about leaving the cats when we go away, I worry about the flight going wrong, or some government-related stupidity that might leave me (or maybe just my laptop) stranded in a far-away land for some unknown period of time.

But, maybe someday. I’m probably not going to stay here forever. After all, for all my sluggishness, I’ve never stayed anywhere else forever, either…

Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

Review of the novel The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven.

The sequel to Ringworld was published a decade after the original, and from Niven’s introduction it sounds like it was inspired by a desire to shore up some of the scientific deficiencies in the original, such as the implausibility that the Ringworld would hold its position about its star without drifting away or collapsing upon it.

On the one hand, I’m not sure Niven should have bothered: No science fiction novel is going to be perfect, even if (maybe especially if) it’s meticulously worked out, and the fact that Ringworld sparked such interest and criticism I think helps make it a worthy novel on its own. Better to take the lessons learned and put them into a new novel, rather than trying to “fix” the earlier work.

On the other hand, Niven left a bunch of backstory out of Ringworld, and the sequel afforded him the opportunity to revisit some issues, such as who built the thing.

In the novel, the deposed leader of the Piersen’s Puppeteers, the Hindmost, wishes to find a matter transmuter whose existence was deduced by the original Ringworld expedition, and to this end he kidnaps Louis Wu and Speaker-to-Animals (who has earned his own name, Chmee) and brings them back to the Ringworld. Once there, they discover that the Ringworld has drifted away from the orbit of its star, and is less than two years from striking its primary and being destroyed. Louis has an idea who built the thing, and wonders why they didn’t provide for this possibility. Louis has also spent several years as an addict of electrical current fed directly to his brain, and feels he has a lot to atone for, and so he embarks on efforts to improve the lot of various cultures they encounter while on the Ringworld, even as they both try to save the world, and seek out the matter transmuter (which Louis is certain does not actually exist).

Engineers is as much a travelogue as its predecessor, but it feels like it drags on even longer. While much of the purpose of this is to give Louis a sense of the population of the Ringworld in order to set up a hard choice he has to make at the end, it just feels like more of the same. I did appreciate that the novel finally tackles head-on the nature of the Ringworld’s builders, and we even get a sense of what they were like, in an oblique manner. But overall the novel doesn’t have the sense of grandeur or the clever ending of Ringworld, and of necessity it completely avoids the humanity-changing implications of the conclusion of that novel. Instead it’s a continuation of the stories of Louis Wu and Chmee.

But despite the scope implied by Known Space, The Ringworld Engineers seems claustrophobic, exploring old venues and closing doors rather than opening them, and consequently it’s just not as exciting as the first book. It’s not entirely redundant, but it is disappointing. Ultimately, I think Niven would have been better off leaving the Ringworld only as explored as the first novel depicted.

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