Categories
Narrated Reflected

You Must Choose Between Pain Or Drudgery

It’s been over six years since I last read my favorite book passage to anyone. This will be familiar to only a handful of people I still talk to – for the rest of you, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.


“I’ve got an end of the world story,” says Dag, finishing off the remainder of the iced tea, ice cubes long melted. He then takes off his shirt, revealing his somewhat ribby chest, lights another filter-tipped cigarette, and clears his throat in a nervous gesture.

The end of the world is a recurring motif in Dag’s bedtime stories, eschatological You-Are-There accounts of what it’s like to be Bombed, lovingly detailed, and told in deadpan voice. And so, with little more ado, he begins:

“Imagine you’re standing in line at a supermarket, say, the Vons supermarket at the corner of Sunset and Tahquitz — but theoretically it can be any supermarket anywhere — and you’re in just a vile mood because driving over you got into an argument with your best friend. The argument started over a road sign saying Deer Next 2 Miles and you said, ‘Oh, really, they expect us to believe there are any deer left?’ which made your best friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat looking through the box of cassette tapes, curl up their toes inside their running shoes. And you sense you’ve said something that’s struck a nerve and it was fun, so you pushed things further: ‘For that matter,’ you said, ‘you don’t see nearly as many birds these days as you used to, do you? And, you know what I heard the other day? That down in the Caribbean, there aren’t any shells left anywhere because the tourists took them all. And, haven’t you ever wondered when flying back from Europe, five miles over Greenland, that there’s just something, I don’t know — inverted — about shopping for cameras and scotch and cigarettes up in outer space?’

“Your friend then exploded, called you a real dink, and said, ‘Why the hell are you so negative all the time? Do you have to see something depressing in everything?’

“You said back, ‘Negative? Moi? I think realistic might be a better word. You mean to tell me we can drive all the way here from L.A. and see maybe ten thousand square miles of shopping malls, and you don’t have maybe just the weentsiest inkling that something, somewhere, has gone very very cuckoo?’

“The whole argument goes nowhere, of course. That sort of argument always does, and possibly you are accused of being unfashionably negative. The net result is you standing alone in Vons checkout line number three with marshmallows and briquettes for the evening barbecue, a stomach that’s quilted and acidic with pissed-offedness, and your best friend sitting out in the car, pointedly avoiding you and sulkily listening to big band music on the A.M. radio station that broadcasts ice rink music down valley from Cathedral City.

“But a part of you is also fascinated with the cart contents of the by-any-standards-obese man in line up ahead of you.

“My gosh, he’s got one of everything in there! Plastic magnums of diet colas, butterscotch-flavored microwave cake mixes complete with their own baking tins (ten minutes of convenience; ten million years in the Riverside County Municipal Sanitary Landfill), and gallons and gallons of bottled spaghetti sauce…why his whole family must be awfully constipated with a diet like that, and hey — isn’t that a goiter on his neck? ‘Gosh, the price of mlk is so cheap, these days,’ you say to yourself, noting a price tag on one of his bottles. You smell the sweet cherry odor of the gum rack and unread magazines, cheap and alluring.

“But suddenly there’s a power surge.

“The lights brighten, return to normal, dim, then die. Next to go is the Muzak, followed by a rising buzz of conversation similar to that in a movie theatre when a film snaps. Alredy people are heading to aisle seven to grab the candles.

“By the exit, an elderly shopper is peevishly trying to bash her cart through electric doors that won’t open. A staff member is trying to explain that the power is out. Through the other exit, propped open by a shopping cart, you see your best friend enter the store. ‘The radio died,’ your friend announces, ‘and look–‘ out the front windows you see score of vapor trails exiting the direction of the Twentynine Palms Marine base up the valley, ‘–something big’s going on.’

“That’s when the sirens begin, the worst sound in the world, and the sound you’ve dreaded all your life. It’s here: the soundtrack to hell — wailing, flaring, warbling, and unreal — collapsing and confusing both time and space the way an ex-smoker collapses time and space at night when they dream in horror that they find themselves smoking. But here the ex-smoker wakes up to find a lit cigarette in his hand and the horror is complete.

“The manager is heard through a bullhorn, asking shoppers to calmly vacate, but no one’s paying much attention. Carts are left in the aisles and the bodies flee, carrying and dropping looted roast beefs and bottles of Evian on the sidewalk outside. The parking lot is now about as civilized as a theme park’s bumper cars.

“But the fat man remains, as does the cashier, who is wispily blond, with a bony hillbilly nose and translucent white skin. They, your best friend, and you remain frozen, speechless, and your minds become the backlid NORAD world map of mythology — how clichè! And on it are the traced paths of fireballs, stealthily, inexorably passing over Baffin Island, the Aleutians, Labrador, the Azores, Lake Superior, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Puget Sound, Maine … it’s only a matter of moments now, isn’t it?

“I always promised myself,’ says the fat man, in a voice so normal as to cause the three of you to be jolted out of your thoughs, ‘that when this moment came, I would behave with some dignity in whatever time remains and so, Miss–‘ he says, turning to the clerk in particular, ‘let me please pay for my purchases.’ The clerk, in the absence of other choices, accepts his money.

“Then comes The Flash.

“‘Get down,’ you shout, but they continue their transaction, deer transfixed by headlights. ‘There’s no time!’ But your warning remains unheeded.

“And so, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet — the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below —

“And just before you’re pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines —

“And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward —

Just before all of this, your best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, ‘There. I’ve always wanted to do that.’

“And that’s that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you’ve been imagining since you were six, it’s all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn’t you say?”


Categories
Enjoyed Played Reflected

Happy 1 Year Birthday, VJ Army

[this is being crossposted on both my blog and the VJ Army forums]

A year ago today, I completed my most ambitious coding goal of my life – VJ Army. I had turned what was originally a single user score tracking script into a multi-user, competitive score site. It was (and still is) rather rough around the edges, but it certainly worked.

Since then, I have been pleasantly surprised again and again by what the site has become. I find myself fortunate on two fronts:

I’m shocked at how easily I’ve made my code adaptable and open to change. Yes, it’s rather messy to look at, but I really lucked out with much of the initial database design, the flexibility of the code, and a few of the algorithms I ended up writing make me look back and wonder what I had done that day to come up with such inspired coding. (There have also admittedly been portions of code where I wondered what I was smoking.) The code was adaptable enough that I could adapt it into another score site – for Pop’n Music – with minimal work.

But more shocking is how the site has restored my hope.

Understand the following: I’ve been in the Bemani community since the end of 2001. In the just over two years between when I started playing DDR and when I launched VJ Army, I had grown incredibly jaded and hateful of anyone who played music games. The drama, the flaming, the reputations that some sites had versus others…it was hellish, beyond anything I had dealt with in a gaming community before.

I had picked up Beatmania IIDX in early 2003 because I wanted to get away from the DDR players. IIDX at home can be a hugely isolating game, and at the time, it was just what I needed. The community at the time was – no offense to those involved, and I certainly joined this at times – a bunch of elitist assholes.

When I got requests from friends (John Stiles and Ryan Madeksho are the two most responsible for the requests) to make a multi-user site, I coded it with some trepidation. My fears that the site would turn into a massive penis-waving competition made me wonder over and over if I was doing the right thing.

I’m so very happy I was wrong. We’re currently 1,063 users strong – not all active, but far beyond what I expected to see. Over 25% of these are on the forums, which are amazingly trouble free and surprisingly useful.

And while all this was going on, something amazing happened in Japan. There had been a nearly two year hiatus of IIDX home releases – 9th Style had been released, and we were still playing 6th at home. But as the community started to rally, Konami started to listen. In the span of one year, we will have had three home releases, spanning from 7th Style to 9th Style. Konami has once again gotten serious about IIDX at home, and while I know it’s really not the case, I’d like to think we all had something to do with it.

Before I get to indivdual people I’d like to thank, I want to thank the user base as a whole:

If you’ve ever posted a score, thank you. You’ve helped to make the site what it is.

If you’ve ever posted a bug report, thank you. Without you, I’d never catch the holes in my code and never be able to catch them all myself.

If you’ve ever posted a feature request – even if I rejected it – thank you. The passion you all have to make the site grow is unbelievable.

If you’ve ever PMed me, or emailed me, or even IMed me just to thank me for the site, thank you. I really do appreciate it, and it keeps me going.

If you’ve ever bought something from the VJ Army store, thank you. You’ve helped to keep my gaming addiction in check, and my wallet (and my wife) thank you just as much as I do.

If you’ve ever referred a friend, or said kind things in public about VJA, thank you. This site couldn’t thrive without word of mouth.

Okay, now onto specific people:

To John “mafiaboss” Stiles – thank you for kicking my ass about the features. You’re always spot on with your requests, you’ve more than helped out with the coding (percentile sort, live grade adjustment), and it’s always a pleasure to watch your progress, even if it means you’ve passed my skill level in far less time. Cheers, my friend.

To Ryan “ryan2dx” Madeksho – you are truly a fantastic IIDX player, and without your help collecting note counts and difficulties, I couldn’t have the site as ready for each home release. Thank you for driving me to get the site built in the first place. …./

To Aaron “rmz” Ramsey – you are incredibly helpful between bug reports, helping out on the forums, and keeping people in check so I don’t have to repeat myself quite so much. I’m very happy to have you around.

To Malcolm “Reo” Cuffie – if I couldn’t bounce ideas off of you, I don’t know what I’d do. Thanks for listening.

To Random and Ransai – I know this isn’t related to VJA, but thanks for trusting me and believing in my coding. I promise, there’s still more to come.

To my wife, Katie – thank you for putting up with my shit. For those of you who don’t know, I frequently end up coding and managing the database at strange hours, and she tolerates it with the patience of a saint. Without her understanding and support, I sure as hell wouldn’t have the opportunity to work on the site as much as I have.

To Paul Kehrer – your donations of time, server space, bandwidth, and understanding are immeasurable. Thank you so goddamn much. gg sir.

Before I get onto the meat of the goodies today, here’s some fun with numbers.

Over the first year, VJ Army has received:

  • An average of 2.9 new users a day.
  • One new score entry – not including updates, just flat out new entries – every three minutes.
  • One new course score entry every two hours.
  • An average of 545 scores entered per song, across all difficulties.
  • An average of 36 scores per expert course, across all difficulties.
  • Top 5 Songs AAA’d on L7:
    1. 5.1.1 (319)
    2. Nothing Ain’t Stoppin’ Us(247)
    3. Burning Up For You (226)
    4. Comment Te Dire Adieu (178)
    5. Spica (162)
  • Top 5 Songs AAA’d on 7:
    1. 5.1.1 (312)
    2. Nothing Ain’t Stoppin’ Us (273)
    3. Burning Up For You (190)
    4. Comment Te Dire Adieu (182)
    5. Love Will… (161)
  • Top 5 Songs AAA’d on A:
    1. Don’t Stop! (103)
    2. i feel… (92)
    3. Burning Up For You (97)
    4. Comment Te Dire Adieu(97)
    5. World Wide Love (87)

Here’s to having another great year of IIDX.

Categories
Reflected

Christmas By The Terabyte

An alternative take on the blog-what-you-got-for-Xmas meme.

Assuming the following mappings to be true:

The average PS2 or Xbox DVD game has a capacity of 4.5 GB.

The average Gamecube game has a capacity of roughly 1.3 GB.

The average CD – be it audio or game – has a capacity of 700 MB.

The average movie DVD has a capacity of 9.0 GB.

The combined data capacity of my Christmas presents – just mine, not including Katie’s – is 288 GB. Now, I don’t know what percentage of that capacity is actually filled, but my impression is it’s close.

Ten years ago, the computer I was using (the infamous SE/30) had a 30 MB hard drive. Were I to segment all of the data I’ve acquired over the last 48 hours into 30 MB chunks, I would need 9,600 Mac SE/30s to contain it all.

Just a wee bit frightening.