I realized, with the release of Halo 2, that part of my life’s ending. I’m not upgrading to Vista – I wrote about it earlier, but the DRM we-own-your-machine-you-just-lease-it is finally too onerous for me, and I’m calling it quits (side note: Google’s acquisition of Feedburner made me realize exactly how much data Google now has available to it, and it scared me).

I started playing games on PCs back when I had to play Adventure, or type them in from the back of magazines, and I’d inevitably typo on some DATA statement and fubar the whole thing. I could talk your ear off about my favorite games and what they meant, why they were awesome, and how they influenced games that came after them (more so than I could for books, say, which I took a bunch of college courses on).

Now that’s it. It feels, weirdly, like I’ve decided never to watch television again, or read a book. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is quite likely to be the last boxed game I buy, with stuff off Steam — the Half-Life episodes and Portal (Bring me Portallll!!) until they go Vista-only, too.

I can’t explain why I’ve been willing to put up with DRM on my games (as long as it’s not Starforce or particularly horrible) and even the ridiculous Windows Genuine Advantage on XP but drew the line at Vista’s hobbling. And I’m not confident that I won’t eventually be forced onto a disagreeable platform. But there it is: it started with Adventure and other text games, and this is where the end comes.

I’m sad.

I was browsing a tech site today doing research, and noted that someone was going back through old articles and spamming the crap out of them (for adult friend finder). I thought “hey, I’ve got a second, I’ll report that –” I hit the handy button, and I was presented with a “Sign up for your free membership!” screen — there was no way to report abuse on the site without registering, and registering meant giving up a huge amount of personal information and opting out of newsletters. I gave up.

Enjoy your defacement, guys.

I’ve been reading Pauline Kael’s “For Keeps” which is over a thousand pages of her movie criticism. I don’t agree with Kael a lot, but her work always makes me think. I love her book on Citizen Kane, which is included here. Last night, I was reading through and caught this sentence, on how Mankiewicz, who wrote the film, used the script to take apart not just Hearst but also Orson Welles:

One can sometimes hurt one’s enemies, but that’s nothing compared to what one can do to one’s friends.

About a month ago, I was amazingly sick for a long time, and I found myself in a strange situation where I understood that I was operating at some fraction of normal intelligence, sick, with people disagreeing with me. My hazy plan, despite repeatedly feeling light-headed, was to stumble back on a ferry, get to Seattle, reconsider a plan of action, most likely taking a bus to get home.

People around me, though, strenuously disagreed, and felt I should go to the hospital, and I had to make a really strange decision: am I thinking straight? Trying to make that decision, of course, meant a contradiction, namely:
– if yes, then my original plan’s entirely valid
– if no, then my original plan’s a bad idea, but then how can I be trusted to evaluate whether I’m thinking straight or not?

I decided to stop thinking about that and take advice, which meant I went to the hospital for a while, felt a lot better, and went home.

I had a similar experience deciding to go to Clarion West this June. I didn’t really expect to get in, and when they called, I had a whole set of problems:
– no money
– accepting meant I had ~two months and then would be gone for six weeks, so no one in their right mind would hire me
– standard problems being away for six weeks

I didn’t know what to do for a while, and I agonized over whether I should go or not, whether it would be awesome or not, if I could go in future years, if it would be worth the sacrifice of taking a promising job, and so on. I was looking, a little bit, for a set of justifications for not going.

In the end, what swayed me was other people: when I talked to my friends about it, they told me to go and volunteered to loan me the money. Once, I think I might have shrugged it off, but when a lot of the people who really knew me lined up for it had the same reaction, I had to step back and think “Am I really acting rationally, or am I so tied up in the situation that I’m unable to look at the whole?”

Once I made the decision, I feel great about it, even though it meant walking away from job possibilities I was really interested in. And I don’t think, if I hadn’t placed my trust in the judgment of a bunch of people I didn’t know when I was really sick, that I’d have so quickly said “as conflicted as I am, the universal view of others is to go, and to do what I have to do to go, so I’m going to take that course”. It’s been a strangely-won piece of wisdom.

Not that I’m going to let reddit users vote up or down on my meal choices.

I run this and the Cheater’s Guide blog open, which means anyone can swing by and say whatever, but they’re moderated, the other more heavily than this one, and I’ve got the built-in spam comment thing on. They catch ridiculous amounts of spam. I can’t even believe how much. And I haven’t seen a false positive on either blog yet, and I’m reasonably diligent about scanning for them.

So, here’s the weird thing. At USSM we use registration, which means you have to provide an email address and get signed up, ensuring at least that there’s some fairly low bar for users to leave comments. Since we went to registration, I’ve seen only a few dozen spam comments, almost all of those caught by content filters for keywords (or secondary criteria I set up).

I cranked Akismet up a while ago there, and its false positive rate in that environment is 100%. Every comment it has identified as spam was an actual message. None of them particularly worth keeping, sure, but all of them were real comments.

It’s interesting to me that given a target-rich environment in which spammers dominate, Akismet absolutely shines, but in a target-poor environment with no spam, it seems like it gets bored and starts picking off passer-by.