I Cast Magic Missle

Playing on Purpose

2006-05-17T08:28:00.000-04:00

The other day I had a rather interesting revelation about the last 10 years of my RPG experiences. While I can't pinpoint the exact moment or actual play in which it happened, I've long felt a deep disatifaction with role-playing games. Imagine, if you will, a culture in which the actual play of these games is a functional substitute for friendship. Do you see what I have been self-inflicting for so many years?

The vast majaority of my time spent with people I like has been in boring, repititive activities. It's trying to balance a egnuine desire to 1) have fun playing these games, and 2) spend time with friends with the basic problem that the playing is not fun. It's not fun because it's dull. I had this glimpse that these games were addictive, emotionally immersive, and thrilling. I had a notion that given the right people and the right shared understanding, you could get that all and more.

I've stopped attending the "game night" I helped to put together and sustain over the last 5 years. In reality, I'm not sure "game night" is accurate - little gaming occurs. It's more of a "hang out, watch movies night". This is even more boring than before. While I do appreciate my friends, I do not enjoy what they enjoy as leisure, it seems. I've tried suggesting alternative activities - especially going out of doors - and so far, there is little or no reception to this. I have a hard time getting any of them to interact with me outside of this venue. This is very frustrating.

I understand the need for an identity and interest separate from my wife or my son. I understand the need to socialize with my peers. I understand just hanging out just to hang out and relax. But, ultimately, my time is limited. I have a future to plan for. I have goals that cannot be met by hanging out. My son will only be 4 years old for a little while. I want to taste the juice of adventure gaming now and without endless shopping trips, cliched tavern dialogue, or bullshit GM-player characters.

If I begin to assemble another gaming group, I will purposefully lay down the expectation that I want to Play on Purpose. I don't want to play just because we're all there, and this just happens to be what's available. I want to play because we all want to play this game.

Does Anarchy Require Utopian Behavior?

2006-04-12T10:05:00.000-04:00

This morning the wife and I were listening to NPR coverage of the demonstrations against the immigration bills passed by the House. She asked me what I thought about the situation, given my political beliefs.

I mentioned that I didn't think it was up to anyone but an employer and an employee if they agreed to come to terms ("creating a job") and how much that job paid. It's too bad if some people didn't like the fact that someone else was willing to work "their" job for less money. If some one was willing to rent or sell housing to these people (all those "illegals"), then so be it. That was also none of my business.

My only objection was any additional burden that I, as someone who the government extorts money from in the form of taxes, would incur for schools, hospitals, roads, and so on. My solution of course, is to remove the government completely from these servives, but that's another path I'm not going to go down at this moment.

The wife again objected to my "free for all" attitude, suggesting that would only work in a Utopian society. She didn't explain why she thought this. It's not clear to me why allowing people to freely negotiate between themselves would require anything but the rawest of self-centered drives. These dozens of negotiations are things we all do, every day, with other decision-making people without the slightest bit of Utopian sparkle in our eyes.

I hear this many many times: people cannot freely operate with a government or the state "guiding" the process unless they are all saints or in some way divinely guided for the best possible decisions for all concerned.

Anarchy is not chaos. It is simply life without the State. People are free to choose government, for themselves, and not for others. The State is a monopoly, enforced by violence, on government for a given area. Anarchy is the freedom to choose any agent to help arbitrate agreements and disagreements, including the choice not to rely on any agency what so ever.

I don't see the need to keep track of immigrants. Clearly, they want to come here because unlike Mexico, you don't need to bribe the police not to rob your house and even at half the minumum wage, it beats anything they can get at home.

I think most people are fightened by the influx of people who look different, have different cultural values, and speak a different language. We'd better get used to it: we can no better hold out people driven my the desire for a better life than the Soviets could hold people in.

In way, it's also fair: the United States stole what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Nevada from Mexico in 1848. Maybe it's time we recognize this ancient theft, and not be so uptight about a few Mexican flags.

National Socialist Republicans

2006-03-31T06:16:00.000-05:00

Karl Marx must be a confused spirit these days. Tired of rolling in his grave, he has instead possessed Republicans from coast to coast.

From this CNN article: about a GOP revolt on immigration bills now being debated by Congress:

[Rep. Steve King of Iowa] analyzed the issue in class terms.

"The elite class in America is becoming a ruling class and they've made enough money by hiring cheap illegal labor that they think they also have some kind of a right to cheap servants to manicure their nails and their lawn, for example.

"So this ruling class, this new ruling class of America, is expanding a servant class in America at the expense of the middle class of America, the blue collar of America that used to be able to punch a time clock, buy a modest house and raise their families. ... Those young people are cut out of this process."

I've never heard of a Republican in modern times become so class conscious. We live in strange times in which the GOP minions are criticizing the "new ruling class." But this is the Party of Lincoln - a part of war, corporate welfare, and - increasingly - of socialist ideals.

Conversion to a Anarcho-Capitalist

2006-02-07T09:01:00.000-05:00

I could have just as easily labelled this entry "Conversion to a Conservative." Many of my friends have wondered what happened to me over the last year and a half.

In reality nothing has happened to me. The changes have all been internal. The changes have occured in my head - my way of looking at the same events are now different. No cosmic rays altered my brain. I examined my thinking, and conciously changed my outlook.

I various points in my life I have held different belief systems to be true. Some of the elements of these beliefs never varied (I've always believed in personal privacy and freedom of choice). Other elements are completely opposed (from a neo-socialist to an anarcho-capitalist).

How did this happen?

I can recall one afternoon at work, researching articles on software development employment trends. Report after report mentioned that as a whole software development was going to dissappear in the United States. Foreign workers, especially impoverished Asians, would do the rote programming work for a fraction of the cost of an American programmer.

I asked myself what to do about this dilemna. Personally, I was quite upset. It seemed so unfair - all the years of school and the money spent on tuition down the drain. I often wondered if I would be better off never studying computer science. The industry seemed so bright and full of riches from 1998 to 2001.

By the fall of 2002 I had experienced first hand the .com boom and bust. My (very) well paid position at a semiconductor design company was liquidated while the CEO jumped the sinking ship for a new VP level job at another company. Scores of my coworkers would out of work months. I know of a few others who have never returned.

On the evening news I saw many stories about the growing trend of offshoring. That is, labor in other countries like India and China were nominally cheaper than the labor in the United States. In many cases the savings were so vast that any and all jobs that could be sent overseass were. As if the drought of technology jobs wasn't bad enough, now these darned little brown people were taking our jobs.

I was upset and angry. I just spent the last few years and a no small amount of money educating myself at graduate school for just this field of work. Now, no matter what, a gigantic downward shift in wages was in the works. In some cases, it didn't matter how little you would work for, there simply were no willing employers taking on new technology workers. It seemed like the Dark Times were nigh.

The political rhetoric was also heating up. The parties were jostling for the pathetic sliver of concerned voters for the upcoming Presidential election. On the one hand, the sitting Presdient insisted that we must train the displaced textile workers for the "knowledge" jobs of the future, and on the other I was aware that those same jobs were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape.

One of the solutions offered was a strong system of taxes and tariffs designed to punish companies for offshoring or for the importation of foreign built goods (like software or hardware). Surely, a tariff would make foreign goods more expensive and give domestic firms an advantage. And the taxes would punish companies that sought cheaper labor anywhere but in the United States. I wondered if this was a good idea. I seemed like a good idea.

I've always questioned authority. I had to examine the ideas for myself, on my own time, and verify them as good or bad.

Certainly if I questioned the wisdom of these measures, I could validate them with reason and facts, and come away with a solid understanding of the issues. I would be well armed to convince my family and friends (and appointed leaders) to enforce these ideas.

I began to research why anyone in their right mind would not agree to the idea that placing limits on the movement of jobs would be a good idea. If I could see the arguments against them, I could find their weaknesses, expose them, and further strengthen my convictions.

I began to search Google for anything having to do with "free trade", "market", "prices", and "labor". I was overwhelmed by the amount of opinion and theory available.

Slowly but surely, I felt the outlines of a fundamental crevasse in the explanations. On one side of this gap was the realm of Keynes and Marx, and on the other Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises. Where the former advocated government as a means to channel behavior according to the wishes of those in power by force of arms, the latter advocated a voluntary system of mutually beneficial exchange of value. One side said that my life was not my own and the other said that my life was mine alone.

And of course, there is a huge range of philosophies between the two - lots of "isms", codes, creeds, cape fetishes, and humbug.

At first I was pretty shocked by what I was reading. It was difficult to reexamine the lifetime of economic conceptions and ultimately discard them for something else. The more I read, and the more I questioned, the more I abandoned my previous political identity.

For some of my friends, this change was not all that unexpected. I have held some radical opinions in the past, and I suspect I will continue to do so into the future. For other people my transformation is very scary to them. They no longer really can rely on "safe" assumptions about me. Sometimes it's difficult for them to talk to me.

But I don't think that it is. I try to live by a couple of simple rules - I don't expect other people to do or act in any way that I couldn't myself, and I don't try to make other people's business my own. I perfectly happy to live my own life, and let other people do the same. It doesn't bother me if someone chooses to have bible study in their house on Sunday, or if drink beer and play indoor vollyball.

This is hardly what we'd recognize as a Conservative viewpoint these days. Today's conservative is in the home and on our backs, trying to monitor our private lives and siphon money for one government adventure or another. Whereas int he 1960s they did it in the name of Anti-Communism, today they do it for, well, whatever government backed War On Whatever they have running.

This also invalidates my membership in the great Liberal collective, I suppose. I distrust the government. I do not consider the never ending cyle of crisis and government growth to be a good thing. I believe the choices of a billion consumers to be better than the wisdom of any central planner. I trust that people will choose best for themselves.

I can't do any justice to the host of anarcho-capitalist thought and works. I encourage anyone who is interested (or enraged) to examine, without prejudice and with charitable reading, the concepts. Kill your TV. Make up your own mind.

Journey to Cliche Canyon

2006-01-20T21:17:00.000-05:00

While I have decided to not play in games out of social obligation as opposed to what I truly find interesting and fun, I did return to Game Night. I setup a laptop in the adjacent room and worked on Lincoln's War. At the same time I was able to listen in. Occasionally people would filter out and either take a moment for a phone call, get the next drink, or pull the traditional Game Night frozen pizza from the oven.

I noticed many things, almost all of them techniques, that irritated and amused me. The use of these techniques and the bizzare fetish of using them, no matter what, is the at the core of my disatisfaction with role playing games as we have come to know.

I should first mention that these techniques are ones that have been used over and over again, for years and years. I don't think they are unique to what happened that night. If anything, they are used because it's part of gamer culture: "We've always done it this way, so it must be the only right way to do it."

And I realized, in preparing to write about this experience, that I am just as guilty in my previous quests for the Right Way to role play. I have experimented off and on for many years to perfect my abilities in running a game. The problem was that I was not having fun. Surely fu was just around the corner if I only did X or Y without understanding what I actually enjoyed.

It occured to me that it was not the "unrelated" chit chat around the table that made or broke an evening of role playing. I noticed that the amount of unrelated talk was almost irrelevant to the amount of fun I had in the evening. Becoming stressed about the amount of distractions was probably the source of anxiety, not the distractions themselves.

Of course, I was convinced that if everyone just put as much passion and energy into the game as I thought they should, everything would be fine. The problem was that everyone wasn't going to be as passionate about what was happening. The games were essentially contrived injections of things the characters should have cared about. But as we all know, characters do not exist - only players do.

The more I can see a game focusing on player priorities the more fun I have. It helps to have rules that reinforce this - why worry about rules that do not add anything to your moments of play? Eject needless rules - you aren't gonna need them.

What I observed could also fall into "20 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours of play". There was a substantial amount of actitivity that almost nothing to do with what the game was about - ordering beer at a tavern, sussing out that evening's mission from the chast of pre-programmed NPCs, bartering in a diceless (and therefore, social intimidation laden) manner with these NPCs, negotiating with the GM about the equipment and dangers of climbing a wall, and so on. Almost in every case, the outcome was dependent on the ability of the player to convince the GM that the outcome was more likely than not.

There is one player in particular, David, who is very good at negotiating these sorts of events. I can pretty much count on him making an argument to "game" the system. It's not that this is bad, or makes David evil. I wish that this sort of behavior could be harnessed in a way that is congruent with the rules.

Now, I did talk to the person running the game later. And his take was that these sorts of things were just the way things were done. The group expected it because it "this is fun." And you know, it may be, for them. I just don't understand it.

Character Development

2006-01-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

My friend clarified that he mean "character development over time" to mean exploring the fictional person and decisions, not the application of game mechanics (like experience points). I'm surprised - I really thought it was the other way around.

I really don't know of a game that makes that part of the reward cycle measurable. If such a game existed, what would it look like?

Another Cherished Myth About Lincoln is Demolished

2006-01-10T08:06:00.000-05:00

As long as the South rejoined the Union, slavery intact, Lincoln was willing to suspend the war.

The only thing that mattered was the recognition of national authority over any other authority and absolute obedience to it. Lincoln becomes the new Reichsfuhrer!

The Trouble with Difficulty Numbers by Fiat

2006-01-06T10:34:00.000-05:00

In reviewing and rereading the rules for the Burning Wheel RPG, I find myself cringing at the difficulty number assignment given to the GM.

It seems to be too arbitrary. I don't like mechanics that aren't tied right into the currency of a game. This has been discussed in terms of GM fiat before.

There is a section of the Burning Wheel text that suggests that players should not beg for difficulty rating that are not organic to the situation at hand. I have not played Burning Wheel so I'm wary "fixing" a game that is not broken. It mught be functional and fun as is.

Nonetheless, I still don't like it. I'm staring at gargonzola cheese, and no matter what it's covering, it's still gargonzola cheese.

Adam Dray designed a mechanic where the players decide on the difficulty of each conflict. It's like Pool in a sense - the players gamble that the higher the difficulty (and the less their chance of passing a roll/test) the greater the reward.

Burning Wheel is similar - players require more and more challenging Tests in order that their stats and skills increase. Unless they are seeking a developmental stasis, there is no reason they would never choose to amplify their difficulty numbers (Obstacles).

If the players could raise (never lower) the Obstacle for a test, should this be governed by currency or player fiat? Is there an economy to this currency, like Artha or Prime Time Adventure's Budget?

Rat Mazes and Bobby G

2006-01-05T12:47:00.000-05:00

I had a short conversation with a friend about my self-imposed exile from the old gaming group.

One of the current goals of this group is to create and maintain, perpetually and forever, a consistent role-playing game and characters to go along with it. They propose to create this by using a favored set of role-playing rules (in this iteration, GURPS 4th Edition) and stick with that.

I mentioned that I could no longer enjoy playing or running games that were rat-mazes where the players had to chase down the cheese in a particular pattern. No meaningful decisions were to be made. Just some dice rolled and some color thrown in by the players. I was also sick-to-death of the Bobby G experience.

I explained that I had a collection of RPGs that I wanted to play. I described how they differed from "traditional" RPGs, and how they were the same. I didn't get into why these differences were so important.

We did both agree that intensity was important. Then I thought to myself - can you bring about intsensity that will satisfy the needs and desires of my friend as well as myself in the same game? What kinds of intensity could we generate that will satisfy our other needs at the table?

My friend mentioned that in one of the games I ran as a one-shot (it was a mix of Twilight 2000 and the Morrow Project) trial, he experienced intensity. The situation was essentially a running firefight. My friend mentioned that he cared about what would happen to the character.

In the context of a role-playing game I think this means that the events in the game are close, if not dead on, to issues and themes that the players find interesting. What happens to a character is imaginary - it's only the real emotions and interests at the table, in the player's heads, that matter.

That particular game ended, in the aftermath of that big fight, because I follow the trajectory of the game in a few sessions. I forsaw that I could easily begin to inject and persue events that I found interesting in the setting. I had no way of detecting what the players would really dig, other than to trot them out in play, and test and discard as we went.

What I really wanted was a mechanism by which the players could indicate what they liked and found intense. That way, I could feed that back and run with it. I didn't want to have to worry about coming up with some contrived mission and hoping that the players cared about securing that last Morrow Project cache, or helping the refugees escape the Krell, or whatever.

This isn't really the same as asking for a player-generated game, in the sense that the GM is just another player, like Universalis. It is re-apportioning some of that power. Instead of chasing the carefully laid cheese, the players can easily indicate in game mechanics which cheese they want to get, how they want to get it, and why.

Can we find a game that does this?

One of the reasons for the perpetual rules framework was that my friend enjoys developing a character in play, over a long period of time.

Without trying to look at this desire in anything but with a mind to understand, here are my thoughts about it:

1. I'm not sure that such an act exists in reality - a character is nothing more than what the player brings to the table. Any developments are not internal to the imaginary character, but moment-to-moment decisions enforced by the player who "owns" that character.

2. Developing a character in play may instead mean to alter the mechanic representation of the character (the numbers and such) through a series of iterations of a game's reward cycle.

3. Finally, it may also mean, together or separately from the above points, experiencing whatever story is created, over time and considered as a whole, around and about that character.

In any case, out of all the RPGs I spoke of, I think the Burning Wheel would fit comfortably as a "new" rules system. The Burning Wheel is a rich and deep set of rules. I hope that its textual complexity will not keep my friend from reading and (most importantly) trying it out.

Burning Wheel has a very good system of "flags" for telling the GM what in the game the players are after (Beliefs, Instincts, and Traits). I'm curious to compare the reward cycle of Burning Wheel (BITs -> conflict resolution -> Artha rewards -> applying Artha) with the Riddle of Steel (Spiritual Attributes -> task resolution -> rejigger SAs/skills).

Debating Lincoln, the "Civil War", and Slavery

2005-12-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

I get my debating scrubs on at Nate's Hundred Schools of Thought. Look at this post first, and read on. It's a low grade exchange at this point. It's blessedly free of personal attacks and other nastiness at this point. That's a good thing, as this guy plays in the online Donjon game I've been lucky enough to run since late August of 2005 and good players are hard to find.

"Abused Player Syndrom" Is Alive And Well

2005-12-16T08:38:00.000-05:00

This week I decided to attend a board game event at a local game store. It had been a long time since I stepped into a game store to play a game, perhaps as long as 10 or more years. I was nervous about meeting new people in a new place.

I had all kinds of self-doubting questions such as "Wil they like me?" and "Will I like them?" But, I quiteted that part of my brain and went anyway. I was glad that I did - I met some new, friendly people and played a game I had never played before.

The interesting part of the evening was observing the people a coupe of tables over. They were playing (I think) D&D. It had all the things I never liked - reading from boxed text, play in a meta-plot rich environment, and rat-maze game play. But, they seemed to be having a good time. Wether or not they were having a good time because of the "game" or in spite of it, I don't know. I doubt it. But they were all smiles together, around the table.

The owner of the store, Richard, was playing in this game. (I say he was playing to distinguish him was the person who was "running" the game.) At one point he was asked about a particular task that he wanted to accomplish in the game.

Richard described, very carefully, how he was examining some object. The description, just from the few seconds I watched, was full of details about how he was doing this task. It was like if he said the wrong thing, or didn't describe how careful he was with this task, something bad was going to happen. Then it occured to me that if he didn't do these things, he was going to get screwed.

I think this has happened over and over before, in previous games. I remember this being so common - it was just a part of most RPG experiences. In a task-centric resolution system ("I want to find a trap on this thing." "Ok, roll this skill." "Ok, now I want to open the door." "Roll that skill.") a player has no choice but to describe, task by task, how they want to get from point A to point B in pursuit of some goal. All the way, the person "running the game" can bascially thwart the intent of the player. "No, the door doesn't open." "The chest is empty." "The guards have no money." "The ambassador is repusled by your looks." It doesn't matter how many successful tasks the player accomplishes, the outcome is 100% fiat.

Compare this with conflict resolution mechanics. A player states his intent, rather than a list of tasks to secure his goal. "I want to find the files in this safe that incriminate the President." Resolution is a negotiation of that intent and the stakes involved. "If I win this conflict, I find the files incriminating the President!" "If you lose, the alarm will sound, and the whole building will know a theft is in progress." Then you roll the dice, and the outcome is binding. In a sense, it's a way to counter Abused Player Syndrome. The mechanics enforce a success by allowing victory to bring about the player's intent. The outcome cannot be comprimised by fiat - the outcome was already established by the negotiation of the stakes.

This is one reason why I am eager to try Burning Wheel.

Economic Ignorance At The Pump

2005-10-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

In an October 30th column, Raleigh News and Oberver columnist Barry Saunders writes:

"...we'd be out en masse raising hell over the gasoline prices we're paying, heating oil prices were projected to pay and the high profits oil companies are reporting."

That's incredible! Apparently the solution to high prices are popular demonstrations!

I think what Barry really meant to say that if we use the threat of bodily harm, oil and gas vendors will lower there prices out of fear.

Increased cost sof gas and heating oil discomfort consumers. Every dime a gallon of unleaded gasoline costs more than yesterday is a dime extra you have to earn to purchase it. The increased profits of the oil producers rides on the back of the consumers. What he doesn't mention is that there is a reason that prices rise or fall, and that the mechanism is very important.

Profits and losses are signals to the markets of production and consumption. Higher profits in on business (say, gasoline production) compared to another (movie distribution) is a signal that business of gas production is a good one to get involved with compared to distributing films.

High profits encourage investment that, if the profits were lower or higher in another arena, would not be funneled into gas production. In order for profits to remain high, the producer must enjoy an efficient means of satisfying consumer demand or that no other competitors are available or willing to undertake the same function. (Other than intervention by the government, there is no reason why anyone cannot enter the market as a competitor.)

As energy profits go up, so does the incentive for other forms of energy production. There are more producers of non-gasoline powered cars now than when gasoline was cheaper. If oil doubles in price, solar and nuclear power options become viable where they previously did not. As energy business enjoy higher, "excessive" profits, more and more people will seek energy production as a way to make a living.

I'm not sure if Barry understands this.

Barry's column relies on things unmentioned. I'm pretty sure he thinks that the bounty of cheap energy is his right. How else can a threat of violence be justified against the oil producers. Barry points out that companies like Royal Dutch Shell attempt to hide or explain away high profits. If I was threatened by a howling mob of angry consumers that my wages for software engineers were outlandish, I'd certainly mislead the press about how much money I was making, too.

But nothing desired by people is given without it being produced by someone's effort. If you are a Kalahari bushmen, you have to shoot the food to eat it. If you are a consumer of beer, someone has to brew it. Along the way you decide on the price of your effort.

You cannot simply jam a price down the throat of the consumer. There is a price so high, for any thing, that the consumer will not agree to. They will either seek another provider or a substitute.
If raising your prices was a matter of fiat alone, I'd be retired by now, I can assure you.

Barry wraps up by asking Congress to "investigate" oil, pharmaceuticals, and banking interests. And what would be the purpose of Congress plowing into these corporations? Will they find that the companies are charging too much for their products? Will Congress finally do something, and put these bastards in jail for their outlandish profits? Barry seems to think that this would be a fine and good thing.

What if I were to investigate Barry? Barry, you earn too much! You are gouging the News and Observer with your record-breaking salary! Guards! Take him away!

Victory for Self-Defense...

2005-10-24T09:37:00.000-04:00

...Against Criminals and The State (but I repeat myself)

In a bizarre twist of reality, the BBC says that the "gun lobby argued sucessfully" that guns were needed for self-defense. Really? As if this notion wasn't clear to the people who fear for their lives already?

It's a stunning victory for anyone who would dare to defend themselves against the brutal criminals of the streets. Clearly, Brazil is a country where the police are often as bad as the gangs who battle in the streets.

Banning firearm sales to citizens is lunacy. Any one who won't obey a law against murder and robbery will not be dissuaded by a law against purchasing firearms.

The problem is not proliferation of firearms. The problem is a lack of willingness to use them on the lunatics wreaking havoc. Yes, it is abhorrent to take someone's life. I feel that it is equally abhorrent to lie passively while someone tries to kill or maim your family.

The End of Crime

2005-10-21T13:40:00.000-04:00

How can it be that crime is on the rise in United Kingdom when they banned all firearms? Now they will have to ban them again.

The Myth of Price Gouging

2005-10-18T08:59:00.000-04:00

Recently, I listened to a radio program from Baltimore. The host and guest took calls from listeners about various questions of economics. The topic varied, but eventually the concept of "price gouging" came up. A caller tried to trap the guest by putting forth this scenario:

You are hanging for dear life on a cliff. Someone comes by and offers you a rope for $75. Wouldn't you be mad?

The guest laughed. No, he said, he'd be very happy that someone was going to save his life. But, the listener objected, aren't you mad that this savior is going to charge you money for the service? Again, the guest countered, no. The cost of the rope ($75) was cheap compared to his life. He said he would easily pay up much, much more for it.

Take a look at any newspaper or TV webpage during a period of price increases for say, gasoline. You'll see articles about how the state is cracking down on those villainous gas station owners for daring to raise prices. (Do we ever see similar outrage when the gas station owners try to reduce fuel prices below the state-sanctioned minimum?) Again, the Mises writers spell out why prices fluctuate, and the the reasons why we should let them vary.

Eric Sink, Eat Your Dog Food

2005-10-04T08:37:00.000-04:00

My employer recently switched from Visual Source Safe to SourceGear's Vault for all of our source code control. I lobbied hard for this change. Visual Source Safe has issues that are unresolved and apparently will never be addressed. Vault seemed to be an ideal replacement. The client interface looks as if it was designed to mimic Visual Source Safe in every way. Besides the lack of a "web deploy" feature, it's a darn good replacement - on Windows.

SourceGear advertises Vault command line clients for Solaris and Linux. All the wonderful work and effort for Vault goes into a deep, black abyss once you realize what they did. They simply provide a .zip package with their command line client and supporting DLLs, and point you towards Mono. Mono is a third-party implementation of the .NET framework for non-Windows platforms.

Building Mono on Solaris was a hideous, error prone process. Luckly for me that RedHat rpms existed for Mono, or I would have to repeat the terror-ridden Mono construction and installation for out Linux development and build environments.

SourceGear's bizarre support system is a public forum. You can pay for premium support service for a few dollars more. Still, what you get is acess to the "Gold" support forum. Rather than track individual customer issues, and endless stream of messages pour forth, and the support people must try and keep up.

I've encountered numerous issues with the Mono platform, and the brain-dead approach to using the Vault client for Solaris and Linux. When I pointed out a serious bug with the Solaris client, in which GET commands from branches retrieved old versions of files, the response was

Yuck. I guess I have no choice but to spend some quality time with our molasses-slow Sun machine.

Guess what? I have to spend quality time with Sun machines as my full time job. Save your attitude and comments for the water cooler. We paid money to use this product. It would be nice if Eric Sink followed his mentor's advice and ate his own dog food. Clearly, from this example, at least the support team doesn't. If they did, how long would they tolerate a "molasses-slow" environment? I'd be very surprised if any of the development staff did.

As Joel Spoelsky explains:

Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product.

Rather than just generating precious Windows binaries and foisting them on your customers, and hoping that Mono works, why don't you fine folks at SourceGear crack open the petty cash and hire some qaulity assurance talent to really try to use Vault with Mono? Better yet, Eric Sink should try and develop software with his product on Solaris. I bet the bug count would plummet quickly.

I know the first think Eric would do would be to squash external dependencies, like Mono itself. The Vault client for Solaris and Linux is a disaster - it will continue to consume precious time and money from the real issues and feature development of Vault as long as they are not seriously used by SourceGear itself.

Right now, if there was a compelling replacement, we'd switch to it. This is not a good way to retain customers.

Please Stop Saying That Word

2005-09-22T10:05:00.000-04:00

Why must article after article continue to pollute our mental landscape with that word, "suck"?

Lack of precision in thinking leads to this sort of behavior.

Constructive Destruction

2005-08-31T14:01:00.000-04:00

From a talk given last year, Lew Rockwell strikes again at shoddy thinking:

If you understand why people believe [that the destruction from a natural disaster is a boon because of all of the jobs it creates in construction], you can understand why there exists something called Keynesian economics, which postulates that everyone can be made better off by letting the government rob people and give money to bureaucracies to spend. You can also understand how it is that people cheer on inflation and taxation as productive devices. You can see why so many are still under the impression that war is an economic stimulus, and that Iraq will somehow be better off with billions in reconstruction spending rather than by not having had their towns and cities blown up in the first place.

In short, if you can understand why people celebrate a hurricane's productive power, then you can understand how it is that people think that Leviathan as we know it today is an institution to celebrate and adore, and why we should build on its marvelous successes like Social Security, public schooling, the war on drugs, and the war on terror. These same people should also celebrate other institutions such as crime waves for their productive power. After all, when people have things looted from them, they must then go out and buy more things, which stimulates more production and so on.

Foggy Bottom, Indeed!

2005-08-31T08:20:00.000-04:00

I wish I owned a Confederate battle flag. Perhaps it would be better to display the Bonnie Blue flag instead - I dont want to be mistaken for just any drunk NASCAR fan. At least some of us still understand what it all means.

No, Really, England is Safe

2005-08-23T21:38:00.000-04:00

...because they have no guns!

An Empire, not a Republic

2005-07-15T06:49:00.000-04:00

As the British expanded their empire of the 18th century from America to India, don't assume we are not attempting the same thing. And remember, if you criticize the government, you must be anti-American. When do they execute Order 66?

A House Divided and Lincoln's War

2005-07-12T08:12:00.000-04:00

For quite some time I have labored to reproduce 2 classic boardgames on the PC.

The games are "A House Divided" (2nd edition) by Alan Emerich and Frank Chadwick and "Imperium" by Frank Chadwick.

I spent a lot of time developing a presentation framework in C++ and SDL. In the years since the original work I did, I moved on to using Python and PyGame. I understood that even if I finished the game, it would be an amatuer endevour. I could not charge money for the software. The games are the intellectual property of other people. I wanted only to be able to play against my favorite Imperium opponent, Carl "Virgin Tribute" Schreiber.

It occurred to me that as much as I liked the original A House Divided (AHD), it would never be "mine". I went so far as to develop a complete, event-driven rules server architecture and a working facsimile of the rules for AHD. I began work on a simple artificial intelligence library for the game. But, still, it would never be mine.

I also began a profound shift in my thinking about economics and history. I read a great deal about American history ever since I could read. I still have books on my shelf about the native American tribes that lived on the continent long before Europeans arrived from my childhood. I've even read the same books to my son, Jackson. This time, I was reading Thomas DiLorenzo, who was the first person I have ever read that criticized Abraham Lincoln for being a despot and an enemy of liberty.

Of course, the mythology of Lincoln was that he freed the slaves. In fact, Lincoln never freed any slaves. The Civil War, in my mind, ceased to be a conflict between the virtuous national Union and the evil slave-holding Southron. For to be a civil war, by definition, interested parties struggle for control of their shared government. The American Civil War (ACW) was not a struggle over the same government. The states of the Confederacy clearly renounced their affiliation with the old United States. It was not the Second American Revolution, as the south did not at any time attempt to overthrow the old United States federal apparatus with a new one. The ACW should be more accurately named the War for Southern Independence (WSI).

I had long read and believed, more or less, that the principle conflict of the WSI was about slavery. I was unaware, aside from the casual references in high school AP American History, that the subject of the national tariff was the most important and contentuous of both the northern and southern states in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The federal government drew over 90% of its operating income from the taxation of goods entering the United States from abroad durig the ante-bellum. The vast mojority of cunsumers of foreign goods were the southern states. Additionally, foreign governments, in retaliation for the US tariff, raised tariffs on imported goods from the United States. Again, most of the exports of the United States came from the south (like cotton). The southern states paid heavily for this double burden.

In return, the Northern interests, under the auspices of the Whig party, repeatedl promoted the American System of corporate welfare and high national tariffs. When in power they implemented tariff increases. At one point South Carolina attempted a nullification and secession from the United States over a tariff.

Meanwhile the money being paid to the federal government by the southern states was being spend on massive corporate boondoggles in the northern states. Railroad, canal, and road building projects were financed by this federal program of theft.

Abraham Lincoln then, an admitted neo-Whig politician, campaigned on the Free Soil platform (which became the modern day Republican party). The principle aim of the Free Soil party was to exclude slavery from expansion into the western territories. The goal of this exclusion was not to end slavery but to prevent black labor from competing with white settlers for jobs and wealth. Lincoln's desire for slaves, in the event they were freed, would be to ship them to Africa. The recently stolen West, according to the Free Soil party, would be white.

What would any state do to combat the oncoming tide of oppressive federal power? Faced with the fact that their representation in the both houses of the federal government would be grower weaker, the election to President of a man sworn to uphold the vile Morril Tariff, and the onset of a political machine dedicated to expanding the aupices of centralized authority the southern states elected to withdraw from the Union completely.

And that's the cruxt of the issue - that the ultimate check against any power that oversteps its bounds is to remove yourself from the influence of that power. This is the beauty of secession. Should the state government become onerous and tyannical, communities may and should secede, perhaps to make a new state government, or to join a more virtous and agrreable one. Should a municpality overstep and become an undue burden on the citizens, they should secede and make a new county or join another one. If every person understood and appreciated secession as a means of resisting tyranny, tyranny itself would wither on the vine.

Taken in this light, the subsequent violence inflicted on the souther states by the Federal government of the United States became a chilling and lamentable episode. When the US government asserted its power over the south in 1865, at bayonet point, the Republic passed away. I don't think we've recovered from this, ever.

So, my new mission is to produce a game that reflects the original, liberterian roots of the Constitution. The events in the game will reflect the events as they happened and not as reimagined consequences of a holy crusade. Instead of praising the victory of Federal authority, the game will lay the blame of that horrid war at the man who engineered it, Abraham Lincoln.

The game will be called "Lincoln's War."

"Real" Programming Languages

2005-05-26T08:23:00.000-04:00

I've often debated the merits of one programming language/platform against another. At times, I've waxed and waned on Java depending on what I needed to accomplish.

Very few people I know who write software for a living appreciate and utilize more than one radically different programming platform. By platform, I mean a category of languages and similar tools that share a similar syntax and construction process. I would include C and C++ in the same category. Languages that abstract interaction with architecture salients, like Java, I would place in another category.

I don't doubt that the "higher" level language are, all other things being equal, more efficient - they allow a software developer to assemble and deploy working software with less effort and care than "lower" level languages. I do not mean to say that the "higher" languages are better than "lower" languages. Obviously, it's a comparison based on subjective requirements. If you need to slam bits into registers, if you need to make very specific use of a hardware device, and so on, Python is not likely to be of much use. I also don't doubt that a skilled person with enough experience can leverage a "lower" language to produce working software many times faster than I could with Java, Python, or Ruby, for example.

I have noticed however that software projects are increasing in size and complexity. More aggresive business objectives accompany each advance in abstraction and processing power. Complexity pervades every effort.

The complexity of the source code component of projects for (in my current place of employment) is staggering. It's impossible for a single person to mentally "own" every line of code, although my boss wrote or improved much of it in the past 4 or 5 years. His impressive knowledge and understanding is a valuable resource. Based on the pace of requested improvements just in the last few months, I suspect that the amount of rework and refactoring on the code itself with make his knowledge of the content of the code less valuable compared to the intent of the code.

And this is why I think that in the future more and more source code will be written using languages and tools that sucessfully manage and hide complexity to the developer. Managing the ever-evolving code base will become more and important. If the quality of the product - that is, the ability of the software to satisfy customer expectations - is to at least maintain itself at a given state then the ability of the tools and processes must be capable of scaling to match the increasing complexity.

Tools like C and C++ are fully capable of being written to manage complexity. However, I believe that they too will become niche tools. The enterprise level code monstrosities will be best served by deviced designed with managebility in mind. In 10 years, I'll find out if I am right.

A Large Scale C++ Project

2005-05-23T09:01:00.000-04:00

I really do like my new job.

I used to work in a Linux cluster development group. I worked for about 18 months developing a hardware management application in C++.

The application helped to deploy and configure hundreds of machines into a cluster of networked machines. Typically a team of technicians would work very hard to manually configure each machine to match a networking scheme laid out by the customer or an approved plan by the cluster architects. This was time consuming and expensive for both IBM and it's customers.

Each server, fortunately, was equipped with some sort of headless external control interface, either an IBM Remote Service Adapter (RSA) or an integrated Intelligent Platform Management Interface device. An external process could control the devices through a simple TCP/IP connection, issuing commands and (most of the time) interpreting command results.

Technically, the challenge was interpreting the command results and presenting a cohesive picture to the user the state of the cluster. The typical procedure for cluster installation called for a "levelling" server BIOS and firmware by remote installation. One person would be able to "push" an installation process to as many machines as needed instead of inserting a boot device and applying power manually.

When I joined the project, a lead software developer was already hard at work. I slowly and carefully tried to survey the status of the project. Regrettably, the project had no regular build process, no qaulity assurance or control, no source code control, sparse documentation for the hardware we had to program to, almost no existing software libraries to leverage, and, worse of all, no specification or firm requirements to program towards.

We were also crippled from the start with a lack of customer interaction. We had no of eliciting what functionality was important until it was much too late.

Despite these handicaps, we continued to work as best we could.

The very first step was to introduce a source code control system, CVS. I felt that if any work had been done already, we needed to safeguard against accidental deletion. My coworker, who had been working by himself up until this point, probably was not pleased to have to take extra steps to complete his work. But reasoned that by doubling the developers (from 1 to 2), we had no choice. Concurrent development could not be safely attempted using a shared code base in a network file system.

Our primary tool was GCC and Kdevelop. These worked rather well for us. Kdevelop had enough bells and whistles to support C++ development. We needed a solid, multiple-Linux-distribution code base. By the time I left the project, we had produced and maintained builds for RedHat Linux (versions 7.2, 8.x, 9.0, Enterprise 2.x and 3.x, and Advanced Server 2.x) and SuSe Linux Enterprise 8.x.

Our initial machine architecture was 32bit Intel. We began to support the AMD Opteron platform some time later. It was interesting to note that C++ builds that appeared to work without error on 32bit environments began to experience catastrophic failures in a 64bit environment. Shortcuts and sloppy programming assumptions surfaced again and again as bug reports filtered back from the Linux cluster test teams.

Our test teams were primarily hardware test teams. Our application was the first "in-house" development project the team had been exposed to. It took a lot of education and feedback for both the test and development teams to establish a productive process for reporting and acting on bug reports.

Internally, we had no regression test package. I felt frustrated that at any given moment, I had no realistic perception of the state of our project. It was humiliating to work so hard only and watch management and test leads see only our failures. Without a way to indicate the health of the project the development efforts were haphazard - a fix for one bug usually begat another.

At one point, my coworker worked 100 hours in one week trying to meet a deadline. Not only did his efforts, however heroic, fail to satisfy all parties, but he jeapardized his health. He did not rejoin the project for 3 weeks until he recovered.

The code itself was riddled with horrendous errors of judgment: state information was embedded in GUI objects, duplicatation of data was rampant, inheritence was used exclusively instead of composition, features were being added before we could fix any of the existing bugs, estimates for complettion were (as I tracked them) off from "a few days" to weeks and months. Some of these problems were addressed asbest as we could. Others were ignored. The complexity was becoming unwieldy. It was as if we read The Pragmatic Programmer and decided to test it's merit by violating every known law of mankind in some sort of coding barbarism.

I did manage a few victories. I created a daily build that extracted the code base on a pristine file system and ensured a successful compilation and linking of all of our code. Any errors would be logged and emailed to all developers.

As the project continued, I began to become afraid of it's final trajectory. I resolved to approach management and urge serious efforts at oversight and auditing. Unfortunately, the pressures on the "regular" staff were so great that they did not allocate enough time and resources to deal with the issues. I understood that if the project was not valuable enough to ensure it's success then my job was in danger.

I made it clear that I would begin to look for another assignment from my contracting company or another job without them. I wasn't going to stay. Eventually I did find one. The project was cancelled shortly after I left, as far as I could tell.

None of the problems we had were insurmountable. I learned that unless the will existed to address the problems, nothing was going to change. I also learned that any pain associated with turing the "ceremony" dial up was well worth the effort. I finally was able to see that concious decisions to enforce quality paid off while decisions to ingore quality rotted the project to the core.

Now I Understand

2005-05-12T14:18:00.000-04:00

Many years ago I underwent a series of Rolfing sessions with a good friend of the family.

Benefits of the sessions themselves aside, I always enjoyed talking with this person. His outlook on life was very different, but refreshing to share.

One day he tried to explain to me what is was like to be a father.

He said, if I recall correctly, that watching his son mature from an infant into a super-intelligent, capable young man was the most rewarding experience he'd ever had. He told me the feeling was better than any drug or food. He said it was better than sex.

For a man of my age, that anything could compare with sex was an extremely outrageous claim.

But now I am a father. Watching my son master things such as dressing himself, being polite, eating food - all the milestones towards to independence, all the little signs of his personality unfolding before me - I get it now. I understand.

My old friend - you were right.

The Tools of Liberty

2005-05-10T07:50:00.000-04:00

One of the changes I've experienced in the last year has been a radical appreciation for firearms.

This, of course, has been a disruptive cultural jar to most of my family and friends. Most often they are horrified. The comments are like these: Why would any sane person want to own a gun? Aren't you more likely to shoot yourself or someone you know than deter a crime? The police are here to protect us from criminals - so why do you need one? Aren't you being paranoid? You're being anti-social!

The decision to own and become skilled in the use of a pistol or rifle is not one that I made one evening while reading "Guns'n'Ammo" magazine.

For a long time I as a neo-socialist. I did not care for the heavy-handed Marxist means of the Soviet Union. I did care about the ability of people to live without fear of coercion or oppression. It seemed that an anti-corporate, anti-imperial political outlook suited me best.

In my research of facts and arguments for and against various political viewpoints, I came across a Liberterian webpage. Within I foud a wonderful criticism of the current Administration and it's warmongering bungles.

It was fascinating to read an anti-government article that at the same time advanced the case for liberty and capitalism. I had never imagined that a capitalist would be against war. It was simple: the state seeks power at the expense of liberty.

Every dime spent at the behest of the state is a dime that could have been spent in accordance with the wishes of the smallest fry in the basket - the citizen - in the free market. Government spending is controlled by a clutch of politically motivated persons. The funds used are not earned - that is, exchanged freely between people in a mutualy benficial fashion of their choosing. The money the government uses is forcibly collected at gunpoint.

By the way, if you disagree with the notiont that tax collection is free of the threat of violence I recommend that you not pay your taxes. Witness the full and complete reaction of your local, state, and federal hooligans as they organize their resources to get your money. If it was truly a voluntary "social contract" we could not pay the money and be left alone.

The choice is clear - either you have liberty or you surrender it to the state. Goverment requires your treasure and your liberty to operate.

If there is to be government, I want it to be small, frail, and only of service long enough to accomplish a minimum task. It should be the agency of last resort. It should be, to paraphrase, the frightened servant of the people, and not the otherway around.

Government power expands constantly. Or it attempts to. The single, best way to restrain the tyrannical inclinations of any government is to balance it's leg-breakers (the police, the army, et al) with an armed citizenry. A government that goes too far, that steps over the boundary between tolerable and intolerable, would be faced with a sea of angry, armed, and uncontrollable people.

Popular insurrections against a powerful occupying force are always successful. The occupier has an impossible task: it must carry out the policy of the offending power against an unwilling populace. Every crime of the occupier strengthens the insurgency.

Undeniably, the army can win the battles. Skilled riflemen, fighting a guerilla war against the army, may lose each contact. But in the long run, they win the war. Eventually even the most stubborn politician realizes the cost of the occupation outweighs the benefit of continuing the occupation.

That's why rifles are called the "Tools of Liberty."

For every genocide, there is a disarmament of the victims. Guns give people a fighting chance. Guns cannot guarantee liberty. The people must be willing to use them. But guns are the essential ingredient.

If you are unwilling to protect yourself, or your child, from the grasping violence of an armed gang then nothing of what I have written will make sense to you. If you cannot fathom that your own government can (and has) violated the peace and security of it's citizenry, then you have no sense of history, either.

The mantra that "it can't happen here" is repeated over and over again, usually on the eve of the storm. The thunderheads roll in, the lightning flashes, and the naive still repeat "it can't happen here."

There can't be a promise that "it" will happen. Guns are a precaution, like packing an extra pair of underwear. You may never need them, but you are sure better off with it than without if you do.

From the viewpoint that guns are critical to the balance of power between the state and the people, then gun control becomes an issue of control, as opposed to safety. Anti-liberty arguments always cloak themselves, however well intentioned, as just that - well intentioned.

I'll leave you with this:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. - Benjamin Franklin

England is safe because there are no guns.

2005-05-06T08:06:00.000-04:00

You have nothing to fear!

Or rather, no guns in the hands of citizens who wish to defend themselves from lunatics and criminals. If you don't care about obeying the laws against murder and assault, apparently it's not an issue to obtain, by whatever means, a firearm.

Andre Anthony Linton, 22, was killed by a single bullet after his car was surrounded by a gang in Wood Green. Police are hunting a mob of five or six black youths who surrounded the victim's small silver car in Bullers Road just before 11pm.

After Mr Linton was shot, the group were seen fleeing the scene in the direction of Redvers Road.

Just as in our largest cities - New York, the District of Columbia, and San Francisco - isn't it obvious that people are free from firearm related crime when firearms are banned?

It's Time To Try Something New

2005-05-05T21:53:00.000-04:00

This has been a dissapointing week.

Since August 2000 I've spent many weeknights with a group of people I have come to know as friends. Every week we'd gather and break out the games.

We played role-playing games most of the time. Often we would break from RPGs and play computer games. As time passed, I noticed that we were playing less and less. Something happened. The interest levels plummeted. Perhaps you've seen this happen as well.

I spent a lot of time investigating new and interesting ways to play the same games. I came across a lot of theory about RPGs. Some of it was good, some of it was not very useful to me. Ultimately, I came to realize that other people had the same issue with their "regular" group of game buddies.

Over the last 2 years, it's been more and more difficult to tolerate the dropping quality of play. It was like a painful disentegration of a relationship. After all, these were real people, and I was undergoing a real change in outlook. Sometimes we accept changes. Sometime we embrace them.

Changes come often are accompanied by pain. The pain we feel is the anxiety about what the changes will bring. Many times I've come out of the end of a painful decision only to realize the only entitiy causing the pain was in fact myself.

The previous week only 3 of us could make it to "Game Night." As it often happens with people who are married or have children, schedules are prone to sudden alteration. However, this particular night, without a plan for a backup activity, such as watching a movie or playing a computer game, nothing happened at all.

After an hour or so, one person gathered a computer game I returned and left. It hurt to know that the computer game was so much more interesting and fun than playing a game or socializing with us. Was I that boring?

Some weeks prior the entire group participated in what I thought was a healthy and productive discussion about what sort of games we could play that we could all enjoy. The emphasis was on trying to keep everyone engaged.

Now things were rapidly returning to their stale and grim courses. Enough was enough. I asked on Monday if anything had been planned in an email. One person said they would not be attending in favor of an event at NC State. Another person was out sick. I restated the problem: with only 3 or so people what could we play? I offered an alternative game, Donjon.

After receiving no responses, I concluded that Game Night was cancelled.

The rest of the day I was not happy. Late today I received an email asking if there was a problem with the events as they unfolded. I explained that I would no longer be a participant of Game Night.

I had spoken about this before. Now was the time to do it. Being angry at people I care about is not healthy. Remaining in a situation that makes me angry is not healthy. It's time to move on.

I've already considered the "advice" some of the group has given me. It's the usual lines about how my goals, the impossible standards of actually having fun, are pipe dreams at best. Good luck they say, but you're going to fail!

What if I succeed? What would that mean?

But I know I can't settle anymore. I read all the time about people who are having fun with different games. I need to find these people and see what it's all about.

Thanks for 5 years of gaming!

This Is So Exciting

2005-05-03T14:34:00.000-04:00

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else" -Frederic Bastiat

I've never blogged before but I've always wanted to.

I hope in time that this will become a digital archive I can share with Jackson. May he look back at this and profit from it.