Pandora

John Winkelman

This may be old news for those of you on the Bleeding Edge of the internet. I have just discovered Pandora, a totally nifty little tool for discovering new music based on music you already like.

It works like this: Enter the name of an artist or song you like, and then click “create”. The rest is pretty self-explanatory. You are given a large list of songs by a large list of artists, and you can listen to those songs and vote on whether or not you like the songs which Pandora selected for you.

For instance: I chose to create a station with the seed “Richard and Linda Thompson”. The first song was “When I Get to the Border”, by Mr and Mrs Thompson. Next was “The Only Living Boy in New York” by Simon & Garfunkle. Then “Little Hands” by Alexander Spence. Number four was “Pro-Girl” by Janice Ian.

All in all, an exciting (and potentially extremely expensive) site to have discovered.

About Pandora
Pandora developer’s blog

Life Upgrade 2005

John Winkelman

Last Friday I bought a house. It is 100 years old, 1800 square feet, with manymanymany new and improved features, thanks to the hard work of the previous owners. I took possession immediately, and spent most of last week moving. I don’t have very many possessions, but I have been terribly busy for months now, so available bandwidth for Stuff Transfer Protocol (STP) has been limited to evenings and weekends. Most everything I own was able to fit in my car, but I have a small car, so what STP bandwidth was available was limited to about 8 cubic feet per hour. You may think that is pretty good, but considering most of my Stuff is in the form of books (over a ton of them), that amounted to many packets sent out. Fortunately the slow line speed (~25mph) was over a distance of only four blocks.

I was able to pick up some extra signal strength in the form of Mr. Bock and his truck, which allowed the transfer of some of my larger files—bed, bookshelves, ego, etc.

Right now I am sitting in my old apartment, taking a break from removing any evidence that I ever lived here. Knowing that I would be moving sometime this year, I let some of the more irritating cleaning projects fall by the wayside, and now I am paying for that lack of attention. Yesterday I spent about an hour chipping old stir-fry from the top of my stove.

A week into it, and I think I have made a good decision. It is a lot of house for one person, but as many homeowner friends (some more than others) have demonstrated, it is not difficult to expand to fill a space.

The address is 629 Innes Street, just around the corner from Martha’s Vineyard and the new Nantucket Bakery. I will post photos in a few days, when I get myself a little more unpacked. If you see lights on, stop on by!

Curse You, Amazon Gold Box!

John Winkelman

Saving up money for the new house has been more difficult lately, what with all of the great books popping up in my Gold Box.

First up was What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. When I first opened the book I was struck with the fear that Mr. Gee might be a wanker, because the chapters had names like “Semiotic Domains”, and “Situated Meaning and Learning”. Turns out I was wrong; Mr. Gee has many useful things to say about the spaces our minds inhabit when we are immersed in the gaming experience.

Next: A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster. I have not read this one yet, but a quick skim tells me that the ideas in this book will be compatible with the ideas in Mr. Gee’s book.

And finally, Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford. I love this book. Crawford uses lessons learned over twenty years of designing and building games, to come up with 95 principles to keep in mind when starting the game development process. He is a wonderful writer.

Only a few more weeks until A Feast for Crows hits the shelves. Five years is a long time to wait for a sequel.

Kingdom

John Winkelman

This is the first draft of my version of one of the first video games I ever played. Variously called Kingdom or Hammurabi, it is a simple economic game. I first played it in the Impressions 5 Science Center in Lansing, Michigan. I must have been about eleven years old.

You are the ruler of a kingdom. Your duty is to acquire land and peasants. You do this by planting crops, feeding your peasants, and indulging in simple land speculation (buy low, sell high). Chaos enters the system in the form of rats eating your grain, peasants dying of plague, and variation in the price and fertility of your land. The “bushel of grain” is the standard unit of currency.

Right now the balance of values is as follows:

-Each peasant eats 20 bushels of grain a year
-It takes 2 bushels of grain to plant an acre of land
-Each acre of planted land will grow between 2 and 5 bushels of grain
-If you under-feed your peasants, they will starve to death.

If you try to spend more grain than you have, the game will simply do nothing when you click the button. And this leads me into the “to do” list for the game

-alerts which tell you when you are spending too much.
-adding logic so that each peasant can farm no more than 10 acres of land
-allowing a set number of years so the game does not continue forever
-if too many peasants die, the survivors revolt and cast you from power

I like this kind of game. It packs a nice amount of complexity into a very small package. I imagine that the idea for Warcraft grew out of something very like this.

Click here to play my version of The Kingdom of Hamurabi.

Aquisitions

John Winkelman

Now that class has started and I have no free time, I have gone back to reading books and listening to music. I briefly moved away from reading purely for pleasure and picked up Flash Hacks, a book which contains 100 “tips and tricks” for the serious Flash hacker. The day after that, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling appeared in my Amazon.com gold box, which I took as a sign that I was ABSOLUTELY required to purchase it. I am glad I did, because it is a fantastically interesting and enjoyable book.

In the last couple of weeks I have picked up a couple of novels; the first being Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb, which is every bit as good as her previous books in the Live Ship Traders, Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. And just today I began reading Forty Signs of Rain, an eco-thriller by Kim Stanley Robinson.

But life is not all about reading: In the past few weeks I have picked up three CDs which I have been listening to nonstop: Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years, a best-of collection of the songs of Richard Thompson; Bacchanal/1969, a double-album set of the songs of Gabor Szabo; and Everybody Hollerin’ Goat, a collection of songs performed by Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum band.

This last CD in particular is amazing. Listen to the samples on the amazon.com page. If you hear something and say Where have I heard that before, it is probably “Shimmy She Wobble”, which was played in Gangs of New York, in the opening scene of the movie, just before the big Five Points fight.

Aaannddd last but not least, I spent $12.00 on the “Best of the Web” issue of Step Inside Design magazine, because it highlights a couple of projects I worked on while at BBK Studio: Discovering Design and Pique.

Katrina: Pointing Fingers

John Winkelman

Actually, the finger-pointing started before the hurricane hit the mainland.

Who is to blame for lack of preparedness in this disaster? Well, since no-one in this country has EVER prepared for a natural disaster to the full extent they were capable, that is kind of a pointless question. So let us say, who was responsible for the levees bursting?

The New Orleans government? Nah, not really. New Orleans has not had the money for that level of civil engineering in, well, forever.

The Louisiana government? Hmmm. Didn’t they request money to improve the levees and get turned down repeatedly? So not really their fault.

The Federal government? Well, they were the ones who refused to give the state and local government the money they needed to fix up the levees, so to a certain extent, YES. But not just this administration; for how long have the levees been too weak to withstand a category 5 hurricane? Forever. So call it the sum of the history of having a city below sea level in Hurricane Alley.

But: what was the most immediate, and most visible, nationwide result of the levees bursting?

The spike in gas prices. Across The. Entire. Country. A nationwide fuel crisis because the locals didn’t pile enough dirt between them and the lake? Don’t think so. The cognitive dissonance in that idea could kill a man.

The single most important material in our economy flows from the gulf, up through the New Orleans area, and from there to the rest of the country. And people are nitpicking about who should have been responsible for bringing in the Army Corps of Engineers last year to fix the place up.

The real answer is, the oil companies and their employees are the ones who, from the day the first pipeline went in, should have been building up the levees and hardening that whole part of the gulf against something like Katrina. Sure, New Orleans is not (officially) the property of Big Oil, but don’t you think that if you build pipelines through a city, it is YOUR responsibility to protect the city, not the city’s responsibility to protect your oil, especially if that oil is for distribution to THE ENTIRE COUNTRY????

If you want to point a finger, point it at the people who turned a sharp profit the day the Gulf coast drowned.

Assholes.